postcardprojectfmp-blog

[postcardprojectfmp-blog]

Evaluation

I felt confident approaching this project. I wanted to create a heartfelt music video that I would be able to share with the artist of the song. I felt that a music video would be a good challenge and a great opportunity to showcase a multitude of skills - which I think I have achieved.

I began my research by looking in to my art and design books. I was instantly inspired by Frank Warren’s ‘Post Secret’ project, where people send in their secrets anonymously, usually on a decorated postcard. Each piece that inspired me seemed to have a collage/multimedia feel to it. 

Soon after I was decided on creating a piece that would explore people’s opinions/stories/confessions/regrets about love, alongside this I would create my own pieces that would go with the lyrics of my chosen song.  I did some further research in to particular styles in videos and pieces of art and decided that I was really happy with this idea, I felt that it would be a unique response to this particular brief and would be the perfect idea to showcase my skills. 

I finally decided on a song and created my storyboard. It was quite difficult to be specific with the visuals as my piece was heavily reliant on other people’s participation. 

I prepared pitches for my class, the 2nd year of our course, the first and second years of graphic design and 3rd year illustration. I also set up an Instagram account, a website, an email address and a PO Box type of mailing system so it would be easy for people to get involved with the project and gain inspiration for their cards. Posters were put up around the university to peak people’s interests, however unfortunately these were taken down.

I was quite disappointed to find that not many people from the visual effects course got involved with the project. I had a few more responses from the other courses, however it still wasn’t enough. So Omm and I went down to the university’s reception and offered ‘free sweets for secrets’ and we had a great response! The things students do for free food..

I feel as though I filmed a little later than I should have. It was difficult for me to arrange a time for both Mark and I to be free to film. I decided to use Mark as my talent as stop motion is a long process and the filming needed to be done in one day, also if I got irritable he would be more forgiving than anyone else! 

Filming was difficult! Although we had a pretty simple set up, setting it all up on my own was a tedious task. I should have tested this before so I was more prepared, this is a lesson learnt. Filming was also long and tedious, but that’s what to expect from stop motion. Towards the end of filming it was about 4am and I was definitely feeling lethargic so some details didn’t quite translate from my storyboards to my footage, which proved to be a bit of a pain during post production.

Once I had filmed it felt that I could finally get on with work as I knew where I was with the project. When it came to editing the piece I realised how much the camera was moving during filming/ shadows entering the frame. This was really frustrating as it felt as though we were really careful. Luckily, the sizes of the images were much larger than the composition that I was working in so I was able to reposition each image to match the one before. 

There weren’t many other problems with the piece - only minor ones such as the keying not being as easy as hoped (but still not too difficult at all), and the shadows in the scene, which I couldn’t do too much about. 

I had a lot of little things that I needed to do for this piece, which at first felt overwhelming and edging towards the  deadline, I decided to shorten the piece by one minute, which took some pressure off and allowed me to take more time to perfect my other piece. Overall, I think this really benefitted the project as a whole.

I feel that there is still an issue with the colour grading, this is something that I’m going to correct. I was going for a warm and bright look - however for some reason, when I rendered it kept coming out differently to how it looked in AE. There are still some very minor issues too that I would like to correct before the end of year show.

I feel that I have used many different skills during this project which I’m proud to showcase on my profile. I’m really happy with the outcome I feel that I’ve achieved that uplifting feeling that I wanted to create from my piece and it’s really entertaining throughout. I’ve had a lot of positive feedback so I’m feeling quite proud of my outcome as a whole.

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We then cut to close ups of different cards, focusing on the word “love” - which links us back to the beginning of the piece where the hand writes “Love...”

Each cut has been edited to go with the music.

Then we cut to a full screen of postcards:

which jumps/cuts out to the music again. To reveal a corkboard full of postcards and images.

A hand then comes in to pin up the last postcard that we saw on the table - again linking the whole piece together.

I ended the entire piece with this quotation from Picasso as I felt that it was quite uplifting and would be a warm ending for the piece.

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Second Instrumental bit

Here. the original drawings that were on the postcard (hearts) fade in. I decided to draw a couple of rings beside it to represent marriage. I was struggling to think of what animations to do for this piece, but I think that keeping it simple has worked best for it.

I was weary of potentially seeming insensitive with the animations that I decided to create for this piece. In the end, I decided to draw some clouds to represent ‘Heaven’ and added a slight wiggle to the hearts on the postcard to add a little energy to it.

I really liked this piece, the separate elements of the coffe cup and saucer allowed to to make an interesting animation where the cup spins around and then steam appears from the top. I’ve previously mentioned how I animated this piece.

