Talking Dog - Knights

Still a bit foggy about this project as yet . . . have some visual ideas in my head, but not sure if they will work.

I think two things are bothering me, for one, that the script is not my idea and therefore cannot develop in the way that I normally like to work, and the other thing is the humour angle, this is'nt really my area, so I don't think my project will protray comedy timing!

Anyway, so far just got a thumbnail storyboard drawn up. Whilst drawing it out I became aware of just how much repetitive behaviour there is in the story and the action.

Talking Dog

Haven't got any further yet, as the compositing project took over at the weekend.

But I have decided on the style. . . I am going to aim at a mostly monotone look for backgrounds, and just adding colour to the flags and banners, and stuff that I want to stand out.

I want it to seem quite serious so that when the little guys come out of the back of the armour it is more of a contrast. . .and I want them to be a sort of 'Elma Thud' type character, quite cute, small body and large heads.

I am going to start the pre-production with character and background designs, and a rough storyboard as usual. . . but then I am going to put together a sound track to work the animatic from. I normally leave the sound till the end and panic, so doing it much earlier will help deal with timing. In doing the editing project I used the rhythm and length of the music sound track to set the visuals to, it felt like the same process as doing lip synch. . . so I am going to use this method to start my animatic.

Just a theory at the moment but I am hopeing it will help sort my timing better.

Compositing Hell

As I didn't know After Effects or compositing at all I was really looking forward to doing this project. . .that was sarcasm.

Took 2 compositing books and an After Effects book out of the library, and armed with some on-line tutorials I attempted to do some compositing. The tracking is rubbish, if something passes in the foreground it throws out the tracking box and sends it off on a completely different course, and it felt too awkward to go back and try to re-position the sky on all the frames that were now of out position. I am afraid I lost patience and left the sky to 'track' where it wanted to.

I animated the two main logos on the building but didn't mask them when the posts move into the foreground, again I lost patience. I wasn't sure if we needed to change the logos on the front fence. . . all of them. I tried to do it by taking the first frame into Photoshop and plotting all the logos in place and then taking them into After Effects in the correct positions, so that I could try to animate all of them by scaling on each frame. But this didn't work, they just jumped about too much. . . so again I lost patience!!
Tried to stabilize the sequence, but the on-line tutorial footage was moving forward rather than a panning shot, so our footage moved out of frame too far to be able to zoom in.

Then I found out we didn't need to change the small fence logos, or stabilize the footage . . . so the time spent messing around with these things I could have improved the other things.

So overall, I don't think this project was very well handled, we could have done with having Georg go through it with us as the brief didn't really explain things fully. And to be honest, if this had been a work environment it would have been bad professional practice to just e-mail a brief to a compositor without having a meeting to make sure of what was required. I had hoped I was missing out on something that I could possibly get into, either me and compositing were never meant to be together, or the workshops have just been not enough.

The whole thing was annoying.

'Talking Dog'

Haven't got very far as yet as it is still going round in my head while I get a few other projects sorted, so I can then clear my head for this project over Easter.

A few mood bits anyway.

Mash Up

Really liked doing this project, it is amazing what can be done with different a sound track to visuals. It is good to know a bit more about Premiere as well.

After viewing all the clips and deciding which ones to choose (Bladerunner for the visuals and Singing in the Rain for the sound track), I started by listening to the sound track first a few times and watching the visuals as well, this gave me some idea of what clips might go with which sound.

I decided to just take out a few pieces in the sound track, there is some dialogue which I wanted to include but it was a bit too long so I edited some out in Audition. Also there is a section of 'tap' dancing which would have sounded a bit odd so that was edited out. I left the sound track in the same order for the rest of the trailor because as it is a musical there are a lot of cuts and changes in tempo already, so I didn't feel the need to re-cut the different songs and music. I decided that it would be best to time sections of music to compatible images. I used 'speed/duration' to lenghten and shorten clips to fit in with the length and tempo of the music, this seems to work.

In doing this project I realise that having a sound track to work visuals to makes a lot of sense, a lot like doing 'lip synch', the timing is already done and this almost works out the timing of the visuals for you!

So on 'Talking Dog' I am going to put together a sound track (it may not be that good, because sound doesn't seem to be my thing!), but this will give me a starting point for timing and length of the animtion.