eMagine Is Coming

Hey guys, I haven' t been on in a while, but I am happy to report that I have been working hard on my various projects. As the title states, our schools multi-media festival "eMagine" is coming up. I decided to do another kinetic typography to the song, All of the Stars by Ed Sheeran. I want to come back this year and show the judges that I have really improved in my animation.

My schedule lately has been super hectic and busy, since I am a senior in high school and the college I want to attend will not let me in. I also play golf and act in my schools theatre program. I am currently working on the kinetic typography project for eMagine but I am also working on a huge client project. I have been hired by an international company to do an animation for their company. Unfortunately that is all of the information I can give you, since this company is very confidential with information and projects.

So, back to my animation, I started by looking back at my project from last year and going over the judges notes on what could have been improved in my animations. My mom and various other particularly liked my hand painted landscapes I would do throughout the project. I needed to find a song with a lot of imagery and when I heard it, I knew it was the right song to do.



I am know for storyboarding as I go, so below I have provided what I have so far for storyboards. Since I have a little over a month to work on the project, I am thinking of cutting the animation after the main refrain of the song.

Right now I am having trouble tying it all together, I did not know if all of the backgrounds being different would be a bad thing. I am also just having trouble managing my time, since there are around 45 days until the entries are due.

My goal is to win a pixel, I really just want to show others, the hard work that I put into everything that I do. I was not born an animator, artist, or golfer which is why I have to work so hard at these things. I don't want to fall flat on my face again; I want to prove to myself and others that I CAN do this and that I am not a huge mess up. To win a pixel award would be like a pat on the back for the end of my high school career, and prove that I am a talented young woman.

Here is what I have so far, I may be cutting the song is time is not available to finish. If you have any comments or suggestions, email them to the email below; it would be greatly appreciated!

krausportraits@gmail.com

The Decades Come All Together

Hey guys, it's been a while since I last blogged. If you saw my blog from this time last year, you would see I was working on my eMagine  project. eMagine is our states multi-media festival that is judged for Video, Animation, Graphic Design and Web. Last year I entered a project called Atlas. This year I am doing a more somewhat out of the box idea for my project.

I am personally into music, no I do not play a musical instrument,

but I listen to music all the time, even as I am typing this I am listening 

to music. I though one day, some people now a days don't even know who Elvis

The Beatles or even The Who. I thought it would be cool to make an animation  that

shows that yes the music from the early 1950's is different than our music today, but 

that it is actually similar. 

I started by making a list of songs that would go with each decades,

then narrowing it down to three songs per. decade. I then made what

I call a modern mixtape on my MacBook on Garage Band, with about

10 seconds per. song. This took me about a full week to get it exactly 

how I wanted it. 

I started with the song Rock Around the Clock By Bill Haley and His Comets.

My mom had said that the song reminded her of the old show, Happy Days

because one of their seasons opening titles were set to the song. So I made a 

record rotating with swing dancers on either side of it, with the words Happy Days

appearing above it  to mimic the original intro. I then have the record fly off screen

to transition to the next song.

The next song is Jail House by the king himself, Elvis Presley. 

I took the video made back in the 50's and separated it into its

separate frames so I could frame by frame drawing of his dance.

I then copied the finished danced and shrunk it down, so he could

have background dancers. They dance in sync until they fade out to

the next song.

The next song is Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry. I watched several

videos of Mr. Berry's performances and noticed that instead of synchronized 

dancers, he had gogo dancers in the background. I then faded out Elvis and his dancers

then slowly faded in Mr. Berry and his gogo dancers. 

The difficulties I am facing with this project, is transitioning the songs 

that don't really go together from the different decades. I also need to know

if this project is actually award worthy, or if I need to be doing something

else completely different. I have worked really hard so far, and hope to win 

a pixel award this year. The test render is below of the 1950's decade finished.

I need to fix the blurry Elvis. I feel that I have worked extremely hard, and 

just want all the hard work to pay off. 

Stop Motion Has Literally Stopped Motion

Hey guys, my class has been assigned a group assignment that is a stop motion project. I am working with three incredible animators to create our story. If you want to check out some other things going on with this project check out my partner and friend Kelsie Wilt.


