The narrative process

I created a narrative with 5 distinct phases for my AE video: Begining, Middle and End with transitional moments between.

--The set up for the begining establishes the man walking and seeing object while punctuated by the staccato breathing.
--When the man sees a worm--depending on your interpritation-- he may have stepped on the worm or he may have just realized his own Humanity because of seeing the dead and gutted worm. At this point, long drawn out breaths make you dizzy.
--This leads into a lightheaded and unballanced walk where your not sure which way the man is heading.
--The staccato breaths and close ups of objects begin again but mixed with the dizzy-walk. The sound behind it starting at a low grumble, rises to a high pitched sonic tone. A crescendo.
--This then leads to the ending. I crammed as many images as I could into the final 3 seconds.

The narrative should be at least that there is someone walking and something happens to him after passing the worm. That he is a changed person because of his interaction.

Working with sound

Working with sound was a great exercise. The flash movie was a cube going through a metamorphosis. I felt a background of ambient electronic music would fit nicely. When Jean asked me to have the sound emanate from the cube itself rather than have music, I knew I would be up late at night working on getting things just right. But I was assured that the ambient music would be the version I like better.
After finding machine sounds and matching each visual moment with a particular sound, I ended up with both stronger visuals and stronger sound.
Having the sounds emanating from the cube makes the whole experience a cohesive whole, rather than having music "decorate" the experience.
Approaching the piece this way the visuals and sounds began to inform each other as to the progress of the movie; meaning that sometimes... ASKing for that particular sound, and at other times... the visuals would need to be changed to fit the sound in order to bring about that "cohesive whole".

New Assignment: Flash Motion

The new assignment is an abstract self portrait in flash. It is to teach the students a basic understanding of of Flash--getting thing into Flash, making them in Flash, animating them, etc. but to also to communicate an abstract idea (like the self portrait) with animation and sound. The final progect should contain "an intriguing communication".

The assignment begins with the student choosing 3-5 adjective to describe themselves, sketching them, and either combining them or considering how they would combine, interact or somehow relate to each other.

The assignment should be "simple yet unique" (Something I think I have a hard time with).


As for examples, it does not seem that I am able to upload Shockwave files into this Blogger site.

final video with sound

Final sound file matched with the final video file. I finally worked on the sound and the video at the same time. The whole sound file was brought into After Effects. I raised the volume levels from within AE. When I needed a specific sound to occur at a particular moment, I would make a separate file for that sound and brought that also into AE.

I cleaned up the un-synced moments on the double coughs throughout the video and made certain sounds only left or right channels. I also made the sound file 30 seconds which forced me to reduce the video to 30 seconds.

preliminary video with sound

This is the first attempt at adding sound to the video.
It was a particular challenge due to the fact that the program I compiled the sound on (Audacity--a free sound editing program) was done at home and the video editing program (After Effects--very expensive program from Adobe) was done at school.
I had worked on the video first and knew generally what I wanted for the sound, but this was before we created the sound files to be used... my surprise. When working on the sound files at home, I kept exploring smaller and smaller sound-bites. I would work for an hour on mixing two or three clips which were each a couple of seconds long, all with a ticking or thumping quality. I would find my interest gravitating towards the sound Between the ticks and thumps. Ambient sounds from the room when the whole class was recording their particular sounds became a focus for a few hours...

I was not recording to match up with the video. I was trying to create an interesting soundscape out of the raw soundclips. I ended up with a soundfile of about 45-50 seconds.

I would play the soundfile in a loop and then play the silent video in Quicktime, trying to match the start times, to see what kind of mess or mix I made. Two unplanned moments stood out, which I further developed. The first was the obvious matching the ECUs (close ups) to the double coughing. The second was the long heavy breath when the camera travels down the leg; this quickly became central transition moment.

I brought the soundfile down to about 35 seconds to match the video. I did not like the ending, but brought it to class to show.

current clip

This short contains about 150 shots assembled and organized in Adobe After Effects and exported as a Quicktime movie. The piece is just over 30 seconds. This is down from the first version which was just over 1 minute.

The professor wanted a clip between 10-20 seconds and then build up. I found it easier to put everything into the clip and work on fine tuning down to a more appropriate length.

The quality of the video has been reduced for web purposes.

I enjoy the stroboscopic effects of the stop motion, so I accentuated that with a visual metronomic beating of closeups.

selected images

(click on images to enlarge)

connotative images

detail images

denotative images

the process while shooting

I first started with an idea about someone walking down the street and getting hit by a car; this would be shot from above with a view only of the legs and the street. My initial experiments started me thinking about how the different textures of the ground being walked upon have different personalities or associative feelings (grass: nature, peaceful, happy; asphalt/street; dark, mysterious and dangerous). I did not want these personalities to be the subject of the shoot, just to be a background additive. I dropped my initial idea about the walker being hit by a car because the subject of the walk itself became enough.
The animation became about the simple act of walking down the street and how one either notices or does not notice various things–cracks, trees, the sun, the heat, a dead worm, or garbage. The shoot started as a quirky little walk which was supposed to be funny, but as I began thinking about the feel I was getting from the images, I began shooting in a more surreal way; or at least a more serious style. Depending on the soundtrack, the end result may be something completely different.

haiku

how man walks on by
so many things unnoticed–
sun, grass, trees, dead worm.

introduction - general jist

Yesterday was the first day of graduate classes at Pratt Institute in NYC. My first class is Digital Design with Jean Brennan where all the students will be utilizing Blogger.com to post the progress of our assignments.
The first assignment is a stop-motion animation with sound and we will be concentrating on the connotative versus the denotative narrative. The denotative set will give an overall perspective of the action and the connotative will give a more abstract or suggestive perspective of the action.
AfterEffects will be used to assemble the animation.
Each student will be posting 3 denotative and 3 connotative images along with a three sentence description of the action.