Woohoo my first animation!
While working on this project I forgot my long lost love for editing video. Using Final Cut Pro opened so many more doors and possibilities than my old PC's Windows Movie Maker. However, my gain of experience and knowledge from this process encompasses a lot more than piecing together live footage.
Creating the Characters:
The first large step of this video was drawing the characters. Through very concentrated examination of the human skeletal system I was able to train myself to create multiple characters and moving bodies that can be seen throughout the piece. Seen below are the 6 different skeletal personalities: Sad, Generic, Cracked, Angry, Brainy, Flower.
My first attempt to animate these guys into moving cleaners was using the animation feature in Photoshop to create GIFs. Bringing these moving objects into FCP created a lot of problems due to awful image quality and 0 transparency. I then used another method of importing the images into FCP as PNGs and exporting each individual motion such as walking, pushing or flying as an individual .MOV file that I could import into my final sequence.
Stealthy Shooting:
My objective for this film was to use the concept of an individual's secrets or "skeletons in their closet" and turn it into an assisting pal rather than a burden. I knew that I need to shoot live film of my room being transformed from messy to clean, however I had to minimalize the visuals of anything other than the animated skeletons doing the work. I used the method of attaching strings to several object and manipulating them off-camera to get the shots and motions I needed. The Cage gave me some trouble with renting a lighting kit for this particular week of taping so I had to construct my own. Using about 8 different desk lamps and spot lights I was able to create a large improvement on Decker Halls dull lighting. I also kept in mind to shoot at still as possible by using multiple tripods and steady bases for my camera. In the final piece, the viewer can notice strings attached to certain objects such as a quilt and paper balls. I was unsure how to remove these and made the realization that it does not take away from the piece, yet adds to it and reiterates the humor of my first animation experience.
Other Creative Execution Techniques:
When piecing together my animations and live footage there was such a contrast between the colored hi-res film of my dorm and the linear, black and white skeletons that I decided to alter the live film into greyscale, old film theme. This helped piece the elements together in a much more smoother fashion.
I wanted the music in this piece to be simple, yet mean something more complex. I recorded myself on an electronic keyboard playing the background violin melody to One Republic's song "Secrets." When I heard this instrumental in the song I instantly recognized it as the theme song to an old watercolor animated children's show I used to watch. It is very soft yet playful and that is the exact effect I wanted in my film. To avoid severe repetition throughout the piece, I alternated different instruments with different scenes, using piano, violin and clarinet.
Imperfections are Imminent
Being my first time using animation, I know I have a lot to learn. Pacing throughout the movement of the skeletons is a little rough and given more time I would spend more effort on creating smoother, more natural body motions. The cartwheel at the end of the 'making bed' scene took about 35 different images whereas most other motions average on 10.
I also added a few extra letters to the word "protected" in the introduction creating "protectected" which I guess could imply EXTRA protection since they are deep, dark secrets.
Looking at this piece and receiving feedback from my class I realize that I could have dived into the concept more and created messier, or bizarre discoveries that would be implied secrets during the tidy-up process.
Ixnay the Strings.
I also would benefit from adding in sound effects from the characters themselves instead of relying solely on instrumentals.
Notes for the Future:
PNG > GIF
(image quality wise)
RENDERING IS THE DEVIL
(always account for the time it will take to render)
ex: Rendering final finished film - 22 hours
I actually googled how to shorten render time and used a nice tip of changing my preferences to render in RGB mode. This did cut down a lot of time. THANKS GOOGLE!!
Lastly, so many times during this project FCP, Ps, and Ai were just randomly shutting down. Conveniently *sarcasm*, Macs haven't fully invested in autosave. -_-
Never again will I work for more than 5 minutes without pressing Command+S.
