Commission: Overcoming Issues Research


This technique is very useful when you're unable to film and all you have is photos or archive footage of stills that don't move. Because I only had images to include in the video, I thought it would be cool to animate them by moving layers and changing lighting. Something quite complicated turned out to be a simple change that made the video come to life a bit more. The lights flickering and image zooming out looks as though it could've been filmed on a camera.
It was only after watching this tutorial that I was able to not only learn how to create this cool effect, but also inspiration with the possibilities of what I can do with one still image. At the start of the video there is a short montage of all different pictures he's edited and animated in order to bring to life.




This light flicker is very effective and I had to actually improvise a bit in editing it. I had to actually edit the one image into two images. One where the brightness of the lights is brought down and one where it stays up. I would then put both into the timeline in After Effects and jumped between them. I also applied a slow zoom out by key framing the scale. This added with the sound of a light bulb flicker seemed really realistic.




The next two animations are very similar I'm not one hundred percent happy with the one above as I feel its not got much going on compared to the one below; its movement was very subtle. This was just an experiment if anything, to test the zoom and to see if I could zoom on the camera screen too. For the animation below I exaggerated this and was also able to color key to change the lighting to make it look like its a live action studio being filmed. 




Research:
Producing these graphics wasn't just as simple as just coming up with the idea. I went out my way to find other short films on Vimeo. In researching for a previous project I remembered a video I saw where they used a 2 and a half demential photo to make a still seem more interesting and immersive and it had a really cool effect. In my research I decided to watch this short film 'Joy' again. It's based on the dementia story of a Joy Frank narrated, by her daughter. Although this short film was produced in a different style to mine, with its documentary-like style, it was still an inspiration to my commission piece. Its use of archive photos.
I found these photos really interesting to look at; they were visually appealing, and enabled me to see what the couple actually looked like. These photos looked enhanced to me, given their quality for the age and the way the people popped out, giving this 2 and a half dimensional effect. Another significant part of these photos was the way the husband disappeared from one of the photos when we find out he died. He is sat beside Joy and fades away which was really moving. The use of Mise en Scene here had connotations of loss and heartbreak. This has different purpose to my piece; I want to make it look like the studios have a good song heritage with old photos, to show that they've had years of experience and a quality, reliable and know what they're doing. This 2.5D effect should really enhance this and bring an old photo into the 21st Century.





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