Here, the lines move away from the card to represent the words “get away from me”. I also had to mask out the words “the fuck” as I wanted the piece to be suitable for viewers of all ages. I animated the original drawing on the card to have the heart actually drip in to the puddle.

This card is then turned around and turns in to the following card..

which was masked in to match the positioning of the previous card (is this wasn’t originally what was going to happen, since I had to cut a minute out).

I decided to end the piece with this particular postcard as I thought that it was quite sweet and heartfelt, and it may be something that a lot of people could relate to.

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“I won’t mess with your heart”

A cut out heart enters the frame, moves towards camera and leaves. I felt that this could be a clever and different transition to make the piece a little more exciting.

I masked the next frame in to show it as a transition  -however I can’t stop on the frame to show this!

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“On nights where the clouds covered the stars”

Enter my mini matte painting! I’ve already spoken about this, but will do so again briefly. I created this piece from stock imagery on ‘Pexels’. The postcards show how the clouds are covering the stars.

There is only subtle movement in this card, I added the stars being drawn in to the scene, which then disappear one by one.

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“I’ll be your neon light in the dark”

The next card enters the frame and covers the sweets. This card is a literal take on the lyrics. Ihad created these elements in photoshop and had made the ‘neon light’ flicker, but it’s very very subtle as a little postcard, which is a shame as it would have added a little extra to the piece. I had to mask around the hand as the card enters and reposition the card’s image to match the movement of the postcard.

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“So don’t worry I won’t mess with your heart”

The love heart sweets enter the frame one by one to the beat of the song. Jason felt as though it was static for a little too long at this point so I added in the lyrics again as a filler - which enter as they sing “Don’t worry”

and on the lyrics “I won’t mess with your heart” each one of the sweets breaks on the lyrics, this mirrors the ‘mess with your heart’.

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“And I really really wanna change your mind now”

I felt that this card would be appropriate for these lyrics as this person wishes that they could change the person’s mind and make them stay.

What I wanted to do with this piece was have pins be put in to the top corners and then have the hands rip it away to represent how it should stay in place, but it didn’t. However, the pins wouldn’t go in to the lino so in the end we ripped it up.

Which represents being torn apart by this person’s decision. Which in a way, works just as well.

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“Really really wanna take the time now”

The clocks enter one by one.

They are very annoyingly off centre. I had the idea that I would just cut them out and duplicate them “It’s fine” I said. I was wrong. It looked bad. So I drew one in hoping to balance the piece out. It works better... still annoying though.

As they disappear I masked the next piece in to make it flow a little more naturally, but they were actually filmed separately. (The piece of paper entering the frame at the bottom is what was masked in)

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“Yeah, I..”

As I had sped up the sequence following this, again, it left a little but of a blank space, so I added in the “Yeah, I..”, but I don’t think that this looks out of place.

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“Every cab ride home I’ll call you just to know that you made it safe and sound back to Brooklyn”

I think that I’ve spoken about this part of the video quite extensively, but I’ll briefly go over it again. Originally, when we filmed I used a green card as I wanted this to be filled in with a tourist style postcard about Brooklyn. I created the piece on photoshop, using an image on Pexels as a reference. I made the clouds move so the piece wouldn’t be so static and potentially boring. 

The hand comes in with a “cab”. The image wasn’t keying very well so I had to go in and do quite a bit of roto and cleanup. I added some drawings of smoke coming from the car to make it a little more playful. I wish that the smoke could have been more visible but there wasn’t much that I could do with the hand in the way.

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“I’ll shatter all your doubt and all your inhibitions”

The piece then “shatters” in to different pieces. Before, the pacing of this was quite slow, so I wanted to speed it up. Again, I had the problem of leaving a blank space between this and the next sequence. I thought that it could be really interesting to reverse it and have the pieces stick back together and then shatter again. I think visually, it’s quite cool to see the torn pieces seamlessly fit together again. So this gave me the opportunity to speed it up, but also fill in some blank space to the pacing of the piece wouldn’t suffer.

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“I promise that I’ll be right here to listen”

The previous card turns in to this one. Headphones enter the frame to represent listening.

Then an audio spectrum of this part of the song grows between the headphones.

I decided to do this quite colourful as the colours on screen at this point were pretty bland. As the headphones wiggle, I had to mask the audio spectrum to match so these two things wouldn’t overlap.

the headphones then leave the frame and the audio spectrum shrinks down to leave a blank piece of paper again.

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First Instrumental

The images drew on these sequences are pretty self explanatory, but I’ll go through them anyway. Here I took the opportunity to display the cards I wanted in my video, but didn’t really match any particular lyrics. I wanted each card to appear in the middle and keep replacing eachother. Obviously, this wasn’t quite enough to be visually exciting so I had planned to do some motion graphics/ drawings alongside them to energise them a little. 

