Superhero School is a 30-seconds animation I've made. Enjoy
This animation was born as an idea the very moment I heard that we are going to have to use still images for our animation project and put them into, what had to seem as, 3D space. The pictures were made without my presence, but it didn't effect my ambitions much. I knew I wanted to do something like this and I carried on.
I've done some After Effects animations using still images before, here is a playlist of some examples:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF8D7FE1105D3F241&feature=plcp
In this animation I wanted to do something new, and I set out to do limb animation to make some movements more believable. The firs time you see it in the video at 00:04 and you can clearly see how girls arms and legs move as if she is trying to balance her self upon falling. This is an enhanced version and I've made a draft some time ago to show people where I want things to be in the Master edit. Here is the Draft version:
Funny, but the biggest struggle in this animation I had was with the soundtrack.(http://ccmixter.org/files/wired/91)
I wanted it to be spot on, but it just wouldn't fit. And I had to use it, it was part of the assignment. So I've made some tweaks to it, changing to a faster speed and a lower pitch, adding some effects on Adobe Soundbooth, to make it "spicier" and here it was, a version I thought might work. Adding some addional sound clips did the job nicely,
The other thing was the background for the last scene. It was hard to compile everything I needed for it to look at least good. A lot of work in Adobe Photoshop. Custom signs for the school on the walls and gates to sell the look of an expensive, sort of X-men themed, mansion.
I had a lot of fun working on this one, and put a lot of effort to make it look as it looks. I would go back and fix some timing issues and work more on some VFX for them to look crispier. But overall I'm very pleased with the result, and, judging from the feedback I got, so are the viewers.
Thank you very much for reading all this,
Ed.
P.S. Here is a clip of the very first animation I've made a few years ago. Lots of Photoshop and a little AE animation:
Wednesday 7 December 2011
"The Shoe Case" or "Shoe Done It"
Here we go. My edit of our "Shoe Done it" film project is here. Ladies and gentlemen -
Funky music, vivid colours and some computer graphics - this is "The Shoe Case"
This creation started in a group of six people and the agreement on the choice of the genre we wanted to shoot in was achieve fairly quickly. The genre of Comedy was interesting, challenging and unique, in comparison with the choice other groups have made.
The story had to have a girl that lost a shoe and a police officer. We decided to introduce two detectives and curve the story around them. That was how Detectives Cole and Kopowski were born. Although I had ideas of my own and even wrote a script featuring other characters and a slightly different story ( this is the script http://edgarkazaksecond.blogspot.com/2011/11/little-red-robin-hood-or-shoe-done-it.html) we chose to stick with the 70's, 80's "Good Cop, Bad Cop" style. We also had some other things to be included in the film:
1. An interview with a witness in a location in or near the Arboretum
2. An establishing shot, a long shot, a mid-shot and a close- up shot of the interviewee.
3. A range of appropriate shots for the flashback.
4. A flashback, depicting what the witness saw.
5. A graphic showing the interviewees name
6. A graphic showing a map showing the location of the witness and the scene.
We had a rough storyline, just a glimpse of what we had to do. That was because we decided to shoot the film with an improvisational manner. That, in my opinion, happened because we didn't have a leading person, or a consensus on what exactly we want to do. Everyone wanted something of their own in the film. I had my own thoughts and introduced some storyboards and script additions and/or alterations, too. Luckily for us, comedy is a fairly flexible genre and we had a fair material to work with in the end. Unfortunately, due to a hectic timetable and "not planned out" shooting days we missed a lot of opportunities to capture good shots and camera angles. This was and stays my biggest concern. I wish I had been more persuasive in terms of pushing my own ideas forward and more demanding in terms of keeping the team up to pace. After all we all were responsible, and my fault was that I couldn't provide the right explanation of things I had to say. This was a good lesson for me.
