Animation: Sticky
Adam Simon and I have teamed up again to bring you this short animated film about the trials and tribulations of a stick man (and his stick dog) in a 3d world. Initial storyboard below.
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November 29, 2006
STFU!!
STFU is a short film by Adam Parrish, Adam Simon, Tom Jenkins, and me. It was a three week process from the concept and storyboarding to the shoot and edit. Among the crew, there was little experience producing video but we made the best of it. While there are (and were) problems (some obvious and some not), I think our little diddy has some replay value (if only to admire Tom’s brilliant character acting).
The concept was simple: document the plight of one dedicated ITP student in his struggle to find silence in an all too noisy world. Appropriately, we would open in the Japanese Room (a space which is supposed to be (relatively) quiet on the floor). Here, our graduate student would be diligently reading when rudely interrupted by annoying person tapping pen. Then he continues to move from one space to the next, never finding the silence he requires. Finally overcome, he is forced into an empty basement where he breaks-down screaming against the white cinderblock wall.
Once we began shooting, it became very clear how important the prep work actually is. We had completed a storyboard, shot-list and had done some location scouting but things still felt a bit haphazard struggling with the blow by blow while carting and setting up 100lbs of equipment around campus. Certainly, we would have benefited from an even more finely detailed plan of action.
We shot the film using two DV cameras. This was a huge advantage that in some ways mitigated for our lack of finely tuned planning. In the end, our six or seven hours of shooting yielded about 40 minutes of tape captured into Final Cut. Among the first problems we noticed was that some of the audio was buzzing due to a problem with our Beachtek XLR adapter (note to thoroughly test equipment before using all day). We also had some color issues between the two cameras but that proved to be easily corrected.
Although I had done some editing in an old (if archaic) version of Adobe Premiere, I found that enough was different in Final Cut Pro to make life difficult. Fortunately, Adam Simon had some FCP mojo which he graciously shared with us. Four people sitting around an editing session is a bit laughable, to be sure. The net result is often one or two people working and the others twiddling thumbs. I did, however, get a private moment with the project later that weekend to get acquainted with final cut and work on a scene.
When we watched our rough cut of the footage, the result was somewhat underwhelming. We had some nice shots but they didn’t always tie together the way that we had envisioned. The story wasn’t arching and building in a way which made you believe that our character was getting progressively more annoyed in each scene. It went from ho-hum to tearing out hair in the next moment. Having run out of time to shoot any more tape we had to get creative with some of the cuts. One of the more (dare I say) brilliant suggestions was that we make short cuts in the stairwell scene to reference the previous scenes. This helped reinforce our end-point and build the tempo.
Late that night, I tried scoring the finished cut to some music. Admittedly, this is a backward-ass way to do things but I was able to pull out a piece of string music (Two Star Orchestra) which worked amazing well. With only a few slight edits it fit just right into our timeline and definitely added some drama and continuity. In the end, I wasn’t sure that this improved the story but the team seemed okay with the addition and it stuck.
Enjoy!