Animation section screen shots..

Animation plans..

Over different lyrics - chosen specifically to link roughly with what the song is saying - we will have various animation sequences.

- Leaves 'raining' over him

- A flower growing and wilting
- A picture frame being drawn around his face
- Clocks around his face - maybe the hands spinning round? (probs a bit ambitious with the time restraints we have).
- Sunshine rising and setting around his face - 'Radio daylight Radio darkness'

General things like this, hand drawn on photoshop to give that effect of a kind of jumpy, sketchy animation - hopefully it'll go right and we'll have time to finish it. (AND OUR TIME AND EFFORT IS RECOGNISED WHEN MARKING EH EH HINT HINT... :'( )

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..

LONG edit..

This overlapping split screening thing took me about 4 hours to complete, probably more. You can't see the all of it because the window wouldn't stretch wide enough to see all of the frames in one screen shot, but it's the majority of it.. there is more above and below what you can see here though.

The outcome of this stupid edit is a 9 way split screen, with each frame beginning zoomed, in the centre of the screen, then zooming out and fitting into its place in the 9 window frame. Each image does this, matching the beat of the music (even though that was VERY hard due to the ridiculously unhelpful, random beat of our chosen song) (so much hate for this song) (trust me, don't listen to it, you'll want to commit).

Ch ch ch changes

Through editing in the footage of the female character and testing out some split screen shots with her and the male lead, we have decided through our own opinion, and those of others we asked who slot into our target audience, that the female shots do not fit with the rest of the video. The colours do not really work, the split screen idea between inside and outside didn't work as we'd envisaged and looked as though the shots were from entirely different videos. From this, we thought about the narrative structure of our video, or our intentional lack of, and realised that it doesn't make sense having the female character anyway, as our point was that there would be no understandable narrative, and the video would be random and storyline-less as with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers video for 'Can't Stop' and 'In one ear' by Cage the Elephant. This meant therefore, that having a female character as representation of a relationship and the struggle with the boyfriend being stuck inside - being closed minded - and the girlfriend being outside - vibrant and interesting, and them being reunited at the end ALL wasn't necessary, and actually contradicted our main intention to create a video without narrative and that was entirely nonsensical. I am therefore VERY pleased with this decision, as the shots didn't look effective or appropriate to the style of the rest of the video, and in hindsight, they never really should've been part of the video. high five

Final filming

Last night we filmed our lead singer mouthing the lyrics to the verses, so we can now fill in some of the gaps that we have. Due to our resourses and the limited access we have to professional equipment/studio space, all of our shots are plainly of him singing alone, and we plan to create what we want through the post production side of things, rather than what we physically filmed. I have started, and will continue to play around with effects on Final Cut to apply to our footage, to create the look and style we set out to create. As mentioned earlier on the blog, this was inspired by several videos, one being '5 years time' by Noah and the Whale, whose use of split screen and post production editing and 'jazzing up' made the video different, interesting and entertaining to watch. I plan to explore lots of split screen variations and transitions to enhance our video.

Editing and.. stuff

I've been going into the media room at every opportunity to edit our footage because our decision to use stop motion was one we made naively.. and it's taking a long time to edit but I really enjoy editing so it's not a problem. As I said I've been going in to edit whenever I have the chance which has resulted in almost all our current footage being edited into the right sections of the song and cropped to the correct framing etc, but we can't go any further until we capture the last of our footage.

We have booked a camera for this weekend and I plan to film some shots at my house on saturday, because I need my younger sisters to feature in these, then we shall go to Anna's on Sunday to complete the rest of the shots we need of Alec singing the lyrics and some more shots of the female character.

I'm not too happy with the female shots so far as we decided on the spot one day to go outside and capture some footage because it was a sunny day and we weren't sure when we'd next see that big round yellow fella we all crave so much. SO we filmed then, but as it was spontaneous, I wasn't wearing particularly appropriate attire and didn't have much makeup on, so I hope to get some better shots this weekend :)