Friday, 12 May 2017

Unit X Line of Enquiry Post

Once we had the plan for our animated piece for William Wilde, we put together a storyboard and presentation to pitch our idea to the client. To our delight he liked our idea and gave us some points on what to improve upon. Originally in our story, Cinderella’s dress was going to just tear around the legs and Cinderella then just decides to go with it, but the client suggested that she then rips off a chunk of the dress to become a sexy empowering look that still employs the ragged aesthetic we were going for. The client also warned us on what colours to use, we had shown an example piece that used a very bright yellow and green, saying that it looked a little to citrusy he recommended that we look at the colours that he’s used in his own collections. From this comment, we went and created a colour palette based on William Wilde’s work which we then compare to the 60’s colour palette we had already taken and used the colours that we felt would best encapsulate both styles to use within our animation.


The next step was then to shoot our live action pixilation in front of the green screen. To find a model to use for Wilde’s work we went on his Instagram and found a model (@megcase_) that he had previously worked with and were able to contact her and ask her if she would be willing to work with a group of students. As we were unable to get a hold of a green screen studio, we set about to make on most of the shots on the day of shoot as I directed the model into the positions we wanted as we required her to stand in positions models aren’t normally used to using, such as asking her to hold in-between poses to make the animation smooth as well as some more over the top expressions to give the piece a more exaggerated animation feel as opposed to it just looking like a jumpy live action film.
our own, we had a large green screen which we draped over some walls and we then secured the screen down with tape to create an infinity curve for the model to stand on which would help when compositing as it would remove hard edges which create shadows. I took charge


Once the shooting was finished we had to go through and edit what we had taken, in some cases we had multiple takes of different shots where we had to decide what looked better, and some poses we found didn’t look as good in sequence as they did on the day of the shoot, but we had purposely taken more shots than we needed to make up for this foreseen occurrence. Additionally certain frames needed to be held longer than the 10 fps frame rate that the film has to give it its choppy look. These frames were the key poses or the story telling poses that we wanted the audience to register fully and we didn’t just want lost in a sea of images and so they were held for either 2 frames orpremiere. The editing had to be done first before we could begin work on the effects and compositing to go around the model as we needed to know what the exact footage was that we would be applying the effects and animation to.

Lastly we made a plan of how we would approach the rest of the task in terms of time management and sorting out when we needed different assets by, we decided to all work on a scene at a time so that that way the compositing on each shot could be done as we go along rather than being pushed until the last minute. Additionally we also discussed the idea of meeting up with the client again and asking for additional feedback to make sure that the finished product is in line with his brand and make sure it is a piece he I happy to have his name on. 
in some cases 3 frames until we found what looked right. I was the person to take lead in the editing on

Tuesday, 2 May 2017

Unit X Research Post

Ladybird 1964
We have been given the task of creating a 30 second piece of animation based on the classic tale of Cinderella and inspired by the work of fashion designer William Wilde. The project is a live brief set by William Wilde himself, who gave us some background on his relationship with Cinderella growing up, he spoke about how one of his earliest memories of the tale was a Ladybird book from the 1960s which, although was set in a fairy tale/ renaissance era, featured many 60s haircuts and styles. He also talked about how an iconic moment, for him, in the Disney version is the image of Cinderella dressed in rags after her sister ripped her dress apart.

Latex Drama Quenn Dress -
 William Wilde
We decided to take these moments that were important to our client and design our ideas around them. Upon researching who William Wilde is and discovering that he likes to work with latex we chose to place our Cinderella into a latex dress to go to the ball. Researching 60s fashion allowed us to see the kind of dress we wanted to go for for the look of the piece, but of course then rendered in latex to fit with the client. William Wilde had said that he wanted the piece to be somewhat humorous and also did not shy away from the fact that the latex material he used was somewhat unpractical as it rips very easily. Due to this, we thought it would be funny if after being transformed from rags to her beautiful latex ball gown, that rips as soon as she moved anyway.
[JTBC2] Taming Ms. Tomboy - Vimeo

Upon further research of a 60s aesthetic that we liked, we came across pixilation style of animation to capture the poses in. To tie these back into a 1960s aesthetic we wanted to go for a colour palette which is very of the era which is very bright and contrasting with heavy uses of primary colours.
An Animation of Chloƫ Sevigny FW13
 - Vimeo 
paper dress up dolls that children used to play with and thought it had a nice look to it that would work well with the transformation element of Cinderella’s clothes and with the idea of maybe trying different dresses for the ball. We also found some videos that helped us visualise how we wanted the piece to look in terms of combining live action characters with a 2D environment as well as a
Fairly Odd Parents - Nickelodeon


We then set about working out a plot of our video, knowing that we wanted the focus to be on the transformation scene and to show the ripping of the dress. As such at the ball such as the ugly stepsisters be in shock at the girl walking in in a ripped dress and we could have the tagline, ‘It’s not ripped, It’s Wilde.” The stepsisters would also be rendered in the pixilation style but would be men with animated hair and makeup on to give the ugly almost pantomime look we desired. The fairy godmother however would be completely hand drawn in a style not too dissimilar from that of Fairly Odd Parents’ fairies. 
we decided to feature the fairy godmother scene and then her arrival at the ball with a ripped dress, we would have people