Intro to the Making of: Week 9-11: Animation History Video essay coming together.

Over the last few weeks I spent weeks 9-11 of the module doing my making of video essay as we would be submitting our work next week. This meant I would need to focus on this module and do the other modules later on. Since my script was long and I had a number of clips to edit I decided to do this in sections beginning, middle, end much like a story spine. I felt the best place to start would be to place my green screen files into Premier files, and build them up as I went along. Annabeth suggested that I needed to re record my audio files in the green screen, and as I reviewed them I felt she was right. I did some background artwork using different medias for different scenes such as digital art, lineless art for the golden age of animation and watercolour paints for backgrounds such as the office and prehistoric caves.

Stone age cave watercolour piece.

Gallery for the technical side of animation.

Background for the golden age of animation.

The first item needed was an introduction and I was still conflicted about wether I should introduce sounds or use the music from the clips I was using. I sought Annabeths advice and she said it would be a good idea of using the soundtrack from each clip that I've used, and with that decided I added my dialogue. I recorded this using my iPhone, voice memos and transferred them into Premier for the picture and clip based scenes. I was advised to cut them down to the base scenes such as the ending scene of the Voltron transformation, and on the ending crescendo of the opening which was the end of the Part of Your world Reprise.

I felt rather ambitious in my essay development including the use of animated backgrounds. This was because some of my clips such as the intro to Looney tunes needed an animated intro such as a stage curtain. This was accomplished using rostrum animation putting to use what I'd learned from the start of the module. The curtain animation was simple enough by simply animating the curtain rising up. However Annabeth suggested that I should speed up the curtain animation so that it wouldn't take so long in rising up. This made sense as it took too long to rise up. To alter this in Premier I used the speed and duration function and sped up the time of the animation.

I had the original illustration that I did in Clip Studio Paint to then be fully rendered in Photoshop to be compatible with After Effects. This would act as the hold before the opening. However I noticed it didn't resemble the shot before the curtain goes up. Over time I decided to trim down the opening shot and scale it to fit the rest of the scene before.

The watercolour pieces didn't seem to work against the green screen pieces, so I altered the levels and curves in Photoshop to bring out the colours more and to make it look like a digital piece.

Library.

Stone age cave.

These were then applied to the starting sequences of the green screen footage. This was done by applying the ultra key from the video effects option and dragging it into the effect controls. The background then had to be scaled down slightly to fit the screen and the green screen footage.

The time transition effect was placed in between the two scenes, but it was too short to make a timed transition before the next scene. I added the footage from the transition several times and had it fade out before getting to the next scene. However lowering the opacity of the clips at the right time was very difficult as much like After Effects it wouldn't decrease after a few seconds. Each frame of the essay needed to be scaled down to the size of the screen before moving on. One element of piecing the essay together that I felt to be the most difficult was re recording the dialogue for my green screen footage. I tried to talk along side the footage, however it was hard to keep up with it and so I kept stuttering. I was feeling aggravated every time I froze or stuttered as it wasn't professional in my essay.

However I soon managed to get the dialogue matched up with the lip synching. This was something I should've remembered from my experience with the creative play work. In doing my video essay dialogue what I found surprising was the timing in some of my clips with my dialogue. One example was in doing the dialogue explaining the Looney Tunes clip, when it moved to the rabbit season, duck season gag I spoke "well mostly" at the exact time when Daffy got blasted. This was rather funny. I kept some of the dialogue from the green screen room the same in areas like the cave and room describing Walt disney as it was an echo based environment.

One element I found annoying was how I kept coming up with good ideas at the last minute such as downloading additional clips for my essay such as the opening credits of Cars or a scene from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. One idea in particular was an animation explaining the multi plane camera. With which I decided to use rostrum animation to test myself further in this style. So I did the diagram of the camera in photoshop but left the layers unflattened so I could edit them in the animation. I felt that an intro was needed so I decided to have a cartoon version of myself wearing a graduates hat. This idea was inspired by the explanation scenes in the Epic Mickey games but didn't do a full 2D animation but an animatic like animation from looking at animatics from shows like Equestria Girls and Wall.E.

Multiplane Diagram.

Background for instructor.

