The End

As I was progressing through the sequences and my project was nearing the end, it started to dawn on me that I hadn't really though about the ending. Although from the beginning I had decided that I wanted the animation to follow no set narrative, I still felt that it had to have some sort of ending. I didn't want to just run out of footage and it just end there. From the beginning I had looked at the mind and documenting thought processes on referral of personal opinion and also from analysing peoples behaviour, and the telling detail towards the end of the footage is a women sitting on the bench in front of the camera, and to me it looked as if she was debating whether to stay or whether to go. From personal experience and witnessing others around me, I know this is one of the biggest battles that commences inside ones head whilst drawing towards the end of your patience/ concentration span within the library.

GOOD VS BAD.. WHO WOULD PREVAIL?

I decided that this battle would be a great way to end my animation, and as the footage ended and the screen turned black, the winner would be portrayed. I felt it creates a nice cycle to the idea of time.. If she chooses to stay it opens a sense of a cliff hanger and anticipation of what would happen next time round or if she chooses to leave it opens up the varied exciting thoughts of other more entertaining ways of passing time. The sense of leaving one journey and heading into another....

The hardest mental battle that faces every student whilst in the library. GOOD VS BAD, WORK VS PARTY. Everyone has felt it, everyone has succumb to the dark side, whilst everyone has prevailed as a angelic and dedicated student.

Musical Symbols in animation

Another event that I wanted to emphasise through my footage was the constant use of music within the library and in numerous times during my shoot, people are caught walking through the shot with their headphones in, looking oblivious to everyone and everything around them.

To incorporate this into my animation, I wanted to use musical symbols, as they are obviously the best and most recognisable way to visually portray the cocktail sounds of various music coming out of peoples personal mp3 players. Below are a few images of how they have been used in current cartoons/ animations.

Viewing these images, helped me to see how subtle manipulations in angles of the symbols can suggest greater movement and also how by making some symbols smaller creates a sense of distance etc.

I then thought, I would combine this idea with my idea of illustration and thought I would physically draw the symbols on Photoshop using my new Graphic tablet and then manipulate them once they are in Flash. The image below inspired this idea;

Text Message Effect.

Once I had captured all of my images, I proceeded to go through them all and pick out weird, interesting or entertaining movements, events etc that had happened during my shoot and then began to work out how I could incorporate this into part of a creative and interesting animation. One of the best events that I captured is when a boy sits on the bench in front of the camera and proceeds to look to and from his phone and growingly ever so impatient waiting for the person he was obviously due to meet. This linked well with my documentation  of ow a lot of people pass time on their mobiles in the library, and I wanted to highlight this use of social and communication through animation.

It was failing to come to me in how I could achieve this in a way I found creative and entertaining. This was until I was casually watching one my new favourite Tv series 'Fresh Meat' on a hungover, typical rainy afternoon in Brighton. Below is a few print screens of how the show portrays a text in animate form and I came inspired to create a similar effect.

Editing a batch of images.

Obviously with such a large batch of photos captured for my project, it would have been ridiculously time consuming to individually go through and edit each photo and thankfully this wasn't going to be the case as I was introduced to the technique of creating my own 'action' within photoshop that would apply all of the manipulations and tweaks created to each photo once selecting 'automate'-'automate batch'.

If you look to the tab titled 'actions' in the right of the above image you will see towards the bottom the action I created named 'Project photo edits' and below that you can see the steps photoshop will run through on every image within my batch. This setting saved me so much time, whilst also ensured each image maintained an exact consistency with its edits, throughout the batch.

Introducing myself to Time Lapse

After deciding that Time Lapse would be the most effective and practical way for me to capture the time passing in the library, whilst also leaving me with all of the individual images, which would make editing within photoshop and flash a whole lot easier than if I captured time passing in movie form.

I felt that it was essential to look into the technicalities of using time lapse and seek some professional advice via between in the Media department and also experts online. I came across a fantastic website called "Digital Photography School" and located the page titled 'An Introduction to Time-Lapse Photography'. This seemed to clearly be the place to start and gain some knowledge into how I would go about and capture my footage.


Eclectic 3.0: The Roads Less Traveled from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

This video immediately struck me on the website and consequently cemented my new found love for Time lapse photography and inspired me to go out and start filming. I just had to firstly find out how...

I created myself a step by step guideline to follow whilst on shoot that would ensure I captured the time lapse to the best way and quality possible:

1. Choosing the right camera- D1000.
2. Search for built in interval setting. Set the camera to take 9 photos every 10. This would ensure I reached my total of between 100-1200 images.
3. Ensure camera is in solely Manual setting, with no auto white balance etc.
4. Set the image size to as small as possible as it will help ease the load onto the computer and into Flash.
5. Ensure the tripod is level, framed well and in a solid and protected position.
6. Have something to occupy me, as its a long two hours doing nothing.
7. Ready to go....

Illustration on people.

I was really starting to get into illustration, and felt it was time to step up progress with the technique. After researching and viewing the images of illustration below and researching into a few blogs I decided that purchasing a 'graphic tablet' would be the next best step for me, as it would enhance the quality of my final pieces and give me more creative freedom.

For experimentation purposes ahead of my project, I decided to have a little play with my new toy and practise adding illustration to humans within photographs I have stored on my Mac. Below are my best attempts;

Time lapse

I started to delve deeper into the concept of my idea and began to think about what would be the most effective way of structuring and capturing the original footage within the library. I was naive to think that I would be able to use video footage and then be able to edit with illustration on top of it. I realised that this was not the case and I would have had to break apart the whole video etc.

I started to think of alternatives of capturing a period of time passing and remembered the technique I had previously used- time lapse. With time lapse, I would be able to sit a camera next to me in a static and solid based position and set intervals for the camera to take pictures. I would then be able to individually edit and illustrate the certain sequence of images I wanted and then import the image sequence into the stage of Flash. The clip below, is an example of time lapse that suits the context of my idea and captures the similar atmosphere and environment I will be capturing in the library.