OUAN505 - Finalising the Forest Scene

The forest scene was one of the first scenes we came up with as a group. The idea of having a moving shot of the paper cut outs really appealed to us, and this was the sequence of scenes it featured in. Gavin produced the bulk of the scene and I only had to change a couple of things before it was finalised for the final animation. Firstly, the Earth scenes that were used looked too over exposed and needed to be dulled down. I simply replaced these with the original shot of the Earth we had so that there was consistency through the animation and it also looked a higher resolution because the image hadn't been resized. After rendering the scene from After Effects and listening back to make sure everything was as it should be, I realised that the two shots of the Earth within this specific sequence were virtually identical. To add variation to the scenes and to make it so they had a better purpose whilst tying it in to the narrative I decided to make some adjustments. The first time it is shown it's illustrating the point that trees help make up the Earth's atmosphere. To emphasis this I created a blue ring to go round the outside of the Earth on Photoshop and for the duration of the scene altered the opacity between about 10-50% so that it was obvious to the audience what was being visualised. The second time the shot is on screen it is so visualise the idea of climate change. To link both scenes together I added a red ring around the outside and proceeded to create the same effect by altering the opacity - again visualising the point that was being addressed in the narration.

I think there are certain areas of the animation that do need additional things like this to make sure that the audience fully grasps the concepts being talked about, otherwise there would be no real reason to have visuals - so they have to be complimentary to the narration and not detrimental. Aside from the practical aspect it does add something to the scene in terms of movement and we were going for the subtle but necessary style when it came to moving images and the amount of movement we included. I also think we have been relatively efficient in terms of the imagery that have been used, and reusing this particular scene several times throughout the duration of the animation isn't an issue as long as it is consistent. In a way it become recognisable for the audience and the way it has been used on each scene where the narration mentions the Earth as a whole instead of just a specific aspect of the world means that its even more evident what is being discussed.

OUAN505 - Sourcing Music

Music has been the topic of continual discussion throughout the course of the brief and the original idea was to have a friend of Gavin's create some music to accompany our animated documentary and ultimately have a piece of bespoke music that works well with the visuals we created. However, as the project neared the deadline, Callum and I thought it would be good to prepare for the scenario that the music wasn't able to be completed in time and source some royalty free music just in case we had to resort to that. We were quite fond of the music used in the 'in a nutshell sereies' by one of our main references for the project: Kurzgesagt. The music in the series is always apparent to the audience but is complimentary to the visuals and isn't intrusive on any of the other sounds used or the voiceover narration. We emailed the author of the music to enquire if it was open to relicensing or if we could use it for our project. However, due to the agreement between the author of the music and Kurzgesagt the music is not available to be owned by anyone else. We were told however, that they have a range of other music that is available to be used and they said they are always open to helping students and encourage personal projects. They gave us a playlist of licenseable music that we would be able to use for our project and there is a whole range of tracks that would suit our project really well, I think we need to have a listen to the tracks in combination with the visuals and narration once everything is sequenced together so that we can decide what looks to be the best suited music for our project.

On 3rd May, about a week before the deadline, Gavin's friend told him that he won't be able to finish the music in good time. There was still a lot of time to source music if we needed it and it's good that he informed us of this with around a week to go. Due to this we will be using one of the tracks off the playlist by 'Epic Mountain Music' for the main background track in our animated documentary. Epic Mountain have a 'direct music licensing' playlist in which they are happy for people to use for projects such as this one as long as they are non profit or purposes such as ours, educational. I will make sure to include the track we used in the credits so that we aren't using it without making sure they are credited for their music. After listening through the tracks on the playlist my favourites for the project are:

• Zero Gravity
• Space Travel
• Circular
• Rising Sky
• Discover The Light
• Makalu
• Behind The Mirror
• Into The Wild

These songs have a subtlety to them through the use of strings that means they won't be at all intrusive on the narration, and can be played at any volume of varying level throughout the documentary without any real problem. Furthermore they all sound like quite serious tracks, some of the tracks I listened to on the playlist sounded a little more 'fun' and less formal than I would have liked but the few I have chosen to look at further fit the animation theme quite well I think. They also have a sense of drama in them that may help to highlight the narration and give the whole animation some 'umph'. The next step from here will be in post-production where I play the tracks over the finished animation to see which fits best and what effect the visuals and the music have in relation to one another, and that is when I shall pick a final track for the animation.

