My final piece

And here it is, the final animation.

I'm pretty happy with the end result, I admit, the story is a little weird and kinda wish I had a better idea really, that's what was the most time consuming of this module, thinking of ideas to the music, but in the end, I feel it flows quite well and was good experience for future projects, I would definitely want to learn more about after effects and look into using different objects for other stop motions.

After Effects

Throughout this year, we have used a collection of different Adobe software that I had used before and either was confident or knew the basics with them. But After Effects I had never tried, mainly because I had never looked into video editing before. At first it's daunting, your screen gets filled with timelines and render queues and buttons I'd never heard of.

I knew what I wanted to do in AE, it was just a matter of how I apply that to my animation, it was simple enough on paper, but it took several tutorials to do just the simplest things...

my first task was adding text, because of my basic skills, i kept the text simple, ideally I would have wanted something much more complex to happen with the text, but I chose to do a simple fade in, fade out option throughout the first 2 scenes, using keyframes and changing the opacity.

The next task was fading the music out at the end so it didn't just suddenly stop, thankfully this process was very similar to the above with text, so that problem was soon solved.

The biggest problem was getting the music and animation to play at different speeds, It just wasn't working, either the music would slow down and sound really deep, or speed up and go high pitched, I spent a long time trying to fix it but instead, I increased the speed of my animation by 10% and rendered it without sound and turned it into a .mov, knowing that hopefully, I could just simple drag and drop the music onto the .mov in iMovie and it should fit together fine.

Thankfully, it did.

A close version of the final piece

Instead of editing each piece in After Effects (one of the most confusing programs ever) I decided to leave that until last and just use iMovie to help give me the idea of stop motion and putting music to it, this helped speed up the process of being able to quickly check and then going back to the camera and re-shooting something if necessary

List of things I need to edit:

Print to pixel and my name needs to go in there somewhere

make it faster by roughly 10%

align the music to her pace

cut out a few pictures that aren't required

Time to load my pictures in After Effects.

Dancing and Waving: The final scenes

The song is a feel good song, and as soon as the beat kicks in, it's hard to not want to move to the music, which is why I thought a scene with dancing in would be perfect.

making lego people dance however, I thought was quite a challenge...

At the moment, the girl has just got out of her car and is walking on the beach towards a party where there is dancing going on, she walks towards as they dance, and then the camera shoots to a different angle, a shot of the house in view and each character lined up waving simultaneously.

The shot of them dancing and her walking.

The set.

Introduction to the animation

I needed something to start the animation off, before the 'ba da da ba da ba' kicked in, so that when that bit did start, the girl would be walking to the music.

looking through footage I had taken while playing with lego, I found a bit where she turns around from facing the camera and walks away from the camera

The rest of the video is messy, but that bit just seemed to work, I went to iMovie and quickly threw it in and just placed the music on and this is what I had so far...

Introduction and 2 scenes

Things seemed to be coming together, and I was pretty happy that I hadn't had a major disaster.. yet.

Adding the car

The car scene was my least planned one, not because I wasn't prepared, but more because I felt it had to be one of them, unexpected ideas, originally I set out to do all the scenes with the camera stationary, but instead of having different angles for this scene, I felt moving the camera while moving the car at the same time would give it a much more realistic feel to the animation and also include more motion

Before I tried moving both, I filmed what the car would look like moving just one brick per picture

It turned out to be quite successful

For the final second scene, I needed to move the car, the camera and the background, after getting it wrong the first few times, I got into a routine and finally got it right, and also decided to add the car door opening to help the story flow into the next scene, while people in the background are waving at her and horses are eating grass.

First Scene

After sorting out my set and listening to the music, over and over again, I thought I'd give my first scene a shot!

After putting it to the music, I knew it needed a little intro before this, but I'm quite pleased on how it went, the walking is quite smooth, the brick work behind goes quite well, and I only edited this in iMovie and made it 0.1 secs per picture. When editing it properly, I think it should be a little faster, I need to make sure she is moving to the beat.

Process

Instead of jumping straight into my final piece, I wanted to make sure everything was going to look okay before doing it all at once. I decided to break it all down into scenes, and then practice each scene roughly to get an idea and not waste time

In the first part of my animation, I had a red brick wall being built behind her, so I had a go at just the brick wall on its own, there was two ways I could do it, either straight left to right, or left to right but at an angle, I also had to work out, when to start filling in the pieces I had missed at the front, as you can see in this, I left them to the end and it looks quite odd...

The next thing I wanted to look at was walking, again, but this time from a better angle, that I would probably use in my final animation, what I really liked was the shadow the character was creating and obviously moving with them, this gave it a more realistic effect, unintentionally.

Another idea that popped into my head, after the storyboard was to add text into the animation using lego, to keep with the theme, I made a quick video to see what it'd be like, but I wouldn't exactly know where to incorporate this into my final piece.

First go with stop motion and lego together

I didn't really have an idea of what to do at this stage, so I thought I would mess around with a lego character to see what it's like getting a character to walk and how smooth or choppy it looked.

Time to play with Lego

I had a solid idea to work with from my storyboard and it was time to start trying to piece together some sort of animation. A good friend of mine lent me all his childhood coloured bricks and it was time to start building.

Big tub of lego!

So.. Many.. Bricks..

Like filming a movie, you need a set, so my first task was to build a sturdy set where nothing would fall over or move out of place easily when constantly moving pieces around it.

Start of the path and grass

I cleared my living room table and attached masking tape to help secure the base of my set I was creating. The aim was, a grey path, with grass sand and sea in the foreground and buildings and other lego people in the background.

