Final Artwork
storyboard and audio log
In the first scene, I will include, some casual music that will set the tone of everyday life. I will include sounds of crockery banging against each other just to get across that the house isn't empty.
I will use menacing music with high pitched violin strings potentially and the screams of those running from the monster. The noise of the monster I will produce by foley.
Here I will add the sound of screaming and news anchors discussing the chaos, I will add crashes and the sounds of things falling down.
Here I will play dubstep music as Frankie Vengence gets geared up and confronts the monster to add comedic effect, they will fight and she will contain the virus.
The politicians are shouting, dancing and being rowdy, the camera will pan around and show how the MPs are reacting to the situation.
I will have the sound of metal rattling as the virus tries to get out of the cage, the sobbing sounds of the Prime Minister, I will also include the sound of a slap by Foley as my character will slap some sense into the PM. There will be a 'twinkle' noise as the pm reveals he has the antidote, the camera will zoom into a bottle that has 'antidote written across it.
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Party music. I will use the sound of crowds laughing and cheering. The music and cheering all come to an abrupt stop when Frankie enters the room.
I will have the sound of vents and futuristic sounds to replicate the noise of a science lab, the sound of the PM crying will be playing lowly in the background.
A drunk, recognisable MP from a previous scene bursts in and begins to make a racket, he brings a zombie minion in with him for backup, I will use a zombie moaning noise, and shrieks of surprise for this scene. I will also use the Foley noise of a door slamming to indicate this character bursting into the room.
In the final scene, the antidote is sprayed from the top of the sky and people slowly start turning back into human beings. The music will be joyous music playing, perhaps something resemblant of take on me by aha, very 80s and fun. The sound of gas canisters will be used to recreate the spraying sound.
Frankie has had enough. She boldly steps forward and begins to tackle the MP and his minion. I will use generic fight sounds and the same dubstep music used previously to indicate a fight scene. The odd shriek here or there will also add to the scene. Meanwhile, the teacher/scientist is completing the machine needed to get the antidote to the people of the city/world and change them back into humans rather than zombies.
production diary
final design and animatic
evaluation
The brief was to create a short animation about a superhero character that we created using research done prior to the task. We also had to ensure that we used at least ten seconds of a Kevin MacLeod soundtrack of our choice to pair with our ensemble.
When starting this project, we completed an extensive amount of research that aided us in getting a better picture of existing heroes and the evolution of animation. We initially focused on looking at the history of animation; we created a timeline demonstrating how present-day animation came to be. We collaborated on this as a class by adding information to a timeline that we gathered individually. We approached this task by each taking sections of the timeline from the 1800s to today; adding images and writeups about the pieces we had chosen. I found that this task was good for me to understand just how far animation had progressed through time, this was interesting as I could get an understanding for where my piece was going to fit in this timeline. Knowing that my piece was not going to be the most advanced piece of animation, I could look at other works from a time where the type of animation I used was popular and see the techniques used and what the general feedback was on it from the audience.
We looked at methods of producing audio and how we could use it for different aspects in our animation. A technique we looked at was the use of Foley Art, a format used in post-production of movies and documentaries to create realistic sounds that can’t be recorded or were recorded poorly during the initial filming. Foley Art uses everyday objects to recreate these sounds. This is something that I initially wanted to add to my piece instead of using sound effects that were found online. I intended to use sounds of slapping, banging and groaning in my piece, however when coming to create my piece it was evident that I ran out of time to produce the sounds that I wanted to for the initial deadline. I also didn’t want to add pre-recorded sounds to my final piece besides the composure, this was an artistic choice as I wanted to ensure that my piece was as organic as possible to add to its artistic integrity.
When discovering that our final deadline had been extended, I used this opportunity to add some Foley Art to my piece. I recorded a few different sounds to see what would work for specific moments in my piece. I used a stapler clapping together to recreate the sounds of metal banging, this was to replicate the noise of the virus banging against the cage. I then used a screwdriver tapping against the glass of a candle to recreate the noise of people clinking their drinks together. I also used sweet wrappers to recreate the sound of rustling, this was to be used in the initial lounge scene to show that my character was comfortable at home. I recorded the sound of my hands clapping together to recreate the sound of a slap, I followed this closely by an ‘ow’ noise to express the pain the prime minister felt after receiving said slap.
When creating my storyboard, I found that the process of creating it was rather time consuming. This was because I had to draw and redraw aspects of my character in different locations and with different expressions, this was difficult for me because illustrating isn’t a strength of mine; meaning that I wasn’t able to create the scenes that I wanted to, at the standard I wanted them at in order for my animation to have true impact on an audience. In order for me to complete the storyboard for the deadline I had to use a site called Storyboard That, this enabled me to use pre-set illustrations such as locations, people and objects to ensure that my storyboard was convincing and easy to interpret by an audience. I was able to create a total of 12 slides and added an extra one that was hand drawn to complete my storyboard. Upon further reflection I would’ve created more slides that isolate key moments from the story and emphasise different moments in detail rather than trying to give a holistic view of the plot. If I had done this, my storyline wouldn’t appear to be so generic and the audience may have had a clearer understanding of why my character does certain things or ends up in different places, also because there were aspects of my three act narrative that weren’t translated over into the animatic. If I had more time this would be something that I would include to authentically tell my story.
