First Draft of Music Magazine

Here I have constructed the first draft of my music magazine. I used photoshop and constructed layers to make it, varying with font styles and colour to try and stay in line with the codes and conventions of the fantasy animation genre I am following.

Character Design

I knew I had to have a series of character designs so I sketched up some options and this is the final result for the main stages of the single characters life.

Movie Magazine Main Image Construction

Just like for my movie poster I selected File, New, selected international paper size and made the background a dark grey. From a previous sketch of hands that I completed, I went back in and drew over the top of the drawing to look like the same style as my movie poster, using circles to sculpt the shape. Taking a picture I then imported the drawing into Photoshop and began to edit. I started by removing the background using the magic wand tool and moving the image onto my original dark grey background. I had to adjust the size to fit, as the photo was only 17x20cm and my background was 21x29.7cm. By making this the front cover of my magazine I am keeping in context and theme of my movie poster, but also I am challenging the codes and conventions of a movie magazine, as there is no charachters face visible on the image. Only the power of suggestion will connect the two. I knew from making my backgrounds dark grey/black and my illustrations I would need to incorprate another colour or colours into my poster and cover, so I decided to make them red and yellow, as these colours would stand out most against the harsh background.

Final Draft of Movie Poster

Here is my final draft of my movie poster, I really like the outcome.

Finishing My Movie Poster

Once I had the main part of my image drawn, I knew that half of the struggle was already over, this left me time to enjoy composing my idea and bring it all together. That left constructing all the layers together. To do this I first of all found the images on google images, made sure there was either no copyright or I got permission to use them. I found the credit block on an open blog, complete with instructions on how to download it to use on Photoshop. Once I had my writing placed in the template I then again went back into its features, stretching it and warping it to make the perfect credit block. I made sure the font was then centered. As you can see I stretched it 130% in height and condensed its with to 85%, also resetting the spacing settings to 25, so that it wasn't too squished and still readable.

Font Experimentation

Here is some of the experimental fonts I have been testing out to match my poster. Picking a font is easier like this because I can compare products side by side. Personally, I like the last version best. I changed the size and width to manipulate it to fit.

First Shot Animated

I published the first shot to YouTube so that you can see how it came together after constructing it.

First Shot Construction

So I started off on Photoshop by opening a new document, selecting film and video formatting and setting my background colour to a dark grey, almost black.

Then I opened window > Timeline and changed the frame rates per second from the automatic 30 (for live film) to 12 (for animation).









The next task was drawing a simple tree design, adding an image layer and a video layer. Once I had drawn the tree then on the unmovable image layer I realized I had made a mistake. I wanted the tree trunk and grass to stay in place but I wanted the leaves to move, the leaves that I had already drawn on the image layer...

So i made a new layer and redrew the tree over the top of the previous image layer as I needed to clean up the lines anyway.

This was the result I was left with when I hid the first layer. Almost identical but a little cleaner cut.

I then  went in frame by frame redrawing the leaves each time.

After I had about ten frames of the leaves moving, to work smart and not hard I duplicated the frames rather than redrawing them another coupe of hundred times, creating then a video layer group.

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First Draft (2) of my Movie Poster

So here I completely changed the concept and layout of my poster to suit a more sophisticated audience.

I asked 10 of my target audience then to give me constructive feedback:

1. Needs an age rating.
2. Possibly change of font in places.
3. Needs a star rating.
4. Missing rating box.
5. Excellent composition and imagery.
6. Like the illustration, lacking colour though.
7. Very dark, try brighten it up in places.
8. Nice structure and drawing, wouldn't change it.
9. Make font bolder in places to stand out more.
10. Love it! So eye-catching!

Change In Mind

After a little deliberation and really studying how my movie poster was turning out I decided that the whole poster was too overpoweringly green. The poster was supposed to be aimed to a more sophistocated audience, but this was looking very childish, very picture book like. It was supposed to be imagery that really stood out, was unique and eye-catching and enticed the older audience. I'm glad I realized the effect the imagery had at this early stage, it gave me the option to go back and fix it. To fix it, I simply restarted. Not an easy decision to make but I knew it would make a huge impact on my final product. And it wasn't as if I was completely restarting, I had all my important layers saved so I could re-edit them back together.

