Additional animation..

On a last minute desire to jazz up our lip syncing shots we were inspired by music videos in the same genre as ours, that combine some sort of animation into their videos to add a different dimension to the standard footage, and make the videos stand out and be more quirky and in a 'DIY' style as desired by indie-rock fans.

The shots we want to add this too are the ones where Alec is simply miming the words to the song, which is what we thought we needed because we'd only use short snippets of these - BUT because we underestimated how much time and space our stop motion sections would take up of the song, we have longer gaps to fill, THEREFORE need to have the singing and lip syncing shots on for longer than planned - and they are really boring and basically just his face. SO because they HAVE to be longer to fill the gaps in the timeline, we need to spice 'em up a bit, so we're exploring how we can use animation - preferably hand drawn images, appearing around him when he's singing, to make the shots more interesting. Anna does Art A-level and therefore has good knowledge of photohop, so we managed to work out how to put a video clip into photoshop, splitting into separate frames, allowing us to draw on each frame - so when put together it looks as though the animation is moving independently next to Alec singing. EASIER SAID THAN DONE - it took an age.

Just a quick example - a 3 second clip of Alec singing about 3 words was equivalent to about 500 frames when exported to photoshop.. and every single one of these had to be drawn on, continuing the image from the previous one (for which we were using tracing paper BLUE-TACKED onto the mac screens..) so this took about 3-4 years, then every single layer had to be saved SEPARATELY as it's own file, then imported onto final cut as hundreds of still images, cut down to 0.1 seconds long, so to move quick enough so the lip syncing was correct, and placed in order on the timeline, taking about another 4 or 5 years. Then all of that time and effort was equivilent to about 3-4 seconds of music.. of which we have 4 minutes of that needs to be FILLED with alecs face..