At a different time of day this week is another Throwback Sunday! Today weve got my first step into doing vector art, which led me on the path to where I am today. Im not sure where Id be now if it werent for this project, but it would more than likely be somewhere very different. For this FD Year One project, we had to design and create new titles for an existing movie, and in the process learn how to use After Effects. Other peoples entries included a gorgeously-shot DSLR video for American Beauty (https://vimeo/51609559), a surreal sequence for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo involving ink drifting in water, a very literal take on A Clockwork Orange (https://vimeo/51345491), somewhat inappropriate titles for Superman (1978) (https://vimeo/59400130), and a very shitty, shot-for-shot recreation of the Drive intro that the creators were so ashamed of they didnt even show up to the big screening of everybodys work. As for my two-man group? We chose The Terminator. He composed the music (the quotations are referring to both the quality and originality of his final piece. Yes, it is meant to be *that* distorted), and I did the vector art. Its quite shocking to look back on it now and see how good I got the cityscape to look. Bear in mind that Id only had one lesson on Illustrator over a year beforehand, and that was focused on vectorising black and white artwork, the two images I did were made over about two hours the night before the session where we put everything together, and I had absolutely no prior experience making vector art. The art I did is no visual masterpiece, but with all that considered its a miracle it came out half as good as it did. In fact I got it so right first time around that Im still using elements from it today (a crane that appears in destroyed form at around the 30 second mark was reused in the opening scene of Orange Blues, for example). Its just a shame that the rest of the film lets the side down. The music created for it is... well, you can hear it and judge for yourself. It was the first time Id ever used After Effects, and while I was very happy with myself for coming up with a creative way to have the credits appear and disappear, I didnt notice that they didnt fade out completely, and awkwardly cut out instead. And of course, the elephant in the room is the ending. Mcolleague had storyboarded the ending with a nuclear blast leading to the titles appearing. Since we wanted to stretch ourselves in learning After Effects, we decided to realise the explosion through chroma keyed stock footage. And, well, you can see how well that went. Still, despite the pretty wonky way a lot of the film was realised, it was still an accomplishment for me getting vector art down so well on my first try, and at least the shittier aspects of the production were a learning experience. So then, head back to the very beginning of my animation work with the redesigned titles for The Terminator.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 18:00:01 +0000
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