Monday 11 May 2009

BEFORE YOU READ THIS BLOG

If this blog is printed out then before you read it... read this.

Due to the nature of the blog its in chronological order starting with the most recent, so if you want to follow the progression of the project, its advised to start at the back of the portfolio and work your way forward. Its adviseable you read the blog online though, that way you can view all the movies and visit weblinks within the text, the blog it located at http://gd3titlesequence.blogspot.com/

Beginnings of topics are clearly headed in orange. Other Sheets are interspersed in the portfolio where relevant.

A CD with the final animations accompanies this Portfolio.

Cheers

Tom Jensen

John cage - Final animation

This is the final piece. Again this blog doesn't support widescreen so the image is squished. You'll have to view the movie on the CD to see the final sequence in its proper format. To finish off I inverted a few frames to give a strobe effect to piece like the original fluxus movies.



tj -x-

John Cage - Merging the two pieces of footage

To merge the two pieces of footage I just keyed out the white of the distorted footage and then applied masks to areas that I didn't want to include.



As i said before the distorted images reminded me of distressed film, so I applied a sepia filter to the distorted footage. I then offset the footage by half a second with the original footage so that it gave the impression that the type was burning an image into the film.



Finally I inverted the distorted footage via hue. This turned the Sepia a blueish colour.



All that was left to do was apply inverted frames to the two pieces of footage to create a sort of strobe effect that can be seen on some of the original fluxus films.

tj -x-

Sunday 10 May 2009

John cage - A series of random events

Something really weird but not altogether bad has just happened. I imported the john cage animation into premier and it seemed to be corrupted. To be honest I'm not sure whats happened, but i like it non the less! I'm thinking of keeping the animation in keeping with John cages philosophy of random events and cause and effect and try and use it somehow.



The first thing I did was to enlarge the distorted animation so that the messed up bit became more abstract.




Then I applied filters to soften the image. The final effect reminds me of film spools passing across the animation, creating a rough look to the animation, which has entirely been created digitally and more or less by accident.



Now all i had to do was apply it to the type animation. tj -x-

John cage - Creation Process

As stated before i've taken the Fluxus films opening title cards as my inspiration for the John cage animation. Then in started to place the modified type I'd made on the screen. I'm trying to achieve pacing phonetically, as you would say the quote, hopefully achieving a sort of poetic movement as the original quote is about poetry its self "I have nothing to say, and i'm saying it, that poetry". So the words with double syllables are on screen for longer, and the breaks in animation are where you would naturally take breaths.


The trial piece about, lays out the positioning and pace of the animation, but it lacked an impact, i wanted to emphasise certain words more so I played with scale.


Here I tried moving the word nothing across the screen, This took alittle adjustment across a few test pieces (below) but the final outcome works well.


The two tests below are examples of adjustments to pacing and positioning.



I felt ready to start to add sound in the next example. I used a soundtrack taken from the proms performance of 4'33 (show earlier in the blog). Although the piece is silence, you get a low hum through the monitor and the odd cough from people creating an ambiance to the piece.


I experimented with adding well placed coughs when the type flickered. Overall I didn't think this worked too well.


I needed some other audio stimulus to the piece, the ambient hum worked but i think the piece needed another layer. So I grabbed a sound effect of a ticking clock, slowed it right down (1/3 speed) and put that under the 4'33 track at -15db to create a more interesting audio landscape.


The above version I'm happy with. I now need to add some inverted frames to break up the white a bit and idea taken from the fluxus videos.So I'm moving onto adobe premier to do that.

tj -x-

John cage - Fluxus

I looked to a movement John cage was heavily involved with, Fluxus, for inspiration. They were a sort of anti art, neo dada movement (referring to themselves as neo dada towards the start of the movement).

I found some
old fluxus movies, and what really drew me in was the title cards, which can bee seen in the example below.

*the examples don't seem to want to embed, see the web page for details

Other examples can bee seen on the webpage, a good on is 07 George Maciunas - 10 Feet (1966).

I'll use this to structure my type around

tj -x-

John cage - intial idea

The original idea behind the John cage animation was inspired by Robert Rausenburgs white paintings, with a soundtrack to 4'33 - silence.



This proved to be uninspiring. I'll have to come up with something else.

tj -x-

Eno Revisted

Turns out, there was a slight bit of clipping on the left hand edge of the Eno piece in the final animation, so i've adjusted the camera angle accordingly



tj -x-

Tan dun - The final animation

Below is my final piece, the only real difference from the last video in the last post is a slight alteration of type size and position.



Sadly this blog doesn't support Widescreen, so to see it properly you'll have to view the CD supplied. If you don't have the CD, it'll be on youtube shortly, and i'll post the link when it is.

tj -x-

Tan Dun - The creation process

The following post outlines the complete creation process behind the Tan Dun animation.

I added type to the animation, Century Gothic.


As with the Brian Eno animation, I opted to change the Type face to Fruitger Ext. This keeps a consistency between the two animations. The striking difference between this version and the version about id the colour correction, this was done in after effects. The original animation clocks in at about 24 seconds, this was too fast for my self allocated 20 second slot to complete the sequence in, so to try and fix this i sped up the animation. I liked the way the original animation moved to the music, so I sped up the music too. This didn't really work, the music obviously lost its haunting quality and the sped up version complete destroyed the pace of the piece. I also added the BBC four logo to keep the sequence in context.


The colour correction above really destroys the quality of the video. So i begrudgingly changed it back. But this wasn't the end of the battle!


I got the animation down to 20 seconds here, and kept the score normal speed. I think it works quiet well. I also changed the export settings to wide screen as that was that format i wised to work in. Annoyingly, because of the size of the photographs, my animation was stretched.


so i changed it back


Again I took a stab at the Colour correction, and this time got it right! It was applied in after effect and was simply a case of 'auto colour' and then adjusting the saturation and contrast to make the red really "pop" but without washing out the shadows around the paper.


Struggling with format problems I opted to zoom in on my animation and then set the composition to wide screen. I think this enhances that animation. As with the Brian Eno animation the bigger you can make the image, the more striking and dynamic it becomes.


tj -x-

Tan Dun - Colour correction

The set up I had used to take the original Photographs wasn't the best in the world. This gave the animation a yellow hue as it was lit properly. I attempted (using final cut pro) to colour correct the piece to be more in keeping with the Brian Eno piece - white background contrasting animation - but it seemed I'm not very good at colour correction. The disasters are displayed below.



After speaking with my tutor he said he didn't think it needed correcting, but it did grate on me that the two animations didn't 'match'. Its definitely something I want to go back to maybe using after effects a program I'm comfortable using.

tj -x-

Tan Dun - Music

As with the Brian Eno animation i wanted to use a track by Tan Dun thats recognisable as Tan Dun. The Hero soundtrack has won many awards and most people have seen the film and would atleats recognise the score even if they didn't know Tan Dun. I Opted to use 'For the World' from the hero soundtrack.





tj -x-

Tan Dun - Setting up the animation

Tan Dun is famous for his movie soundtracks, but his more interesting and forward thinking work takes form in his water and paper concertos - pieces created with water and paper respectively. Its the paper concerto that has inspired me to create a piece using Origami, the art of paper folding originally a Chinese art.

I decided to animated an origami
lotus flower over say a crane or a swan as I think the Lotus flower has a greater sense of symbolism.



The lotus flower has a unique characteristic in that it blooms and sheds its seeds at the same time. In the context of Buddhism, the theory of karma says that, just like the lotus flower, our life is made up of cause and effect. Every cause -- be it action, word or thought -- will imprint an effect that can be seen in this lifetime or in future lives.


Cause and effect was something i used extensively in the Eno animation - the Music was the cause, the animation the effect - and John Cage was heavily influenced by 'Ching' - the Chinese book of changes, a symbol system used to identify order in random events, explaining a cosmology centred on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change. By using a Lotus flower I hope to link all three artists with the notion of, random chance and cause and effect.

Previous post show the research onto how I could set up the animation. I decided wall mounting the paper with masking tape and blue tack would be the way to go, as at the time i didn't have a tripod set up.

The image below shows the set up i used.


At 12 frames per second I opted to have the animation consist of around 240 photographs for a 20 second piece. I took about 220, the remaining 20 frames were left to allow room to create reversed animations on some of the folds. after a few test shots





The end result.



tj -x-

Tuesday 5 May 2009

Eno - The final Title sequence



Above is the final title sequence, set to widescreen (16:9), as it would be displayed when aired. If the TV the viewer had was only 4:3 aspect ratio then the show would be set in a letter box. I feel this is appropiate to the target auidence and a channel that shows world cinema and art film. The BBC Four logo is included to give the piece context. The Sequence is bang on 20 seconds or 500 frames. I wanted to achive to this to show that I can edit within a set parameters. This is key to media within TV which have very tight slots of viewing time. If this was a film title project, I wouldn't have to work to these constraints. tj -x-

Making the Animation more dynamic

I'm happy with how the animation works. But as it is it's a bit boring, within the title sequence I have to keep the audiences attention for 20 seconds so their has to be a certain dynamism to it. I'll ac hive this through camera movement.

