Time to Go Pro...

After doing a trial run with a handheld video recording device, I recognised that the quality of the footage was not as good as I had hope, as it was a too jumpy and the quality was slightly grainy. Although I do want the footage to be realistic and a slight shake helps to represent that, however, I felt the handheld recording device was too shaky and jumpy and therefore ruined the impact of the footage. I began to look into alternative ways of capturing the footage and came across the Go Pro camera. I am familiar with a Go Pro camera as I have used it whilst skiing and from memory I felt it could be a valuable piece of equipment.

Go Pro cameras come in a high definition format which would solve my issue of the grainy footage from the handheld recording, whilst they are also very light, agile, wearable and are designed to block out unnecessary noise such as wind etc. The quality and sharpness from a Go Pro camera is astonishing giving the size of it leads you to believe it wouldn't have the capabilities to capture such high quality image. With this in mind I felt it would be an ideal piece of equipment to use for my recording and felt that if I just strapped it to my mid rift, or my head I could capture the desired footage. 

Adobe After Effects

After a frustrating time with Adobe Flash, I looked to seek advice on if there were any other programs available to me that I could use that would help the production and flow of the project. On consultation with my tutor, I was steered towards Adobe After Effects as it is known for its greater fluidity, powerful colour adjustments and the ability to play with sound, moving image, still image and illustrations all within the same timeline. Flash is a lot more rigid and I felt it didn't allow me the freedom to play around and experiment enough and After Effects offered this.

I looked up a few beginners tutorials of After Effects and they confirmed my tutors advice in telling me that After Effects offered the following features:

• Motion graphics and video
• Freedom to work with illustrator/ still image/ video/ sound combined
• Rotobrush feature- Allows the user to grab juts a particular park of a layer and to animated appropriately.
• Powerful colour adjustments allows for a more visually engaging experience throughout the work.
• good for animating objects/characters using the 'puppet tool'. 
• Puppet tool allows you to take a flat 2d frame and organically bend it etc.
• Good for compositing footage with text
• Stylistic text effects

Experimenting with Binaural...

I rented out the new Binaural equipment from the office, and after long discussions and the process of trial and error with Chris I managed to understand the Swedish instruction book and headed off around campus to experiment with the recording device. Unfortunately for myself, I picked a cold, snowy February afternoon to do this, which was great for the sounds that were recorded but not so great for the numbness of my fingers by the end.

Below are a few snap shots of the equipment and the two most successful recordings:

A lyrical journey...

As mentioned in the previous post, I felt I had to add more snippets of text to the animation to flesh it out and to ensure something was always happening and maintaining the fast paced, fluidity that I desire throughout the animation. In order to do so, I felt it would be a good activity to sit and listen to music and pick out any interesting/ memorable lyrics that stood out. I felt the listening of music via headphones in a secluded and private environment was a suitable activity as it resembled how society uses pieces of technology to privatise themselves in the public space, and also distract them from their everyday routine by providing themselves with a soundtrack.

Below is a list of lyrics that I pulled out whilst listening to the radio for approximately 30 minutes:
I also went through and analysed the lyrics and thought about ways they could be animated on screen.

"I ain't got time to think about money..."
(Rather basic animation using numerous monetary symbols)

"Love you like a fat kid loves cake"
(Would tie in well with the theme of the inner child- Cartoon style illustration of cake/ child taking a huge/ un realistic size bite and ending up with cake all over his face).

"I don't see why I need a stylist, when I shop so much, I can speak Italian"
(Again, slightly basic but the inclusion of an Italian flag or a cartoon illustration of a stereotypical Italian blurting out Italian.. Mamma Mia, tres Bella...)

" Best things in life are free"
(Slightly cheesy but I could see this working well with passers by cuddling/kissing/ performing some sort of romantic gesture).



"She take my money"
(I wouldn't want to repeat the monetary symbols that are used previously but they are a possibility, other than that I would say this lyric if used would have to just be used alone with no animation to support, which isn't a problem as it would add variety).

The beat of Ludacris's track 'Growing Pains' has a very nostalgic beat and is something I would like to incorporate within the project in little glimpses as I feel it would encourage the audience to think nostalgically and remind them of the theme of the project.



"And that's how it went, when we were kids"
(Lyric that's fit well with the themes of the project and is taken from the Ludacris song above. Feel it could be used in collaboration with the songs beat and could cause a series of vintage effect pictures to appear on the screen in a memory/ cloud like pattern).

"Memories fade, like looking through a fogged mirror"
( I found this line really touching and nostalgic. It caused me to think of a few happy memories and I feel it would do the same to the audience. There are a few things you could animate with this lyric but I like the idea of creating a foggy effect on the screen and having numerous photos, again in a vintage colour effect, fading in and out of the shot. This would create quite an eerie, magical effect that resembles the floating, dream like nature of nostalgia and memories).

"Yo I once was a kid with the other little kids"
(I would accompany this lyric with the sound taken from the opening of the song which is off kids running around and screaming in what sounds like a playground. The sound is has been used in loads of different mediums but carries that instant memory and childhood and the school playground so I feel it is essential that it gets included at some point).

"My life is a party, I'm never growing up..."
(This lyric struck me as it reminded me a lot of how I wanted to end my project. The notion of the subject, an adult, reliving all of these child hood memories throughout the journey and ending with society slapping an end to this inner child and bringing the subject back to reality or a twist on this idea. I feel these lyrics would combine well with this ending either continue to build up the notion of the inner child before being shut down, or emphasising the celebration of the inner child and how it can still live strong in certain environments".

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Kinetic Typography

In order to flesh out my project, I felt that I had to add not just pieces of illustrative animation but also pieces of text. It was already in my thought process to use text to highlight spontaneous observations, judgements, comments on passers by etc but I felt I had to expand on this. As I journeyed through town, I would often listen to music, or if I wasn't, hearing songs from car radios as they passed by, or out of shops would trigger me to start to sing or hum along to the song. This caused me to think about how music can trigger certain memories of particular places, events, periods of time etc and I felt that this notion could add another interesting aspect to the animation. Certain songs or even just lines from a song can remind me so much of certain events, but often particularly of my family, as we are a family that often listen to music together during social activities; in the car, during dinner, whilst putting the Christmas tree up, decorating etc.

I began to think of ways of which of presenting these thoughts and the most obvious form is obviously via the use of text appearing and flowing around the screen. This could either be done in rather basic form like in Hodgson's work or if it is a longer piece of text could be portrayed via the use of the technique, kinetic typography.  

Kinetic typography, to use the online definition is "is an animation technique that requires the mixing of motion and text to express ideas using video animation. This text is presented over time in a manner intended to convey or evoke a particular idea or emotion".

Kinetic typography instantly hit me as something exciting, fresh and inspirational. I enjoy the sense of freedom that is giving to the words as they move about the screen in an array of transitions and how the text can add so much more meaning or emphasis to quote/ phrase taken from the audio. Many examples of kinetic typography are used for film scenes or songs, so I was sure to pick up some interesting ways to present lyrics within my animation.

Below are a few examples of my favourite pieces of kinetic typography found on Youtube.

This is one of my all time favourite scenes in Lock Stock and I feel the use of motion graphics really emphasis the dramatic and cutting edge tension within the scene. The use of splat graphics to portray the idea of blood being spilt is so simple, yet so effective and also the transformation and rotation of the explanation marks, to create the allusion of them daggering into the screen is incredible and a technique I would indefinitely incorporate into my work, if I chose to follow this lead of animation.

I also feel the choice of colour scheme is spot on and really adds to the cutting edginess of the scene. The harsh contrast between the rough black font and the bright yellow background ensures the viewers eyes are transfixed on the motion of the text, it then reverses half way through to black background and yellow text as the subject of the audio becomes deeper and darker. I feel this is an effective and simple way to use colour to emphasise the change in tone within the subject of the audio.

This kinetic typography is of a Owl city song and I feel the movement and fluid flow that the technique gives to the lyrics adds an alternative and aesthetically pleasing visual. Although at times I feel a few of the movements are slightly over-elaborated I have taken inspiration from this piece and others I found online and realised that for my animation I would only have to use simple movements and transitions as the inclusion would only be for a few short sentences of lyrics, used just to add a break and contrast from the real life footage and the animation world and maintain the chaotic and fast paced flow of the project.

The next step was to practice creating some of my own pieces of kinetic typography and they will follow in the next few weeks...

Binaural Kit

I was still unsure to what music/sound I would use for my project, the use of canned, diegetic sound to enhance some of the objects of observations was something I wanted to include but I was still unsure on whether to provide a soft musical background to the project, or alternatively use the background sounds that are picked up from the camera whilst filming. The issue with the latter is that on video and audio recording devices the sound that is recorded isn't the same as the sound as what our ears here. Stereo microphones/ recording devices basically fake a sense of spacial audio by presenting our brains with a concept of left and right spacial sounds.

"The main field of sound recording heavily overlaps with both their left or right counterparts in front of the mic, focusing 40 percent or more (depending on the microphone) on the sound in front of us. This is not how we actually hear. We accept this because our eyes see forward in this rather narrow 40% overlap, therefore we think that is how the sound actually moves around us, but that’s not the reality of sounds audible presents around us. In addition, stereo never reaches much further than beyond a 180º sound plain. What about the sounds behind us that we can hear equally as well as the sounds before us?"

As the diagram above shows, a stereo microphone/recording device can by no means truly present the dimensions of sound which naturally emanate not only from the left, right, but before and behind us, in the same manner which our ears deliver to our brains the exact audible landscape we hear.

After this discovery I was introduced to the Binaural Kit. With binaural microphones, we are presented with an exact replication of the entire theatre of sound surrounding us in the exact same way our ears send the audible sensation to our brains. The audio recording from a binaural kit is a close to accurate representation of the dimensions of sound that the human hears.