I've worked on one stop motion animation with a group previously and it was a claymation story derived from an audio recording of my partners drunk friend.
Anyway, working with Hyat and YG was a splendid experience. They both were from more technical backgrounds but had brilliant creative minds. We all sat down together in the lobby and started to storyboard some ideas.
Originally we built 3 scenes of this post mid-term itp superhero doing things in their life that school often overrides. Things such as laundry, grocery shopping, working on personal projects, and general relaxing.
Then we realized our ambitions, the time frame, and other commitments to other classes. We only had one day that we were all free to shoot footage and that day also happen to be the day when YG and I could also meet for our other group projects.
So many frames were shot, moved, altered, for hours and hours.
The result is a trimmed down, jumpy version of our ITP man. But it was good to work with these fellas.
While thinking about a piece in after effects, there was a familiarity. The idea of having layers and compositions reminded me of the Photoshop UI very much. It's all a matter of imagining complete pieces in different layers that requires a level of thinking that I grew accustomed to while studying printmaking. When you created a new layer out of wood, you never quite knew what the outcome would look like until it was pressed against a piece of paper. That reveal and surprise is something unique that I loved.
Perhaps that element of surprise is lost when working in After Effects. Having to deliberately calculate each of your intentions to represent your imagination eats up so much time. Which I felt I never had enough of while balancing these animation projects with projects that were taking up most of my breadth and passion.
All qualms aside, there are so many possibilities that can be achieved with this tool. Motion capturing and playing around with track mats enticed me. I wanted to give motion to video elements that already possessed their own motion. In a way, I was manipulating videos of my past and giving them a new perspective.
The idea was to emulate my previous experience with rotoscoping. An animation effect I dabbled around in the past.
However, manually rotoscoping is always a long process. And my animation teacher in undergrad told me that there are always easier ways to animate this similarly. My goal for the AfterEffects project was not make the best animation ever, but it was to learn a new process of going about animation. I took this class to give new perspective to what I learned over five years ago. Also my classmates who don't have a similar art background as me bring ideas and a vigor that you kind of lose when you already familiar with the subject matter.
It turns out, you need a lot of space to run After Effects. And, even after clearing as much as I could from my hard drive. My 2012 macbook still putzed, crashed, and stalled. I didn't have a good lighting situation to key out my body. Everything came out pixelated and distorted.
I decided to try the rotobrush tool. It probably took me about two full days to figure out how it worked. Then I realized importing that data to another type of computer will completely through off the motion tracking.
But what I did extract out of this was how some of the After Effects algorithms work. I probably need a new hard drive. And now I can rotobrush like a pro. I'm talking with a good computer, I can create a 30 second rotobrush that looks good in a few hours. Which is waaay better timing than If I was doing that frame by frame. What I hope for is on my off time from school, is to be able to enchance the videos I take in my daily life with a bit of After Effects familiarity. And also, why do my animation teachers always tell me there is an easier way to do this, after I already went through the pain of doing it? I guess i'm stubborn in my mediums. =]
Since the semester started I have founded a new appreciation for the "process" of my projects. While the end result is more polished, it doesn't always articulate the bumps on the road it took to get there. I carry around a sketchbook where I write everything down for all my classes, and just ideas in general. In itself is a story of the mangled information being spit out from my brain.
For this AR piece I decided to take some of the documentation of my notes and mesh them together with the videos I took along the way. If you asked my 2 months ago I would have never thought I would be applying AR to my notebook. However, I think It is an element that is fascinating to explore.
I did have a piece of chorography I sketched out in my notebook as well!
However, I was faced with a slight roadblock:
Well, here is the video of my dancing for your enjoyment anyway:
I'm a hip-hop dancer and I freestyle a lot. To practice I'll play a song, dance, and film it. Usually I only take a small portion of my footage and post it on Instagram or the sorts. As a result to my sporadic dancing fever, I've collected probably hours of footage of me dancing in front of the camera. I was thinking of editing them together, and masking myself out to create cool effects. Maybe pattern overlays on my figure. Another idea is to create depth and multiple characters on the screen with myself.
