Jenni Rope - Healthy Obsession

Everyday

I have read through the brief and am yet to sit down and brainstorm visual ideas, but I know what audio I would like to use and plan to use this as a starting point.

The song reminds me of the frantic, rushed way I get ready in the morning as I'm always running late.

I want to do something quite humorous and simple, perhaps focusing on one character.

Inspiration: Marcel the Shell

This is a good example of an animation that's slightly longer (ours needs to be 1-2 minutes)

It was awarded Best Animated Short at the AFI FEST 2010 and was an official Sundance selection.

Seeing sound: Final cut

....we finished episode 1 of Cloud Girl.

We used Final Cut Pro to select parts of film and audio clips, combine film and audio clips, change the speed of film clips (to 50%) and divide clips with the 'blade' tool so we could modify them and make the whole thing more seamless.

For example, we cut out a couple of frames where our hands (or shadows of our hands) were visible, and duplicated frames where we felt there needed to be a pause.

We also learnt how to zoom in on a section, which helped us with a part of the film which jerked between two scenes as we moved the background too quickly.

Here's the final edit:

To finish the induction to Final Cut we were shown how to add text to make a title, here's the final film after I added the title:

Seeing sound: In progress

Today I teamed up with Oliver and Jamie to create the basic material for our animation of an extract of the sound we chose.

Ollie suggested the sound reminded him of the ending of a favourite film of ours: The Dreamers (Bernado Bertolucci 2003)

In this scene Isabelle (Eva Green) attempts to gas the other two characters to death after their incestuous love triangle is discovered by her parents . This is irrelevant to our animation... until the scene collides with a clip from the 1963 French film Mouchette - "a tale of a young girl whose life is filled with tragedy".

We liked the idea of a girl rolling aimlessly down a hill so we borrowed it and thought, why not have her rolling up and down hills which emulate the sound waves in the screen capture we were working from. We used collage to make the hills and clouds and this was our experiment with moving the backdrop along and rolling the girl around.

Overall we were pleased with what we produced, but we ran into difficulties with the background moving too quickly and the character falling off the page. We rectified this by jumping to the start of each hill, which did not disrupt the smoothness of the motion too much, but meant the animation moves too quickly and is only about 8 seconds long.

Next week when we edit it to match the sound, we may try to double the speed so she rolls very slowly.

Seeing sound: initial ideas

Phonophani - Kvaale (the first track)

I have chosen this sound which for me evokes images of a slow journey home, trudging up a ladder or rolling down a hill.
It sounds exotic, dreamlike, and at times monotonous.

I have made some rough notes but will wait until I arrive tomorrow to start tranforming them into experiments.

In the meantime, I researched Phonophani. He is a Norwegian composer and his real name is Espen Sommer Eide. I found the following interesting videos:

Documentary

The most moving and memorable documentary I have ever seen:

You can find it all on Youtube.

'Research'

Basically I went on youtube for a while..

I tried to focus on music videos as we're starting the sound project

Music video for Pay TV - so bad they're good

Matthew Robins' Flyboy - amazing live

Toy Food - a silly song by (one of) the makers of Potter Puppet Pals

Jerry Jackson - my idol

T shirt war - me and my friend Beci wanted to do a similar one with facepaint, but never got round to it (yet)

Paper horse - only one sheet of paper, wow

The Knife, We share Our Mother's Health - their video for Like A Pen is good as well

Forkbeard animation school

Came across this while researching another project - more examples of amateur animations

'When did we lose our voices'

Here's what we made today.

Animation based on a newspaper article by me and Gracie