Due to the fact that this project was moving on directly from Global Practice, rather than starting completely new, I was able to get on right away with some well accomplished primary research. Below is a short teaser trailer idea that I have been playing around with, the aim is to progress further with the artwork but also to work more on combing image, motion and sound. I didn’t get to work on this combination as much as I would have liked in the previous project so being able to do that from the start of the one is a big bonus, especially as its 7 months long, it bodes well for the development of the final production.
The first technical issue I came across was the slow evolution of the frames of the waving hair. My aim was to loop the hair flapping around with the hope of limiting how much animation I would actually have to do. the issue was that the final frame and first frame were quite different making the loop difficult to achieve because you could obviously see when the animation restarted. This is because after drawing the frames more and more I found nicer ways of illustrating the hair, only small changes but after 70 frames it had evolved quite far away from the original. The way I combated this was to basically recreate the first 20 which is approximately when the change in frames happened. There is still a minor jump but nothing quite as brutal as before.
The animating of the background scenes worked very smoothly and very quickly, compared to drawing out all the frames of the hair this was a peace of cake! its certainly something to bare in mind that scenes require much less animation than a person which has a lot of moving parts.
This is actually my second draft, as the first one didn’t progress in quite the same way. The animation of the hair flapping would continue but the flashes of red and black were not there. The reason for this is that this scene is heavily inspired by the opening scene of ‘Ran’ by Akira Kurosawa, in which the hunters are almost motionless for ages, so much so that for some time you feel as though they are still photographs. see picture below. By adding the red and black flashes and synchronising them with the musical break down, I am able to hint, or nod towards danger, as if she is facing something like a threat, rather than just holding a pose in a field. This change only came around after a tutorial, its another win for doing early primary research, it also makes me think I should get peoples opinions on work more often in case I miss something like this.
Opening scene from 'Ran' by Akira Kurosawa
The second part of the animation, the title scene is a direct reference to Tarantino’s opening scene in Kill Bill. I think it gives the whole trailer the right feel, by that I mean it's really the first time I have thought about visual language. Where as, the last trailer rough was a little bit of a mess, lots of influences all over the place not packaged into a more coherent visual direction. This shorter trailer feels much more directed and sharper because all its visual language is pointing in the same direction. This is the biggest influence I have taken from Tarantino, knowing how to package everything up into something new whist being influenced by other things. This also applies to the music which I have attached below. Queen were instrumental in changing peoples opinions of Homosexual people in the UK, so from that point of view what their music stands for aligns well with my project. Again in the last trailer I had someone talking over the top of the music which did confuse the situation some what, so this time its just the instrumental, or the opening of the track. The part where the music change sin tone just works so well, and because its a professional made song there are no mistakes or errors that make it a poor performance overall.
So moving on from here I am happy that this is a successful production and leads me well into the next phase of the project which is nailing down the main trailer. As well as technical process I have also worked out more of the visual language I am going to employ within the trailer and I am thinking about it a lot more making the production more likely to succeed.