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RATIONALE
So this is my book trailer series that I created for Project 3. I chose the novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. My focus was to take a very direct and well planned path in creating these videos. I began by rereading the book and highlighting key quote, or phrases which I felt we partially interesting and partially expressive of the feeling or emotion of the book. Then after narrowing down to 3 final quotes, I began to create some ideas for visual representation of the quotes. I recorded by audio first to create a time frame to work within, then I proceeded to storyboard each quote. Working from my storyboard, I created animatics and from there I drew and created all the frames from my first clip. I did this by drawing and animating on the computer and then colouring them in by hand.
The first time I attempted to animate I scanned them in at a lower resolution and tried to vectorized them in illustrator. I tested this with my rotating dog idea, which gave an interesting visual feeling so I thought I might be okay. But upon completion this really took away the charm and visual aesthetic I wanted and the project looked cheap and unappealing. So I rescanned at a high resolution and created jpgs in photoshop. By inverting the photos I got this beautiful layering effect where the sharpie markers and the printed ink gave two different shades of white and really added that sense of depth and movement that was necessary. After animating part of the first video, I saw that this was working, so I continued with the rest of the drawings. Each object is a minimum of 6 drawing, scanned, inverted, aligned and cropped in photoshop. Then they are brought into after effects and screened over and orange shape and then that comp is animated in a major composition. The opposite applies for the black objects.
I tried to stay pretty true to my animatics, obviously with some minor changed. This way of working was beneficial to my success because I needed to know my story and my direction. This is mostly because each step was very time consuming and if I had done it any other way I would have wasted so much time and wouldn’t have been able to finish. Also the simple feel of the videos are misleading. For me, working in after effects is relatively new and I learned and tackled a wide variety of what may seem like simple problem. However it was good to go through this learning experience, trying to organize files, do simple animations, and really sort of unmasking the essentials of an important program.
Finally, after animating and completing all 3 videos, I created a mini website packaging them. This can be reached by clicking on the image above.
In regards to the submitted versions, I have include the current website version, the same version in higher quality and a new version with new sound. I attempted to record my own music or rendition of the song, but I could record at respectable quality. I contacted a friend who is in the industry, but he couldnt help me out as he is in school as well. I attempted to find free online music, but that was unsuccessful also. Finally I used a track created with my old band, it has a similar feeling, but isn’t perfect. The final piece is still best viewed with the original song and I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.
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