Journal 5/2/2006
After a long arduous journey, the goal is at hand. Between the rough cut and the fine cut, I spent, essentially two days working. Two, FULL days of working, that is. About 40 hours in total. The first "day" was spent finishing up the special effects. I was working on all of the scenes sporadically, but, in order, I essentially did the following.The opening scene was a little too blurred for my taste, so I screen grabbed MS Word and pasted it in AFX as an image, and added a grain effect to jive with the rest of the footage. I also spent time working with photo filters and brightness to make it look less like a graphic and more like live footage. The text animation I basically took from my animatic.
For the first abstract scene, I had to animate strokes across the monsters to simulate the writer thinking about the various ideas for monsters. I used AFX's vector paint after a torturous, wasted hour trying to figure out how to do it in Corel painter. The strokes don't look as stylish as Painter's, but I'm happy with them. It took me about thirty tries to actually get the scribble stroke just right. About ten tries for the circle on the third monster. Of course, after that tenth try I realized half the circle was out of action safe and had to do it over again.
The third scene took the most time out of all the scenes (obviously). First, there is the text animation that appears on the screen. In order to keep my camera move (the zoom into the screen), I had to pre-compose my background layers twice, once as a 3D environment, and once as a 2D background. Only then did the text appear correctly in 3D. The camera move had to be quite precise because I was basically using two cameras to show the same movement (once on the background footage and once for the 3D text layers). There were also problems with the mask, and I had to do extensive tweaking in order to get the mask to line up with the screen. Additionally, the mask stays the same size regardless of Z-depth, meaning I had to manually enlarge the mask to make the text stay on the screen only for the duration of the transition. you can see some mask errors if you go through that transition frame by frame.
I had a great idea to transition to the feathery green mask--in the rough cut I just had it appear on the frame that it was supposed to. In the fine cut I actually have the mask existing for the whole scene (including the zoom transition), only it's blown way up (edge pixels quite high). I then shrink it as my face comes into view. There was a more subtle transition problem in that I went from a really bright screen to a really dark background (zoomed in on the laptop's screen to the black backdrop of the next abstract scene). To fix this, I simply added another white layer and turned down its opacity to fade from bright to dark.
This abstract scene was where I had the most fun. All the movements were done in AFX using basic transform keys. The blood I put on a separate composition called splatter. Of course, masks had to be done frame by frame to match the monster's toothy smiles. The little girl I actually redrew in Photoshop to make her demonic. I'm quite happy with the way she turned out. I also photoshopped the monster that the demon girl attacks: it's eyes slant in the opposite direction to convey its fear. I considered putting a sweat drop animation on it, but that seemed too anime-like, and I wasn't going for that kind of look. To fade out the mask I just turned down the edges of the mask. Since I had two masks, one on the footage and another one the turquoise adjustment layer, I decided to make use of them and fade down on the footage slightly before the turquoise, leaving a dreamy, almost other-worldly closing effect.
For the last scene, I put on a nice purple overlay to ease the transition into the final animation. It's hard to see from the web version, but I also tracked red eyes to my footage while it's purple. I then fade into an Imageready gif sequence. I created ten frames of shadowy-beast animation and tweened them. Unfortunately, the opacities of the frames changed on the tween frames, creating a slight flicker in the animation. It is very visible if you go through frame by frame, not so much if you're just watching it. Now I know how cartoonists feel drawing things out frame by frame.
The second "day" was spent having fun doing the sound design. I actually really liked working with the sound. I have an old game (Windows 98) called Klik n Play, which allows you to create rudimentary 2D games by controlling movement, sprite collision, and object creation. And while I had a lot of fun creating nice games, Klik n Play also comes with a hundred or so audio clips to use in the games. I stole a bunch of them for my sound editting. The typing sound I found on the web, but I really had to edit the hell out of the clips to make it sound less repetitious. The monster screams are mostly from Klik n Play, some from findsounds.com.
The scribble sound is definitely from Klik n Play, and was nice because it was a series of short scribbles followed by a longer scribble. I cut it up for both the scribble animation, the question mark, and the circle. The blood n guts effects are all from Klik n Play. I was laughing quite hard after doing all the sound--it really makes the piece stand out. It's a lot funnier than I intended, but funny in a good way.
The scary finale is from a track on the Hannibal movie soundtrack. On the Vide Cour Meum song, there are about five seconds after the piece finishes. And suddenly, this lough sound comes in. Quite terrifying, the first time I heard it, as it was so unexpected. But it was perfect for the ending to my piece, and even matched up well with the jumping movement of the shadow beast.
The music is a waltz by chopin. Quite serendipitously, there is a nice, slight fade-out at about twenty seconds into the song, which I simply faded out to silence. It matched quite well with my piece. I also like the way the piano glides into the transition with the turquoise mask. I could tweak with sound the whole day. I could probably spend another week just editing the sound on the piece.
So ... all that's left is to burn the DVD. And it's due in about 1.5 hours, so I guess I should be getting on that. Thanks, faithful readers, for staying with me to the end, and best of luck on all your endeavors. I hope my sharing has been worthwhile.
-jk
posted by JKing @ 1:01 PM
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