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-