In the last week...

In the last week I have been in production mode. I got feedback in the last tutorial about my projects and got some clearer vision and went with it.


FLUID


I storyboarded the fluid t.s. to get a clearer idea, and tried to animate it. The idea is to have a kind of "I met the Walrus" type animation, which flows seamlessly to the various clues of the movie.

In practice, however, I misplaced my specialised team of animators, so it proved a lot harder than I have originally thought. More tedious in masking and geting everything to flow. I tried all week, but kept getetting stuck at the same time. Here are the first couple of versions:


The t.s. is image based. I wanted images that were slightly medical looking, that were creepy in the way they were a mix of puppet and human, like John Malkovich is in the film. I got very lucky to find the perfect book in the library which had all the images, and proceeded to give them a gritty quality, by using different paper textures in the background and playing with cutting them out in photoshop and blending mode-multiply. Then I took them into aftereffects and played around with them.

The song is Sebastien Schuller, a french artist. I wanted something ironic, if that makes sense. Something that seems light, but can be seen as dark as well. This pieces music took a very long time to find, looking through nearly all the songs on my library (over 4000) and looking online at different composers and artists. I considered Black Moth Superrainbow, Waxpoetic, Explosions in the Sky, 65 Days of Static, Johnny Greenwood, Aimee Mann and Moondog. None of these had the right feel. I was looking for more I also was looking forsomething modern, half electric half classical, for an edgy feel. I settled on Sebastien Schuller which was nice to animate to, although it is a bit lighter than I wanted, it works well.



The first one is where I got in the first couple of days of animating it. I wanted to make it seem like a camera rostrum in aftereffects, with animation connecting them. I don't like the camera in aftereffects, which is an understatement. You need to make the layers 3d, but as soon as you do, they start acting like they they want to show off how 3-d they actually are and don't stay put. This first tests shows what I mean after cameron diaz section, when you can tell its in 3d, instead of a 2d surface.