Journal 3/20/2006

The hardest part about the storyboards was to actually iron out some of the details for the abstract imagery. Framing the live action shots was relatively easy--I've had some experience using the digital tablets, so I had no problem tracing over pictures of myself. I drew outlines of the pictures on a separate layer in GIMP then exported just that layer as a Photoshop file.

I've decided I don't really want the monsters to look real as such. Instead, I want a more artistic look, sort of like the Impressionist filter that we saw last class in Painter. The monsters are supposed to mimic an artists thoughts, so the details may are not supposed to be ironed out 100%. In that spirit, I made the monster drawings a little more crude I may end up tweening the monster images to get the animation, saving it as a tiff sequence, then running the tiff sequence through one of Painter's filters.

One interesting idea I got from the storyboards was for frame 4, the second sequence of abstract images. My head is kind of skinny, leaving a lot of room on both sides of the frame. I can make use of this space with the monsters, animating the bit scenes in different places around the frame instead of having to keep the animation just over my head (as I originally intended to do).

I worked on a second version of the script to further develop my ideas for the abstract imagery, and cut down on some of the scenes for time. The images I have in this revision are much simpler, and easier for me to visualize (which was helpful for the storyboards). At this point, I've pretty much decided on what I want to happen in the video, but I'll probably end up doing another version of the style frame to get better looking monsters and perhaps change the color scheme. I think I like my original idea of having very low light, maybe even using the computer LCD screen as the sole source of light, if that's possible.