We were inspired by the stop motion music video Morning Elegance that was all shot with the emphasis of stop motion. Our idea deals with a girl having a nightmare that is represented by black sheets that continue to try and capture her. The difficult part of this animations the song we were hoping to put the animation to is four minutes and thirty- five seconds, which would mean we would have to take over 5,000 pictures. We decided to cut the song to two minutes which meant we only needed to take around 1,000-2,500 pictures.

I am hoping to get this project all set up and ready by the middle of next week. Our biggest problem is not having the bed or sheets, we are trying to get some loaned to us, so we don't have to establish a budget that is looking like it would be around $90 for just the sheets. Hopefully we can get a king sheets set and king mattress ready for shooting next week. 

We worked a whole week on the storyboard and it was a hard and long process. 

We had to go through the music second by second and plan out every frame, thankfully most of Kelsie Wilts past projects have incorporated this in-depth storyboarding music sync. 

In the story, a girl is running from her nightmares and is given a sense of hope by a horse that comes to save her. We had done a few tests with the sheets to see what it would look like and it looked awesome! 

We were hoping to be finished around this week, but that did not happen. 

Our stop motion project had not worked out because of time and material issues. We began to think of a new idea with only two days left to work on the project, so we re-started our project with a new idea.

Our new idea is a text message coming out of a phone, but it comes our as a note instead of a normal "cyber" message. The first note says "You Matter" and it crawls around the school, and to our good friend Mike's phone. Then Mike sends another message the same way that says, "UR 2 LegiT 2 Quit" that goes back to our teacher, Mr. Netterville  and he was happy to receive it. 

Our pre-production process for our new idea started with the idea of spreading kindness throughout our school. We had two students suddenly pass away last week and I felt that kindness is the only way to help people recover during this hard time.


We also wanted to add a fun kind of twist to the end by incorporating our animation teacher receiving the text in the end of our project.

We story boarded in a day, and shot the project in two days. This made our group very stressed and very articulate with everything we did. We moved the note card very slow, which took us even longer to shoot.

On the way of making this project I learned that we need to have all the appropriate materials and time before starting the project. Over time, I felt that our group was honestly ready to rip each others hair out and we started to get on each others nerves, but we made it through.


For my next stop motion project, I will check what time I have until the project is due and get the materials collected before you get set on an idea. My biggest problem is that once I get a really good idea, I get my mind set on it, and I do not want to change my idea at all. I need to work on expanding my ideas and projects to make them more entertaining to not just me, but my audience.

Our team 

Kelsie Wilt was one of our two project managers. She helped come up with the original idea and the new idea. She also drew up all the storyboards. She is a hand drawn animator than a stop motion or 3D animator, but she brought a lot of skills to our team and our project.



Mike Webster was our technical director. He would move the card around the floor for us to shoot, he also helped convince Mr. Netterville to have us put note cards on him.







Hasset Habt was our behind the scenes. She helped add her own twists and ideas to our project. She really helped out during the post production process, but was not as involved in our production or post production






Chloe Kraus (This Blogger) was one of our two project managers and director of the project. She helped come up with the new and old project ideas. She also was the cinematographer for the project, and had to move notecards when they are at Mr. Netterville's desk.

New Project Has Some Progress

Hey guys,

My new project is slowly but surely getting started. My group for our stop motion project is almost done with our final project, click here to get the hyperlink to my blog for that project.

As I said in my last blog, the movie Interstellar was the inspiration for my next project. I had spent several hours earlier this week to storyboard my idea so I could see what my plan for this animation is. I am combining both my portrait and animation skills together for this project.














Here is the song I plan on using for the animation. It is from the original soundtrack, so I do not own any rights to the music.

 My storyboards are very different from other peoples storyboards. I do not like being confined to a small box. Even if that is the size of my frame, I like to be able to see the whole thing all together.

The first part is going to show the house and under it list the directors name, until dust blows the name away. The camera then moves up to the window and goes inside Murphy's room. It will be zoomed on the book shelf where the books will fall to spell "Written By Jonathan and Christopher Nolan". In the movie Murphy has a model of the moon landing rocket, I am going to have the camera zoom into the rocket and it will list the executive produce. The rocket will flip over and become a chemistry beaker to symbolize the labs they worked in, with the name of another producer bubbling out the top. The background going up will turn black, then show rockets shooting up with lines reading the others producers names, now this is where it gets really complicated; I will zoom up on the lines with producers names are, then rotate the lines, and inserting the other producers in the spaces between the bars. The next transition would be the one of the bars stretching out to make a part of the watch that the main character wears, then zoom in on the watch, which has a hand ticking a morse code message. I would zoom into the watch part, and when the hand moves down it will wipe the word, "Music By" on the top, then it will wipe the letters away and say the composers name. I will zoom out and the shape of the watch will make one of the engines of the space ship.