“I’ve never been in love” - Here I cut out the words and rotated them along the timeline to make them look as though they’re wiggling. The person that created this card had already drawn circles on the card, so I animated these by having some of them replace each other. Then around the outside  I simply animated some circles to go with the design already on the card.

I love this one. As soon as I saw this card, I knew that I could make something really silly and fun. I digitally cut out the words and placed them on the blue card - which was filmed on the night. I created the ‘nan’ character in photoshop, with a straight cape as a separate layer - to make this easier to animate in AE. I then used the puppet pin tool to make the cape look as though it’s moving in the wind. I then placed this character on a paper texture and roughly cut around it to make it look as though it was cut from real paper - to match the hand made feel of the rest of the piece. I also cut some clouds from the paper texture to emphasise the movement of the flying nan. Then I animated some wiggly lines behind her, again to emphasise her movement while flying through the air.

From this piece I took ‘Pizza’ and love. So I hand drew (On actual real life paper!) the pizza slices and love hearts and had them interchange with eachother. Then to the side, the drawings are a pretty similar idea. The sream coming off of the slices form a love heart. Pretty simple but it works!

I kept this card quite simple. I had struggled to come up with an interesting idea for this. Originally I was going to animate two glasses clinking on the card, but that would mean having to re design the whole thing. In the end, I created a thought bubble to represent memories and then did a little animation of some wine glasses clinking to represent “drunken nights”. This is one of my favourite animations as I think the glasses clinking look quite smooth!

I didn’t do any animations on this piece as there was already movement happening and I didn’t want it to be too chaotic. I drew a stereotypical “Best Friends” locket which starts together, then hands come in to move them apart and then out of frame. The really annoying this about this piece is that either A.) I didn’t take images of the hands slowly making their way in or B.) some images were missing, because after uploading and giving the camera back I noticed that not every image uploaded properly.. which is pretty annoying.. so the hands kind of just appear on them.. Either way, I think that the viewer understands the point of it.

For this piece I just had some tali marks appear on screen which represented how this person is “counting” the days. Originally I was going to have date stamps appear on screen, but the more I thought about it, I wasn’t really convinced by it.

Next, for “I love the rain” I animated paper textured rain drops to fall from the top of the screen, to make this a little more interesting I had them have a little motion graphic animation on them as they passed the paper. Only simple animations to catch the viewers eye. One was (as you see above) small lines that would shrink and grow to represent rain falling from the sky. The next one (below) were growing circles, representing the ripples that falling rain makes in puddles.

The umbrellas were just a simple animation to accompany the rain drops as this is what everyone uses when it’s raining! (See, like I said, pretty self explanatory)

This this, I tried to make my eyes look like newspaper cut outs again. I decided to use eyes as this is what one would generally use to notice something. I’ve made the eyes move with the beat of the music so it much more pleasing to watch. I’ve then scribbled over the eyes to represent how this person feels as though they don’t exist.

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“I won’t mess with your heart”

As I had sped up the previous sequence, that left a little bit of blank space between that and the instrumental bit. This wasn’t planned originally so I had no footage to fill it in with, however, I felt that adding in the lyrics could be a nice addition as this is the title of the piece, but it also is done in a similar style to the drawings so it flows quite nicely and adds another interesting visual. 

These were done in the same scribbly/hand coloured style of the drawings which I think makes it quite playful.

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“On nights where the clouds cover the stars”

In this sequence the hands enter holding confetti stars. I decided to use these as I wanted a real texture that the hands could interact with. The words that inspired this idea was “stars” and “cover”. I wanted the stars to cover the previous card- again to show some interaction, and then they would all be wiped away to reveal the next sequence.

As the hands come in they go over the lightbulb, so I had to rotoscope around the fingers so they wouldn’t overlap.

I had some small problems where the stars were poking out from under the right side of the hand - which has previously been spoken about in my blog. These were cleaned up and you wouldn’t even know! 

I ended up speeding the movement of this up, again to match the tempo of the song and keep the piece energised, rather than the same rate of movement throughout.

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“I’ll be your neon light in the dark”

My very simplistic answer to these lyrics is to have a lightbulb turn on. I did struggle to think of exciting ways to portray these lyrics, but I quite like what I’ve done.

Again, here, I had to roto around the fingers to make the lightbulb appear as if it was under the hand. The lightbulb was a stock image that I found online (that I’ve referenced previously) I took out the saturation for this and gave it a paper texture to make it look as though it had been cut out of a newspaper.

The light then flickers and turns on. I did this to add some movement to the piece. I also thought that the triangles that grow from the lightbulb add a little bit of energy to the piece and give it more of a stylised feel.