Week 13: Project Description

The title of my animatic is The Fly and is based on the William Blake poem of the same name. The narrative of the poem is themed around the significance of the existence in life, namely between humans and the common fly. In the poem, the protagonist encounters a fly, and upon first glance, dismisses it as insignificant. However, he eventually comes to the realization that the life of the fly is of the same worth as his.

My animatic follows a similar theme, but the narrative differs, and instead focuses on the relationship between two office workers – the protagonist, who is well dressed and the antagonist, who is poorly dressed. In the film, the protagonist mistakenly judges the antagonist to be of a lower social class than him, solely due to his attire. However, in a turn of events, it is revealed that the antagonist is the boss of the company, and offers the protagonist a job.

My inspiration for the narrative derives from the capitalist society and consumer culture of the 21^st century – where success is judged on image above other attributes, and the notion of that no matter how successful you are there will always be someone above you. I wanted to show that human beings are all the same regardless of this.

In regards to the visual style of my animatic, my main inspiration is the work of Don Hertzfeldt – who uses minimalism and rotoscoping to create an ‘eerie’ and bleak effect. I wanted to recreate this as it reflects the honest nature of the narrative. 

Week 11: Changes made to the final product

As my animation is nearing its final stages, I thought I'd post about some of the changes I made during the production period.

Sound
Originally I wrote: "I am going to use just naturalistic sounds". At the time, this seemed like a great idea. However, after the majority of the production process was finished, it felt as if something was missing. The silence throughout the scenes didn't really add anything to the 'eerie' feel that I was attempting to create. In an attempt to resolve this, I decided to try out some background music, to see if it would change anything - and it did! I spent hours searching the Internet for some copyright free music and found various horror tracks that I were able to use. However, a lot of these were dramatic and over the top - and this didn't fit with the minimal theme of my animatic. Fortunately, I managed to find various tracks that were minimal, and when I decided on which to use, I turned the volume of it down so the audience can hear it, without it being too much of a distraction from the narrative.

Rotoscoping
There is a previous post about this, please refer to that.

Relativity
I initially discussed about using the themes from Relativity by Maurits Cornelius Escher in my animatic, and although I admire the piece, the use of metamorphosis art didn't fit well in regards to the overall style of my project. In the end, I decided to focus my inspirational values more on Don Hertzfeldt work - rather than complicating the imagery by using the work of Escher. This, again, helped me keep to the minimal stylistic production values I was hoping to achieve.

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These were the only dramatic changes made, and I feel that my project has kept the same values from what I envisioned in the planning stage.

Week 9: Notoscoping

When creating an animation, the artist has to make many decisions in regards to the visual style, narrative and sound. When creating my animation, I wanted to utilise the technique of rotoscoping, as I believed it would fit perfectly with the visual style and narrative. Whilst I still believe this, I have decided not to use the rotoscope method to create my animatic.

After a brief talk with my seminar tutors, I came to the realisation that it would be more beneficial for me to utilise a more basic animatic technique - rotoscoping isn't easy, and I simply do not have the time or skills to do so. (If I continued to insist in using the rotoscope technique, I would have needed more time to learn the new skills required, and even more time to utilise these skills to create my animatic. This wouldn't feasible)

Whilst this is a shame, not all hope is lost. Adobe After Effects provides a fantastic set of tools that allow me to mirror the rotoscope effect. The most notable of which is the Wiggler effect, which I can use to make the objects and character's shake uncomfortably, much like they do in Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected Cartoons. Furthermore, I can make use of the blur and contrast effects, to enhance the eerie effect that I desire to create.

So what now? Roll on with the production! Although I am saddened about these turn of events, I still believe I can produce an effective and successful animation.