Animation

the final design for the sun and the moon

Animation and the final structure of our documentary 

We decided quite early on that our documentary would have the structure of a day passing. At first I had hoped to have a sunrise as the opening shot, and a sunset as the closing shot, but we realised we had a lot of footage of before and after. We went out early in the morning to get videos of people setting up shops and going to work etc, so those scenes went in before the sunset. And of course we took many nightime shots, so the sunset had to go before them. The essential is still the same though. Our documentary takes us through the very early morning, to morning, rush hour and busy day time, to evening and then finally the night. To help us keep this structure we used interviews. (Emma for morning to day, Silas the taxi driver for day to night and the kebab men for night). We decided that having all these interviews was enough, so we decided not to do the poem. We also really liked the idea of the beginnig fading in, with only a black screen and sounds to begin it with. Because of this we decided to keep the title to the end, so that it wouldn´t be too randomely thrown in the middle.

I also explored the stucture and build of the film whilst doing the storyboard. (When I drew it I thought we´d have the sunset and sunrise build, and also the title at the very beginning.)

Our storyboard

For the animation I decided really early on (even before it was sure that we would do animation) that I wanted to draw a sun and a moon. For this is I was inspired by the classic and also bohemian style of sun and moon, with the faces. 

Sketch of how the title would look. At first I thought we would have some video in the back, but it was decided that that would be too messy, so the background is just black.

Alya suggested I could do something abstract, to fit with the poeticness of the documentary. I struggeled a bit to find what could work, so I tried a lot of different things. Below are some sketches I made, trying to find what could be good. I sent pictures into the group and they said they liked the first squiggly one the most, so thats what I kind of used. I didn´t have time to just do a squiggle animation, but I used this idea for the "transitions". (when some of the shapes come in, like the sun and the moon)

I used my iPad and adobe Illustrator to draw all these, and once I saved them all without the background I put them into premiere pro. Some of the transitions are over thirty frames long, and on top of that i have the loops. The loops are little animations 5 to 9 frames long where I just looped them to make it easier for myself (so essentially the sun, moon and taxi all had two seperate video files made). I think the all worked out well, and the looping gives them movement, even when nothing is happening. I did have some problems in the edit, with premiere, on the second day of editing (10.12) . Whenever I saved anything (at this point it was the sun and the moon transitions (seperately)), it would cut of the last two frames. It was really annoying and meant that if saved like This I couldn´t really put the loops at the end of the movement as intended, as they match with the loops. Nothing I did seemed to make any difference, so I battled with thiss for awhile, but in the end I came with a solution. I just put in the two last frames twice, so that when it cut of the two last frames, I still had the whole animation saved. From there I could go on with the rest of the animations.
On Thursday 12.12.19 I got everything ready!!! I had drawn the last of my animations the night before (the taxi and birds) and finished with all the credits. For some reason when I bought the taxi and the birds in the animations were placed wrong. As you can see from the picture below the birds are being cut at the edge, nowhere near the edge of the frame. I had to change the position of every single frame individually to get it right.

On the photos I´ve fixed the positioning, so that the birds dont cut off. This obviously took some time. When I then went into a new project on premiere (for the loops) I noticed that both the taxi and the birds were much bigger. Turns out that for some reason when I put the files into the first premire Project it had downsized the animations, and that´s why the positioning was all wrong. So in the end I ended up deleting the original animation of the birds  and replaced it with the properly sized mp4 file I made. The same went for the taxi, I had to delete the whole transition bit I did and replace it again. In the end though it all went well and I was super happy with the results. Also, because I didn´t have enough time for new animations, I reused the birds for the "sound" and the "animation" credits. For the sound bit I used the birds as intended, but for my bit I reversed one of the birds to make them fly the other way, and also used the smaller version the birds had that caused me so much pain. I was happy with the way it looked though, so it wasn´t all in vain. 

For the title, we used smaller versions of the looped sun and moon. Rodrigo made them rotate around the title, like they do in the sky. I thought it looked great.

 Here are some of the finished animations: