Rhythmic Editing

This project made me realize how few hobbies I actually have other than eating. And sleeping. It made me feel kind of pathetic, to be honest.

Filming was the easy part. Kyndall is a swimmer and I liked the idea of shooting at the pool. It made for some interesting shots. Although it did feel kind of weird directing her to swim around, like "Swim from here to there in a breaststroke," and "Okay, now do it again, but butterfly this time and stop right there." 'Tis the life of directing, though.

Once I sat down in the editing room, I was optimistic that I could finish in just a few hours.

Ha. Ha ha ha.

Eight hours later found me staring at the screen with glazed over eyes. Even when I closed my eyelids, I still saw the same images flashing before my eyes. Kyndall swimming. Kyndall drawing. Kyndall biking. When we filmed, I felt like I had gotten plenty of footage to use in my project, but after sitting there and watching it over and over again, it felt like I barely had enough to make it through. Maybe it was just because the clips were so short and repetitive.

The editing process itself wasn't hard, just tedious. After awhile, I got into a sort of rhythm. 5-15-5-10-5. Over and over and over again. And again. After the first three hours, I eventually memorized the exact length of a clip I needed to drag into the timeline for it to fit the number of frames. It made the remaining five hours a little bit easier.

One of the nice things was that everyone from our class was in the editing lab late, slogging away together. Even though we were all focused on our own projects and didn't speak much, it was still nice to have the company and know that we were all laboriously cutting down every clip frame by frame. A class that edits until two in the morning together stays together, am I right?

More Experiences with Animation

Although working with sand is very time consuming, it's also really satisfying and even therapeutic. I didn't get to work much with the sand since I'm animating the last 200 frames, but I helped with ideas and helped evolve our story and actually transfer it to the glass pane.

Also, I found out that this is very much a team effort. Even though we are individually animating different sections, we all have to communicate with one another to figure out exactly what we want.

This is really giving me a lesson in patience. It's probably much needed.

Animation with Sand/Charcoal/Paint

I'm a little bit nervous about animating. Patience has never been my strong suit; that coupled with my perfectionist tendencies might not mix very well for this project. That being said, I'm still looking forward to it.

Before we started testing out all the different methods, I thought charcoal would be my favorite. It seemed simple enough. Once we actually got down to it, however, I realized it was actually pretty frustrating to work with. After something was officially on the paper, it was pretty difficult to erase it. I found myself getting slightly peeved when the lines stayed visible on the page. I'm also not the best drawer, so maybe that had something to do with it as well.

The paint on glass, though I didn't get to play around with it much, had the opposite effect. I had a preconceived notion that I wouldn't like it, and yet to my surprise, I found it much more satisfying than the charcoal. I liked the way it turned out in the film, the way the paint looked when it was lit from behind, and how it looked like a painting come to life once it was animated. It was super cool.

My favorite by far was the sand, though. The texture and look of it was absolutely beautiful. Even if you didn't do anything too fancy, like merely running your fingers through the sand or making lines with the little shaping tool, it still looking so pretty on the screen. Initially, my group had wanted to use charcoal for our project, but in the end we all agreed that sand was the best way to go.