'Together'

To produce a short motion sequence of between 20 seconds and two minutes duration. Taking a piece of text (written or spoken) as your starting point, create a sequence that compliments, enhances or subverts the content. You may consider using a TED talk as a starting point, a poem or edit a section of written text using a ‘cut-up’ method as pioneered by William Burroughs.

My short movie that I made is about an elder man who lost his wife and struggles to accept it. A story about his late wife reincarnating to a butterfly and interacts with her husband who later passes away and reincarnated to a butterfly too.

The text that I have chose as a starting point is a poem called ‘Butterfly’. I chose this poem because I felt that some areas in the poem are very interesting and could be utilised for a motion sequence. I decided to make my own story up being inspired by the poem and also making it more personal to myself. When my nan passed away, a butterfly flew by to her house window and stayed there which is when we believed it was her within that butterfly.

I wanted to make this story a short sad movie where the audience feel sympathetic towards the man and get close to the story that’s being told.

My initial idea for this project was to use Blender which is a 3D software to make a story about a life cycle of a butterfly using 3D elements to tell the story by creating a morphing action of particles. Although I was happy with using the software, I felt that the story wasn’t good enough and it would create a lot of complication throughout the project.

I tried to come up with different types of stories that could potentially work with Blender with its complex style yet still simplifying the story throughout.

I’ve experimented with Blender to get the idea how the animation could look like using particles morphing and changing shapes. I wanted to test out first wether it would work and also thinking about time management which was very important. I felt that creating the effect took a lot of my time and also the rending time which I had to take into consideration.

After deciding that I wouldn’t use Blender, I decided to work with Animate which I’m familiar with and decided to also come up with a new story. I made a short movie storyboard that would work with Animate and also picking a style of work which I decided to use rotoscoping. Drawing out a storyboard before hand helps a lot in order to get the feeling of how the story would run through and also how it would look like.

Before starting in Animate, I recorded a video of how the story would look like so I could use that footage to rotoscope with to make the whole process easier and also quicker. I wanted to make the style of the animation looking as it’s a sketch.

I made the settings of this animation 24fps where I would draw every three frames to get the sketch look effect. I chose to draw every three frames as it’s not too smooth of a motion and also it’s not to jittery when looking at. Credits fo sound: Music: www.bensound.com

Overall, I am happy with how my final animation came out as in terms of style and most importantly the story of it. I felt that the story is a lot more important than the aesthetics of the animation so I prioritised it more. I feel that the story works really well throughout and all the scenes make sense following each other. There’s no confusion of what is happening and I feel it engages well with the audience.

I feel that I used many technical skills within this project, from using 3D skills in Blender to rotoscoping inside Adobe Animate. Although I knew how to use those skills and techniques, I still learnt a lot in terms of motion of the human body. I learnt how to use my time management by knowing using Blender would take me a very long time and knowing when to decide what works best for me in the project.

I felt that at the beginning of the project, I thought too much of how I wanted the final animation would look like rather than thinking what the story is that I’m using and wether it works which the style I wanted to it. I jumped too far ahead to thinking about the final outcome rather than focusing on the brief more.

Although I had to manage my time by switching softwares and using different stories, I’m still happy with how my outcome turned out and I feel it wouldn’t of happened if I didn’t experimented before hand.

Links below to workshops I have attended throughout the project in order to develop my motion graphics skills: