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Exercise 01:

Inspired by Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist, he speaks of one climbing their family tree of artists, AKA following the trail of inspiration as it flows. The artist I chose as my central inspiration was Nifty-Senpai, who I have been following on Youtube since I was 10 years old. They are a core reason as to why I went into animation in the first place, and have pursued it ever since.

It was very interesting to trace back the inspirations and see where some intersected with my own but also introduced some new names into the mix.

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01/17/2018 ... Exercise 1 ... Final edits

So here’s the final product. I edited the video to sync with the music better. I think it flows much better. When the letters for solitude come on screen and off, when the “people” return to our lonely character, and when the black screen comes up, it’s now all in time with the beat of the music.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the effect. When I was originally looking up definitions of solitude, I pretty much only found the one I knew: “the state of being alone.” While sometimes being in solitude can be a reflective state, and is not a bad thing, I wanted to portray solitude in a sense of loneliness.

To be honest I think my idea is pretty obvious, but I like it for that. What gives it more character is the movement in every letter throughout the entire thing --it makes it feel more human. And since being alone and in solitude is something that is wrapped up in a lot of emotion, this human aspect was important to me. While the photography gave me a lot of difficulties, I think the shifting light supports the anxiety and uncertainty of being alone. The roughness of the characters (having them hand cut and uneven rather than being laser cut) ads a bit more individuality to each character. This is not a perfect, clean-cut piece, but it wasn’t intended to be. Being lonely isn’t my idea of perfection, and the video is meant to reflect that.

By having the characters come back on screen, I accomplished two things: I can make it into a nice smooth loop, and more importantly, it ends off on a hopeful note: that your solitude and loneliness is only temporary.

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01/17/2018 ... Exercise 1 ... Adding Sound

Originally I was thinking of adding in the sound of chatter and conversations dying out, but decided I wanted to go more abstract, and play around with music. Fortunately, my musically inclined partner helped me out. Funnily enough, our inspiration came from Duke Ellington’s 1934 song, titled “(In my) Solitude.” After going through the video a couple times, we came up with something suitable. I brought it into After Effects, and below is the result.

I was pretty happy with the result, and I think it suits the mood well. But I feel like I can sync up the music to moments in the video better. This means I either have to adjust the music (which would take a lot more effort), or made adjustments to the video (cut out frames and add others). I could do this by stretching or shortening the whole video, but I’m worried that this speeding up and down would feel out of place. Instead, I’m going to manually add in more frames in some sections, and remove some in others. This way the pacing of frames will be consistent, but I can made the video hit some of those significant music moments a bit better. See the next post for the results!

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01/12/2018 ... Exercise 1 ... I used After Effects!

Still needs some work, but here’s my images in After Effects!

Some of the things I want to go in the next round of editing:

Add sound (the chatter of a crowd dying out as people leave)

Right now the “solitude” text leaves very abruptly, so I’m thinking of reversing when them come on screen to have the letters leave one at a time as well.

I’m going to cut some frames I think are too jittery. There’s a couple frames of the head of the last, lone “I” moving back and forth. It was meant to make it seem as if he’s looking to check if anyone is there, before his head droops from being sad. The back and forth is too quick however, and it makes it look like a mistake.

I think I’m going to experiment with a slower frame rate. Right now it moves a little too fast for what I wanted.

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