My first test just panned out completely, from right up close to the distance the camera was originally set at. I also experimented with the type positioning.




When watching this back the most interesting part was the close ups of the animations so in my next series of tests i experimented with going right in close and panning back ever so slightly, allowing the shape of the generated image to dominate the screen. I also panned and orbited the camera (ever so slightly) to the left, this left an obvious space in the right hand corner for the type.



Watching this back It was clear that I could go even closer to the image still. This is my final composition, where the camera pans out ever so slightly, keeping pace with the soundtrack and allows the animation to create a dynamic by dominating the screen before fading off to the left and leaving the type to take centre stage at the end.



tj -x-

Eno - Music Bars and Font Consideration

In my sketchbook I've toyed with the idea of having the the generated string like lines in the animation as bars in a musical score. My sketches included using the treble and bass cleft as motifs, but I think that's not subtle enough, I want to hint at elements, not show them entirely.



This animation is slightly more complicated than the previous animations. Instead of using the combined channels bass and treble to create the two particle generators, I needed to create six to create the three layers of strings seen in the animation. To do this I split the music into left, right and combined channels. I then split these into bass and treble creating 6 waveforms to extract positions from.

The same process of converting the waveforms into positional key frames and applying them to the particle generators within set parameters based on the high and low point of the waveform remains the same.

I also changed the font from Century Gothic to Frutiger Ext.



I like century Gothic I really do, but i want a font that has some sort of tie to Eno, however tenuous. I decided on Frutiger for the simple reason that Eno is famous for "Music for airports" and frutiger is a "typeface for airports". The Ext version just seems to fit nicely.

Being a modern Sans Serif font it also has the potential to be used across the series, and tie all the sequences together typographically.

tj -x-

Eno - generative images

Moving through the electrical landscape was all very well, and i could have gone further with it. But to me it doesn't say anything, theirs no real concept to it other than illustrating electrical circuits and the idea than Eno used electronic beats, which is nothing really unique to Eno. So I've decided to go back to using music to generated images. I'm doing this because its a play on Enos techniques.

Eno used to generate music from random elements - So in Turn i'm generating an image from Enos music.

The first thing I changed was the track. The previous animation used 1/1, which although was groundbreaking in Enos career, when i asked a few people they had no idea what who it was by. So I looked into Brian eno his ventures into mainstream popular culture, I considered using the
spore soundtrack but that's a generative piece that doesn't repeat, Or the windows 95 start up sound;



But that's one; too short, and two horrible.

Eno tracks have been used in movies and the track that people recognised the most was "An Ending (ascent)" From 1983s Apollo atmospheres and soundtracks. People didn't recognise that it was Eno, but rather it was "that track from 28 days later".



I plugged that track into the after effects expressions I had created previously and created a generative animation.



Like Enos work its minimalist black on white with a subtle title on the bottom right hand corner, hopefully this will appeal to both Enos fans and BBC 4 watchers.

tj -x-

Target audience - BBC Four



To proceed with appropriate visuals i need to consider a target audience. The hypothetical documentaries on contemporary classical composers will be aired on BBC Four. BBC Four is a channel aimed at

a wide variety of programmes including drama, documentaries, music, international film, comedy and current affairs ... an alternative to programmes on the mainstream TV channels


The channel broadcasts a mixture of art and science documentaries, vintage drama (including many rare black-and-white programmes), and non-English language productions such as films from the Artificial Eye catalogue and the French thriller Spiral. BBC Four further supports foreign language films with its annual World Cinema Award which has been running since 2004.


So BBC 4 aires an alternative listing to the mainstream BBC 1 and 2 by targeting a demograph interested in the arts, sciences and politics, one of its previous slogans (which it has now dropped) was "Everyone Needs A Place To Think", so BBC 4 could almost be considered the thinking persons TV channel.

I will create my animations with this audience in mind. So they'll need to be 'artsy' sophisticated and more importantly different to the kind of title sequences seen on the other BBC channels.

I also need to target people interested in Contemporary classical composers directly. I'll do this by using a very minimalist pallete, and minimal, yet sophisticated animations that have a concept behind them. Hopefully the concept will shine through, creating a prelude to the tone of documentary to come.

tj -x-