City Project: Life in The City

Finally! It was lovely to see our work on the big screen on the day of the exhibition. Especially because we had gone trough so many challenges. We had spent so much time on our animations and seeing them finally come to life and not being catastrophically bad was wonderful. We even managed to make some people chuckle.

All of us had made animations for the group. All of us had illustrated, animated, done voice recordings for the final product. We did a lot. Everyone contributed to the final animation. You can follow our process on

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1K8B_TGTbXI8WWfQRjBmHuzLWUWW2dMZh

You can watch our finished video on

Green Screen

Green screen is a visual effects/ pre-production technique for layering two images or video streams together based on color hues (chroma range). The technique has been used heavily in many fields to remove a background from the subject of a photo or video – particularly the newscasting, motion picture and video game industries.

I was aware of what green screen was, but I did not know how does it actually work. I have never done anything with green screen before. In this lecture we had access to the green screen studio and we got educated about the green screen and told many fun facts about it.

So why is it green? Green is the go-to because it doesn’t match any natural skin tone or hair color, meaning no part of an actor will be edited out through chroma key. When it comes to cloth it is different. Wear something green and it will become invisible on the screen.

We were told how to use the lights on the green screen and people in front of it. I did not know that you would use different lighting on people, but it does make a lot of sense. I just had never thought of it.

After that we were shown a brief tutorial on how to record and edit the video in the green screen studio. Unfortunately I could not stay for that part, because I had to go to work. I did give it a go at home with Jean Claude Van Damme green screen clips which were available on blackboard.

I used my drawings as a background for it. They do not mash up well with the video, but here it is.

 

 

 

 

Foley

Foley is the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film, video, and other media in post-production to enhance audio quality.

I did not have any knowledge about this subject. I had never made any videos or sound effects before, so this was something new for me.

We were told different ways how you could add sound to your animations, also we were told about some interesting ways how you could make sounds. We were shown a video from a third year student and in this animation a fox was jumping on a bird and breaking it’s bones. So how do you make a sound of breaking bones without breaking bones? In order to make these sounds student had wrapped twigs in leather material and then hehad recorded snapping them. I thought that was very cleaver. I do not think I would be able to think of something like that. We were also shown short clips from TV show ”Happy Valley” as an example. I was surprised that for some of the scenes they had used so many sound effects. For one particular scene they had used foot steps, punching , scratching, door slam and lighting sound effects. I never knew that those noises were added in the editing process.

After this lecture I made a little research of my own on how to make different sound effects. I think it was a very interesting lecture. Can not wait to make some foley sounds of my own.

 

Some water and not much colour

I had not painted with watercolours for almost a year? I used to paint with watercolours almost every day. In fact painting used to be a very relaxing process for me, I did not think that after not painting for a little while it could be so hard to pick it up again. Painting turned out to be more challenging  for me then I thought it would be.

In the work above you can see my attempt at painting entrance to Manchester Town Hall. I really struggled with painting it. I am not very good at drawing or painting architecture. It was not easy to paint it, but I think it does slightly resemble Manchester Town Hall? So maybe it is not a very bad sketch?

My painting of Manchester Town hall was a bit stiff, so I tried to save the page of the sketchbook by painting some little studies of hands and an eyeball. I think they came out pretty good and that they did saved the page. They are almost like eye-resting space of the page. They did not come out as forced as the architecture piece, which I am quite happy out.

Different Formats

Can you recognize the place on the right page?

It is a café in the Northern Quarter and it is called ”Blue Daisy Café.” I actually have never been in and I can not recommend it for you, because of that reason, but it does look very cool from the outside.

On the left of the page you can see a little sign ”Jackson’s Row.” It is not related to the café or to the Northern Quarter, but when I was walking pass the Jackson’s Row I did make an eye contact with this grumpy old man, who had been smoking through the window and I thought it should be included in my sketchbook.

I am pretty pleased with this page of my sketchbook.

Jolanta, where did you find sakura trees in Manchester?!

