Create a video (a composite: made up of several parts) to tell a story about something that doesn’t exist, something you’ve created. Use both artistic and technical skills.
Suggested software to use is After Effects. Workshops will be done for After Effects too.
Deliverables
Video
1920 x 1080
25 FPS
MP4
Minimum 90 seconds long (2250 frames)
Learning Journal
Documentation of projects development
Research
Exploration
Word Vomit
I thought it’d be a good idea to write down ideas as they come to me - word vomit - and see if anything sticks or can be developed.
About how trapping my room can feel, especially at night. Maybe it could start off in a dark noisy familiar space that closes in, I could fly out the window into the beauty of the outside fresh air with street stuff flying by and then going into nature with moss and branches and running water. I could make sounds and music for it and take photos for all the assets myself.
I could create my imaginary perfect place that my mind could transform into (imagining brain and soul and stuff transforming into calming fields with green fields, warm sunbeams, peaceful creatures, nice wind. Nooks and crannies to relax in. Convey comfortableness I could feel there).
Running through the woods as a creature running from all the overwhelming bad and people and memories that are chasing me. Maybe spinning around feeling and visuals and a weight. A anxious fuzziness. I could jump over a river into another world.
Reaching out to someone but not being able to touch them, like they're an infinitely deep fractal with no area, like the Menger Sponge. Imagining an arm reaching out to touch it but never being able to touch it. Maybe this isn't how it works...
Jumping different parts of life like sitting in bed, dancing to music, cooking, walking somewhere, brushing teeth..
Wrapped up in a duvet sleeping next to someone so precious. Sleeping and waking up seeing them numerous times in the night. Switching between dreams and seeing them. Comforting music.
A video of erupting from inside brain through meaty bars, through my skin, to my room, from the familiarness of my room to the outside.
Dream where looking at your past self in the eyes, they hold you and slowly kill you while grinning with total white blank eyes.
A video of a fawn travelling through the world - empty city streets with ghostly noise of people, woods that feel they're watching or uncanny - with an overlooming fuzzyness upon the fawns atmosphere and soul. The fawn wants to find a place of sanctuary but it cannot find one. The fawn is falling.
A video about nature and how I feel it heals me and makes me feel free, compared to the busy city life where it feels sort of lonely and disconnected. I could do the journey of a deer that wanders out of the city and gets on a train and ends up in lovely places like Glenmoss and Lochwinnoch Nature Reserve, where feels free with the beauty of nature. I could make the deer cartoony, but could change its art style depending on its mood. I could overlay nice patterns and shapes into lovely areas. Maybe make gloomy places with fog and noise. I want to show how much my solo journeys to places have meant to me.
Reflection
I really like the idea of showing the journey of an animal (thinking a fawn deer) going on a train from Glasgow and walking to somewhere nice and relaxing there. I could combine aspects of feeling trappedness to show the development of the mood of the deer as it moves from the city to nature to feeling free.
I think it could be cool to initially give the deer just a line drawing with line boil, and by the end it’s coloured in. I could put other things in the video like foliage around the platform or scenes flying by outside the train window.
Here’s how I think it could go:
Deer in bed in my bedroom
Deer makes it down a Glasgow street
Is on a platform in central
Gets on the train and is pictured laying down across two seats
Wanders down a footpath within a bunch of trees
Relaxes somewhere on the floor next to a lake
Development
Source Capture
I'm going to travel to Lochwinnoch and film in the ruins, waterfalls, woods, and train station I've marked on the map. These are my favourite places and I wanted to capture them.
Map of LochwinnochList of videos capturedScreenshots of some of the videos
I captured a bunch of footage during my day there. I just used my phone camera. I had thought of booking out a camera and tripod but I felt it’d be too much time for scope of the project.
I also wrote two different writings during my trip here that I want to incorporate, one was written whilst walking down the boardwalk towards the ruins. The other was a poem written to the waterfalls.
After Effects
Tracking train windows and chairs in Mocha
I used Mocha to track the two train windows and the two chairs. I was having trouble with the tracking as it was drifting, but Gillian helped and showed me how to properly do the tracking data and how to connect the masks to this tracking data.
I used the tracking masks in After Effects in two ways. I made the windows gain colour throughout the sequence by changing the opacity of them. I wanted the chair to keep the colour as that'll highlight where the deer sits.
I connected the tracking data to the photo of the deer, which I draw and scanned in and neatened up.
Mask in After EffectsAdding deer and changing colours in After EffectsMasking bus windows and chairs
I wanted to also put the deer on a bus seat that I captured on the way to Central Station. I used Mocha again and tracked it like I did with the bus. It was a bit more work and not tracked as well, but I liked the outcome when I applied Posterize Time effect to the windows.
I wanted to add a deer sitting on the grass in this shot atop the ruins. I tracked the ground and used the tracking data to transform position of the image.
I added audio I recorded of me reading some writing I did on my visit and overlayed scrolling image of my writing on top of the video. I am still not entirely sure about this but I'll see.
Deer sitting next to a lake
Ableton
I used Ableton to create two different sounds for the video.
Using a granulator (it splits audio into little grains and plays it back however you set), I input my reading of writing I wrote whilst walking down a boardwalk. I gradually made it clearer as to what I was saying, but you’ll only hear snippets of it.
Using the imagiro piano plugin I recorded myself playing a random simple tune on the piano that I felt would fit into the video. It was quite quick and not that much other substance to it but I enjoy the simplicity of it.
