Henry Bernstein
Self Assessment
This project was probably my most ambitious so far in my college art career. It involved something that I've never done before. But I've ventured into uncharted waters before in digital media- that wasn't the issue. The project was so daunting because I was doing something that I really didn't know how to do, that being animating over live action video. I didn't have any previous instruction and all I really had was inspiration from an X-Games commercial that pulled the concept off nicely. So I had to figure out each step on my own.
The first step was really to plan everything out. I knew I would be using mostly photoshop and a lot of flash because those are the two correlating programs that I'm most familiar with. I didn't realize until the end that I would have to use a third program to bring it all together, and that would end up being final cut, which I'll get to later. The second step was to take screen shots of the video from youtube. Difficult in this part was deciding which screen shots to take. I didn't want to do stop motion so I didn't want to have to take a shot of every frame in the video. In order to make sure the animation matched up with the video I figured I would need to take a screen shot of the first frame and the last frame in each shot to determine where the animation would start and where it would end up on the screen. It turns out that this worked only for some of the shots. A couple didn't work, for instance the shot of his feet leaving the ground, because the path for the animation didn't follow a straight line. His feet went upwards in a corkscrew pattern.
The third step was to draw the actual animation. For this I drew over the screenshots on photoshop. This part wasn't difficult, just time consuming because I had to get the positions right so I was continually erasing and redrawing. I always enjoy drawing though so it wasn't bad. Then I moved everything to Flash where I put them in the right sequence stop motion style. From there I realized that I would need a third vehicle to put everything together with. That ended up being Final Cut, because it needed to be something that used layers. I had used Final Cut before but didn't like it as much as Flash. But for this project it was perfect. The more I used it the more I got used to the motion tools and by the end I was very happy with my finished product.
If there is a message in my work I would say its kind of a tongue in cheek response to the prototypical sports-motivational commercial/media outlet. But I don't mean for it to be in direct opposition to that genre, it's more of a playful take on it. When I saw the X-Games commercial I really liked it because of its craftsmanship and its loose style. Not every shot has animation in it and most of the animation is very subtle. I could see myself doing something like that as a career down the line. I would be very interested to see what their process is and what kind of software/equipment they use etc.
Looking back on my project I think that I handled everything really well. I used my time wisely, which has often been a problem for me. I planned everything out from the beginning so that I was organized and knew what I had to do at each step. I'm also happy with how I expanded my software repertoire and figured out Final Cut. That could be a very important tool in the future. A few things that I wasn't satisfied with were two of the animation sequences: the feet blasting off and the can flying through the air on fire. Had I more time I could have probably fixed it by drawing more frames and using stop motion but I didn't and I didn't. So for the next project that's something to expand on maybe. I would like to continue with this video because I only did about half of the actual commercial, or maybe by the time we start the next project I'll have something else in mind.
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