VIDEO AND SOUND PRODUCTION - PROJECT 3
VIDEO AND SOUND PRODUCTION - PROJECT 3
8TH OCTOBER - 25TH NOVEMBER (WEEK 9 - WEEK 14)
NG VEYHAN (0349223) / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
VIDEO AND SOUND PRODUCTION
PROJECT 3
Practical
As per standard procedure for similar projects, the search for some mood board references are in order. I have chosen "stress" as the social issue that I wanted to tackle for this project. When thinking of something that would be the antithesis for stress, it would be the innocence from our childhoods. One video that I thought of that reflected it perfectly would be "Fireflies" by Owl City.
(Fig 01, Fireflies by Owl City, 16/12/2009)
I really liked the use of a night setting as it carried an air of mystery that really made the toys coming to life believable in a sense. I feel that this was also evident in the Toy Story movies, as the toys in those movie almost exclusively become active at night, as being asleep makes so many possibilities to occur around us while we are unaware.
I decided to take inspiration and create a character that would be animated in a night setting as well. Since I had a notepad lying around, I would put it to use for this project by drawing a bunch of 2D sprites to be used for this stop motion, similar to something that could be seen in old-school RPG games such as the Pokemon series.
(Fig 02, Animatic Storyboard, 21/10/2021)
As I had never done any form of stop motion animating before, I wanted to do a quick test run to get an idea of how to film one. Taking a very barebones attempt of what I planned to do later on, I cut out a few paper sprites of the animated character to create a simple mockup of one of the scenes that I planned out in the storyboard.
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(Fig 03, Test Animation, 23/10/2021)
For a first attempt, I thought it came out fairly well. After a few more short attempts, I began the shooting for the project. Due to the timeline of the video being split into a day and night portion, I had to plan out two separate shoots for the video.
This part was also a little tough when I had felt that there could be one more take or the take could've been better. Another shoot had to be planned out, especially for shots in the night environment, as the window for shooting was a lot shorter. After 4 days, give or take, I had finally managed to gather all the shots that I required for the video.
(Fig 04, Shot Videos, 28/10/2021)
I had decided to use Premiere Pro as the software to create my stop motion animation. While it may not be specifically designed for this purpose, I am still the most familiar with the operation of this software. In order to set it up for frame by frame animation, I set each imported still image to have a default duration of 5 frames, in a 25FPS video. This effectively emulates the basic principle of stop motion animation in a duration-based software.
(Fig 05, Adjusting still image default duration, 3/11/2021)
It was worth noting that for this frame animation, instead of taking pictures individually for each frame of the animation, I found it much more efficient to take videos containing every frame of a scene. While this was much more storage intensive than taking photos due to the nature of videos, it saved me a lot of time by omitting the need to click the shutter button so often.
In order to extract the frames from the videos, I used the scene filter function from VLC media player. I set it to export a frame for every 20 in the video, with each separate video having separate prefixes to organize the image stack. Then I'd just set a video to play and VLC would do the rest.
(Fig 06, Extracting Frames with VLC, 4/11/2021)
I quickly sorted through the stack of images, and deleted the frames which were unnecessary for the video (i.e. frames when moving the props around). Importing the images en masse, it was largely kept in sequential order, as the prefixes kept the shot list in order. Selecting a number of frames required for each shot dragging them together into the timeline creates a largely complete stop motion animation of the shot.
(Fig 07, Importing images to Premiere Pro, 4/11/2021)
Some of the shots had some mediocre lighting, and to fix it I used some adjustment layers. The only two effects I used for this item was the lumetri scopes effect and the brightness/contrast effect. Some of the shots were too dim, so I cranked up the brightness a little, and the used the lumetri scope to adjust the color of lighting a little to make it more consistent with the other shots.
(Fig 08, Creating Adjustment Layers, 4/11/2021)
After I completed the basic portion of the video, I decided to work on the audio for the video. I browsed through FreeSound for material, sorting through the various results presented for every search. Many of these audio clips provided on the site tend to have background noise and/or just recorded poorly in general. Playing through the video in Premiere Pro, I identified what kind of noises would be made in each shot and went through it in order.
(Fig 09, Browsing for Audio Clips, 8/11/2021)
Much of the audio was jumbled in terms of volume when it was first imported into the project file, with background noises being overly loud and more important sound effects being lost. I tweaked the levels of each clip to better suit its position in the video, another additional step I added was to keyframe the levels to fade out very briefly at the end of the audio to make the sudden cut less abrupt and noticeable.
(Fig 10, Audio level control, 8/11/2021)
For certain sound effects such as the repetitive placing of paper on the table near the end of the video, it must not be the exact same sound being played thrice, otherwise it'd sound unnatural. Using the pitch shifter effect, I changed the pitches of the different sound effects to make them sound unique from one another. I was surprised that I had not found a need to use the reverb effect in any of the sound effects, perhaps its due to the setting of the video being in a room that doesn't have echoes.
(Fig 11, Pitch Shifting, 11/11/2021)
After completing the audio for the project, I went back to see if there was anything that could be added to the video. For a certain shot of a from-the-top view of the drawing pad, I wanted the shot to zoom out gradually to show some scale. Therefore I individually changed the scale for each frame little by little, I didn't nest the sequence together and zoom out the sequence together as the smooth zoom out would look very odd when the animation was moving in frames.
(Fig 12, Final Video Adjustments, 15/11/2021)
For the end of the video, I needed to add a rolling credits. It was a simple case of adding a matte black layer that fades in and have the credits roll. Getting the size of the text box large enough was a bit of a hiccup as I couldn't get it to stretch past the size of the screen but it was resolved fairly quickly.
(Fig 13, Adding Credits, 15/11/2021)
When exporting the video, most of the settings were already defined when creating the project file, thus there wasn't much to change in the export settings when doing the final render.
Completed Video:
Feedback
WEEK 9: The idea was quite interesting and the use of different frames for the movement of a 2D sprite could make for an interesting project, but has to be executed correctly. I was advised to continue developing the plot for the video.
WEEK 10:
WEEK 11: The storyboard in the form of the animatic could still use some work. I could add more animations to the paper sprite in order to give it more screen time. The story wasn't too compelling and should be worked on more.
WEEK 12: -
WEEK 13: -
WEEK 14: -
Reflection
WEEK 9: For this week, looking for inspiration was not particularly difficult. I was pretty sure of the issue that I wanted to tackle as the subject of this project. I thought of a few "keywords" of the theme and style of the project and just used the first things that came to mind as reference.
WEEK 10: I managed to create the storyboard animatic for the video. It felt a little bit short, but perhaps this was due to the small number of keyframes with lack of proper timing. This was something that I expected would fix itself when the shooting for the video began.
WEEK 11: The shooting of the video itself was a massive pain. My room was very tight in terms of space and trying to set up a tripod in this set required a lot of experimenting, with position of lighting and the length of the tripod legs, in order to get a stable position to begin shooting so i could maintain consistency.
WEEK 12: The editing of the video was a lot less of a hassle when compared to the shooting of the video. My digital workflow has largely been streamlined through my choice of shooting and importing, and there wasn't any crazy visual effects that were required for this project. Therefore, editing the video was a fairly simple task.
WEEK 13: The first render of the video was done this week. It did look a little off here and there, so I went back and tweaked and rendered it again. This process repeated for a few times before I reached a video that I was satisfied with.
WEEK 14: I was largely done with this project in this week. I dedicated more of my effort to the work in my other modules for this week.
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