Introduction to Creative Play: Green Screen and Animation (Week 11)

After seeing the results of TZ's background being finished, We have started on the next phase of our brief. The main tasks that I had today was setting up the green screen room, to record some of the fictional characters of the city. These characters were to be: 1) The news reporter (played by TZ), that was to be over layed onto the skyscraper section of the city

and

2) The tyrannical politician (played by myself), that was to be over layed onto the government building part of the city. We started the morning by renting out the green screen room, 2 studio lights, a tripod and a stop-motion camera. I was impressed at how we managed to independently set up the studio, without any help, (considering that, for me in particular, I had never set up a green screen studio before).

We promptly began filming the footage we would use to be overlayed over our main background. Each character had to be filmed in two different ways. The first way of filming had to be done in a superficially 'normal' manner, i.e. the politician making a speech and the news reporter reading the news:

For when the sinister side of the city is to be revealed we filmed footage that showed the true nature of the characters, i.e. the politician being a tyrannical leader similar to that of Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler etc. and the news reporter being an insane spewer of hysteria and lies:

Visually, we turned up the lights to create more shadow and definition in the characters faces. In turn, giving the footage a more dark feel. I made sure to really exaggerate my face and anger to convey, silently, what was happening:

I directed TZ in particular to mess up his clothing and run his hands through his fair and over his forehead to make him appear more deranged:

I liked the result this created and I was pleased that TZ could pull off the acting, after my directions:

TZ will now take this footage that I have arranged into After Effects. He will edit the footage using green screen technology, to overlay onto the background.

So far it's looking promising:

Geanina has been busy designing the characters that will appear in the background:

In the meantime, I am going to work on the actual animation of the commercial: For this, I have considered the art style that Geanina has drawn with, I will design the characters in a similar art style, to the best of my ability.

The only thing I had to do then was actually animate the 20 seconds of advert. Firstly I digitally illustrated the characters I had just designed into their final form: For the mascot character, I realised I had to include the logo for the product on his packaging. In order to be able to see the character from different perspectives, I took the logo, (which I had designed on Photoshop, taking inspiration from the document I had previously produced, below):

Final logo design:

The logo design was taken onto an outline of the mascot and I reshaped and distorted the logo for the various positions it may take during the animation:

I then used colours from the colour pallet, myself and TZ outlined in the first week of the brief and made this design for the packaging:

All in all, this helped me to produce the profiles of the mascot character:

For the other characters, the profiles did not need to be as specific, seeing as the storyboard only directed them to be facing the camera for the majority of the animation, also time was of the essence and I needed to get to work on the animation fast. I used the colour pallet to swatch some colouring for the cast of characters, this was all in-keeping with the Vapourwave aestehtic.

The making of the animation for the fictional advert: Finished Advert:

There were a few steps taken in between the finished product you see above and the animatic from the previous week. This is how I made the advert...

I started off the animation by importing the animatic as a graphic symbol (all the layers of the animatic were now contained in one continuous cell with only one layer required), into a new file as well as the audio I had created in Adobe premier, in last week's session. (arrows indicate the files).

To give me a sense of scale and perspective I created the background layer and the forefront layer (the wall and the dining table), so that all other mid ground layers could be placed in between them.

After that it was just a case of taking the guides from the character profiles I had previously drawn. components, like torso arms, face and head where placed on separate layers, so they could be easily manipulated.

Even though I am animating at 25 fps, I have decided to deliberately animate with few in between Keyframes, to emulate the budget restricted animation style of most anime shows, which focus more on the extreme frames. This will also benefit me time-wise, as I only have a few days to complete this work.

Here are a few examples within my animation of where these extreme poses are prevalent, (i.e. there are few in between frames).

(Reminder: the thin colored outlines of the certain drawing components correspond to the colour that represents which layer they belong to).

The storyboard had outlined areas in which a 'camera would be panning and zooming out at various points. In order to not make this job near-impossible by redrawings these pans frame by frame, I instead opted for a pose to pose route, by tweening the symbols I had created of the mascot:

Detailed above is the whole sequence that I had to copy and paste into one graphic symbol.

(As you can see above) The symbol has been placed onto the stage above and through using motion tweens, the over all effect that one can see on the stage, is one of a simulated camera panning out.

There were some other examples of straight ahead action taking place, (with the images above shoeing such principle in effect), but still the in between frames are limited to keep in line with the minimal animation that Japanese anime is infamous for. This has been a particularly challenging part of the brief, however I am now excited to see how this advert will look when it is placed into the rest of the production. I'm rather pleased that I managed to produce this animation in time (I gave myself 20 hours straight to complete it), it was risky, but yet again this is ironically keeping in the spirit of the whole module. Next time however I will give myself more time to complete such a task, to avoid stress and perhaps produce an even longer, higher quality piece. Next session myself, TZ and Jane will have to consolidate all of our work together and present what we have produced to the rest of the class.