Negotiated Brief - Music Video - Finished!!

I am pleased to announce that I've completed my Negotiated project good and proper now..
If you want to skip the 'making of' and see the final video - I've embedded it at the bottom of this post.

I was quite inspired by the Richard Morrison talk earlier this term and took a couple of things from it. With reference to this project I applied what he said about letting the idea come out naturally - and not forcing it out. This was partly due to juggling several other projects but also a result of my way of working.

I acted on moments of inspiration and combined the results of these creative impulses with a methodical approach. In other words - doing some storyboarding and visually responding to the music (see earlier post) as well as thinking 'hmmm - I'd quite like to put in a sunrise timelapse' or 'I feel like going out and doing some creative night photography'.

Some results of these experiments are below:

Also during the term I went to an Audio Visual and Projection mapping Festival at Geneva with Simon which was great fun and inspiring. I will do a separate blog post on this. The point of me mentioning it is that I was able to get some great shots of being above the clouds.

So around a week or two ago my head was full of ideas - I had lots of footage filmed in mind of the project, I had some initial artwork to go on, and some timelapses and photographs. I just needed to somehow condense everything into the 50 second audio piece. Essentially I needed to go 'back to the drawing board' and do some final preparation work. I still needed a proper storyboard (the first one was done before getting a lot more ideas/footage etc.) , a dopesheet -which turned out to be very useful and a place to put all my ideas:

I got to work following the storyboard and produced some artwork designed to be composited into the piece (whilst listening to the music I was doing it for) Eventually I had all the raw material I needed and worked the different elements into After Effects.

One fun idea was to dress up in a suit and incorporate pixellation of me holding a heartbeat (using a video but having it printed off so literally holding up a frame at a time.) I was planning to do the same with a sunrise - but due to time constraints I decided 'hey I'll just composite it onto a blank sheet of paper that I'm holding ' This was a massive time saver and looks a lot smoother. There is a nice hand-done quality to the Heartbeat however. If you have any opinions on this feel free to comment! Getting muddy whilst wearing the smart clothes was Ninas idea (who is also featured in the film.) This was great fun. Also see if you can spot the additional prop in the shot. Here are some elements I put into the final video:

I cut out these cogs by hand using a scalple and some card. Then I scanned them in and animated them in Flash. These fed into the people timelapse shot below - for this I used After Effects.

These were initially hand drawn using pastels on black paper. Then I put them into photoshop and
used a pallett brush and liquify effect. I designed them carefully on photoshop to be able to be looped.

So you get the idea - inspired creativity is what it is! I Love it!



Presenting an Audio Visual piece I produced for my 'Negotiated Brief' project at the Digital Animation BA course in Falmouth.



I really enjoyed doing this, it gave me a chance to be quite experimental and incorporate a range of techniques. Hopefully I will continue to do this kind of audio visual work. Its great to have an idea and then make it happen.

The highlights have to be dressing up in a suit and getting muddy - great fun!



Thanks to Nina Cumberbirch for allowing me to feature her in the video. Thanks to Lazulene for the music.

What does it all mean?.. well I leave that to your interpretation.
Now I must go out and celebrate ! Wooooooooooo!

Negotiated Brief - Music Video

For this we are given free reign and can do anything we like (so long as it is related to animation.) This is a great chance for me to explore and develop some of my own ideas and techniques of producing animation. I'm also hoping to develop a personal style and look to my work. As I enjoy linking visuals to music I have decided to do a video for my musician friend Nathan (Lazulene is his music alias). Click on the link below to listen to the tune I will be doing the visuals to. It's called Terrestrial Sci Fi.

So far I have done a fair amount of research watching music videos and audio visual albums. I have done several mind maps and also produced artwork and written down ideas, thoughts and feelings whilst listening to the track. My new Sony Nex5 camera will come in handy, I have just ordered an intervalometer for it which will be useful for time lapses (I'm looking forward to doing a sunrise time lapse which I reckon will suit the latter half of the track.)

I will go on continuing the pre-production stage for another couple of days and hopefully end up with a rough storyboard. I'm considering that it may be wiser to aim to produce just a few clips to fit different parts of the track as it is a bit of a tight deadline (less then 4 weeks, taking into account the Mapping and Audio Visual festival in Geneva.)

Here is my work space :-)

Here is my work, initial doodling, research notes and ideas:

These show my thoughts/ideas/feelings that I got whilst listening to the music..

The 3 pages above condensed into one page..

Heres my visual response whilst listening to the music - These have been fun to do and should hopefully come in useful..

Some experiments with using cellulose thinner applied through magazine/printed imagery onto blank paper..

I like African and Aboriginal art - the visual look of it may help feed into my animations..