Final Project: Documentation

Abstract

       With this project I wanted to execute a time lapse but give it an extra push and add tones and colors to the animation using a very sketchy style to make it the black and white time lapse more playful. I want to use the principles I learned in rotoscoping as well as incorporating digital painting.

Research

       For this project I enlisted the help of Photoshop, and used it as my primary program. I encountered a few issues at first with it because I was using an older version of the program and the animation options weren't readily available. I had to do a lot of research online on how to achieve animated results with the version I was using. After that, I was still relatively new to animating in Photoshop, so I kind of felt my way around the program and experimented with the order of the different layers and effects that I could add to individual frames. As for the aesthetics of my project, I was really influenced at first by different time lapse videos and their particular beauty of showing time passing and showcasing seemingly mundane subjects. As my ideas for my project changed and I decided to add digital painting, I was really influenced by a 'loose' and sketchy animation style, which adds a lot of motion of playfulness to the video. I wanted to incorporate both  of these things.

Production Log        
      First I took separate time lapses of my friends walking to, and from lunch, seen here.

        As for my process, as seen in my previous blog post (1st Iteration of Final Project), and above, I was mostly experimenting with how my time lapse would look in gif format at different frame speeds and using different colors. After that I chose to narrow down the number of frames in order to make it more workable, and then  select the colors in the image and in a new, accompanying layer, paint the bits of the image that I wanted in color and then overlay it on top of the black and white original image. Since I was starting to get the feel of a silent movie, I added 3 title frames throughout and gave them a silent movie graphic treatment while still sticking with the playful sketchy feeling throughout the rest of the frames. I encountered some difficulties trying to transfer the file into video format (seen below), as the different qualities of both the painted layer, and the actual black and white frames wouldn't match up.

Because of this, I've stuck to displaying it as a gif.

Self-Evaluation

        I'm pretty content with how this project turned out. I didn't expect it to all tie together as much, since for most of the project I was focused on individual slides and was worried that it wouldn't be cohesive, but it does end up being that. I like how playful it is, which is what I was definitely going for. I enjoyed working with animation more than I anticipated. It definitely has a lot of possibilities, which is great as an artist. In the future I would like to add more color and maybe see what it would look like if it was neater---if it would still have the same effect or not. Overall, I'm very happy with it.