Approach + Choices Made
Watercolor Background
Over the past week I have worked towards refining my video components and iterating on different representations. Because my original watercolor stop motion needed to be oriented horizontally and further revised, I re-painted the scenes using larger watercolor sheets and the DSLR camera, as well as DragonFrame to select scenes from the recorded painting.
However, I was not very pleased with some of the picture quality inconsistencies (many seemed to have a pink tint not present when the recording was taking place, and the blue of the watercolor did not appear as vibrant). I thought that this would be easy enough to fix in Photoshop, but the individual differences in each frame made this process tedious. I started to play around with digital painting and using the watercolors to inform brushstrokes, color, and an overall realistic watercolor aesthetic.
I experimented with a few different water movements create an animation:
Otter Form
I also iterated on a few ideas for integrating the form of the otter. First, I extracted otters’ bodies from their backgrounds.
I looked at how these would look when overlaid in the animation:
I tried out a few other Photoshop tricks as well from tutorials watched and what I remember from predominantly using this tool in undergrad. To try and blend the otter and water even further, I made the form the same color:
Finally, I decided to try out making the otter images more dynamic. Using the Motion options in Photoshop, I create a sort of stop motion to overall on the watercolor wave from stop motion. First in black:
And then using the blue otters:
The addition of the movement and color matching I think effectively conveys the merging of water and otter I was looking for. I am still working through my knowledge of Adobe Premiere and overlaying the Otter stop motion over the waves versus the individual frames (which as far as I can tell need to be moved, scaled and sized individually and lined up on top of each other). While further refinement of sizing and timing needs to be worked out a bit more, iterating on these options has helped me to point my work more confidently in this direction.
Audio
Next I experimented with the audio. As stated in my last post, I wanted to incorporate the sound of children laughing to mirror the piece of the poem and to further draw the parallels between the playful attitude of kids and otters.
I think that while the audio files in this need to be evaluated a bit more, the addition of the laughter brings back the more light-hearted tone that I was hoping to end with.
Current Questions/Needs Raised
I plan to do a bit more investigating of tutorials and other resources to make the merging of the various images, video, and audio I am compiling. Now that I have all of the assets put together, however, it is just a matter of tweaking things to get the timing right and ensure that the video and audio will render properly when presented this week.
Likely Next Steps
- make transitions between water movements more fluid
- match up sound to animation better
- fine tune animation sizing, output, and audio levels