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.