Well, I did not. This was my attempt at drawing regular trees which ended up looking like sakura trees and I do not know what else to say about it.

Sketching with crayons! The cheap ones! I felt like a kid when I was drawing this couple. It is just a quick and fun sketch for myself.

I enjoy drawing people so much. I could sit in one spot all day and just draw strangers. In the drawings above you can see that I do that quite frequently.

Psychogeography

Psychogeography is the study of the influence of geographical environment on the mind or on behaviour.

How do different places make us feel and behave?

It is a very fascinating subject. I have never really paid that much attention to my surroundings or thought of what I felt about different places. I rarely just stop and look around. Most of the time I am in a rush and focus on my destination and not the trip. Just new food for your brain.

Above you can see a bad scribble that I made on my tablet when I was walking around university.

Collages

After visiting couple of galleries my bag was filled with different leaflets, so I decided to play around with them. When I was visiting Manchester Art Gallery they had this botanical exhibition going on. There were a lot of different plants and seeds on display, so I decided to make some ballpoint sketches of them on the leaflets and see what will come out of it. The end result was not really what I was going for, but I had fun making it.

Market street looked so fun during Halloween! Lanterns and skeletons everywhere.

As you can see I had picked up leaflets, taken photos and made sketches. I tried to make a collage out of them, but I am not sure if it worked out well together. It is quite a lot. I think I should have left some details out of it. That being said, I am still quite happy with it.

Walk in the City

My route from Market street to home. Marker sketches and a collages, and a bit of Photoshop.

Time lapse, Pixelation

For the time lapse assignment me, Elena, Alisha, Bethany and Alex chose to animate a character Cyril. The idea was to make a character that we could ”interact” with.

At first we had to find a white board and a space were we had enough room to shoot the video. With help of our lecturers we were able to find a white board, so once we had it we sat down and tried to figure out what exactly will we shoot it and how will we do it. We were brainstorming for quite a while. We were discussing different characters and scenarios, but then we just decided to go with the easiest one. After all none of us had done much animation before and we had limited time. We went with a character who was shaped like a ball – keeping it simple. To add more character to Cyril, we gave him a little mustache.

We had talked about so many different scenarios that in the end all of ended up being on different pages, because once we started animating the character that’s when all the confusion appeared as well? The idea was to wake up our character and play with him, but at the time we had not actually decided how would we play with him. All of us were new to each other, so I think it was a bit hard for us to communicate. Our video ended up being a bit all over the place. It was a fun process though.

Video is not perfect, but we did have fun and I think it turned our alright.

Team ”Steaming”

Can digital media students and animation students create something amazing together? The answer is yes. Today’s lecture was pretty much a mash up of designing, testing, prototyping, failing and being able to work in a team. The first assignment was to build a paper sculpture without using anything else but paper and it had to be able to hold an egg on top of it. The goal was to make the sculpture as high as possible and sturdy enough for an egg to stay on top of it in a limited time frame. We were put in teams of five people and we had to work together to figure out how to make it work. Each of us were making different parts of the sculpture. One of us was working on the base and others were working on the structure of the sculpture. We were solving the problems together by trying out different things. I think we did a good job and I think all of our team members were pleased with the outcome. It was tall enough, sturdy enough and in my opinion it looked interesting.

Here is the photo of the paper sculpture we created.

Our second assignment was to create invention that would keep our egg intact from a high fall. Our team was struggling with this assignment, because we did not really want to do anything similar to rest of the teams. We were making a parachute and so were the rest of the teams. We figured that using foam brick as a ”case” for our egg would be different and it would be light enough for it to float in the air, also it would not weight down the parachute which was made from bubble wrap. At the time it seemed like a good idea so we stuck with it.

Meet our precious egg.

Everything seemed to be going just fine..

Unfortunately our precious egg did not survive and others found it aesthetically pleasing, BUT we did have faith in it. We failed at the second assignment, but I am sure we could have perfected it if we had a bit more time.