Testing

So the past couple of days I've attempted to do a bit of animation based on the statements people emailed me/got through facebook.

One was 'I hate pennies', which I msyelf can identify with, I keep all my coppers in a little teapot in my room, so I decided to a bit of pixilation with them. Sadly I only had enough to make "I hate" and "pennies" separately, but for a little test, I thought it wasn't too bad.



Someone else said that they hated the Mac wheel of doom (aka, beachball of death/wheel of death/rainbow of doom...), so I thought the penny could turn into one. Done in Flash.



Aaaand today, I rented out a voice recorder from the Media Center, and with Dan as my back-up, went and accosted random people about campus who didn't look busy. I got quite a fe voiceclips, but I realise I will have to ask lots more people. Kathy is my mentor up until the pitch, and she suggested recording younger children, which will be a good idea since I got a lot of "I hate early mornings/lectures" and "I love drinking/getting drunk/beer". Oh you students.

So, here's a little mock-up of the kind of introduction I'd like to have... I'm thinking of calling "Love/Hate" (because I'm god awful with names), since it's quite a simple themed project...

Ident Presentation

This afternoon we had to present our idea(s) for the ident project infront of Andy, Derek and the rest of our class. I haven't really written about the ident project, so I'll give a brief overview: we have to create a 10-15 second clip to promote a new music website from Virgin, The Red Room. The brief was basic, so we could pretty make up anything we wanted. The rest of the class had some really wide range of cool ideas and tehniques, but I had two to present myself.

My first idea is having a red amp lead being plugged into a guitar jack, the camera follows the cable and sees that it spells out the words 'Red Room'. I'm still not sure which way to go with it, Derek and Andy both preferred this one to my other idea, and said that I should use live-action or make it really stylised. I really like the idea of using Flash for it, but I think some of the camera movements in my idea might be too hard to try and recreate. (The only way I can really think of getting the angles I want are to use Pixilation or After Effects, which my skills are worse than Maya on. Which is saying something.)


My second idea compromises of a red box (original...) being opened and lots of musical equipment jumping into it. The box lid shuts and then shakes, then re-opens displaying the words 'Red Room' inside. Not as original, but I quite liked this idea and was tempted into using Stopmotion to animate the box, however I've decided to stick with my original idea with the guitar.

Bradford [2]

I’ve been meaning to get round to talking about Bradford again (like I promised a good while ago). I’ve hunted out some of my favourite films I saw on YouTube, and provided the links so you can have a cheeky peek at them (and either agree with me on how cool they are, or completely disagree).


The Professional Films
I have to say, if I’m brutally honest, I thought the quality of the student films were (dare I say it?) better than the professional ones. The Student ones have been proved much harder to find online, probably because they’re still owned by the Colleges that made them, two of the films I really liked (“Bruce” by Tom Judd & “I See What You’re Saying” dir. By Lottie White), came from the RCA but even though they’re mentioned on the website, there’s no link to see the films, which is a shame.


The Cat Piano
Directed by Eddie White & Ari Gibson (Australia/2009/8mins, 23secs)
I really loved the style of both this film and the one below, the story is a pretty strange one but engages your attention all the way through which some of the other professional films didn’t succeed in doing.


Lettin’ Go
Directed by Malika Whitaker (France/2008/5mins)
I love the style used for this, it almost looks like it has been drawn with spray paint and stencils, I also like the looseness to the story, I style can’t really figure out the ending and what has supposed to have happened to the male character.
Other films I really liked in this category were “French Roast” directed by Fabric O Joubert (France/2008/8mins, 15secs) and “Alma” directed by Rodrigo Blaas (Spain/2009/5mins, 2secs), both were done in 3D and are simply amazing animations. They both won awards, but sadly I couldn’t find videos for them.

Commercials
I love animated adverts so much, they make a nice break from the normal low budget adverts that are constantly repeated. I only saw this advert on TV a couple of times so was really pleased when it was featured at BAF (and won the Commercial award). It’s a clever combination of 2D and what must be Pixilation, I also love the song that goes with it, it fits really well, and you’ll see why:

Audi Unboxed


Panoramas


Photograph of Jesus
Directed by Laurie Hill (UK/2008/6mins, 40secs).
I really like this one (well, I like all of them which is why I’m writing about them), but I think this one is pretty clever, it uses Cutout and Collage with Pixilation which is something I’ve been really tempted to do myself at some point (who knows, I could try it out over Christmas...). It’s also a visual piece that goes with a spoken interview (like Creature Comforts).


Loof and Let Dime
Directed by Vereshchak Roman (Russia/2008/2mins, 31 secs).
This is similar to “Photograph of Jesus” in that it creates a visual to spoken words, but it couldn’t be more different. A lot of my fellow students disliked this film, but I thought, even though it wasn’t one of my favourites, it was worth talking about. It creates a visual to a nonsense repeated poem, even though the images it uses don’t have anything to do with the words being spoken, I love how the text travels around the screen, it reminds me of a similar thing on of my classmates did in foundation.

It’s been nice to be able to watch the videos again and write about them, I can’t believe Bradford was nearly a month ago! It’s not nice when you realise just how quickly time has slipped through your fingers!