Although the filming experience didn't live up to my expectations (I did't really get a chance to do any technical things, but that was generally because I was always one the other side of the camera. ) I was really looking forward to editing the film. I did a whole bunch of editing in the past years so I was aware of the fact that no matter how bad the material is (our material turned out to be way better than I expected, and here I am very thankful to Kalab Khaliq, Jasmine Leung & Kamil Manysiak. I should have had more faith in my team. Sorry.), you can edit it into a great video. The pieces fell together quite well and the core script worked pretty good. The biggest challenge, however, turned out to be turning it into the 70's, 80's themed film. The right music, colours and fonts were crucial. Here is the video that sums up all my research and choices:
The music I used:
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/435837
and
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/411826
was a great addition to the film and really gave it a great 70's and 80's feel. I tried to do the same with the visual portion of the film and I was successful in the most part. Though not everything was achieved. I failed to implement the transactions popular in those days. Although the classic "CUT" was pretty helpful, the other, "fancy" transactions just didn't fit for me, and I abandoned the idea. The colour correction nearly suffered the same fate, but I found a way around the problems and was very happy about it. I thought that correcting colour in Adobe Premiere was a very tough thing to do because it had less control. But the problem was that when I tried to do it in After Effects, it was even less controllable, thanks to the live convertion to Premiers sequence line. I had to turn the editing program off and try to do edit the colours in After Effects separately, but it would include a lot of transferring and rendering, so this option soon became obsolete. Everything was close to falling apart, nut I discovered that CS5 version of Premiere had a great feature - layer blending (previous versions like 0.7 and CS3 didn't have this option). And so I added a Ramp effect, added some funky purple and orange, reduced opacity to 34% and turned on the Overlay and it was done. I used the same technique for the title and credits backgrounds, only without blending and with some animation to the key frames, so that colours would switch places.
My last concern was that we didn't add a "graphic showing a map showing the location of the witness and the scene" in our film. Here I did something I've tried before once, but it was still high tech. Here is the clip I made before showing a compilation of completely different scenes in one. Here is the guy entering the room. He isn't actually entering a room but a dark corridor and from outside the house. The other shot is him entering a room with the girl but from a poorly lit corridor. The goal was to combine it together so that it looks like he is entering a room from outside the house. It uses a lot of AE motion tracking, layering, masking and colour correction:
I used the same techniques on "The Shoe Case" and inserted a map of Arboretum with a red "X" on it onto the wall of Detective Kopowskis office. You can see it 00:08 and appears again in 03:34.
After that the film was done and I was more then happy with it, and still am. A classy soundtrack, colours, some cheeky edit to spice up the comedy and here we go, a nice short film about shoe theft.
In the future I would definitely try to make most of the pre-production and try to be more involved into the filming from behind the camera. I would love to do that. I like this edit but there are some "bugs" to fix, such as fast cuts of music and the titles that appear too early. Also some colour correction where the map is inserted to make it more believable. Some cuts in the video were too jumpy ( the main concern of people giving me feedback) and I am sure I can fix that. But overall I like what I see, and I hope it will continue being an enjoyable thing to watch.
Thank you for reading this far,
Ed.
Funky music, vivid colours and some computer graphics - this is "The Shoe Case"
This creation started in a group of six people and the agreement on the choice of the genre we wanted to shoot in was achieve fairly quickly. The genre of Comedy was interesting, challenging and unique, in comparison with the choice other groups have made.
The story had to have a girl that lost a shoe and a police officer. We decided to introduce two detectives and curve the story around them. That was how Detectives Cole and Kopowski were born. Although I had ideas of my own and even wrote a script featuring other characters and a slightly different story ( this is the script http://edgarkazaksecond.blogspot.com/2011/11/little-red-robin-hood-or-shoe-done-it.html) we chose to stick with the 70's, 80's "Good Cop, Bad Cop" style. We also had some other things to be included in the film:
