Aww Dip

I took this photo to help establish a visual language for my Motion Design class. I honestly was surprised at how well this one shot turned out. When processing the shot, I paused for a second and realized I needed to force myself to make note of the things I did right with this shot.

Here is to going from accidentally awesome to consistently awesome.

Last night I worked on adding a few more lines to this self-assigned kinetic type project. There is still a long way to go, but I am happy that progress is being made at a steady pace.

One of the projects I am working on this quarter is a quasi self-portrait. The fictionalized story is told through animatic still images. I was working on storyboards tonight, and I had an idea… Since I was planning on shooting/processing all of the photos to have a high contrast, Film Noir feel, why not try to recreate a silent movie feel?!

After some processing of the images and some tweaks in After Effects, this is the concept piece I will have to show to my professor:
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Timing is still getting tweaked to allow enough time for information to be understood, but not enough time to have the images get boring. Also, I am sorry for the small size. I am currently looking for a new video player, as WordTube is not giving me the features I am looking for.

During the summer quarter of my Sophomore year in DAAP, we were given a kinetic type project. This method of animation has become very popular as of late, especially on NBC and in recent Ford commercials. I was never happy with the final results of my first foray in to kinetic type, and seeing it over and over again while watching television has lit the necessary fire underneath me to take another stab at combining sound, motion, and typography.

If you have not seen my original kinetic type piece, here it is:

While it is nice, it was never something that I felt represented my vision. One of the biggest problems was that since this was a school assignment, I felt that I needed to make this something that my professors would look favorably upon. I chose to ignore my gut feelings and went in a direction that I thought my professors would like. Yes, professors… plural. There were two different professors that were both grading this project, and at times their feedback would be in direct opposition of each other. I felt stuck in the middle, and after a sting of communication breakdowns, I simply threw up my hands in frustration.

The last third of the piece is my favorite, and it was almost done completely out of spite. In stead of trying to continue working in a visual language that I did not agree with, I decided to just have fun and let them give me whatever grade they wanted. It was when I finally stopped worrying about making my teachers happy and started making myself happy that I found satisfaction.

Instead of going back and redoing the same piece, I thought it would be beneficial to move on, learn from my mistakes, and make the next piece better than the last. I chose to use the song “No Sunshine” by Rhymefest. It is a remix of Michael Jackson singing the popular Bill Withers song. (Confused? You won’t be, after this video example…)

I will post updates on the process work, and as you can see this still has a long way to go. Not only does the rest of the song need to be roughed together, but I also have to add color, finer animations, extra details, and then overall tweaking. It will take a while to get this to a finished stage, but I am looking forward to seeing where it all takes me.