Fluid 2

Here is the next step that I took with the fluid piece. I wanted to make it look like the camera was zooming in on the line, but I dont like the result, it looks sloppy and very after-effectsy. It is also a very tedious process, with the line moving and the camera. I spent much of my time masking and changing the position, which was not gratifying at all. Everytime the music was not in sync I had to remask and reposition everything. The idea was there, but in practice I need more skills.




The next thing I did was to make the lines bigger. It was difficult to animate and place perfectly such a small line, and I thought it was make it more obvious and fluid if I used a larger line. I had already been trying to animate it for a couple of days, making no progress, so I decided to try and change and see if I got further. The leading into the clock is in the original storyboard. It signifies the 'cinderella effect' of getting into JOhn Malkovich's head before midnight. I tried many different approaches to making this work. I had lanned to have the line feed into the '1' of the clock, purposely making the '1' into an 'i' so that the line would go smoothly. I masked it, opacityed it, tried everything I could think of, but in the end the feeding into the black outline of the lcock worked best for the section.



Finally, it had been about 5 days since I started animating it, and I was going nowhere, fast. I decided to delete everything I had done, and see if there was another way of getting in all the key images that I had connected to the characters, in an simpler, faster way. I thought a clearing of the project and my head would be beneficial, and it was. I got this out in about 4 hours. Although I loved the idea of how it would be in my head, this works well as a title sequence. After my tutorial yesterday I got the feedback that if this was this so called 'real-life' then I would have done enough to get my ideas down, and then pull out my animation team to go through with it, so I am pleased with the final result.