Testing Animation

Now we have decided to use animation we spent an hour testing out how it would work and talking out the sequence. We are definitely using post-its to do our animation and we have decided to use them to create images that reflect lyrics of the song. We will be showing them on a wall behind Jack, but we have also decided that we don't want Jack to be animated, because of the issue of lip-syncing. Therefore, we have decided to record him separately playing the song the whole way through in different shots, (ms,cu,ls) on a blue screen then doing the animation separately, again on a blue screen, then layering them in edit. That way it will look like the animation is happening on a wall behind him, but he will still be live action.

We have tested out animation using post-its on a fairly small space and now know that when we actually come to film it we will need a big floor space for the animation, because of the size of the post-its and the shapes that we want to make. So now we have to find a space, (which will probably the lecture theatre) where we can set up and film our animation. Hopefully, we will be able to get the room for an entire day so that we can do it all at the same time, so it all looks consistent and the post-its don't get moved.

The post-its will be done on the floor on some blue card (instead of blue screen, because it needs to be completely flat to work properly), as we feel that this is probably the easiest way to do this. Therefore, we need to get the camera up high, which hopefully won't be too difficult to do as we think we can get a tripod that will reach the height we need.

One of the next things we need to do is work out timings for each image and how long we need them to last in order for them to appear in the right part of the song. 

This is a tester we did:

From this we now know that when it comes to filming the actual animation parts, we will have to do it on a much bigger scale, because of the size of the post-it notes. For the tester we worked with two frames for each image and we think that this is the speed we need for the animation. Apart from this, we are fairly happy that the animation won't be too difficult to do once we figure out what colour post-its we want for each image and how the images will flow into one another. We may have to do a few more test shots before the filming of the actual animation just so we can work these things out properly.