This was my first project at ECA so I was rather apprehensive about it. Ultimately, it’s fair to say that the end result was not the desired product that we set out to achieve. I think we worked well as a group however, we all got along, supported each other and each other’s ideas and shared the work load. We began the project by first discussing and evaluating the brief, we were especially focussed on what seemed to be the most important and stressed issue of including 20 places or sights of Edinburgh. We decided to take a walk as a group, scouting locations, this was particularly helpful for those of us who were new to Edinburgh, and we managed to form a vague route, which would incorporate significant areas of Edinburgh.
We still saw including 20 places as being quite a challenge, particularly if we did each place individually, so we began to think of more unusual ways we could explore each place. We eventually took ‘sights’ of Edinburgh to mean not just the places but also the ‘perspectives’ and thought it would be an interesting way to follow a route of Edinburgh through the perspectives of different people and animals, something that would also make it easier to get to 20.
We set off individually to which ever location we wanted to explore. I began by taking a walk in the meadows, and thinking of the various perspectives that could be found there, a child, a dog, and insect and so on.
We later reassembled and all assigned ourselves a perspective, myself for example was assigned a bird, so I decided to conduct research atop Arthurs seat.
Before setting off to do this research we discussed story boarding and how each of our segments would flow into the next one, however, as we still worked on our story boards individually, even after collectively bringing them together, it seemed that our parts didn’t marry up quite as expected. For example, the fish segment came after mine, so we agreed that the bird's perspective should 'swoop' down, although, I realised the camera just couldn't get close enough. But when it came to seeing the fish segment, the fish was just swimming normally, even though we had agreed on it jumping out of the water to meet the bird. So I suppose time constraints affected the undiscussed alteration within our story boards, but collaborative story boarding is something to consider for future projects.
After the first week, our group diminished in size, our fourth-year student was working on her final project and one of the third-year students, although was still working on his segment, had another project to focus on, which left four of us. As myself and another member of the group had never actually animated before we agreed that a live action film might be the quickest way to gather footage, we could then animate over the top layer.
This is the bird I drew then animated using dragon frame. For the final animation, it turned out to be quite difficult and time consuming, as to overlay the bird on the footage, I was required to roto-brush around each image. I like my drawings of the bird, however, upon learning more about the processes of animating, realise I should have key framed it first, this may have made the wing movement more fluid.
