Again, only so much freedom may be offered to a student. For the second project of the semester, we were given the opportunity to work with stop-motion. (Stop Motion -noun -A cinematographic technique whereby the camera is repeatedly stopped and started, for example to give animated figures the impression of movement).
The students had been herded into groups that shared similar ideas and concepts. I had initially come up with an idea revolving around chess. The idea was that the chess pieces would battle and display the progression of war. However, the popular consensus in my group was more of a free-running theme. I decided that ultimately, this idea was more fun and easier than mine.
Then we (my group and I) began to storyboard. Before there is any storyboarding, an idea must be processed and toyed around with. The plan was to allow a fight scene between two characters over something menial and follow the lines of a floor. We had thought of many places to shoot including several hallways, outside and even a theater. Eventually, though, we elected to do it in our school's smallest gymnasium because there was scarcely any traffic through there.
Storyboarding didn't take very long as we saw exactly what we wanted to do when we walked through the Gymnasium and took a few reference shots. Our storyboard wasn't quite a storyboard, though. It had merely been a sketch of the basketball court with a bunch of arrows that would direct our path. On the actual storyboard, though, we sketched out the live action that preceded the stop-motion.As for the quarrel that initiates the fight sequence, the cause had been debated. A few ideas had been tossed around, but everybody's favorite had been that the fight had been sparked by a character not sharing his bubble wrap with the other character.
Once we were storyboarded, we collected all of our gear (tripod, camera, crane for aerial shots, and the bubble wrap) and headed towards the gymnasium. To our dismay, we soon discovered that the gym would to be available during 7th hour because that's where cheerleading practiced. If that wasn't enough, we later found out that the weightlifting class typically inhabited the gym during 6th hour. That left us with the conclusion that it would be now impossible to do our video as we had storyboarded it.
We didn't have enough time to lose any. With two of our group members traveling to New York for a week, we had to start shooting immediately. Eventually, we decided to use a hallway as it had some differentiating tile colors that we deemed acceptable.
We got right to work. My friend Travis and I were the actors with Sam positioning us. Ian worked the camera while Noah typically took care of our stuff. Spencer assisted Ian when he was with us (which was in 7th hour). We finished shooting in roughly 3-4 days of actual shooting. Immediately afterward, Ian and Travis traveled onto New York. For several days following that, Spencer and Sam both had missed school, as well. I was on my own.
Altogether my role didn't call for me to help too much in the editing process, Sam had asked the group to clean up a few pictures that had a tripod leg in the shots. With everybody gone, I took it upon myself to edit them. It took me about 2 hours in total because Photoshop is slow. Below are a few examples.
This was the original picture. As you can see, the tripod leg is VERY visible in the bottom of the photo as well as another foot of the tripod just left of it. These took about two minutes to clean up each, but there were over 60 to fix.
As you can see, I cleaned up the tripod leg along with most of their shadows.
However, this wasn't the worst framed to deal with.
This was a real difficult frame to deal with because I had to fix both the tripod legs as well as Sam's legs. I endured through it, though, after about ten minutes, and finally cleaned up the frame to look fine. The only unfortunate result was a little black speck where the tripod leg was. I couldn't find a way to get rid of it cleanly, so I left it there in the hopes that nobody would notice if it went by at 12 fps.
I'm under the impression that the main goal of this project was to practice working with other people on animations because in the real world, riding solo and doing projects alone requires a lot more effort and time, so the more people helping you, the faster and more efficiently it will get done. In hindsight, I wish my group and I had checked to make sure the gymnasium would've been open every day or near every day rather than cling to the hope that it would be vacant for us. To make this lesson applicable to the real world, make sure everything can be guaranteed before diving into something headfirst.
To have never worked together before, my group and I really clicked and we really fell into place. The roles of the project were split up quite evenly and the work distribution was crafted just about perfectly. If I were to do this project again (which I will be doing next year), I think my group hit the nail on the head with distribution of work. Everything was organized and everybody understood their role.
As for what I'm taking away from this project in general, I feel it's dire that one must storyboard and have a developed idea before starting a project. Some smaller projects it may be okay to jump into, but when it comes to big assignments, such as the last two I've done this year, storyboarding is vital.
Overall, this was a fun project and a nice break away from the 3D world of animation. I would do this again if I had the right software at home to do so. All in all, to the left is the finished project below...or so we thought.
After unveiling the previous video to the rest of our class, it was brought to our attention that a few holes existed in our project. One such hole was that there was no explanation as to how we ended up on the floor despite just being on the bench in a hallway. We took it upon ourselves to fill that unexplained gap by going back to the hallway that we shot in and shot a few more clips. We added a few seconds to show that we were thrown onto the floor in a running motion after we had pulled each other to the ground forcefully while throwing the Bubble Wrap ahead of us.
As well as it turned out, it was a very slow, painful process because my colleague and I kept forgetting to bring from home what we needed; I kept forgetting, along with Travis, the clothes we wore during the scene. Eventually, though, we managed to finally bring what we needed and got the shooting done in a day. Editing would take several days more including the credits. Ian worked out all of the kinks on the credits as Sam would continue to make sure the editing ran smoothly. To the right is the true final result.
Check out other great blogs by my groupmates:
No comments:
Post a Comment