This blogpost is a summary of another three sittings of working on my sting. I thought this was the best way to document this because I have to admit my process was a bit all over the place as I kept noticing different things that needed to be changed. I thought I had taken a lot more screenshots than I actually did which is probably because AfterEffects took all my concentration so it was hard for me to be thinking about blogging while I was trying to get my head around it.
This shows the movement of the flowers which I had from last time, I had to tweak these slightly to make the fit on the beats of the music which I have now added in.
Seeing as there is a slight pause before the music starts properly, I decided to move the keyframe which starts the enlarging of the border to this point so that its like the music is triggering the start of the opening up of the viewfinder. I have kept the flowers moving from the beginning so that the animation isn't just totally stationary for this split second.
I haven't got any screenshots of applying movement to the central chess pieces, probably because this was meant to be one of the most simple parts but actually took a long time and a lot of small tweaks and edits. They needed to be timed so that the king moved faster than the smaller chess pieces to create a sense of depth and to highlight that one is in the background and one is in the foreground. They also needed to be timed so that the strings didn't cross awkwardly and make the composition look unbalanced. I found it hard to get the timing right where the king starts to enlarge as it starts to look jerky as if it has suddenly changed direction. I kept going back and forth with different ways of fitting these movements together and eventually decided on a sequence where he king starts enlarging before it has stopped moving downwards. I think this makes the animation smoother but I am not so keen on how it takes even longer for the cross on the top of the chess piece to appear.
This is in relation to the text at the end. In my original plan for my sting (seen in my shape mock up), the text appears as white and then a red shape is lowered down behind it to slowly turn it red from top to bottom. I tried to mimic this with the same colour used on the border but couldn't seem to get the layers right so that it only affected the text and not the background. I didn't want to give up on this but I started to doubt that this was a good idea anyway as this colour isn't as striking as red so against the black it might not have much of an impact. Instead I just decided to have the white text fade in. I arranged this so that it would happen on the last prominent beat in this clip of music so it really signifies the end. Also, the lack of colour after the disappearance of the floral border makes it look like the animation has taken a darker turn which I quite like the idea of.
To add a further complication, I somehow managed to delete about four of my layers when I had nearly got the sting complete. This was obviously totally my own fault but I have no idea how I did it and however many times I pressed 'undo' it wouldn't bring them back. Also, when I quit the program and tried to open it again in the state I last saved it, I found that it had automatically been saved over so I just had to face facts and add these layers in again, trying to use the parts I already had to figure out where my keyframes were before. This was really annoying but I suppose things like this do happen, I was glad it happened now while I still have plenty of time to fix it.
Agatha Christie Sting from Naomi Smith on Vimeo.
This is my sting. I can't say it has met the initial expectations I had for it but thats probably just a reflection of my storyboarding skills and how my imagination started thinking up this amazing performance which just wasn't feasible. I know its good to keep things simple but I feel like this has been kept simple in the wrong ways. I feel like I could have added more detail to my individual components, maybe having flowers on the vines and loose threads on the strings to make it more visually interesting but still keeping the movements simple. One thing I am really happy with is the textures. I think it has paid off linocutting the chess pieces, especially the king as I think the patchy texture of this exaggerates that he is being dragged down because it looks worn and battered.
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