Developing the Experimental Media project

After our first tutorial with Anne, Flora and I discussed what we would each work on. We agreed that I should continue with my animation while Flora should create glitchy backgounds on photoshop as she still didn´t have access to any of the other adobe suite. (Flora was going to do a lot of editing on After Effects.) She said she would also work on the sound. We also had a look at some of our footage together. I tried editing the green screen on my premiere and it actually worked better than we had hoped (because looking at our footage we realised the green wasn´t very smooth, especially the paint was a different colour.) I just took random pictures from the internet to just test it. The link is to the clips I edited. I think this experiment shows what we are aiming to do.

https://youtu.be/A1ApeqcylRU

Here are some of the amazing backgrounds Flora has created for us

For my animations I decided to download a new app on my iPad. I did consider using Adobe Animate so I tried it out and after hours of not getting a circle to move, I decided I didn´t have time to learn it. It looks really complicated. It´s also much nicer to draw on my iPad then on my laptop.
The app I had was quite limited and put a watermark on the exported videos. I also couldn´t download all the images seperatly and without background. I looked into other apps and I soon discovered that if I wanted a good one I would have to pay for it. I started looking at best payed apps for animations. I watched a lot of reviews and tutorials, comparison videos etc until I decided on Animation Pro. Animation Pro looked to be by far the most ecompassing. With it I can build character figures, draw traditional animation, rotoscope, bring in images and videos, play with camera movements and settings and more. There are also more exporting possibilities. I´ve bought it now and I´m really happy with my choice. It seems I could do any sort of animation on it. Obviously this means I will be able to animate faster than normally. Before I just used a drawing program with which I had to save each drawing seperatly and then put it into premiere to see what it actually looked like. Below are some tests I did using Animation Pro.

After the initial try outs I was more confident with what I was doing. I did some rotoscoping of around 10 frames that I thought we could loop. Originally when I exported the movie though, it looked very wrong. It was flashing and I realised it was because there was a blank frame between each frame that I had drown. Eventually I realised I just had to turn off the automatic tweening (in between frames) and it came out alright as seen below.

The loop does look a bit weird as Laura and I move in it. While I was drawing it I didn´t notice it as it was so minimal. I don´t think it´s too bad though, because it adds to the unnatural and glitchy effect we are going for. Below is another loop I made, where Flora points the camera at me, relating to the theme of surveillance and control.

The final big thing I did was a 80 drawing rotoscoping of Flora filming Laura and I. This will hopefully be put in the final video with a background that Flora has made.

this is where I would draw over the shapes

After drawing and colouring us in white I would delete the background

Exporting the video

We had another tutorial with Anne. It was quite useful and has made my timetable clearer. She told us that we might have a full day adobe after effects workshop on Tuesday the 21st of April. She recommended then to try to finish both the Experimental Media and the essay before that (the essay deadline is anyway on the 20th). I think this is a good idea so the plan is to focus on the Experimental Media and the essay for now. After that I can then completely focus on the After Effects, starting from the workshop on the 21st. I like this because I can now only think about the two projects instead of all three at the same time. Here is my schedule that I updated after the tutorial.

Next are more pictures of what Flora has done to futher our project. I can really see our film coming together now and its exciting. 

I asked Flora to edit this clip after I had drawn an animation for it. I sent her a screen recording I had done of my instagram feed that I had tried to match up with Laura´s swiping.  She said it was hard to get it on the arm and make it look natural.

 Here is the clip where I have edited the animation on top of it. I had some techinal difficulties with it. I had drawn the animation on my iPad the same way I did the rotoscoping, so I could see exactly where her fingers were and when, so I timed the animation perfectly. The swipes made things come out from one end of her arm and her tapping left marks exactly where it should. However, once I saved the frames without transparent background so I could put it on top of the now edited video, the sizes and timings were all wrong. I still don´t know why this happened. In the end I started the animation later then planned (from the yellow flowers not the white lines that were meant to be first). I had to resize every frame so that it actually matched up to Lauras arm and I put the speed of the video at 80 percent. Weirdly enough that seemed to be the timing I originally had whilst drawing the animation. After all these adjustements I got it to work and I´m happy with the result. 

Flora making one of her backgrounds. This one is for the scene where she is watching Laura and I on her laptop.

Two screen grabs from our project. I love the way Flora edited the sreen to reflect from Laura´s eye. I think it looks great.

Here is a clip Flora asked me to do. This was actually one of the first scenes we had planned to do, where we show that the Laura is actually not human. Later on we find out that I´m not either. 

For it I used a similair method as before but instead of drawing every frame I had and image that I fitted on top of Laura. Laura does move a bit in so I did have to make small adjustements. The image above shows how I worked with the image. Some parts of Laura were occasionaly visible from under the picture so I had to colour those bits in black.

Flora and I also decided on our title. We´re going to call our film Power On.  Essentially were going to start from where the power is on and show all the technological chaos we have, and then in the end its going to be too much, and the power will be turned off. Flora was working on how the title is going to look.