Press Pack

We were finally briefed on how to get our animation ready for festival submission. We were asked to put a press pack which consist of :

• 4 x stills from your final animation / or work - resized to 146x111mm at 300dpi TIF
• 100 word bio of the each team member / or individual + Team / Individual Photo
• Poster ( including branding and strap line )  
• Trailer ( 1min in length )
• Synopsis of Plot / Premise - 250 words max

After doing the art book doing the press pack was quite easy because I already had some of it n my art book. So it was nice to see the correlation of the tasks going back and forth with them.

So time for a check list-

Trailer- check

4 x Stills- check

Bio of each team member- check

Greta Narbutaityte- (choreography, editing, animation, directing) “Be Together” director with a specialisation in 2d animation and a background in dance. This is Narbutaityte’s passion project therefore she had a heavy input in the creation of the choreograph as well as overseeing every aspect in the making of the video.

Katy Mulvey- (choreography, lead dancer) Trained in classical ballet Mulvey is also an aspiring animator. Mulveys grace and elegance was a great attribute to the creation and execution of the choreography in the film.

Vasare Piscikaite- (filming) graphic design student, with a passion for film and photography. With a profile in filming dance videos Piscikaite helped capture Mulveys dancing on film being the main operator on the set of “Be Togeteher” .

Synopsis - check

According to Greek mythologies humans originally had four arms, four legs, and a single head made of two faces. The men were children of the sun, the women were children of the earth and the Androgynous were children of the moon, which was born of the sun and earth. It is said that humans had great strength at the time and threatened to conquer the gods. The gods were then faced with the prospect of destroying the humans with lightning as they had done with the Titans but then they would lose the tributes given to the gods by humans. Zeus developed a creative solution by splitting humans in half as punishment for humanity’s pride and doubling the number of humans who would give tribute to the gods. These split humans were in utter misery to the point where they would not eat and would perish so Apollo had sewn them up and reconstituted their bodies with the navel being the only remnant harkening back to their original form. Each human would forever long for his/her other half; the other half of his/her soul. It is said that when the two find each other, there is an unspoken understanding of one another, that they feel unified and would lie with each other in unity and would know no greater joy than that. However, this concept leads to the question of “Would the other half necessarily had to be another person?”

Poster- check

Final Crit

A week before we had a final crit. It was nice to see other people work and it was nice to see other peoples reactions to mine. The thing that alarmed me the most was the lack of feed back. Oscar made a good point the animation just stopping towards the end so the animation needed some conclusion. ollie said it could do with filling in more space in the black background part. But a part from that it hard to tell if people liked it or not which really scared me. I showed it  some friend and family and all the feedback I got was that there should be more animation and the dancer could have been more emotion. One person told me i could have done with a bigger variety of camera angles. To be honest I agree with all of the feedback I got but it certainly hit my confidence and made me question if I have anything good at all here... However I will move on to the press pack and other parts necessary for submission and make some changes only if I have time left.

Edtinig pt. 3

So finally I was animating on top of the footage! I have already had some experience with it back when I was playing around with the footage i made with Katy after the firs session. One thing that bothered me then was the video quality would look worse once its gone through Flash export but I came up with a way of animating on top of the video without having damage the video quality. I realised this back when I was in Lille than you can export the animation as a transparent png image sequence. So basically I would import the the footage I would be animating on into Flash, do the animation and export the animated layer as a png image sequence and pot it on top of the footage back on Premier without ever loosing any quality. I did in pieces just save time rendering a big chunk, it made the process  a lot quicker.

This method was really good for editing as well because since the animation was transparent and in a separate layer I could apply effects to it. So at time when i wanted the animation to come a live a bit more I would enhance the glow. So overall the footage animating part was fairly straight forward and easy since I already did some testing beforehand.

Editintg pt. 2

While editing if found that the glitching transition helped cover up the mistakes of filming, basically when the dancers position in the shot is inconsistent. Like in this shot she starts off going in one direction, but changes to her going to another direction from a completely different position

So basically there's big jump in the shot framing so tried fixing it with some glitching once again, making the layers go transparent on one another  going back and forth between the shot.

Now obviously I can't change the position of the dancer in the shot but I thought it made the transition a bit more fluid or at least make a bit more sense story wise,  because in the narrative her world starts glitching and going back and forth with her animates half. So it kind of justifies the thing being all over the place and glitching through the space of the shot. Another effect I discovered was the wave wrap. I found it really cool. Basically it distorted the image in a really cool way. So it was the same principal of duplicating layers, changing the blending mode and the applying the effect and it gave a lot of variety to play around with. So I had a good hour just playing around with the effect.

Editing

I had the biggest emotional rollercoaster when it came to editing the footage. Then I started putting everything together on premier things looked really bad. The positioning of the dancer was all over the place, the shots were't steady, I did not realise the background looked so bas (the posters on the door, shoe rack, radiator) I started seeing things that I overlooked and I just had a complete meltdown. I actually started crying because I thought the whole project was nonsense because of my in experience. But then calmed down and showed to other people and everyone said it's actually not that bad as I think it is. Then I talked to Annabeth and she showed me the magic of editing. She showed me  a few editing tools and said that you can get a lot done with editing. I am actually really grateful that she knocked me back into sense and I started looking up editing tutorials. I spent half a day going through all of the premier effects and see what they do. Once all of my footage was cut u and put together I was ready to do some effects.  This where things got fun, I started playing around with various effects I found out about and through experimenting I started getting the Images I wanted in the first place. By the time it was screening test day I was actually happy with hat I came u with and I felt like finally it was looking good for my project. It was very beneficial that Annabeth made us do the animatics and work on top of them. I still had the premier project file for my animatic so putting the footage together was lot easier because of that. 

