Inspiration.

OK WOW obviously Video Copilot is a godsend for anything ever.
I *cough* bought all the packages from them and they are wonderful. i think that Andrew Kramer is the funniest man ever and that i will eventually marry him because he is so wonderful. (NOTE: sometimes elaborate obviously untrue statements are the only way i can express how much i think something is wondeful.)


http://www.videocopilot.net/

<3 <3 <3




Teen Lovers by The Virgins.


This is of course a wonderful video by The Virgins. I love it so much becuase it doesn't try to pretend like the people are static. hahah they wobble (sometimes a little too obviously unfortunately)



Colour in MOTION.

So cute. this website is so highly entertaining.
http://www.mariaclaudiacortes.com/#
i already knew a lot of what it says about colour though and i do say that there was some stuff that i either didn't know or didn't quite agree with... but that's a debate for me and the colour world to have.

I think that it is a really clever way to communicate the meanings of different colours... NIFTY i do say.

Mood Board and Synopsis

Lemon Tree/the girl’s World.

The target audience of this work is teenagers, specifically teenage girls. The song is a very light-hearted mellow tune, which I was attracted to because of the imagery that the lyrics put in my mind.
The mood of the piece is mellow and fun. It is a fragile sounding song. The imagery, which the song presents to me, is of a gentle fragile looking girl who is contained entirely within her own magical world.
She travels through her world in a kind of daze. She is trapped in her own imaginative world in which all the beautiful things she sees around her are accentuated by animation. Butterflies and vines will grow around her as she moves around her world, stencils will move about her, showing just how truly amazing it is within her own head.
The film clip will be made using hundreds of images to get a very jolted stop motion effect. With long very un-filmic pauses
Its quite reddish sepia toned almost as though seen through a 1970s film camera, but not quite so grainy.
My way of dealing with copyright is to avoid the problems in the first place.
All of the main images used in this animation will be acquired from a photographer who I will hire. Any secondary images will be creative commons.
Distribution of this work will be on free websites like YouTube and Vimeo. It would also make a really good Sprite.
One video that helped inspire this piece was the opening titles of Skins the British TV show. This title sequence uses techniques like lens flares and rainbow colours as well as fast cutting to produce an energetic yet laid back feeling. The main character of my animation has characteristics that highly emulate some of the qualities of the Skins character Cassie. She is locked away in her own world and has a very unique view of the things around her. She is fragile looking and would wear delicate lace dresses. All of these stylistic elements are reflected in my proposed work.
My work will differ from the Skins opening title sequence in the way that it will not have as obvious effects. There will be no large 80s style moving letters across the screen and there will be a more direct narrative. In the Skins opening title sequence at the beginning there is a lot of use of moving images and their reflections splitting the screen in half. My animation won’t be using this affect because it would take away from the focus.
There is also a large amount of images layered heavily over one another so that only parts of the frame are visible. They use overlay and half opacity colour shape layers a lot as well to give the titles a patchy thrown together look. This is a technique that strays away from my stylistic choices.







MOOD BOARDS

Drama...

My First assignment. gah i wish that i could have created something wonderful. instead of this mediocre thing.

I was trying to go for a 'drama has so many possibilities that it is like a world unto its own' sort of feel. like in the first scene its just a huge room in which characters are created out of thin air and fly at you from all directions. they are all unique characters from many many different genres of performance... it was supposed to show you the depth of possibilities.

Um i think it looks quite SBS.. which being as i watch sbs that is unsurprising. hmm i spent along time at the beginning doing elaborate amazing masks that were huge and time consuming to animate on the characters. then Chris Denaro told me about a lovely thing called write-on which is an effect that took like 20-30 minutes of work and compressed it down into about 1 minute or less. the funny thing is for all the work i did on those masks it all goes by so quickly that you don't even notice it. good times.

there are moments in there in which is it difficult to understand why i have used certain effects, like the snow falling upwards. Things like that are just tools i have used to try and continue the magical never ending world theme... just as the writing is plentiful unreadable, because it is meant to show the vastness of dramatic possibilities.

I OBVIOUSLY hate the ending. just ending an animation with the words 'a world of never ending possibilities' how super lame could i get. if i had my way i would not end it like that.

My original temporal identity idea was of a drop falling in a white world and when it hit the floor colour would explode outwards revealing a theatre space. i tried so hard to make that idea work... but the droplet was just hideous and fake and just plain nasty. so once again i scrapped my original idea and went with something completely different.

