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

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

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.

PAN-MAN Kinetic Typography

Week 3

This is my version of a 30 second Kinetic Typography using the provided music thing.

i call it Pan Man. Becuase at the start he uses the word Pan a lot.

there were a few things i really struggled with in this exercise.
1. i had problems trying to find a connection, some common theme other than the music that could link my words. i didn't just want to repeat the script which unfortunatly to a certain degree i did.
2. i felt like i was definatly over using random effects at some points... simply becuase i could not think of any reason for this text to be moving or doing anything at all.
3. there were some technical problems i faced. i could't figure out what to keyframe if i wanted the music to fade so unfortunatly it ends rather abruptly. and i had problems with the audio while rendering out... which obviously got sorted.

i think if i had maybe done some more research or just spent a little longer on the animation i would have created a more satisfying result. something that had a little more 'deep meaning' rather than being so superficial.
OR is that what i intended?




TYPOGRAPHY

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/25/breathtaking-typographic-posters/

This website while servicing static typography just showed me some really beautiful examples of how text can really be used in unusual ways rather than just sticking to straight forward text saying something (much like my kinetic typography animation) text and fonts can be used to create outstanding images.

I wish i had had a look at it before i did my kinetic typography... then it might have been good.. well better than it is.

week one - my first attempt

well these are my first attempts at anything to do with after effects. I've used photoshop before... so i knew what was going on there.

Urm obviously looking back on this i'm horrified that i could be this lazy. Its boring and terrible makes no sense the masking is el yucko.

i don't think i actually read the instructions of the weekly tutorial exercise properly. So NOTE to self i might want to d that in future.

here you go i hope you enjoy my particular brand of rush.










thanks for watching,
Caspian