On page two it starts with the "Gigantic" planet they have to pass by that gets them into a different dimension. I will have different parts moving within to, then have the name of the editor flow through it. The next part would be a wave from the first planet they visited with the words "Casting By" then the wave comes crashing down and the casting persons name pops up from the water. It when then going into the vector portraits of each character. Some will shatter for a transition to another character.

***SPOILERS***
The final part is when the main character goes into the 5th dimension and it will show the way Christopher Nolan had illustrated on the scene. It will then transfer to Cooper's daughters life span, which is showed by the vector portraits from her being young to old, while Cooper's portraits state the same since the time he was in was slower than Earths time.

Here is the first vector portrait of Cooper I have done so far. It took me two days in class to complete, but it will all be worth it in the end. I will have to do eight portraits of just people, then over a dozen of just objects. I hope that this project will look good enough to enter into our state wide multi media festival. 

I will check back in a few weeks to show my project. 

Interstellar Idea!

Hey guys, 

This past week has been a long week. We unfortunately had two students pass away, so not a lot of work had been done through this tough time. My group was dealing with the problem of a fast approaching deadline, and lack of materials. We have had to scrap our whole idea (which seems to be a normal thing with me) and come up with a shorter simpler idea. Our idea is a kind text being sent, but instead of digitally the text jumps out of the phone as a piece of paper and runs through the class room to the other person. The test render looks very good, so the final should be done by Friday.

Now you're probably wondering why the title to this blog is Intersellar idea. My dad and I got to go see the new Christopher Nolan movie Interstellar starring Matthew Mcconaughey and Anne Hathaway,  last night. 

I was inspired by some of the fan art I found online today, 

(Source: Pintrest I do not own any of these pictures.)

and began storyboarding a credits animation, that goes with some of the music to the movie. It will look similar to my past Supernatural animation that was not finished. I hope to get this project started tomorrow. 

STOP... COLLABORATE AND MOTION

Hey guys, it has been a while since blogged about my animation class. We are now doing a group assignment that is a stop motion project. I am working with three incredible animators to create our story. If you want to check out some other things going on with this project check out my partner and friend Kelsie Wilt.


We were inspired by the stop motion music video Morning Elegance that was all shot with the emphasis of stop motion. Our idea deals with a girl having a nightmare that is represented by black sheets that continue to try and capture her. The difficult part of this animations the song we were hoping to put the animation to is four minutes and thirty- five seconds, which would mean we would have to take over 5,000 pictures. We decided to cut the song to two minutes which meant we only needed to take around 1,000-2,500 pictures.

I am hoping to get this project all set up and ready by the middle of next week. Our biggest problem is not having the bed or sheets, we are trying to get some loaned to us, so we don't have to establish a budget that is looking like it would be around $90 for just the sheets. Hopefully we can get a king sheets set and king mattress ready for shooting next week. 

We worked a whole week on the storyboard and it was a hard and long process. 

We had to go through the music second by second and plan out every frame, thankfully most of Kelsie Wilts past projects have incorporated this in-depth storyboarding music sync. 

In the story, a girl is running from her nightmares and is given a sense of hope by a horse that comes to save her. We had done a few tests with the sheets to see what it would look like and it looked awesome! 

I'm hoping to start this project this upcoming week,

and hopefully be finished by the end of November, then 

have post production for about a week. 

And thats a... FLOP

Well, our video to promote our program flopped. The deadline was really early and the video portion of the project was not put together how we envisioned it. We went in and had another meeting with the video department to see what we could do to re-shoot and come up with some new ideas to make the video better and more about our project. We are currently brainstorming and meeting again in about two weeks to share our ideas. The big thing with this project is to to have everyone on board. Both the video and animation teachers need to be fully supporting our idea for the collaboration to work between the two strands (focus groups)
  

So since I had been working at school and at home with the ideas of the cubes, I did not really have time to finish my previous tutorial driven project, so for my final project I will be using one of my test renders for the cube.
I hope to have better news in two weeks!