Video Production

Final Plans

Below is my final shot list. I made this to illustrate my final ideas and plans into a ‘checklist’ to be used during filming to make sure I gather all the shots I need. I used the research that I had undertaken along with my research on storyboards to create a highly effective shot list, that is universally understandable by different people during production.

The next few images are that of my final storyboards. I am happy with the look and feel of these plans, as they look really professional, while still very simple. I have even more plans and sketches in my folder that will be submitted with the rest of my work. these sketches and plans aren’t as neat as these but do show my thought patterns.

It was suggested to me that I look at, and try to, redesign my storyboards from a different angle, such as birds-eye view. This allows for a deeper understanding for the camera crews and will help them to frame and compose the shots exactly how the director intended. it also helps to plan what will be going on ‘behind-the-scenes’ and out of the view of the camera.

My story idea takes the idea of how quiet electric cars are. I took the idea of someone being followed by an electric car being completely oblivious about what’s happening behind him. This is because of the car not making any/minimal sound. To help communicate this to my audience, I have encouraged my actor to act with added confusion when he notices the car behind him and will edit playing with the sound and music track I have chosen. I chose this song as it has a playful beat and the lyrics speak about how the singer wants the listener, which could be applied to my car and character duo. I am also going to be designing and creating a small animated character for the cars internal infotainment screen, which will give my audience an idea of how/why the car is managing to seemingly drive itself to follow behind the person.

One-Way Sign Coverings

There isn’t much in the way of editing other than the general cutting clips and editing the sound. For the first ‘special effects’ type editing work I needed to edit out the one-way signs in the shots. I designed a few different ways to do this with all involved covering the signs. I ultimately chose a design that allowed for additional advertising for the vehicle I used, a Toyota RAV4 Hybrid.

I then put my chosen idea into photoshop to prepare it to be overlaid on my video project. To do this I sourced the Toyota logo from online and overlaid it on a blue background. I started overlaying these on the signs I adjusted the blue to be a little darker so it didn’t stand out so much. I did this in the standard dimensions of a one-way sign, which had to later be adjusted.

I scaled and fit the sign cover over the sign which made a good snug fit once I was finished with it. This design worked well to cover the signs and didn’t look too obvious to the viewer which is what I wanted. this also added for extra brand advertising in the scene.

Sign and Head Masking

I used THIS video as a reference to masking in my own project. This helped me to better understand after effects and how it works, as I had struggled to figure it out on my own. Bty Masking this way it still allowed for freedom of movement. Once I put this into my premiere project, I’m realised that I’m not happy with the sign that I had to mask. To me, it seems to bright in the shot compared to the others (see above), but it might still work as the people I asked about it said that they didn’t really notice this until I pointed it out. This is something that I may come back to later on.

First Cut

This is what the premiere file looked like before I rendered out the first cut.

Overall I’m really happy with the progress that I’m making with this project. This first cut took me a few days to fully cut down and edit due to the special effects it required, and this was the finishing product. I will be designing a small emoticon character to animate and incorporate into my final piece, like this: >_< This character will add extra personality to my video and its storyline. This animation will be a challenge for me personally as I haven’t done very much animation on my own. This cut looks good and works well with the music I chose, but there are a select few clips that are a little too long, but I didn’t want to spend all my time making my first cut absolutely perfect, especially since I still had a lot of time to spend on this project.

Peer Review: 

Fluidity – The shot where you have the person taking out the earphone you could possibly add a shot of the actor walking into frame and around the car. This will make the actions of the person more fluid. Ending Sequence – I’d say that you should have the end titles as black text on a white background as it will be more eye-catching than white text on a black background. The music track you have chosen fits really well.

Character Animation

Character animation design reference video HERE

When I first started animating my character’s expressions I struggled to actually get it to stay in one place and fit to what I needed from this project. I played around with adapting the tiny sketches in my sketchbook into actual video animations, which was far more fun than I initially thought it would. I chose to create a frame-by-frame animation as I love the style, and the clip I needed would be upwards of 15-20 seconds. I used THIS video as a reference to animate in Photoshop as this is a program that I am familiar with.

For my first attempt, which I have now scrapped, I tried just drawing it out freehand, which worked o an extent, but I couldn’t quite get the positioning or timing right. For the character that will be overlaid on the video, I need 9 seconds worth of the character ‘interacting’ with and reacting to the person sitting in the car. This design is cute, and fit the profile for what I need, so for my second attempt, I will stick to this drawing style.

When I started my second attempt at the animation, I underlaid a screenshot of the scene that the animation is to be placed. At the person in the car never directly looked at the screen where the character is going to be, I am limited on what I can make the character do, but an idle animated face gives more context than the person just sitting in the car looking confused.

When I was animating the short clip, I found that keeping the same expression on the characters face worked the best, as there would be natural movement from the frame-by-frame animation. I Found that the issue I had with using Photoshop was that the limit was only 5 seconds, while I needed 9. This also makes my animation way too jittery, so I moved it into Animate. Before I did this, I put the base video through Premiere to stabilize the motion from the camera movement and to trip the clip to the length I needed.

In Animate, I animated a face every 5 frames. This way the animation was subtle and delicate. Although, when I zoomed out and overlaid this animation on the video scene it seemed just a little bit too subtle. I may come back to this animation at a later point to add more expression, personality and feel to the character.

When I put this animation into my video I found that I wasn’t entirely happy with how the face turned out, and I wanted to add a little bit more movement to the face itself. I decided I would add one eye-opening, looking around, then closing again as the person is the shot looks up at the screen. This looked miles better in my opinion and allowed me to spend more time getting to know adobe animate. I really enjoyed working with animate and found making my animation enjoyable. My character came out with a fun personality that adds extra context to how the car can drive itself behind the person in the advertisement.

Here is my finished animation piece ready to be overlaid into my project file. I am really happy with the outcome of this clip, and would definitely use this technique again in any future projects. When I put this into my final video It pulled my video together and allowed it to be rendered and completed.

See the eyes opening/closing reference videos here and here.

Extras

Just before I exported my video I added narrow black bars, which gives a more professional and finalised look to my video. these made my work neat and less ‘in-your-face’ for the viewer.

Most advertisements have small text at the bottom of the screen to give the viewer additional information/disclaimers on the product being sold. I couldn’t find any information that I could include in the ‘small print’ so I decided to make a comment about the small assistant I included in this clip, in the form of ‘tiny assistant not included’. While comical, it is still relevant to the project and the clip I selected.

I synced all my text to the song’s beats at the end title sequence, including Toyota’s famous slogan ‘Today, Tomorrow’ Toyota.’, which closed up the video neat and fully.