Thursday 16th January 2014

Final Edit

Today I needed to edit a significant amount of my animation to react to feedback I had received. I planned on removing the audio files containing the reading of the texts, adding the new shoots and fixing all the scenes that where showing the text messages.

I first deleted all of the audio files I mentioned. It is best if I just leave them out as they do not suit the animation at all and it also drags out the part of the scene which really did not need to be as long.

I then focused on the new scenes for my animation. I batched processed the images exactly like I did previously, at a pixel ratio of 1280 x 720. Once these were completed I put them on the timeline accordingly and redid the audio of the wind and text message alert to match the sequence. I also made sure that the images lasted 3 frames just like the majority of the images in the animation.

Finally I reworked the text message scenes. I decided it would be best if I have a small bit of animation play at the beginning of the clip and then have a still frame for the rest of the scene. I believe this works a whole lot better compared to how I had it the first time round. Afterwards I also shortened the length of the scene as it did not need to be as long as it was previously, ranging from 15 to 20 seconds. The scenes now last no longer than 10 seconds as it shouldn't take that long to read the text messages.

This is how I now layed out my text message scenes.

It was during this time however, I noticed an error with one of my reshoots. I accidentally had used the wrong text message during the shoot and this scene was the same as the one where the message was too big for the screen. But I didn't have any time to reshoot again so I have to use the old shoot. It isn't too bad though. I managed to reposition each shot on screen so that none of the text is being cut out.

Tuesday 14th January 2014

Reshooting

Today I acted on the feedback I had received and reshot the outdoors scene and also shot an ending scene. I also used this opportunity to reshoot some shots of the text message as in one scene the text is taking up the entire screen.

The outdoor scene was being reshot due to the fact it would have been just as effective to shoot as live action, so in this reshoot my actor instead slid across the floor instead of walking. The actor also spins around when the wind blows him backwards. This was inspired by cartoons when something moving at high speed goes by the character on screen. The character then spins around frantically. My actor, however, did not portray this very well so I don't think it'll come out as well as I had hoped. But I might be wrong when it comes to editing the footage into the movie.

Just as I did when I did my final shoot, I used the exact same settings on the camera. Mainly the landscape setting as it still provided a good colour balance. The unfortunate occurrence though, is that the weather was not as generous as last time and I was unable to maintain a consistent lighting due to clouds constantly blocking the sun. The lighting doesn't change greatly but the shadow of the character disappears on occasions.

As I mentioned, I shot a conclusive scene to add some form of ending to my animation. The character returned to the beginning room and received a text message alerting them that they have completed both tasks and thus are able to return home. It is not a very good ending considering the theme is 'lost and found'. Rather than finding his way home the character is granted it. But it is better than having no ending so it should hopefully suffice.

 

Thursday 9th January 2014

Critical Evaluation

Peer Evaluation

After screening my animation to my peers I got given very useful feedback on how to improve my animation and also what I had done well.

Overall my animation worked pretty well. The soundtrack and sound effects were suitable and effective and some of my scenes had a good impact. The usage of flying in the film studio was a good example of this as it is something that couldn't be accomplished using live action. However, the main problem with my animation is that other than the flying scene everything else could have been shot live action. I didn't really push the boundaries of what I could accomplish using stop-motion and that is something I need to improve on. Also my peers seemed to agree with me that the voice did not suit the animation at all and there were also incorrect readings of the text from the voice actor. The text messages also had a couple of grammatical errors that I did not notice at time of the shoot. Another edit I need to make is that when the text messages are on screen, they shouldn't move around for the entire time. They should be a still image on screen to allow the audience to read the message easily.

Personal Evaluation

I agree with the feedback I had been given and using the information given I plan on reshooting some scenes to improve the animation. I don't have the time to reshoot the entire animation so I plan just to reshoot the outside scene because that is the scene that really needs something to show it can be accomplished better using stop-motion rather than video. I also believe that I need to shoot a more sufficient ending as the animation at the moment isn't conclusive at all.

I had mentioned before my discontent with the voice acting and after my peers reaction I will certainly be taking the files out of the movie. However, I feel that the other audio files were used very effectively but I could have made usage of a few more. For example a door creaking when one was being opened could have been effective.

The pacing of the animation felt could have been handled slightly better. There were times the animation would slow down in one scene and then speed up again in another and I don't feel it worked with such an inconsistent pacing. This only really occurred during the scenes where it had a shot of the text message. I had to slow down the pace of the text message so it was possible to actually read the messages. Maybe having it as one image for the majority would stop this from happening. I do plan on changing the text scenes accordingly to what feedback I received.