OUAN505 - Changes to Scene 3

As the project progressed one of the roles I took on and was suggested to take on by Callum was more of a directorial role. This actually was quite an interesting position to take, and it worked to an extent because the method we were using for the project was an idea that I had nearer the beginning of the brief and all of my ideas were contained in my head. The ability to go to Callum and Gavin and ask them to change aspects of a scene or do something a different way without feeling like I was being controlling or too forward was quite a good position to have. It also made it so that we could talk more openly about the changes that could or should be made without feeling like we were disrespecting each others work. I think this type of hierarchy when it came to the style of the documentary made our communication as a team stronger and more productive. Numerous times where Gavin, for example was working on a scene he would ask me for my opinion and I would suggest changes to what he was doing. It's always good to get opinions and feedback on work anyway but this made it more of a steady production chain than just having a crit session when it came to gathering feedback. So, across the scenes we all worked on independently we were sharing what we had done at all stages. Being in charge if the visuals also meant that the style throughout the whole production was consistent and clean rather than having three seperate styles coming together. It's taken me a while to realise the benefits of having a person to make decisions rather than coming to a compromise for every action that has to be made. Doing so makes the work produced clash because of the mix of styles and decisions that are made as individuals so this approach I think worked quite well, but perhaps we should have adapted this a little earlier on in the brief. I feel quite heavily responsible for this project and making sure it went smoothly because early on I pushed the idea of producing the animation in paper and use cutouts to comprise scenes, so the pressure to make sure we all benefited from the experience was present with me from start to finish.

An example of this in action is in a scene that Gavin did, the third sequence in the animation. The visuals represent the Earth as a whole before the narration discussed the impacts of logging, fuel wood harvesting and forest fires being big factors in the amount of forest that is removed. Initially we had the scenes switching from one to another, but it didn't seem to flow particularly well and felt clunky. I experimented with overlapping the different scenes using a mixture of blending options and changing the opacity and I think it worked quite well. Earlier on in the project as agreed as a group that something that would contribute a lot to the success of the documentary since there wasn't much movement was imaginative and interesting transitions from scene to scene, so this was an attempt to implement this idea. Using effects such as fades made the scene feel a lot smoother overall and less like it was just a number of straight cuts from scene to scene. The last thought process for me behind this idea is that since we were using paper the objects and shapes are very simple and are essentially silhouettes. By layering objects and changing the layer properties and adjusting the opacity it means that a layered paper effect is achieved, which in turn makes the objects and the scenes feel more complex.

OUAN505 - Animating 'The Lungs of the World'

The way we were producing this particular animation meant we relied heavily on simple movement and visual accompaniment to the narration as oppose to sophisticated movement as it would have been too much information for the audience and could have been overwhelming. The animation for the 'lungs of the world' scene was an example of this very simple movement to illustrate the point being made in the voice over. After Effects was used to create the simple level of animation we needed and it was no different here. I prepared the assets in Photoshop and made sure to keep everything on a seperate layer so that any aspect of the scene could be moved and adjusted later. The right lung in the scene was comprised of three different sections each getting progressively smaller so that they could be removed from the scene and it would appear like the lungs of the forest were in a sense, shrinking away or being removed - relating back to deforestation. Even though I wasn't originally part of the production team doing smaller tasks like this one meant that the work was divided a bit more equally during the production process and also made it so that both Callum and Gavin don't have to worry about this scene and can concentrate on the others. It just made sense for me to take on some more work since I wasn't meant to be doing anything during the production stage. I don't really like the regimented system that was implented in our group at the beginning. Gavin opted out of pre-production as the project began so it meant it was shared between Callum I, with myself doing the majority because Callum was planned to also work on the production stage most. I think if we had all split the project up more equally across all stages it would mean that the project would have been a lot quicker and more work would have been done. I recognise that everyone has their strengths within processes like this and that's where the division of labour comes in, but at the same time if we had implented a 'lead' for each section of the process with the others in the group helping where they could I think it would have been more efficient and allowed us to move through the project at a much quicker speed that we have been.

This scene was a very easy scene to do but nothing of any real difficulty was really present in the animation side of the project as we relied on the shapes of paper cuts and the visual side of things more than the movement. Perhaps some other aspects could have been moved like clouds in the sky or the sun setting to make the scene more interesting. At the same time however, I was concerned that if too much is going on the audience won't pick up on the significance of the sections of lungs dissappearing and the scene wouldn't have the impact we desired.

OUAN505 - Paper Fruit Bowl

The next scene I worked on to aid in the production process was the scene involving a fruit bowl. The aim of the scene was to accompany the narration which states that trees give humans what they need to survive, both in terms of food and oxygen. This scene is only on screen for a couple of seconds so it didn't have to be overly complicated, it just needed a smple fruit bowl to accompany the narration. I took some of the different paper I had been collecting over the course of the project from all of the different paper cuts I had done for different objects, so; orange, red, green, dark green, yellow and brown and cut various fruit shapes out of them to act as apples, plums, bananas and oranges. Once they were scanned in I adjusted the colours slightly to better suit the image and started placing them in the fruit bowl shape I had cut out. It was quite easy to arrange them in a way that was appealing and working as a composition. Doing this digitally also meant I had the ability to duplicate certain objects if I needed more of them, whilst being able to modify the sizes of different fruits was also helpful.

Some time was spent making the grapes and arranging the fruit in a way that I thought worked well. I had in mind from the beginning that two options for the scene was to have the fruit fall down into the bowl from above or alternatively, just use it as a still image when the scene comes onscreen. The final step for this scene was to include a background so I added a simple table and a background colour. Callum and Gavin liked what had been done and so I passed it onto Gavin to animate and start incorporating it in with the other scenes that had been completed.