I received a 4+ mark on this assignment (which is a pass +) dissappointing yes. i never expected a great mark but i was hoping for higher than a 4. *super sad face*

Lego Man

This is my favourite animation thus far.

i loved making it.. and i think it looks good.

i wish that i could be as happy with everything else as i am with this.


I have to say i enjoyed the tediousness of adjusting the masks every frame. of course i tried to automate it but that doesn't work out quite right and adjustments are needed.
I like the whole godzilla thing. hahaha i SHOULD have added buildings exploding that would have made it epic. BUT none the less i stil thoroughly enjoy this short short animation.

Oh i got so scared when i first rendered this out. because it didn't work the masks were all off time and it didn't make any sense, giant bits of blue was showing through... STRESSFUL. but it turned out it was just a problem with my render settings. I thought that being as the original footage was set to 15.1515 fps then my render setting should be set to that too.. because that is just logical in my mind. However, adobe after effects rendered this out perfectly when i set the render settings back to 25fps. weird, strange but it worked in the end

Graffiti!

I made a two comps of this... my first didn't use a wall as the back ground.. it used an aging envelope and some yucky images. it was appalling so i started again. it also used cameras which just made it look less and less like a graffiti

This new comp is a bit slow moving but i'm not displeased with it. i used the write on preset to animate the images on and for the schematic i used a mask with stroke to reveal it. Also the whole schematic thing is clearly a homage to other works... like for instance the video tutorial. They just tie it together nicely.

i got help from a nice pass tutor with this i just asked his opinion about ways to animate on the drawings and what he thought in general about my attempt at the exercise.

I wish i had used some sort of colourised image now... to show the difference and also to see how the stenciling would work on colour. but i didn't. damn











The image i've used to 'Sin City-afy' is an image of the wonderful Liam of youtube and dailybooth fame.



Original




Edited.


I did another version with a picture of a blonde lady but the curves could not be changed to make her look quite right. so i used Liam instead. mainly becuase he looks like David Tennent (Dr Who).

i added the gun obviously.

Samford no shit!

What can i say about samford no shit.

Well first off my group came up with the tagline so GO TEAM!

i created this one over a couple of weeks (and therefor you would think it would be good) but i took time off from it and came back etc etc etc. I think i'm going for a particular jolted kind of obviously fakely animated style here so it isn't taken seriously.. because with a tag line like "Samford No Shit!" there is no way it would be take seriously anyway. By fakely i mean the cow falling from the sky with the word moo above it and the oh so fake leaves. And lovely blunt bland statements like "there are cows in samford." it is supposed to be light hearted.

The section where the leaves are falling is interesting because i played around a lot with adding grain and spin and wiggler and a heap of effects to try and make it look more interesting but ended up cutting a lot of it away because it took too long to render. And i hate that i deleted stuff because i was too lazy to wait. (shame on me!)

i like the way the forest appears. the feathering of the masks just fits nicely with that sort of hazy green light to get in forests. i think its pretty.

i had major major problems with getting the dirt patch and its edge to transition into place. i was trying to position them with in three d space so i could just use a camera to move forward and down in a curved motion so it looked like it was actually traveling through a forest to the ground... but for some reason i could never get to to work right. so i used a double layer and fading and other things to try and make it look as smooth as possible.

Just putting it out there that i did the composition setting wrong... the width and height is ALL WRONG. damn mistakes.

Mad MACKs

Now lets see... I had some trouble with this one simply because it is so hideously ugly and you hate yourself for creating hugely disgusting thing. I made two versions but the first one was horrible because i attempted to just use masks to create nice interesting looking stars but they ended up just looking mangled (thanks to my wonderful drawing skills). it also had problems with timing and masking and i couldn't be bothered to go through and fix every little thing that was wrong with it so i scrapped it and started again.

I think with this i could ave gone a little more crazy as per the outline we were given... and maybe more of a running theme, like each of the sections for each appliance be kind of similar in presentation. However that might make craziness less.... so its a toss up really.

there is one little bit that annoys me so much because i didn't notice it until i rendered it out. But at the start when the "its price madness" text appears a couple of times... it starts to reappear slightly before cutting to the next product. so it only gets to about "ess" of madness before cutting. annoy me to no end.. because it looks unprofessional and bleh.

other than that i don't hate it. BUT of course I'll never be happy ith anything i do.. everything can always be better