I decided to come into University on my day off to do this section of work given it would limit the risk of distractions at home and procrastination, this was a time when focus was critical. I opened these diagrams and backgrounds in After Effects. My plan was to introduce the dialogue to get an idea of when to add the transitions or animations on which frames. However there seemed to be a lingering issue, the audio seemed to be cutting out, slowing down or just wouldn't play altogether. This was beginning to worry me as this could be an issue that affects my future rostrum pieces that featured sound.

One alternative was to play my recordings against my footage and apply the animations as I went along and do the animation section by section. Starting with the instructor, then the camera animation itself. This did seem to work, and I had some clear animation for my piece.

 In introducing the animations to the premier file about multi plane animation I slowed it down slightly to compensate the dialogue, until it was timed perfectly with the animation and fading in of the labels. Playing back the animation seemed to help as well. Over time I began to feel tired and frustrated with some of my work. I was particularly worried when I played back the first section only to discover the sound had disappeared, as to why I didn't know but this meant I had to start again. In hindsight I suspected it could've been when I was rendering some of my essay sections the heat from the fans could've been affecting the operating system unless it was just a one time bug. However I may need to consult James on this matter.

There were some elements I could do at home such as recordings but I could also do this in the base room when it was quiet. I felt amazed that I got more work done in Uni then I otherwise would at home, this maybe something to consider for future reference. I was beginning to make progress and nearly finished all my sections, but I needed to add further elements such as the black and white of the industrial revolution and to accompany the black and white cartoons from the old times. I did some backgrounds and explanation frames such as the rising popularity of 3D over 2D animation which I researched from the Pixar story documentary.

I used Mr.Incredible and Mikey mouse as the characters in this diagram. I created this in Clip Studio and drawing straight into the computer instead of wasting time of doing a separate sketch. I used lineless art on Mr. Incredible with soft shading to show the 3D elements whilst Mikey was in flat colours and line art. I included a small graph behind each character to show their popularity.

For the black and white backgrounds and green screening I looked

through the different tools until I found the image control options, and it had black and white listed. Once applied it turned the footage black and white which was what I wanted for the past element. It worked especially well for the industrial revolution section of the frames. I decided to add it to the section describing Walt Disney, however there were some issues with the green screening as when I applied the black and white it just showed the footage rather than the background which was a concern.

However I discovered that it was because the layer for the black and white
was above the green screening and so I rearranged the layers for the green screening to work. I felt I wanted to include music so I decided to use the Youtube audio Library to see which music would suit which scene in the essay. One example would be a music track called tick tock which I selected for the time travel theme as it suited the theme of time travel. During this I found some music that I could use for my storytelling animatic so it killed two birds with one stone.

I downloaded other sound effects and music as I worked. In my explanation of the multiplane I felt inspired by the Playbook music from How I met Your Mother but I knew I couldn't rip it off so I found some jazz music from the album to use.

My sections were all complete and rendered, so it was time to bring it together in one file. The sections were put in order and scaled to size, then some transitions and music was added in sections I didn't have time to add earlier or want to risk damaging my mac when being rendered. I played through the essay and adjusted the sound as it played laying out keyframes. I was still new to the sound mixer so it was hard to hold it in place. The final piece was finally rendered and saved as an mp4 file.

Looking back over this experience I would say its been the hardest few weeks of this whole course, it wasn't easy at times and I did start to loose confidence but I decided to go on as I never give up. If I could do this again in the future I would think that I would possibly need to improve on the organisation of my work as my work was all over the place with conflicting modules and late developing ideas. It would've made more sense to do elements like the backgrounds first before doing the editing so that I wouldn't divert from my schedule.

In hindsight I should've asked for help from the staff on matters such as the sound blacking out on my original first section then I could be better prepared for it should it happen again. In addition looking over my finished sections for advice before I finally rendered them. In conclusion I believe that whilst this task has been difficult I got it completed in record time before the hand in, so all that was left was to do my blog posts and update anything that I've missed before the final submission. In future I shall create a schedule of things to do in the event we are asked to do a video essay for next year, this way I won't divert from my tasks. I shall also work on writing down my ideas on paper so that I know what to include and what to place on the shelf.

Final Essay.