When searching for music to compose the soundtrack to my piece, I found that this proved to be difficult. This is because we had to ensure that the sounds were using were accessible and royalty free. The sites I used to obtain the music in my piece were Bensounds and YouTube. Bensounds has a range of downloadable and purchasable audibles to select. Because of the large variety of sounds, it took a while to select the audios I wanted to use, this was also challenging because the sounds themselves weren’t befitting to the type of video I was creating and to the overall ambience and feel I wanted to create.
A limitation of this is that the music could never be exactly what I desired for the scene. Without composing the music or working with a composer I could not achieve the perfect piece of composure for each scene, a lot of the choices were ‘the best’ I could work with or find. Even purchasable sounds and pieces of music also had their limitation; for some, there were aspects of the sounds I didn’t like or just weren’t quite right for the ambience I wanted to create.
When working in premier pro I found that it wasn’t too difficult adding camera movement to the still images. This is because I had worked in Premier Pro before, so I was able to navigate my way around the software easily. After adding shaky movement and trying to match cut using aspects of the images that I used from the previous image. After looking at my finished cut I decided that the narrative wasn’t entirely too clear; I decided to take the video into After Effects to then add text and narration to the animatic so that the audience could clearly understand what was happening in my story.
When creating my animatic in Premier Pro I had found that I wasn’t able to add my final character design to my Storyboard That artwork. I initially intended on having my character as a picture that went on top of the original storyboard so that I could isolate and animate her movement as well as animating the movement of the storyboard itself. This was a visual based problem of mine that I was not able to overcome. This is because I tried to turn my final design into a JPEG, but this wasn’t successful when working in illustrator; I could only isolate different parts of the design i.e leg, arm and turn them into individual files rather than one whole file. This meant that I had then had to improvise and add my final design to the title scene and end credit scene to ensure that my design was included somewhere within the animatic.
When analysing the effect of this, I realise that it may not have had the best impact on animatic and the time spent on developing my character and gaining feedback on my character becomes almost meaningless as my design wasn’t used to create the storyboards in my final piece. This technical issue devalues the authenticity of my piece as the character in the storyboard wasn’t my actual artwork. However, I was still able to capture the essence of my sketched character in the one I designed in the Storyboard software using the pre-set colours and costumes.
I did not get to complete an animation due to lack of resources and not being able to get into the classroom. To compensate for this we created an animatic instead - I found that my animatic was far from where I initially wanted to take it, due to it not being able to finish an animation and running out of time to finish it to the standard I wanted to before the deadline.
When showing my animatic to the rest of the class I got mixed feedback. Some members of my class understood the intent of my music choices and my camera positions, others felt as if the camera movements caused a ‘motion sickness’ effect. When analysing the effect of my camera movement I believe that it strongly captured the feeling of terror and danger that I was trying to replicate in my piece. This was supported by feedback that I received from the rest of the class by comments from my tutors and peers ‘the zooming effect in the second scene worked well’. When looking at the transitions between each piece I tried to make them as smooth as possible by adding cross dissolves in between each slide so that the story would appear to play more smoothly. However, I intentionally didn’t add ‘easing’ to my camera movement and positioning so that there was a more frantic feel adding to the chaos that was happening in the story. When analysing the effect this had on my audience, I believe that this was a good choice overall as most of the feedback was positive. Although, I do understand how frantic camera movement can have a different effect on more sensitive audiences.
Another visual aspect of my final piece was the narration text that I had added to help the audience better understand what is happening in each scene. I believe that this was a strong choice and had a great effect of my visual production as it meant that my audience were able to get a better understanding of the narrative; during feedback there were no questions raised about the narrative.
When analysing the audio production min my piece I believe that for the mood I tried to create I used the right music to do this. I used Dubstep music to add a comedic element to the story. This is because in blockbuster comedic hero films such as Kickass, Dubstep is used in the fighting scenes and throughout to add that comedy factor. I chose to repeat the same piece of music for each fight scene along with repeating the same camera movement for each scene this was to create some familiarity to each piece, also adding an element of comedy and giving it an Edgar Wright, video game feel. The analysing of this effect I found that this was a positive one, as the feedback from my peers, validated my artistic intention. This is because I had multiple comments saying that they ‘liked the music’ and the comedy element was understood.
Overall my piece hit the brief and demonstrated my ability to create and tell a short story through illustration and animation. My narrative concept was clear to the audience and my artistic choices were appreciated. If I were to do this project again, I would ensure that I make sure that my illustration work was in the moving animatic itself and ensure that the quality of my Foley audio was up to a high standard. I would also aim to make a short animation based on the characters I was trying to create.