So, Sandra and myself met around one to work on our animation. In retrospective, it turned out to be a really good idea to story board on Illustrator, since this way, our main characters were easily transfered into the Flash environment. Although we did not need to redraw any frame, we did have to discuss the main ideas and what we wanted the main characters to do, so we did had a small white paper to work on nearby.

The only big “problem” we encountered was the fact that once we “cloned” the characters, and started working on them it turned out that the program - or our lack on expertise on it - decided to apply those changes to the original character. Hopefully we have saved the original work, and now we know that we have to be really careful regarding this.

Finally, and after some discussion, we have “added” a couple of actions, and taken away some others. We think it works better this way, and are eagerly waiting to see what the class has to say.

The more I read about how to Story Board, whether for a “live” shoot or for animation, the more it reminds me of “Understanding Comics”. It is becoming clear that we are working on the invisible, on the being able to produce adequate triggers for the audience. When we present our projects in class, it is obvious that the audience wants to fill in the gaps, wants to interpret what is being presented as something that is familiar. There is almost a desire to identify the particular situation and empathize with it. We, as audience, as human beings in the face of other’s work are almost compelled to “fill in the blanks”.
Because of all this, in the end “less is more”. In my opinion, the best advice (if it could be taken as such) the hand out gives is: “Like all forms of story telling, the feature has to appeal to the mind as well as to the eye”.
So, animation is not necessary – or not at all – meant for children. Is just another way to illustrate ideas or thoughts, and we have to concentrate of delivering the story in a compact fashion. Thus it is indispensable to have a plan, i.e. a GOOD Story Board to be able to perform at an adequate level.

Kristen and myself met on Monday morning, to decide what to do, and how to do it.

We story boarded the “Lost Balloon” story, and immediately got to work. Neither of us imagined it was going to take so long (8 hours straight) to shoot such a simple story, nor that the Play - Doh will get dry so quickly!

We also had to “upgrade” our figures, i.e. make them bigger while shooting, since we realized that it would be nearly impossible to make the little character cry if the figures were so small.

It was a little tricky to work with Final Cut Pro, but we received some help, and in the end managed to tell the story. Please click to watch.

Sandra and myself (since this exercise was meant to be done in pairs)  met over dinner, and decided on the  story line, as well as “divided” between ourselves who was going to do what according to our schedules.

The finished story board is a post, under this same category (animation) and is called “Gol!”. Enjoy.

Although we brought ALL audio tracks to the class, it was impossible to locate the very first one. We could only listen to the finished story once we exported it as .wav.

This happened to various groups, so we concluded, as a class, that it must be something with the new Audacity version, that somehow “hides” some of the tracks, and therefore, the final product can only be listened to in the computer were the files were created.

Here is our file: Click to listen.

Since we already had the “storyboard” for the sounds we had recorded, which took the shape of a list of noises that will happen in a specific order, and therefore tell a story through sound, the editing process was quick and efficient as well.

Although neither of us had used Audacity before, it proved to be a user friendly and easy environment to work in.

We were careful to record our work with a different name, and thus leave original files “intact” since we have been warned in class that it was a destructive environment.

The next assignment was to record sounds, and we (Jonathan and myself) organized the whole thing quite efficiently. We met for about 20 minutes to focus on ONE idea, since as usual each one of us had an idea. Then we assigned the different “scenes” that each one will record, and remembering the experience from last week, we had A LOT of different takes, each of them quite long as well, to be able to have enough material to work with.

We recorded each of the needed sounds while we did our everyday life. This has proven to be the most time - efficient assignment so far.

When the time came to show our movie in the class, it turned out that we haven’t exported our movie correctly. Thus, we couldn’t present it when we should but after the break.

It was well taken by the class in general, and the comments / critique was mostly directed towards establishing more solidly how the two main characters are different, without going back and re shooting the whole thing. The suggestions included shooting the H& O’s fan watching one of their videos for a while, as well as shooting various of their posters. The same treatment should be used for the guy who was a Terror Movie Fan.

During the presentation, we also talked about the main obstacles we encountered and there was another group who had happened upon similar difficulties (such as watching the scenes immediately after shooting them).

Since it was our first time ever tackling editing, and shooting as a matter of fact, we found out that it was the worst idea ever to look at what we have filmed immediately after filming it. That is, because we rewound and played each of the various takes of each of the scenes we have filmed (personally out of curiosity and excitement of filming our first movie) we have left some seconds between each of the takes, which made it very tricky to get the footage onto Final Cut Pro. We had help from Marianne, which happened to be around, and by-passed that first obstacle. I learned that we should NOT look at each scene after shooting it. Just make sure to shoot it several times, so some of it would be good.
The second obstacle was that I looked at the camera immediately after the scene to say “cut”, and it was quite difficult to edit it correctly so that that particular gesture did not appear on the final movie. At the end we managed, but I learned that we have to “keep on rolling” for about a minute as well as give some space at the beginning of each scene for editing purposes.
The final obstacle was finding the appropriate music for the whole film. We were able to find a way of totally “silencing” the park scene (extremely loud when we first shoot it) and record the music over; but it took a LONG while to be able to take the music out of Zannah’s iPod, and get it into the computer.
Finally, writing the introducing credits and end credits took longer than expected, but we were all really happy with the final product, since it is funnier every time we watch it.

In spite of the fact that none of us are actors, when the question arose in class about WHO was going to act we decided that we were going to do it ourselves. When we meet to distribute the scenes and so on, we found out that it was going to be very tricky to be able to film both stories. This due to lack of enough actors for all the roles and also to time constrains. So, we decided that we were going to focus on ONE story, and distributed the various roles amongst ourselves: camera, sound, lights, location finder and actors and directors. We had to re-draw, or rather, enlarge the storyboard, to accommodate this new development.

It was a lot of fun to alternate between all the roles, and it was much more time consuming that I ever expected. It took us all Saturday to have about 5 minutes worth of tape, most of them between two and four takes of each scene. By the end of that Saturday we were tired and happy with our work.