1. An interview with a witness in a location in or near the Arboretum
2. An establishing shot, a long shot, a mid-shot and a close- up shot of the interviewee.
3. A range of appropriate shots for the flashback.
4. A flashback, depicting what the witness saw.
5. A graphic showing the interviewees name
6. A graphic showing a map showing the location of the witness and the scene.
We had a rough storyline, just a glimpse of what we had to do. That was because we decided to shoot the film with an improvisational manner. That, in my opinion, happened because we didn't have a leading person, or a consensus on what exactly we want to do. Everyone wanted something of their own in the film. I had my own thoughts and introduced some storyboards and script additions and/or alterations, too. Luckily for us, comedy is a fairly flexible genre and we had a fair material to work with in the end. Unfortunately, due to a hectic timetable and "not planned out" shooting days we missed a lot of opportunities to capture good shots and camera angles. This was and stays my biggest concern. I wish I had been more persuasive in terms of pushing my own ideas forward and more demanding in terms of keeping the team up to pace. After all we all were responsible, and my fault was that I couldn't provide the right explanation of things I had to say. This was a good lesson for me.
Although the filming experience didn't live up to my expectations (I did't really get a chance to do any technical things, but that was generally because I was always one the other side of the camera. ) I was really looking forward to editing the film. I did a whole bunch of editing in the past years so I was aware of the fact that no matter how bad the material is (our material turned out to be way better than I expected, and here I am very thankful to Kalab Khaliq, Jasmine Leung & Kamil Manysiak. I should have had more faith in my team. Sorry.), you can edit it into a great video. The pieces fell together quite well and the core script worked pretty good. The biggest challenge, however, turned out to be turning it into the 70's, 80's themed film. The right music, colours and fonts were crucial. Here is the video that sums up all my research and choices:
The music I used:
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/435837
and
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/411826
was a great addition to the film and really gave it a great 70's and 80's feel. I tried to do the same with the visual portion of the film and I was successful in the most part. Though not everything was achieved. I failed to implement the transactions popular in those days. Although the classic "CUT" was pretty helpful, the other, "fancy" transactions just didn't fit for me, and I abandoned the idea. The colour correction nearly suffered the same fate, but I found a way around the problems and was very happy about it. I thought that correcting colour in Adobe Premiere was a very tough thing to do because it had less control. But the problem was that when I tried to do it in After Effects, it was even less controllable, thanks to the live convertion to Premiers sequence line. I had to turn the editing program off and try to do edit the colours in After Effects separately, but it would include a lot of transferring and rendering, so this option soon became obsolete. Everything was close to falling apart, nut I discovered that CS5 version of Premiere had a great feature - layer blending (previous versions like 0.7 and CS3 didn't have this option). And so I added a Ramp effect, added some funky purple and orange, reduced opacity to 34% and turned on the Overlay and it was done. I used the same technique for the title and credits backgrounds, only without blending and with some animation to the key frames, so that colours would switch places.
My last concern was that we didn't add a "graphic showing a map showing the location of the witness and the scene" in our film. Here I did something I've tried before once, but it was still high tech. Here is the clip I made before showing a compilation of completely different scenes in one. Here is the guy entering the room. He isn't actually entering a room but a dark corridor and from outside the house. The other shot is him entering a room with the girl but from a poorly lit corridor. The goal was to combine it together so that it looks like he is entering a room from outside the house. It uses a lot of AE motion tracking, layering, masking and colour correction:
I used the same techniques on "The Shoe Case" and inserted a map of Arboretum with a red "X" on it onto the wall of Detective Kopowskis office. You can see it 00:08 and appears again in 03:34.
After that the film was done and I was more then happy with it, and still am. A classy soundtrack, colours, some cheeky edit to spice up the comedy and here we go, a nice short film about shoe theft.
In the future I would definitely try to make most of the pre-production and try to be more involved into the filming from behind the camera. I would love to do that. I like this edit but there are some "bugs" to fix, such as fast cuts of music and the titles that appear too early. Also some colour correction where the map is inserted to make it more believable. Some cuts in the video were too jumpy ( the main concern of people giving me feedback) and I am sure I can fix that. But overall I like what I see, and I hope it will continue being an enjoyable thing to watch.
Thank you for reading this far,
Ed.
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