While the Covid-19 problems have been progressing I found myself trying to complete my creative work, but not really getting too engrossed in it, and this has meant that I have done small amounts of this piece without screen recording any of it. Instead of screen recordings to show my process, I will just annotate some screenshots.
Here is the final piece, although it might still change slightly before my submission.
Breakdown of the process
The logical way to create a piece like this is to storyboard the whole thing, making sure each line is planned out. Personally I just don’t work well this way. Initially in my first post for this piece, I shared some ideas for specific parts of the song, and this is the way I like to work rather than making sure I know what I want for the whole thing. The way I do it, I work from some initial ideas and expand on them and plan as I go, I feel like I get to be much more expressive this way.
I decided that the best way to compose this would be to create compositions for each line or two of the song, and then collect these in one master composition.
To create the illusion of this being a large metal fence falling, I added a manual camera shake within this composition. I also added a slight bounce of the fence but made sure that it was quite sharp to suggest that it is heavy.
For this part, I was a bit hesitant to brainstorm for it. The lyrics are very fast and I knew that I wouldnt have the chance to make anything too flashy. I settled on just changing the opacity and making it punchy just like the lyrics are, and while this doesnt really show off any technical skills, it is likely the best creative decision for this section.
The speed of the lyrics is still very fast at this point, and so again I made the decision to use less of a technical method for transitioning to the words ‘Im afraid’ because it felt like the best creative choice. To emphasise the feeling of fear at this part of the video, I decided to have the words almost jump out, to ‘scare’ the viewer, and added a shake to add tension. I think the shake works really well (I just used the wiggle expression on the position).
At this point, I wanted to have the cup tip over and spill into the next words. To do this I created a spill shape that expanded and used the text as an alpha matt for that layer. I really like the effect this gives off, but I’m not sure if my intentions translate well and others can pick up what it is supposed to be, so I will have to discuss this part with my peers.
I also might change the cup outline, I wanted it to stick in the hand-drawn style like the rest of the piece but I feel like the line weight is maybe a bit too thin in comparison to everything else.
For this final part, I used three overlapping animators on each of the pieces of text. I have never used three before but once I got my head around it I found it really useful to create more organic movement. For these, I had one to increase the scale from 0, one to move each letter up by 92 and then one to move them down by 10, and by staggering these three animators I think I got a really nice movement. In theory I could add some more to ease the motion even more, but that would likely be overkill at this point.
Jennie Hawkes 