• To start, I selected file and new.

• Next, I made sure the size was "International Paper" as this is an A4 sheet.

• I chose to have the main background black as it is a more sophisticated colour

• This automatically made the main background black and saved me time from having to re-edit a white background.

• Using the Elliptical Marquee tool I carefully positioned an equal circle at the top centre of the page.

• Then  using the magic eraser I cropped that circle out.

(cropped out image)

• I then  selected a dark grey colour with green undertones

• And filled in the missing circle with this lighter colour.

• This then became my main background that I would build upon.

• Following the background I imported this image onto photoshop, an image of my brother that  I had drawn over a while ago, that sparked a thought. The image looks quite like the lines of age on the inside of a tree trunk. So using photoshop I used my magic wand tool to edit out all of the white background & leave it as a simplistic black line drawing.

• I took that same image then and after most of the white background was taken out I inverted the image, by selecting Image, Adjustments, Invert. I left a few white spaces as I knew that once i inverted my image it would turn them black and create shadow for dramatic effect.

• Now that the image was white I copied the layer over onto my background layer. Thankfully I had originally created the illustration on the same size of a document so I did not have to change the image size.

• After a bit of sketching on my graphics tablet and Photoshop I experimented with the image until I was happy with the outcome. I will now add hints of green through the leaves and start to play about with titles and fonts.

Animation Construction on Photoshop CC 2015

Here I have replicated my previous presentation on Photoshop CS6 except this time I have taken you through the features and extras of the new version of Photoshop in regards to constructing an animation. There is also a video at the end which helped me a lot in regards to making movement, Youtube has been a huge inspiration for me to create an animation and solve all of my photoshop problems in the making!

Rotoscoping

In my teaser trailer I will be attempting to rotoscope images (draw over the top of them) to animate the live footage.

Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films. Originally, recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is called a rotoscope. Although this device was eventually replaced by computers, the process is still referred to as rotoscoping. In the visual effects industry, the term rotoscoping refers to the technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate so it may be composited over another background.

A Scanner Darkly is a 2006 American adult animated science fiction thriller film directed by Richard Linklater based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick. The film tells the story of identity and deception in a near-future dystopia constantly under intrusive high-technology police surveillance in the midst of a drug addiction epidemic. The film was shot digitally and then animated using interpolated rotoscope, an animation technique in which animators trace over the original footage frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films, giving the finished result a distinctive animated look. It was distributed by Warner Independent Pictures and it was the first (and only so far) animated film released by Warner Independent Pictures.

The film was written and directed by Richard Linklater and stars Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder. Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney are among the executive producers. A Scanner Darkly had a limited release in July 2006, and then a wider release later that month. The film was screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival^[4] and the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival, and nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form in 2007.

After principal photography was finished, the film was transferred to QuickTime for a 18-month animation process: interpolated rotoscoping. A Scanner Darkly was filmed digitally using the Panasonic AG-DVX100 and then animated with Rotoshop, a proprietary graphics editing program created by Bob Sabiston.

Rotoshop uses an animation technique called interpolated rotoscope, which was previously used in Linklater's film Waking Life. Linklater discussed the ideas and inspiration behind his use of rotoscoping in Ashraf's documentary, linking it to his personal experiences of lucid dreaming. Rotoscoping in traditional cel animation originally involved tracing over film frame-by-frame. This is similar in some respects to the rotoscope style of filmmaker Ralph Bakshi. Rotoshop animation makes use of vector keyframes and interpolates the in-between frames automatically.

The animation phase was a trying process for Linklater who said, "I know how to make a movie, but I don't really know how to handle the animation." He had gone the animation route because he felt that there was very little animation targeted for adults.

In my A2 Art coursework I attempted a still form of rotoscoping
for my final piece. I realised quickly with rotoscoping that the artists that create them really emphasise and exaggerate the features of the image, making them slightly goofier, more like a caricature than real life person, giving off the animated feel and adding a lot more detail and depth to the work.

To do this I imported the image to Photoshop and used my Graphics tablet to draw over the top. My teaser trailer will have elements of this in it but mainly it will be pure animation. The image on the left is the picture I took of my friend Lucy, the image below is the illustration I created of it, using rotoscoping techniques.