Final Project: Final Animation

FinaleWAudio from Charlotte Wilson on Vimeo.

Final Project: Samples

For the final project, I began developing animated samples based off the still design boards I'd created that were reflecting the theme of what I wanted my intro to look like. Taking inspiration from Narcos, True Detective, I wanted to focus on double exposures and intertwining several images on top of each other. My main reasoning behind this was that I feel it conveys more of a story than just a plain image, so I took about researching the best way to do this; I also used free stock videos of smoke, ink and other objects that could be easily overlay-ed using the screen blending mode option. I wanted to use ink and smoke to reference back to the accident, and also to represent that this accident literally took over these peoples lives, as this was only meant to be a few days of repercussion - however they never managed to get back to their own city. 

My first sample was taken directly from this design board:

I wanted the map to be the focal point of the double exposure originally, but after finally coming up with what I wanted the purpose of the documentary to be about, I opted to use images from Chernobyl of people, whether they be from new or at the time of the accident. I wanted this to become more of a "emotional" documentary about the lives of these people, and how they were over-run by this incident, as there's plenty of documentary on how the accident came about. I love the way the ink runs over the face of the child in the original sample, however, I also wanted to reflect the "radioactive" side of the incident, so opted for a different colour palette in the second sample.

TestChernobyl from Charlotte Wilson on Vimeo.

TestChernobyl2 from Charlotte Wilson on Vimeo.

TestChernobyl3 from Charlotte Wilson on Vimeo.

For one of my first final samples, I changed the ink dripping to smoke, to see what the effect would look like differently and played around more with the colour tone. I chose to go with red, sort of inflicting a "warning" sign and red reflects the danger of the situation these people were in. Out of all samples, this is definitely my favourite one, I added a lot of grain to the footage to make it look as old as possible, and inverted the colours of the girl to give it more of a horror/fear look. Although this is my favourite one, I would definitely slow down the smoke next time as I feel it's too quick for an introduction, and would work on the "Directed by" text to animate it a bit more, which is something I was planning to do for the introduction anyway. 

Overall, though, I definitely want to integrate Sample 3 into my work as this is clearly my strongest sample, and works best in my opinion at conveying what I want the accident to - I may play around with different colours and textures, and even go and take textures of my own to give it more of my own look about the work. I'm overall very happy with what I've come up with so far and it's inspired me to create many more samples to put together for my introduction.

Final Project: Research 2

My next title that I wanted to research more in-depth was True Detective. I'd always been inspired by this even from my college work, where I'd done a huge project on Double Exposure. The technique was something I'd always loved, as it allowed you to convey messages from a still image and reflect the story of a person or object by overlapping it with another - it also created a beautiful image if done correctly.

True Detective was also inspired by Christoffer Relanders work, which I'd researched for my Photography project, so I was quite familiar with how he'd done his own style - this was all on one image on a singular piece of film, no photoshopping was done for the images to come out.

When pitching their concepts, True Detective used the work as a visual reference, marking this as their main inspiration.
"Visually, we were inspired by photographic double exposures. Fragmented portraits, created by using human figures as windows into partial landscapes, served as a great way to show characters that are marginalised or internally divided. "

True Detectives pace of the introduction is also something that inspires me, it matches the beat in a perfect manner and allows the audience to view each of the frames clearly.

I also integrated the research for True Detective into my own research. They focused heavily on researching the styles they wanted for their introduction, which is what I intend to mimic for my own project, as this is a good way of visualizing what you want out of your title sequence; 

Final Project: Research

After narrowing down my chosen theme to Chernobyl, I opted to begin research into my favourite introductions that would prove as inspiration for me. The main favourites that immediately came to my head consisted of Narcos, True Detective, True Blood, The 100, Making a Murderer and Outlander; quite a few of the list came from the same company titled "Elastic", the vibe they all generate is establishing the story and characters in the introduction in a clever way.

I wanted to approach this brief as professionally as possible, so after discovering a website called Art of Title, which gives interviews and shows design concepts for title cards in film and television, I researched into my initial favourite introductions and read about how they came about to create them.

For Narcos, the designers wanted to delve into their research as much as possible, shown above, is the design boards and visual references that they came up with to get the exact appearance they wanted. In my project, I took about doing visual references very similar to this, as it was a way of showing individual features that I wanted to go into my introduction. I used Pinterest, Google search and deviantart to research into textures, imagery and colours that would reflect Chernobyl well.

Narcos kept to the theme of the show very well, researching into old pictures of the title character they were concentrating on, using film textures and planes as the focus of their research. I love their use of colours as this also reflects well on the intention of the programme, and the abandoned concepts (2nd image) was my inspiration for my own project. Although it doesn't convey the message that they wanted to for the title sequence, it reminds me of my own work and what I wanted to create, so became one of my main points of research, especially the use of texture and colour, the smoke being something that I would later on use in my own work.

"One thing that I wanted to really focus on was getting away from the traditional tropes of narco culture. Talking with the guys and really understanding Colombian culture and some of the more bizarre aspects of Pablo Escobar’s rise really gave us an awesome footing for ideation."

Final Project: Self-Negotiated

For my final project of this year, our task would be to base a animation or graphics piece around the themes found previously in our essay. Whilst I am a graphic student myself, after nearly completing the year I really wanted to try out Animation again and see how far I could push my skills in After Effects, thus, I selected to create an intro for a fake documentary of my choice.

My first exploration in coming up with a theme for my intro was to pick my essay subject - Apple. After some consideration and research, after seeing how many Apple documentary's and biopics there are in regards to Steve Jobs, I didn't want to create something for an overly documented subject. This led me to start documenting my interests and writing down things that I would find appealing - I feel this would make my project easier to get into as I'd be creating something about thing I'm genuinely interested about.

My interests are mostly to do with the weird and conspiracy theories. I wanted to do something that, whilst interesting to me, wasn't something that would be considered upsetting to some people - at one point I considered the Holocaust, but thought this would be too sensitive of a subject. After talking along with my peers and flatmates, I came up with these three things based around my interests:

• Ancient Egypt
• Chernobyl Incident
• Jack the Ripper

These all have the same theme to them; they consist of conspiracy theories behind actual real life events, which motivates my interest behind them. I wanted to do things that were talked about before and the subject of interest, but not anything that had recently been done. As well as this, subjects who'd documentaries I'd previously seen and had poor introductions were also the target of what I wanted to do, it would be really interesting for me to recreate and compare them to the titles.

I've started a sketchbook where I'm heavily researching into each incident, watching documentaries and finding styles on Pinterest, Behance and other websites to get a feel of what documentary I want to give off to the audience. I particularly like "Making a Murderer" and "True Detective" which both have neutral colour palettes and quite a rustic, paper feel to them. This would work well for Jack the Ripper as of the time set.

Overall, I've not done a massive amount in the two weeks that we have been set, just garnering ideas together and creating a sketchbook - I really want to spend time researching and looking at different possible outcomes before going ahead with any starting point.