If anything needed to be refined from the original film that would have to be the animation, at the time not having any prior knowledge on how to do 2-D animation, my attempt of animation was just to sketch out the picture, with a pencil and paper and just photograph it and use that as the final picture in the film, there was a late attempt to make the picture look more unique by adding a sketchy filter on top of the image, just to make it appear more lively than originally was, apart from the ending been in colour the sketches were completely in black-and-white.
The reason why the ending was the only section in colour was because it was a relatively positive ending towards the film, so in order to show that it was less dreary and not like the rest of the short film colour was brought in to show the difference, on how bright and lively his world is now, although I feel that the black-and-white scheme is a rather overused concept for a film, in order to show the contrast in the wilds between the doll and mundane and the bright and lively, I think I wouldn’t be challenging myself enough if I did the same thing twice, so I want to challenge myself into presenting A colour scheme in order to show the difference between the autistic lad life and everyone else’s life.
So I’ve created a five minutes animation test, by digitally tracing over my original sketches from the first school reflection film, creating them into PNG files, i’ve attempted to animate the pictures on using a key frame on my final cut pro software.
Script Writing
Draft One
Script Writing
Draft One
Research
Audience Feedback
New Logos
After deciding to go into research about the story time animators on YouTube, and decided that YouTube would be the best platform to promote and post my video given how it’s in a very similar style to the storytime animators something I knew would be incredibly important to format is to give my YouTube account more of a brand.
So during my time developing the story of my remake of school reflection, focus upon creating a logo and really figuring out on what’s my type of style when it comes to videos.
(Badger Road Safety)
(Animation Elements)
So I began thinking about my interest and how that bleeds through my videos, watching through my videos the most common thing that they have in relation to one another, is that there is a great focus upon the retro such as old film and TV, I oh so create a lot of my videos by using means of stop motion and animation, and try to maintain doing physical things for my videos, such as even though my badger video was done by 2-D animation on the computer the background still use live-action backgrounds, and the badger it South was meant to be animated in a retro style, with wickedly boiled lines, such as old cartoons, where are they were made on a particularly low budget they were not as well sophisticated in terms of movement and quality such like a Disney production, then it was the imperfection that gave it its charm, as it gives it that home movie feel towards it so I decided that that would be the aspect I would expand upon.
(Real-Time)
The next thing was to think about as to what would defy a retro look, a company that I turn towards for a source of inspiration was real-time productions, being a small independent British company mainly creating documentaries and interview videos focusing upon retired individuals that work in film and TV, but also buy some legal loopholes they’ve been able to make spin-off films mostly from Doctor Who, and those movies are usually made to be on the same level and quality and sophistications as the classic Doctor Who cereals from the 60s 70s and 80s, so given how the company main priority is to not only preserve retro film and TV but also create films in a similar fashion towards the retro style, I took a look at the logo to see if I can gain any inspiration from that.
The logo is that of a film reel spinning on in to the frame as the company logo emerges out of the film reel, looking at this logo I thought would be a wonderful thing to replicate for my own logo, the film reel is an instant iconic bit of imagery to go along with the old TV programmes and movies, as in the modern world it is seen as being quite a rare object, as film cans were rather expensive to film on way back in the day and even still today, so a lot of younger people like me or the general public who never had a hand with playing around with such film equipment, and given how most classic movies and the Genesis of film originated from filming film cans it is seen as being quite a classy eire.
As modern day digital filmmaking is one that is affordable for anyone to do, so it’s not held in the same high regard, as digital is more cost-effective and more Indy filmmaking, film cans and film rails it’s still only some think that those wealthier at Hollywood can afford to film on.
(Behind the Scenes)
So now how was I going to be able to photograph a film can, since like I said they’re not really objects and devices that are common to come on bye, even after years going to film museums learning about the topic, i’ve never once seen any kind of film can on display. I nearly considered buying a projector and film reels, but the cost of how much it was going to be to get all the equipment together, and what an earth was I going to do with it afterwords.
But luckily it just so happens my dad has a mate who owns a film projector and a couple of film cans, so after some negotiation I spent about two afternoons filming with the projector photographing the cans at the back of his Laundrette, thus I could finally undertake on putting together a logo.
(First Logo Test)
And with the advice of my teacher I also brought a green screen in on the second day, just in case if I wanted something behind the rails when they were spinning around such as tax, by green screening it made it a lot easier if I wanted to do instead of masking out each individual frame. I did a number of different experiments with the footage, my first experiment was a small intro with just the projector by it self with only the sounds of the mechanics of the device, I added in a black and white filter on top of that I added on another filter to make it look like it was a moving painting, I was trying to emulate the style of rotoscoping, it’s an old animation technique where you paint over live-action footage, showing it to my teacher and my classmate they both liked it but felt like it was overly long, and the text at the end of the my name, my teacher especially felt like the font was uninspired, so I went back to the drawing board I decided that the intro needed something a little bit more, I had a couple of back shots of the projector so If I wanted to I could very easily place in a picture that the projector was projecting, so I decided to place in one of my photographs that I’ve took over the years.
(Second Logo Test)
This time round I was attempting to go for something from much more of a classy look, I then had a brainstorm of using one of my nature pictures that being of a small Heron called an Egret, where the photograph was actually not token too far away from college, I decided that I would have it where the heron was flying through the projector screen, with the name Edward James appearing alongside the heron.
