Final Edit

Here is the final version of my animation, please click on the Youtube video to watch in a bigger size.

Making The Animation

To edit and create my animation I used Sony Vegas, it's a very similar video editing suite to Adobe Premiere and allowed me to do all the same things. In most cases with film I find editing to be the most time consuming, in this case having all the images saved, edited and lined up in order made the process much easier. However as I wanted to give the animation a stuttered, trippy feel to it I did have edit right to every millisecond, to reverse shots and flash them on and off as well as keeping them in time to the beat of the music.

I also used a short video of a static television to act as a bridge between the narrative and the text in my animation. I felt having it flash up every now and then, added to the haunting and uncertain atmosphere of my animation.

Text Shoot

After a long line of problems trying to animate the text, I decided to scribble a small part of each line out in black pen (from the right to the left) until it would be a black line completely. When reversing the shots back, it would reveal the text from the scribbled line. This was a very lengthy process as I had to shoot from directly above the text.

I also decided to invert every image of the text, as my animation had a very dark feel to it, I thought it would be more effective, in keeping with the rest of my shots and unique to make each photograph negative, so the text and the scribbled ink would be white on a black background. To do this I created an action in Photoshop saved it, then used the batch process tool to apply the same action to every image. This saved me a lot of time as I left the programme running.

Text Ideas

We had to make sure the text in this project was not edited in after filming, instead we had to film the text and animate it ourselves, using stop motion. I wanted to feature every single line of the poem as my music didn't have any vocal on it and I wanted the poem to be able to read and followed easily, also acting like a bridge between the different narrative parts of my animation.

I also wanted to keep the animation looking professional, therefore I printed out every single line in black ink on white paper, in this font below...

The reason why I chose this font was because it has a very clean, defined style to it. Yet through it's narrow letter and small spacings it gives the words some more atmosphere and a more serious tone than say a font like Hevetica. 

Editing The Shoot

As I wanted to keep the same style of photography that I had done before, I had to edit every single image which would be featured in my animation. However to keep the majority of images from each scene the same I saved the settings I had used and loaded them on to every photo in Photoshop.

Shoot

Here are the hundreds of photos that I took for the animation.

Shoot Plan

For the shoot for the narrative part of my animation, I will use my sister. I'm going to capture it down in the same location as my 24/24 project at night, using a high exposure, a strong flash and in raw to give me the chance to edit the images to create a more bold and vibrant effect. I want to keep most of the shots fairly simple, in actually just mainly reaction. I will take the following....

• Walking away down the road, side long shot. (<----- where she walks down the road in the poem)
• Walking away low angle, close up of legs.
• Mid shot of arms waving above head and looking up to the sky. (<---- looking to the sky to show her the way)
• Close up reaction face shots.
• Long shot of her falling to her knees and holding her hands over her head.
• Shots standing over a mirror and crouching down to discovering her own warped reflection. (<---- sort of symbolic to the message in the poem of breaking away and leaving a life and yourself and wanting not to be followed)