Year 2: Edinburgh Map Project
As an introduction project, we were told to get into groups and go around Edinburgh in a path, and document our journey in the form of an animation. To start off, each of us took a few photos from our own individual walks for ideas. I went along the Fountainbridge route and took a few pictures of both historical and aesthetic interest.
Afterwards, we went around in a group, travelling around Arthur’s Seat, the Meadows, Cowgate, and Greyfriar’s Bobby. Our next step was to link these locations together. We had the idea of linking each location through different perspectives of people/objects in Edinburgh: for example, from the perspective of a bird, the sky of Arthur’s Seat could dissolve into the blue pond of Arthur’s Seat, which is perceived from the perspective of a fish, and vice versa. We would then animate on top of the filmed location footages. As I was doing Greyfriar’s Bobby, I made a brief storyboard: the perspective of a bird would switch to the perspective of a tourist filming and taking photos of Greyfriar’s Bobby.
Since I was animating a tourist, I planned to rotoscope the hands of the tourist as she was swiping through her phone for photos. Initially, this rotoscoping animation was supposed to be composited on top of the hands in the footage, though because of time constraints, this was done quite roughly.
The end result of the collaboration was quite rough due to communication problems and time constraints, and I feel that we definitely could’ve done better in assembling the final version of the animation. However, this was just an encouragement for me to work harder in the projects to come for this semester.