If you want to skip the 'making of' and see the final video - I've embedded it at the bottom of this post.
I was quite inspired by the Richard Morrison talk earlier this term and took a couple of things from it. With reference to this project I applied what he said about letting the idea come out naturally - and not forcing it out. This was partly due to juggling several other projects but also a result of my way of working.
I acted on moments of inspiration and combined the results of these creative impulses with a methodical approach. In other words - doing some storyboarding and visually responding to the music (see earlier post) as well as thinking 'hmmm - I'd quite like to put in a sunrise timelapse' or 'I feel like going out and doing some creative night photography'.
Some results of these experiments are below:
Also during the term I went to an Audio Visual and Projection mapping Festival at Geneva with Simon which was great fun and inspiring. I will do a separate blog post on this. The point of me mentioning it is that I was able to get some great shots of being above the clouds.
So around a week or two ago my head was full of ideas - I had lots of footage filmed in mind of the project, I had some initial artwork to go on, and some timelapses and photographs. I just needed to somehow condense everything into the 50 second audio piece. Essentially I needed to go 'back to the drawing board' and do some final preparation work. I still needed a proper storyboard (the first one was done before getting a lot more ideas/footage etc.) , a dopesheet -which turned out to be very useful and a place to put all my ideas:
I got to work following the storyboard and produced some artwork designed to be composited into the piece (whilst listening to the music I was doing it for) Eventually I had all the raw material I needed and worked the different elements into After Effects.
One fun idea was to dress up in a suit and incorporate pixellation of me holding a heartbeat (using a video but having it printed off so literally holding up a frame at a time.) I was planning to do the same with a sunrise - but due to time constraints I decided 'hey I'll just composite it onto a blank sheet of paper that I'm holding ' This was a massive time saver and looks a lot smoother. There is a nice hand-done quality to the Heartbeat however. If you have any opinions on this feel free to comment! Getting muddy whilst wearing the smart clothes was Ninas idea (who is also featured in the film.) This was great fun. Also see if you can spot the additional prop in the shot. Here are some elements I put into the final video:
I cut out these cogs by hand using a scalple and some card. Then I scanned them in and animated them in Flash. These fed into the people timelapse shot below - for this I used After Effects.
These were initially hand drawn using pastels on black paper. Then I put them into photoshop and
used a pallett brush and liquify effect. I designed them carefully on photoshop to be able to be looped.
So you get the idea - inspired creativity is what it is! I Love it!
Presenting an Audio Visual piece I produced for my 'Negotiated Brief' project at the Digital Animation BA course in Falmouth.
I really enjoyed doing this, it gave me a chance to be quite experimental and incorporate a range of techniques. Hopefully I will continue to do this kind of audio visual work. Its great to have an idea and then make it happen.
The highlights have to be dressing up in a suit and getting muddy - great fun!
Thanks to Nina Cumberbirch for allowing me to feature her in the video. Thanks to Lazulene for the music.
What does it all mean?.. well I leave that to your interpretation.
Now I must go out and celebrate ! Wooooooooooo!
0 comments:
Post a Comment