Masking around the Egret was achieved by tinting the water blue and doing a blue screen affect, as for the footage of the projector while it was originally photographed in a dark room, it needed a slight edit of masking around the film reels so they can be placed in front of the projector screen from the camera moves forward towards the image, I was really chuffed on how it looked, I showed my friends and family and they enjoyed it, I was astonished that I still had a lot I footage from the projector leftover, so I decided that I would create a small intro with that footage, mainly to be used for my blogs, to keep with the new theme of my new logo.
I took the inspiration of editing the blog opening, from the Josh Snares fun made series, Doctor Who the missing episodes where he has a similar opening using stock footage of projectors and film cans.
(Doctor Who - The Missing Episodes | Part 1 |)
(Opening)
(Pixar Logo)
(Aardman Logo)
But once confronting my tutor about my new logo he didn’t feel it reflect overly well on my personality and my style, stating that the bird didn’t really have much meaning behind animation, he liked the projector footage it was going in the right direction, but it needed to be more directly from animation he suggested to look at company logos such as Pixar and Ardman for a source of inspiration as it needed to be something more fun to reflect my personality.
So once again I went back pondering on what fun logo could I do, it was at the same time that I was becoming quite fond and watching some old B-movies on the cheesy and laughable Fx, then I had a brainstorm instead of trying to replicate the classic of cinema, what about instead to pay tribute to those old low-budget films, as quite a bit at the fun of those movies it’s been able to tell how they did the Fx, as the tricks on how they achieve the imagery to those films is something so easy that anyone could do it, then at the same time that’s relate to bowl as it can remind people to the days that they did arts and crafts when they were much younger, and that anything could be made if you could put the time and effort into it so it can also be quite charming at the same time, people love identify on how they did it and charmingly ripping it to pieces.
So I then decided to create some sort of wonderfully B-movie style monster as a part of my logo, something as my teacher recommended for me is that I should have a unique font style unfortunately I didn’t felt like I had the capability of creating my own font, but something I noticed with other company logos is that there font is quite generic but they make up for it and the creativity of the mascot they’ve got, and are usually quite simple of a design never anything to elaborates.
(The Mighty Gorga 1969)
(T- Rex From The Mighty Gorga )
So thinking whatmonsters I would want to do for a logo, there was one movie I can vaguely remember from my childhood that I thought that’s the monster I want to replicate, and that movie was called the Mighty Gorga in 1969 King Kong rip-off, put at number one on trailer club 70s.com
as the dinosaurs in the movie being the worst visual effects and monsters to ever exist in cinema, being that of a papier-mâché puppet, I had the idea of the dinosaur ripping through a cinema screen.
(What's that coming over the Hill)
The idea originated from after I did a Fan edit of the Mighty Gorga, with the ape and tribal people dancing along to the what’s that coming over the hedge music, with the video starts off with the dinosaur bursting through a cinema screen, Making the edit by ambitiously masking around the dinosaur and Key framing him ripping through.
(Dino Speed Drawing)
(Dino Model)
(Dinosaur Animatic Test)
(Animated Dino Model)
Before going to the effort of building and creating a papier-mâché dinosaur, I did a computer sketch of the original design of the dinosaur from the Mighty Gorga, and did a 2D animation or animatic in this case, to show my teacher and classmates and see what they think of it, I started off the animation of seeming like this will be a sophisticated production as we zoom into a theatre stage, with them they’re poorly constructive dinosaur ripping through the screen.
I then wanted to give myself a company name, as Edward James was always my middle name and I only used it as a pseudonym online, but it was beginning to become rather pointless as I began to feature my real name more prominently on my YouTube channel, and Edward James never really stood out to me as a company name, taking some advice from my tutor his company name is square one, which is supposed to indicate that every idea in the company start from square one, I love this ingenuity of connecting to behind-the-scenes aspects of filmmaking, so I began thinking up as to what I could rename myself, my thoughts went over to the dinosaur, on how the original prop would’ve been created it was a rather rough construction, but they would’ve always got things rush and ready on time, then I thought rough and ready!
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That would be the best way to describe the type of productions that would’ve went on at that time, and it just personally grew on me, to the point that I decided that’s what I wanna call my own company, I told a couple of teachers and they were quite fond on the idea so I went with that, in designing my logo was going to be a generic and standard font was going to be generic but was there any way I could confiscate for the generic writing, thinking about that the dinosaur rips through the screen in my animatic, I want to betray that similar ripped affect for the tax, so I looked up crap text online, eventually came up with a shattered look for my text.
(Concept Art of a Test Logo)
(Paper Mache Sculpture In Progress)
Ideally I was originally going to create a life action logo opening, where I would’ve re-created the Tyrannosaurus rex seen in The Mighty Gorga, I had started crating papier-mâché puppet by using a dinosaur phone puppet I had laying around as a base, but however after a while I realised that I need to pay more attention to the actual final major then the logo, but when I was finally finished creating my short film I realise that there was little to no time left on creating my intended logo so I decided just to animate the concept art and use that instead as a logo, having it crashing onto the screen at loose attempt to connect the crack in shard design I did the dinosaur bursting out of the wall and the tax.
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While it wouldn’t have been the logo I would have ideally wanted it at least were satisfactory and did its job of what you needed to do, admittedly I could’ve added a little bit more animation with the dinosaur I think I’ll probably eventually will go back and revise the local design, but for now this will have to be my mark one design as a logo.
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