Michael's Art 328 Process

The following animation uses only one font with the other limitation being a restraint to two colors:
kids meeting with coach before game
**Needs to be run in a small window! If you run it larger than 550 x 400 it will go extremely slow**

Before I started animating I recalled from our first small group session that Chris suggested I try playing the sound clip backwards so that the words are not recognizable. I agreed that this would help relieve any continuity between animation and interpretation from hearing English words. So I went ahead and reversed the clip which worked out in the end to my advantage.

After getting about 2 seconds into this animation I realized I picked a sound that had way too many major and minor sounds to keep track of. But I chose not to back down from the challenge. The other challenge was trying to think of letters and letter combinations that I could use which would not represent humans too literally. For font choice I chose one that looked handwritten called TaylorsHand. This particular font had specific qualities that I felt mimicked the human voice in a subtle way. The edges were not sharp but organic and the proportions had good variation.

When first beginning the animation I tried to instantly start separating the sounds to letters. After an hour or two it became too aggrivating so I left the computer and went for a walk to 7-11. On my walk I tried to think of the other parts of the animation that needed attention so I could let my mind cool off from the tedious task of separating out all the kid chatter. On my way home I came to the conclusion to use two letterforms for the coach since he stood out and to make him a different color. I also thought of making smaller movie clip animations of letters jostling about to act as the background chatter; then to add irregularity to some. When I got back infront of my computer I went straight to working on the background chatter as it seemed easier to get started with.

Indeed it was easier and I had it done much sooner than I thought. I previewed the animation with two background movie clips and realized I needed more movie clips in the background to make it feel like you are surrounded at a soccer game by about 20 or so people. I went a lil overboard on syncing and duplicating which resulted in a very slow-running animation. So I pulled out the background movie clips until it ran better but still not full frame rate. I forgot to mention I added a blur effect and faded out these clips to reinforce the background quality. I believe the filter might have been causing the slower frame rate. Basically after some fine tuning I had the perfect set of background movie clips.

Next I got back to picking out the voices that stood out during the animation. There were 3 kids, grass crunching, the coach, random voice beeps and a mom sound. I picked a letter or symbol for each sound except the coach had a combination of two letterforms since his voice stood out the most. I then proceeded to follow the voices down the timeline and accent each outstanding voice with a variety of animation styles. I made the letterforms/symbols move directionally up and down and side to side depending on how the voice trailed in or out. Then depending on how loud or soft the voice was I adjusted the size over time. The only time I did not stick to this animating rule was when the odd grass crunching sound came in. To abstractly portray that grass sound I used a mask on some tilde symbols and revealed small bits in sync with the crunching. If there was a group of kids from the background shouting and coming into the foreground -- I took one of the background movie clips and brought it's alpha to 100% and animated it according to my previous animation rules.

During this animation process I tested my movie many many times to make sure I was still in sync and not killing the frame rate too bad. After a while I didn't have to test it as much since I knew from previous tests I was getting the sync correct.

On my last test I was truly amazed how well the irregular movieclips ended up matching up to voices both on purpose and by chance. It really was a work of art functioning on it's own. For the next animation I hope not to have as much tedious syncing.