I found one editing method I really liked. It basically duplicating the footage into the layers

 And the setting the blending mode to overlay on all of the layers except the last one. Now this is not random because I tried all of the blending mode this was the one I like the most. sometimes I would even change the opacity just so it would not be over the top.

Then I got the channel mix effect and change very layer except the last one once again. I would try to keep it glitchy looking so I would make a combination of red and green, or pink and blueish green. basically I would adjust it to my preferences.

 And then just change the positioning on the layer once again without touching the bottom one. I found that it was best to change only horizontal or vertical positioning one at a time because if I were to put in kei frames and animate the layers moving (glitching) diagonal animations did not look that good. It was best to stick to one trajectory at a time.

Filming

The time finally came to film! Can't say I was excited about it because I had no clue how to do it. I went down to the AV suite to get out some lighting, a stabiliser and some lenses. Matt started asking about what kind of lighting I wanted, do I have a lighting plan,what camera angles I will film from and I realised how little I have planned for it so that made me panic. Once we got to the studio I trusted Vasare (my friend) with filming an I just directed Katy as well Vasare. The reason I asked Vasare to help me because she just got of a similar student project and I figured she had some valuable input. It was an exhausting 3 hours, but we managed to get some cool stuff so I felt like everyone did they best they could which I was happy with. The main problems I had were I did not have a plan of camera angles so we had to find them as we went along, some planning for that would have made Vasares job a lot easier. I was a bit frustrated that Katy was not emoting as much I would have liked but apart from the she was amazing, she put so much effort into her performance, she had a really good attitude throughout the whole project and she took direction pretty well. I directed Katy through the emotions she should be projecting, and what body language I wanted but I feel like that did not come across in the end. The poor thing had to dance 3 hours straight and do it 100% every time, I can't even imagine how she managed to move the next day from being soar.  

Overall if I did this again I would put more effort into planning before hand into what is is exactly I need to achieve. I was bit over the place which is not good since it rubs off onto everyone else on the set. But in the end it was really fun and I really enjoyed this experience!

Finishing up the first chorus

After my initial test animation I really like the aesthetic of it and I have received really great responses about it so I decided to keep some off it animated from there. Basically I animated alongside the music illustrating the words or just following the beat, to keep the animation synched, I re animated some stuff if I was not happy with it, ultimately I think this took up quite some time to get the aesthetic that I desired, but overall I am really happy with this part because it is explosive and suits the music perfectly.

Animatic Development

After the last session with Katy I realised I needed to develop my animatic to make it more specific because it was too vague at this point. I needed to work out how much more choreography we needed to created. So I worked with he footage I had and filled in the story line. So basically the first part is introducing the live action version of the dancer and the chorus introduces an animated one, which can morph and move the way the live action one cant. The second verse shows the two worlds parallel to each other (animated and life action) and culminating in the two of them colliding and the dancer becoming whole, as she is both animated and live action. The last part you can see the the dance feeling contempt and the environment changing around her. In the end she falls down and when the camera zooms in you see her face glitch to create a feel of closure.

Research: 1million Studio

I dicovered 1 million studio not long ago when Major Lazer (the band whos song Im using|) released a new single and made a dance competition for it. Basically the idea was to submit videos of original choreo for the song and the winner would be featured in the video. Major Lazer shered some cool videos of the contestants on their site, so when I was looking them up I found this video-

I fell involve with the choreohraphy. It was loose where it needs to be and its on point with the beat but above all else the dancers look like their enjoying it. Not a major fan of the dab in the beginning but the little swooshing move at 0:22 made me replay it like 1million times. That movement when one foot is on its toes, the other one on its heel and they switch in between makes it look like they just glide through the dance floor.

After wards I was hooked so I looked up their other videos and I haven't found one I wouldn't like. You can tell that the dancer are insanely fit because it takes a lot of muscle power to lock something mid movement, not to mention some of the floor work I've seen in the other videos.

Another video I that really caught my eye was Gold.

At first I thought it was a bit too sexy and show girl like for my taste, but the more i looked at it, the more the dance seemed like some high fashion model poses from an editorial magazine. And the synch with the music is so tight and on point is like the song is piercing through the dancers. My favourite part for some reason was the little walk to the side move on 0.57, it just made the lyrics pop "without ever letting you know" like very syllabus of every word was a movement. 

Another video I was obsessed with for a but was Never Be Like You

To be completely honest, most of the reason I love it is because of the song. It has been one of my favourite tunes for a while and it never accrued to be you could actually dance to it. So it just straight a way hit a note with me. The choreo over all is nothing I haven't seen before just basic arm and leg popping and not much else but I guess the song does most of the work for me and makes me love the dance. I guess it's one of the cases where the music wears the dance not the other way around.