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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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Pre-Production
April 10 Begin Re-Reading Book
April 17 Have book read. Develop outline of key themes, characters and plot. Begin to conceptualize best route for general structure for scripting.
April 24 Finalize Pre-Production, storyboards and script. Developed visual aesthetic and visual conceptualization.

Production

May 1 Create Animation, sound and text while starting editing.

Post-Production

May 8 Begin editing and compositing, create rough cut.
May 15 Continuation of post production on final version. Start website packaging.

Packaging and Presentation

May 21 Finalize trailer web packaging and video.

Name
Rain
Everything

My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries in the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,057.

Eight years ago, when I first met Siobhan, she showed me this picture.

and I knew it meant “sad,” which is what I felt when I found the dead dog.

Then she showed me this picture

and I knew it meant “happy,” like when I’m reading about the Apollo space missions, or when I am still awake at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. in the morning and I can walk up and down the street and pretend that I am the only person in the whole world.

Then she drew some other pictures
:S :O
but I was unable to say what these meant.

______________________________

Pg. 103

I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere,(4) which is like silence but not empty.(3)

I went upstairs and sat in my room and watched the water falling on the street. It was falling so hard that it looked like white sparks, and there was no one around because everyone was staying indoors. And it made me think how all the water in the world was connected, (5) and this water had evaporated from the oceans somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico of Baffin Bay, and now it was falling front of the house and it would drain away into the gutters and flow into a sewage station where it would be cleaned (6) and then it would go into a river and go back into the ocean again. (5)

______________________________

Pg. 140

I see everything.

That is why I don’t like new places. If i am in a place I know, like home, or school, or the bus, or the shop, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it before hand and all I have to do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. One week the Shakespeare’s Globe poster had fallen down in the classroom at school and you could tell because it had been put back slightly to the right and there were three little circles of Blu-Tack stain on the wall down the left had side of the poster and the next day someone had graffitied CROW APTOK to lamppost 437 in our street, which is the one outside number 35.

But most people are lazy. They never look at everything.

Inspirations.

P.S. Show Dennis.