Communications Lab

A few weeks ago, someone had asked me what my first childhood memory was. I thought about it and realized it was at the age of 4 at Memorial Park in Cupertino, California. I was staring and the ducks in the duck pond and wanted to explore the mystery of their staying afloat. I fell (or entered) into the water, just staring and the surface, watching the ducks underbellies, their feet, and their movements. My father realized I fell and was drowning, and came to rescue me. He comforted me and gave me his baby blue oxford shirt to wear instead of my wet clothes. We still have the picture of me sitting on the merry-go-round in an oversized man's shirt. My dad loved to document everything, and he probably found this whole event funny.

Storyboarding
I wanted to combine Com Lab with Core Design since we needed to create a storyboard for both. So I had the story fresh in my mind, and decided to create a detailed drawing of the story. I thought that the storyboard was a bit too ambitious to be done in flash and so did my classmates. I also didn't want to do it in flash because I didn't want to make it a cute cartoon; I think it's hard to avoid the cuteness factor in flash. I wanted to make a visually stimulating, and vivid animation, just the way I remembered this moment: the way a child would imagine or see something.

Making of
I was going to work in After Effects, but b/c of time constraints didn't find the time to sit and learn it. I decided to try to overcome the cuteness problem I was facing in flash. I redrew all the images and characters of my story in flash using a Wacom Tablet. I was going to leave them in black and white to avoid having the cartoon-touch of flash by using the paint brush, but I toyed around with different ideas, and came up with the illusion of water colors. I would loosely paint only the legs or beaks or the water - the colors that I wanted to bring to life, and kept everything else white and blank. I painted outside of the lines and with a level of transparency to create the illusion of a water color painting. I'm not sure if the effect worked well, but I really liked how it looked.

I had requested from Matt Fargo to simply play the acoustic guitar and sing Puff the Magic Dragon , just the way my dad used to when I was a kid. I used to sit on the bed while he would play me his Peter, Paul and Mary favorites; my favorite and most memorable song was Puff. So Matt went beyond the call of duty and recorded an amazing version of the song using 2 guitars, a bass, percussion, and harmonies - all played/sung by him. I had intended to have a poor-quality-dad-version of the song playing in the animation, but I really loved his version and that it would add a new dimension to my animation. I think it made a huge difference and set the tone of the entire animation - made it magical.

I also decided to keep the animations really simple, since the entire focus of the animation were the duck feet and their underbellies. I only had ripples, bubbles, and animated wading ducks.

While working on the animation, I realized the different scenes might not make any sense to a person who doesn't know the story. That's when I decided to add audio. I wrote a 4-5 paragraph audio piece and tried to find a QUIET PLACE on the floor to record, but found nothing. It was really late at night (since this was a last minute decision), so I had to make do. I sat in the stairway, which wasn't quiet, but it was good enough. I used an M-Audio recorder, and I think I recorded myself too low. I should have kept the audio levels higher. I recorded each paragraph several times, b/c I never liked how I sounded or how I pronounced things, my speed, my tone, etc.

I used Audacity to cut the audio piece. I ended up only using 30% of what I had originally recorded, because I realized I didn't need to narrate everything, but that I could get a better effect by simply reflecting about my childhood memories. I decided to have the audio running slightly independant of the animated sequence. I had also tried using Audacity to mix the song with the narration, and it sounded fine in the headphones. When I presented it to class it was horribly mixed. I'm planning on remixing the two and rexporting the movie once finals are done.

I will post the animation once I have remixed the song and the narration.