Mini Project 2

This week I have been working on my stop motion animation which will show the growth of a flower and how that flower will be used to naturally dye prints for the brand Jason Wu. In order to make this, I have had to make 15 animation assisted videos with 20 frames in each. In total 300 frames to make the animation. The animation in total took 554 minutes (calculated by Procreate on the canvas information statistics) which is a total of 9 hours of pure animation. On top of this there was also the opening and closing frames of branding information, editing in Premier Pro, rendering, cropping and making sure everything lined up seamlessly.

All of my frames and pieces made on Procreate to come to the final film.

I got these clips into Premier by exporting the procreate file as a MP4 file which I would then upload to my one drive. I was then able to take them from the one drive and pop them into premier, I knew the amount of videos I would have would become cluttered in the media upload section of premier. I titled the videos and numbered them at the start so I knew the sequence in which they were going to play. I began uploading them into the timeline on premier as I was finishing them instead of waiting until I had all of my clips because this helped me to see where I was at and what the video was looking like. This helped me to visualise better what the next clips can be and how they will come about. Every time I would add a new procreate animation it would on average add around 2 seconds of footage, this was almost frustrating after how long I would spend making one sequence (the longest I spent on one was an hour and a half). I obviously knew going down this path that animation and especially stop motion is extremely time consuming but as I had only committed to a simplistic style of animation I didn't think it would take this long.

One issue I found with stop motion on procreate and my way of doing it was that I could only create 20 frame sequences which meant I had to make sure the different videos linked up perfectly so it looked seamless. This meant copying the final frame from the previous frame and inputting it into the new sequence and following it on from here. Another thing with animated stop motion was working out the movement of my subject, having to know beforehand how the flower is going to blow or how the petals will fall. This was important to know before animating because you can't just start animating a petal falling from one side of the screen and then suddenly decide you need it to be on the opposite side to make sense of your following sequence as you would then have to animate the difference.

My original ideas in term of audio for this film was quite minimalistic, I wanted an ambient and uplifting song with overlaid foley audio to exaggerate this natural journey. I wanted it to have water dripping, branches growing and material scrunching. However, during the process of animation alongside a tight deadline I knew I wouldn't have the time to make audio of a standard I wanted. Instead I settled for just the ambient uplifting song which I think does pair well with the video as it's not too heavy therefore doesn't take attention away from the film. In communication terms this audio would inspire the viewer in a positive manner to think about the craftsmanship that not only went into the video but the Jason Wu garments.

For the branding elements of the video I added a Jason Wu logo at the start which I drew on procreate and screen recorded on my iPad. This was so the video can open with the ideas of illustration and animation. The video then ends with 'spring summer 2022' and 'inspired by the idea of craftsmanship'. I wanted to add these sentences into the film as I wanted it to be clear that the natural dye was an element used and focused on for this particular collection. I think the video speaks for itself without the branding elements however I almost added them into the film to make it closer to the brief requirements of being 60 seconds long. In total, the animation part of the film was 45 seconds long which didn't meet the brief however, if this was outside of a brief I would leave it as it is maybe with just the opening logo.

Overall, I'm happy with this outcome of the film. It was extremely satisfying to watch this back after working so hard on it. I don't think it's something I want to continue into the final project just because of the repetition of it and the time consumption and I generally think I prefer filming with a camera. I also think this experimental film doesn't completely meet the client brief I was given and I would prefer my final film to communicate those ideas more. I will give more reflection and thoughts after we have had our MP2 reviews on Friday.

Watch the video here:

YOUTUBE (UNLISTED)

VIDEO