Lego Research

Really swaying towards Lego, the more I research it, the more amazing stuff I find, the time people must have put into some of these videos is insane, I just couldn't have the patience for a 3 minute film made up of thousands of pictures of lego..

Star Wars and Lego is a great combo..

I like the motion of Mario in this one, It's really smooth and if I was to use Lego, all I can think about is a girl walking down the street to the music...

Ideas

Ideas for what type of stop motion I should experiment with and create my final piece..

The Choices:

Plasticine

Drawing

Lego

Whiteboard

I mean, all variations are good, but I think it's going to have to be plasticine or lego for me, they look more fun and not so much easier, but more enjoyable in my opinion

Storyboard

My idea for the story of the animation is a bit like this.

There is a main female character, walking down a path with her arms and feet moving to the rhythm of the song. That is the image I always get when I hear this song.

I also feel the music is quite surreal, and dreamlike. To get this idea across, I kind of thought of inception and how stuff can be built and demolished in dreams, so as she is walking in the first scene, there will be a brick wall being created and then demolished behind her, which should go quite well with the music.

In the second scene, I was thinking of a car scene, the female will be in her car and driving down a road with grass in the foreground and then either buildings would start to be created and demolished, or, she would drive past different buildings, but I'm not sure on how we could get buildings to move into the shot, this will be the scene I play around with the most.

In the third scene, the female will come out of her car and start to move over to a group of people dancing to the same music, and she will walk along a beach to get to them, as this amplifys the point of summer and sunshine, which is what I also think when hearing this track.

To finish off, I was thinking getting all the characters I'm using to stand infront of the house and then wave all at the same time, keeping the same rhythm, with the music to then fade out.

picture of my storyboard

Research

After looking into stop motion and the capabilities of what you can achieve. I decided to research examples of stop motion in mainstream film and television and also what users have created on YouTube.

Optimus Prime vs Bumblebee, this example is filmed so well, the transitions between pictures is seamless and  the lighting never changes, the frames per second on this piece must be quite high and must have taken alot of patience to get each movement right.

The film Coraline is a great example of stop motion within the film industry.

"At its peak, the film involved the efforts of 450 people, including from 30 to 35 animators and digital designers in the Digital Design Group (DDG) and more than 250 technicians and designers."


The film combines stop motion and 3-D printing. 3-D printing adds so much possibility to facial expressions and movements.


"The film's creators used three 3D printing systems from Objet in the development and production of the film. Thousands of high-quality 3D models, ranging from facial expressions to doorknobs were printed in 3D using the Polyjet matrix systems, which enable the fast transformation of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings into high-quality 3D models. The characters of Coraline could potentially exhibit over 208,000 facial expressions."

Stop Motion Workshop

In our first workshop, Matt showed us the Stop motion suite and what we could use to help with our task. In the room the Macs were loaded with specific stop motion software and hooked up to Video Cameras via firewire, The cameras can be attached to a mount for smoother output and also a birds eye view.

Behind the macs are sectors which can be set up to film a minature set, which you can set up lighting, cameras, tripods and the chosen objects and leave them in the exact same position you left them.

We were split up into groups and me, Adam and Elaine made a short animation getting used to the software and the equipment we had.

The props we had: a wrestler, an alien and a car.

First Attempt

I had a basic idea of what to do with stop motion and turning inanimate objects to animate, So I experimented with my headphones and a few sticky notes I had lying around.

Although the final product is poor, it gave me a good idea of what to actually do, how to set up everything and what I will need to consider when doing further productions.

I grabbed my camera and attached it to my tripod and cleared my table. The repetition of always having to go back to my camera and clicking became quite annoying as I'd knock the camera slightly and would make it not as smooth.

I will also have to consider lighing, and bringing in my lamp to make sure the light doesn't change if I'm taking pictures for a long time, the light will change over the course it's in progress.

My song

Stereolab - Infinity girl.


Already it's getting annoying :(

First impressions:

Summer, laughter, good time, motion, walking, female (is all I can think because of the name) chillout music, feel good, bright colours - yellow and orange. bright green grass, sunshine, walking down a street, iPod advert music, catchy, repetitive, upbeat

Ba da, ba ba ba ba, ba da, bib

Lyrics:

new realities are conditions

much to little for us to suffer

because we don't know any better

there are a hundred ways to fall in step

new realities are conditions

much to little for us to suffer

because we don't know any better

there are a hundred ways to fall in step

because for the past two hundred years

the wine drunk and the freedom proclaimed

o are dubious and laughable

waiting to yield a new use of life

scatter,

scatter brained by

the sins,

sins of silence

scatter,

scatter brained by

the sins,

sins of silence

scatter,

scatter brained by

the sins,

sins of silence

scatter,

scatter brained by

the sins,

sins of silence

scatter,

scatter brained by

the sins,

sins of silence

a knife

to cut the root

the root

of ignorance

a knife

to cut the root

the root

of ignorance

scatter,

scatter brained by

the sins,

sins of silence

scatter,

scatter brained by

the sins,

sins of silence

new realities are conditions

much to little for us to suffer

because we don't know any better

there are a hundred ways to fall in step

because for the past two hundred years

the wine drunk and the freedom proclaimed

o are dubious and laughable

waiting to yield a new use of life 

New Assignment

So the new brief, Print to Pixel is all about, animation. It's something I've never really tried before as it requires so much patience and small movements and I can definitely see it being more stressful than folding paper! 

Before I had heard my song, I was kind of hoping for a song with lots of lyrics and meaning, as that would have made this alot easier (and I also really wanted to have a go at the overused - Kinetic Typography) 

not related, but amazing example of animation 

Favourite kinetic typog. piece