]]> http://www.dukevisualstudies.org/artsvis54/?feed=rss2&p=2930 28 http://www.dukevisualstudies.org/artsvis54/?p=2920 http://www.dukevisualstudies.org/artsvis54/?p=2920#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:41:34 +0000 Rose Sheela http://www.dukevisualstudies.org/artsvis54/?p=2920 I completely forgot to update the blog with my final video!

The clip turned out well and I’m really glad I used the “radiohead” song as the soundtrack. Stopmotion was definitely a difficult process but I think the photoshop/digital photography method worked out very well. I would like to experiment with more stopmotion animation techniques, maybe claymation, or a diaporama of landscape photos. This project made me realize how interested I am in the relationship of music and video. Choosing the audio was the most exciting part of the project and I tried to time my slide transitions along with the musical beats. It was very interesting to see how people responded to the survey, some peoples’ “hells” were other peoples’ “heavens” I would have liked to take more pictures around campus but I did not have enough time to incorporate all of those photos into the video clip.

listen to the full song! It’s reallly good!

I’ve attached clips from the story board.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Puph1hejMQE

and a video of a Ukraine sand artist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOMgDbcA84A

From the beginning I knew I wanted to do a stop motion animation, but I wasn’t sure about what medium I was going to use. I knew I didn’t want to use clay, because while I think it looks great, I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied with the results of my efforts. I decided to do simple drawings and at first I was going to actually do the entire animation on a fridge using magnets and pieces of paper, but in the end I decided to just focus on the scraps of paper. I tossed around several different ideas for the theme and story and eventually decided to use Robert Frost’s Poem Fire and Ice as the focus for my animation.

To make my images for the animation I drew each frame on a square piece of paper that I had ripped by hand. I used a black sharpie and then a few colored pencils. When I had all of the pieces of paper ready I took a picture of every piece. I used a lamp in my room for good consistent light and put the pieces of paper on a black background.

Once I had all the images I uploaded them in Smith and added them to iMovie. I was worried that I would have a lot of trouble with actually making the movie, but I figure it all out after awhile and had the sequence and timing of all the images done pretty quick. I used an effect on the images which made the black background much darker and gave the pieces of paper a yellowish color and old look.

Getting the song I wanted and having it time with the video was definitely the hardest and most time consuming part of making the animation on the computer. I spent a lot of time working with one song and then switched in the end. I eventually found a program online to use to edit it the way I wanted and once I figured out the timing, I saved and added it to iMovie. After that I just exported it to Quicktime.

The finished animation is uploaded on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M16XwvERy1I

My original storyboard was on a scrap of paper and in boxes about 1/2 inch big, so for my final I redid it on a piece of computer paper.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGSUHKRL5uI

I’m in the Fred Burns Film Anim class, in which we did hand drawn animations and shot each frame with the Oxberry camera behind the BC.

Throughout the semester we worked on our final project, a one minute animation. And every once in a while we had to do an exercise to familiarize ourselves with animating techniques.

Here’s a video with my exercises! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS_8-aJdbVM

The actual class final projects will be screened at the Student Film Showcase this Friday (tomorrow!) at 5pm in White Lecture Hall. I’ll post my final project sometime this weekend on youtube.

Sadly, Fred is planning to retire soon, but he hasn’t made an official decision yet! So if he offers it next fall, you should definitely take it if you enjoy animation

Oh and Duke’s Oxberry camera has the LAST PLATEN IN THE WORLD! (platen=glass thingie). how exciting.

I was too far behind to catch up on time. But here are a couple of images from my animation: heaven, represented by a drug trip, and hell represented by complete isolation.

So I wonder this
As life billows smoke inside my head
This little game where nothing is sure, oh
Why would you play by the rules?
Who did, you did, you
Who did, you did, you

When was she killed
The very last dodo bird
And was she aware
She was the very last one

yes… i did lyrics.com that one, but either way i thought the concept of the last dodo bird tied in well with the quote i am writing some of in the sand during the stop motion film: the dodo’s life was but a series of details, and nothing significant, until she died and her species became extinct. this had far-reaching effects on the world surrounding the dodo, and also our world today (most of which we will never know). it also made me wonder about heaven and hell in relation to the dodo, since i am really looking for more abstract connections to this theme. i wonder what it would be like to be the last of a kind on the planet- heaven or hell? adam and eve were 2 of a kind and in heaven without the rest of mankind. i also wanted to imagine what heaven and hell are like (as we tend to do) if they exist, and i realized that something we all have in common as a race is that we will never be sure, which is another thing that dave’s song “dodo” talks about- the certainty of being unsure in this life. he speaks of life as “this little game where nothing is sure”, and i extend that to ascending or descending post game to heaven or hell.

This idea also got me thinking about tastes and how people always say the common expression that something “tastes like heaven,” so maybe I could create an animation about that as well, taking a more literal translation of it.

Another idea I had was from the fact that Yoplait used a representation of heaven in their commercials. There are many other ads that have used the concept of heaven and hell and have referenced them in their campaigns, and I was thinking about maybe meshing these ads together into one cohesive form or story.

Update: So for the project, I have decided to use many advertisements and pop culture references of angels/heaven and hell/the devil from movies to Philly Cream Cheese, and merge them into kind of a fairytale about the stereotypical corruption of fame and getting caught up in that whole lifestyle. I want to create a typical fairytale starting off with the innocent and naive Kraft angel from Philly heaven who gets caught up in the supposed City of Angels—Los Angeles, with some ad references in between, and narrate it like a storybook using either a diaporama, which I think might be easiest, or white board animation. I think my biggest challenge will be that if I use a diaporama, I will have to come up with a lot of images that I might not be able to create without either Photoshop or a lot of props, so maybe a white board animation will be kind of fun too, especially since it will create a whole storybook effect that way.

storyboard

Update: For my animation, I’ve laid out a storyboard and created a narration to go along with it. I still need to figure out how to record my own audio into iMovie so that the animation will read like a storybook or a typical fairytale because that’s how I’ve made my story to mirror, but I will also incorporate background music as well. I’ve decided that a form of a combination between a diaporama and claymation will probably be the easiest way to go, so I’m going to be using some easy modeling clay to form my characters and merge pictures of them, because given the settings of my story and the costumes that would be involved, using real props and people would most likely be more difficult than modeling them out of clay. One of my main concerns is that the animation as I have it planned out right now might be a little too long, but I think that once I get started, it won’t be too difficult to make sure I stay within the time constraints.

Update:

Here are some production stills of my final animation video. I actually ended up doing mainly a stop motion animation with figures made out of modeling clay and cotton balls for the clouds, but there are some aspects of it that seem like a diaporama, because I included pictures as well. The figures were especially hard to get to stand up and photograph at the same time, but I managed to get them to stay upright for the shots that I needed. I narrated the story to go along with the pictures like a storybook, and there is background music as well to fit into the mood of the scene. I actually ended up going over the alotted 2 minute time requirement, and I did manage to cut some of the video, but not enough, and it would be difficult to shorten the video without cutting out some of the narration now. But, hopefully I will be able to find a way to fix that and shorten the video a little bit to fit under two minutes.

Update: So I was able to shorten my animation! It’s still about 7 seconds over the 2 minute requirement, but I redid the narration and tried to say it as fast as possible without rushing too much, and I edited the video to fit the new narration. It came out to 2 minutes and seven seconds.