Monday 6th January 2014

Editing

Batch Processing

Today I eventually began editing my stop-motion together. The very first thing I did was separate every image into specific scenes. This was to make the batch process sequence easier and quicker. The idea was to separate each scene into individual folders so I could readjust the crop to match each scene. As each scene would require different crop areas, if I had batched everything with the same crop setting, I would have a lot of important parts of the animation cut out.

It wasn't hard to change the crop setting every time as well. Once my action had been recorded I could easily edit the action to change the position of the crop. All I needed to do was import an image from the scene, double click on the crop action and reposition the selection area. Once I had positioned the crop correctly all I needed to do was crop the image for the action to be saved.

I cropped every image to a pixel ratio of 1280 x 720 (width x height). This is too have consistency throughout my entire animation and because it is the correct pixel ratio for a 16:9 movie clip.

Creating the movie clip

Once all of my images had batch processed and again separated into different folders, I then began work on putting my animation together in Adobe Premiere. As I was using still images I needed to alter my project settings to make sure each image only lasts a specific amount of frames. For my project I decided to set the project to play images for 3 frames as I had a lot of images to work with and wanted to have a slightly fast pace to my animation.

I arranged all the scenes accordingly and used different layers all the time to make sure I am able to easily edit the scene if needed. I also used different layers for my audio as I was having a backing track along with sound effects so there was constant overlapping sounds.

I only had a few sound effects as I didn't really believe I needed many. In the end I only used a phone vibration sound and some strong wind sounds. I also had my actor record his voice to read out the text messages. Although I have left the recorded sounds in the movie clip, I am not so keen on the outcome of the audio as I don't think it matches very well with the animation. But I will see how others respond to the voice and I will decide whether or not to leave the files in or not depending on what my peers think.

The last part of compiling my animation together was to add the backing track. However, I have yet to find a suitable song up until today when I did some searching for instrumentals. I felt a song with lyrics wasn't working and instrumentals tend to be good for backing music and thus I began searching YouTube. To save myself a lot of time listening to countless songs I decided I should narrow my search by looking at instrumentals of artists I already new. After searching through various artists such as Coldplay, The Cab, Nickelback, I found a song I thought was very fitting. Two Door Cinema Club - Something Good Can Work was the song I eventually stumbled upon and decided to use for my animation.

Friday 20th December 2013

Final Shoot

So today I began my final shoot. I had planned ahead on what locations I want to use, however, I had to change some locations as some were more convenient than others. For example I had planned to use a corridor as my starting point for the animation, but I decided to use a small room instead as it wasn't really possible to stop others from walking down the corridor. The small room provided me with a secluded area where there was no interference. This also meant that my idea slightly diverted from the original plan as I wanted the establishing shot to be of a corridor with various rooms to go through.

Using the new location had it's flaws as well. First and foremost there was not a lot of space to work with, so the camera angles became limited. I could have possibly taken the camera off of the tripod but I assumed the camera would have shaken without any support. I wanted to keep camera shake to a minimum so I did not want to explore this option. With the space limitation I believe I managed to get a few decent camera angles to work with. One camera angle was a P.O.V (point of view) shot of the character looking at a message on their phone. This shot was used as a narrative for the audience to understand exactly what is happening. If I hadn't shown this message it would have been hard to portray the storyline. I used this shot various times throughout my shoot as it was the best way for me to convey what is happening at each point in the story.

This is one of the camera angles I used. With the limited amount of space this was quite awkward to accomplish.

I again used the P.O.V shot in my next scene which I shot in a film studio. This scene was originally planned to happen in a classroom but I again decided against this for two reasons. The first being I needed an empty classroom, and the classroom I originally wanted too use had students working inside even though I had been told it would be empty. The second reason was that the film studio was a much larger area. This meant I could have a lot more space for the camera and tripod. The large area is also why I planned for my next scene to be shot outside.

It doesn't show the entire area however this conveys a little bit of how open the room is.