OUAN505 - 'The Lungs of the World'

As time was pressing on within the project I thought it would be better considering the work load that was remaining to take on a couple of the scenes that were left. One of the scenes I took on to work with was the scene we called 'the lungs of the world'. This was essentially a scene consisting of paper lungs surrounded a background in the Amazon rainforest. The right 'lung' has three seperate components of different sizes and getting increasingly smaller. The ideas was to have them fade away slowly until just a small part of the lung remained. This reduction in size is representitive of the deforestation occuring in the Amazon rainforest which is often referred to as the 'lungs of the world'. Once the paper components were scanned in and arranged I thought that the shapes running through the lungs would look better if they were extended as they were shortened by the laser cutter cutting them a little too short. To do this the 'liquify' tool was used on Photoshop to drag and twist the shapes making them look a lot longer, and covering a larger area of the lungs. This improved the scene a lot in my opinion and the added detail brought up the visual quality of the image. Once the lungs were in place I created a background using various paper cutouts that I had used over the course of the project, they were quite random in their shape and this worked quite well to create almost a collage type effect for the background - acting as the rainforest from distance. The last thing that was added to the scene was a sky, simply by painting blue and orange in the area left for the sky I was able to create a 'sunset' feel. To complete this and tie the scene together I added a slightly orange hue to the whole image making it look like the scene is set as the sun is setting.

I spent some time finalising the scene by altering the colour of different areas in order to create a greater contrast between the different shapes and between the lungs and the background. I spoke to Callum to see what he thought and he thought the lungs needed to stand out more than they did so I worked on that to make sure they were clearly visible. He also said that there was a little too much texture on the background and it wouldn't fit as well with other scenes that have created that don't have as much texture on them. I used a 'cutout' filter to simplify the level of detal and simplicity on the shapes so that the level of detail was close to that other the other scenes. It was helpful talking over scenes with Callum so that we could come to a mutual understanding on what we needed from each scene and also discuss the best direction a scene could go in. It was really helpful when trying to work out the best combination of colours for this scene, and when thinking about the positioning of the different objects.

OUAN505 - Creating a Scene, Introduction

I volunteered to create the opening scene for the animation as I had a good idea initially about how to create the scene with the Earth floating in space. There a few elements I wanted in the scene when I was trying to think about how to design it. Firstly I wanted the Earth to be relatively big in comparison to the frame, so not in the distance but close to the camera. I also wanted an area of light reflecting off the perimeter of the Earth and a shadow being cast on one side of the Earth for added realism. I knew everything except perhaps the black background would be made of paper cuts so it would have an added dimension of texture and depth that otherwise wouldn't be achievable even by trying to recreate a paper texture in Photoshop for example, so the clouds, Earth and the areas of land on the Earth as well as the area around the outside is all made from cut outs of different coloured paper. I wanted to have as much movement included in the scene as possible, to do this I had everything on a separate layer so that it can be easily moved when imported into After Effects. An addition element of movement that I wanted to include was a satellite in the foreground orbiting the Earth. I thought this would add a nice extra to the scene that would take it from a simple still image to a moving scene.

The first step in creating the scene was drawing all of the separate assets using Adobe Illustrator. I used illustrator to make sure the lines that were being drawn could be interpreted as vectors by the laser cutter and therefore cut. I used images of the Earth as reference and simplified some of the different shapes until I had a collection them resembling clouds and land that could be cut out. I also created larger circles that would act as the glow to encompass the Earth when scanned in and edited using Photoshop. After all of the assets were cut out of coloured paper, I scanned them in before reforming the original Illustrator image in Photoshop, this time with the paper cutouts. I modified the colours slightly using the tools and functions that are available in order to find a more cohesive colour scheme, rather than the contrasting and uncomplimentary colours on the paper that the shapes were originally cut out of. Following this the rest of the aspects to the scene such as the background and smaller details were added until the scene was complete. Overall I like the look the initial scene gives and I think combined with some movement and sound effects this scene could be a really nice opening to the animation.

My initial thoughts regarding sound effects for this scene is a mixture of the music that will run through the whole animation fading in and a slow rumble as if the Earth is being viewed from inside a space shuttle, and in general I think a low rumble would work with this scene. One aspect of this scene that I think worked really well was the outer rings of the Earth that were created by altering the opacity of the circles cut out of paper. This gave the scene a dramatic effect that wouldn't have been created without these elements present in the scene. I also think that the shape of the sections of the Earth have a certain look to them because their initial shapes consisted of quite a lot detail and after being cut were shrunk down. In the final image this looks quite intricate, and I don't think I would of been able to recreate this using a purely digital method so I believe it was worth the extra effort. If I could have improved this scene, I think I would have found a way to make the Earth rotate slightly during the time that this particular shot is onscreen, it would have taken the scene away from the flatness that it has and made it more dynamic as a whole. I'm pleased that this is the opening scene of the animation as it brings the audience straight into the style we're going for. Furthermore, it's quite a dramatic scene and I like the idea of showing the whole Earth before going into some of the forests and the life that inhabits it, making sure to ease the audience into the feature.