For our animation, we were given the letter ‘o’ to work off of. Originally, Katie and I chose the word organic to represent the letter ‘o’. We created a storyboard of a happy cow that is getting photographed to be on the cover of a milk cartoon. There is a zoom in towards the cows face and when it zooms out you see that the cow isn’t actually in rolling hills, it is stuck with a bunch of other cows in a pen. There are cuts between seeing the sad cow in handcuffs and behind bars. At the end of the scene the images would be folded up into a box and stamped with the word ‘organic’. This was to be a commentary on the way that food is processed and labeled.
However, once we actually sat down and searched through magazines we realized that this idea was too hard to achieve in 30 seconds and we couldn’t find enough images to create it. We drew on another ‘o’ word that we had tossed around earlier, ‘opera’. We found a lot of great photos of people with their mouths open who we thought could be really strong characters in our animation. After gathering a bunch of potential characters, we looked for some good backgrounds. The one that stood out to us the most was a scene of people lying out on a beach by the ocean. ‘Ocean’ was another ‘o’ word so we wanted to go with that. We then found 2 other images of the ocean that we wanted to use in the scene so that we could use panning in the production.
After laying out all of the characters we began to build a story. We wanted to play on the anti-art/war movement Dada was influenced by while still maintaining a level of absurdity. We narrowed down the list of characters that we wanted to use and laid it down on the backgrounds. We moved the pieces around until an idea/storyline hit us. We wanted to convey the oppression of artistic freedom during WWI. Therefore, we wanted to have all of the characters singing freely. The characters are all singing and creating something beautifully absurd until a giant fish comes out of the ocean and “shh’s” them all into silence. The fish then floats away into the sky leaving the people unable to create anything. As the fish floats away the tuba player in the corner plays a sad tune for the last time.
We shot the entire animation in an afternoon in my living room. I had sheets already up on the ceiling covering my lights diffusing the rooms natural light so there wasn’t much glare. The colors were perfect when shooting in normal camera mode however, when shooting in movie mode to get the correct proportions the entire film was darker. We then decided to add two lights pointing from either side of the background. We laid down the background on the floor and used sticky tack to keep it from moving around. We also used sticking tack to keep all of the moving parts to our characters together. Once the lights and characters were in position, we shot 30 images to represent where we wanted to get to in 30 seconds. We uploaded these to the computer and used them as a guide when we shot the images for the actual animation. The images we shot were doubled and each second had 12 frames in it. This created 24 frames per second when we brought it into QuickTime 7. Katie operated the camera while I moved the characters slightly between frames. At every 12th set of photos I wrote down the number we were on so that we wouldn’t lose track of how many we had shot.
This process took about four hours to set up and shoot. The next day in class we brought all of the images into QuickTime 7 and created an image sequence. We set the time to 24 fps to allow us to use all of the images we shot. This worked perfectly! We then brought the footage into Pro Tools and started building the soundtrack. We knew that the sound was one of the most important aspects of the animation so we wanted to spend a lot of time on it so we got the visuals of the animation done a week early to give us some extra time. We then found some perfect vocal samples however, due to there being no credits in this film, we were unable to use them due to copyright infringement. Luckily, I spent the week in New York with singer/songwriter Sean Nicholas Savage and his touring band so I got them to do some singing for me. They weren’t able to mimic opera singing exactly the way we wanted it but it ended up changing the animation in a good way. The singing they did was quite somber and passionate which almost lead up to the feeling we were trying to portray after the fish had ‘shh’ed everyone.
I would say that we learned to look through the magazines and images first because it was a huge inspiration point. We wasted a lot of time trying to come up with ideas, when in fact it was right in the images all along. We used a lot of panning in this and I think that we should have thought about keeping it in one place but using more zoom may have been more effective. A big issue with the panning that we found was that the tripod and camera could get bumped very easily. This caused a few jumps within the animation.
A2 Animation
For our animation, we were given the letter ‘o’ to work off of. Originally, Katie and I chose the word organic to represent the letter ‘o’. We created a storyboard of a happy cow that is getting photographed to be on the cover of a milk cartoon. There is a zoom in towards the cows face and when it zooms out you see that the cow isn’t actually in rolling hills, it is stuck with a bunch of other cows in a pen. There are cuts between seeing the sad cow in handcuffs and behind bars. At the end of the scene the images would be folded up into a box and stamped with the word ‘organic’. This was to be a commentary on the way that food is processed and labeled.
However, once we actually sat down and searched through magazines we realized that this idea was too hard to achieve in 30 seconds and we couldn’t find enough images to create it. We drew on another ‘o’ word that we had tossed around earlier, ‘opera’. We found a lot of great photos of people with their mouths open who we thought could be really strong characters in our animation. After gathering a bunch of potential characters, we looked for some good backgrounds. The one that stood out to us the most was a scene of people lying out on a beach by the ocean. ‘Ocean’ was another ‘o’ word so we wanted to go with that. We then found 2 other images of the ocean that we wanted to use in the scene so that we could use panning in the production.
After laying out all of the characters we began to build a story. We wanted to play on the anti-art/war movement Dada was influenced by while still maintaining a level of absurdity. We narrowed down the list of characters that we wanted to use and laid it down on the backgrounds. We moved the pieces around until an idea/storyline hit us. We wanted to convey the oppression of artistic freedom during WWI. Therefore, we wanted to have all of the characters singing freely. The characters are all singing and creating something beautifully absurd until a giant fish comes out of the ocean and “shh’s” them all into silence. The fish then floats away into the sky leaving the people unable to create anything. As the fish floats away the tuba player in the corner plays a sad tune for the last time.
We shot the entire animation in an afternoon in my living room. I had sheets already up on the ceiling covering my lights diffusing the rooms natural light so there wasn’t much glare. The colors were perfect when shooting in normal camera mode however, when shooting in movie mode to get the correct proportions the entire film was darker. We then decided to add two lights pointing from either side of the background. We laid down the background on the floor and used sticky tack to keep it from moving around. We also used sticking tack to keep all of the moving parts to our characters together. Once the lights and characters were in position, we shot 30 images to represent where we wanted to get to in 30 seconds. We uploaded these to the computer and used them as a guide when we shot the images for the actual animation. The images we shot were doubled and each second had 12 frames in it. This created 24 frames per second when we brought it into QuickTime 7. Katie operated the camera while I moved the characters slightly between frames. At every 12th set of photos I wrote down the number we were on so that we wouldn’t lose track of how many we had shot.
This process took about four hours to set up and shoot. The next day in class we brought all of the images into QuickTime 7 and created an image sequence. We set the time to 24 fps to allow us to use all of the images we shot. This worked perfectly! We then brought the footage into Pro Tools and started building the soundtrack. We knew that the sound was one of the most important aspects of the animation so we wanted to spend a lot of time on it so we got the visuals of the animation done a week early to give us some extra time. We then found some perfect vocal samples however, due to there being no credits in this film, we were unable to use them due to copyright infringement. Luckily, I spent the week in New York with singer/songwriter Sean Nicholas Savage and his touring band so I got them to do some singing for me. They weren’t able to mimic opera singing exactly the way we wanted it but it ended up changing the animation in a good way. The singing they did was quite somber and passionate which almost lead up to the feeling we were trying to portray after the fish had ‘shh’ed everyone.
I would say that we learned to look through the magazines and images first because it was a huge inspiration point. We wasted a lot of time trying to come up with ideas, when in fact it was right in the images all along. We used a lot of panning in this and I think that we should have thought about keeping it in one place but using more zoom may have been more effective. A big issue with the panning that we found was that the tripod and camera could get bumped very easily. This caused a few jumps within the animation.