With a large open area with no one around was an ideal spot to shoot my next scene but I had to be very conscience of the weather as I did not want inconsistent lighting. This didn't turn out to be much of a problem in the end as the weather was fairly consistent throughout. At one point I did encounter a slight problem with equipment which delayed my shoot for some time. The outdoor scene is the first scene I shot today and I didn't inspect equipment suffieciently. The tripod didn't have a plate to attach the camera to the tripod so I needed to find one. Also the camera didn't have a lot of battery remaining and I was unaware that it used a rechargeable battery pack as a posed to using standard double A batteries. It wasn't until I had obtained some batteries that I realised there was a spare battery pack and it was fully charged. So in all I had wasted about an hour or so trying to get a plate and batteries and eventually got to shooting. A slight problem I also encountered was that the ground was slightly uneven so I needed to adjust the tripod to avoid having slanted scenes. It wouldn't be that much of a problem as I could easily fix it in Photoshop or Premiere.

 

This image shows the outside area I used, also the sky was very clear which was why I was able to get my lighting fairly consistent.

Throughout my shoot I used the landscape setting on the camera instead of adjusting the ISO, F-stop and aperture. The camera setting worked reasonably well inside and outside so I felt that leaving the setting the same would be more beneficial than constantly using a different setting to match the location I am at. I also used two lenses for the camera for different shots. The macro lens was used for the majority of close-up shots where as I used an 18-55mm for wide-shots and for all shots in the small room. This is because the macro lens was far too zoomed in to use in such a small room, thus the 18-55mm was the better option as it showed a lot more but was still close enough.

Thursday 5th December 2013

Test Shoot

Today I did a quick test shot of one of my scenes. I wanted to test to see if I could make this section of the animation believable as well as to get a rough idea of how long the scene would last. This also helped me to get an idea of what settings I should be using on the camera for the outside scene (providing the weather is similar).

I put the completely wrong settings into the camera and this was the outcome so I knew I was doing something wrong and definitely needed to change the settings.

After a quick change in settings I got this image, however this image was a bit too dark so again I change the aperture. This time to 1/1000

This image was basically my ideal settings, the aperture was at 1/1250.

Although the above image had the settings I wanted I changed the aperture a bit more just too see the outcome. This image wasn't that bad but I still preferred the previous image as it wasn't as dark on the edges.

Settings I used were 1/1250, F00 & ISO 800.

Once I had gotten my camera settings to an ideal quality I began my shoot. Because I was only really focused on seeing the outcome of the scene I didn't bother doing various camera angles and just stuck to a wide shot. In my final shoot I plan on using a variety of different camera angles in each scene but for now it's just the one.

I completed the shoot fairly quickly taking roughly 100 images and batch processed them to crop each photo to 1280 by 720 pixels. After that I then imported the processed images into Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 to create a short movie clip.

This is the test shoot. The duration came to about 17 seconds which is a very good duration for this scene. I don't really want to exceed 20 seconds during the final shoot as I feel it may last a bit too long if it does.

Wednesday 20th November 2013

Preproduction Planning

My idea

The idea I have decided to go with is that a person has being 'taken captive' in a sense. They have found themselves in a corridor with various doors on either side and then they receive a text message. Looking at the message we can see it describing that the character has been placed in a corridor with various doors to walk through, however this is not an ordinary corridor. Each door has a random location on either end and all doors that the character will encounter will also have this same effect. The goal for the character is to go through one door, complete a specific task to escape the room and eventually reach the exit. Each area/room has a door to go through, though it may not always be visible. Once they complete the task and go through the door, they will be taken to another room/area.

Storyline

Character standing in a hallway, looking confused about their whereabouts. Receives a text message stating: You have been placed in this hallway and are required to find your way out by accomplishing each task within the 3 rooms. The character can’t move forward without completing each task. Character finishes reading text and begins quest to find the way out.

Goes through first door and found themselves inside a standard room, however there is a task written on a whiteboard that the character must complete to return to the hallway. Door locks behind the character to ensure they must complete the task. The character reads the task and as each word is read it rubs off of the board. Task – Go from the spot you’re standing to the door in the middle of the room without touching the floor. Character accepts this easy challenge and begins to fly across the room easily accomplishing the task. They then walk through the door in front of them and it teleports them to another location.

The door takes the character outside this time. Receives another text message and this time it explains the requirements to advance to the next room. Task – Get to the door ahead of you. Though this seems to be a rather easy challenge very stormy winds occur which make it difficult for the character to move forward. As the character traverses through this field in an attempt to get to the next room, they are constantly pushed back. After sometime of walking against the wind they just about make it towards the door and climb through.

Now in the third and final room the character faces their last challenge.