Sarasota Film Festival

Our final project for the semester was a collaboration with our Concept Development class. 

The brief:

Create an engaging :30 promo/open for the 2012 Sarasota Film Festival that reflects the best of the Sarasota community that we as an arts organization represent. 

Use “Why I Love The Movies” as a general theme and conduct audio interviews of the people of Sarasota, which reveal something special and personal about the individual’s love of film/movies. These interviews, done in a documentary style, will form the concept of the individual trailers. Using the words spoken in the interviews as the concept for their piece, but students have the freedom and are encouraged to be as imaginative as possible when animating the interviews. The idea is to have a “documentary” soundtrack, but for the images on the screen to be as fun and imaginative as possible.

Process:

We were in charge of seeing this through, developing the concept and presenting our final storyboards to the client.

From the final presentations my concept was chosen as one of the 12 in the course to be animated with a partner in our animation class. 

My concept was based on representing symbolically word by word what the interviewe was saying in a sand animation, taking this as a metaphor for time and change, and aspect that we experience in the film world from traditional to the more modern movies of today.

The process in itself was very interesting. We were to first create the animation in After Effects and then take it into the stop motion lab and use it as a base to record it with sand.

Working with a partner:

In general the organization aspect of the project was probably the most challenging for many reasons, the first which we experienced right from the begining was the different working schedulles my partner and I had.

I'm a night person, I feel I'm most efficient during the night and am used to staying up until very late hours of the day to have the work just perfect, whether it compromises my sleeping schedulle or not hahah.

My partner is the opposite, she is a day person, and is used to getting the good and healthy 8 hours of sleep, a trait sometimes I wish I had. 

Although challenging, we managed to work around it, I realized it was probably best if we began early anyways and if anything needed to be tweaked I could always stay up later and make the final touches.

After Effects Animation:

I would say one of the biggest challenges we faced with this section was getting the right movements down. We spent a lot of time with the animatic; which is something I had never worked on before and I have to admit that, had it not been for our tedious work with the animatic and its frames, we would not have been able to create the animation in time. 

Sand Animation:

After weeks of working with the after effects animation, when it finally came to working with sand we were both glad to finally be able to get out of the computer and start working with something more manual.

Working with sand was definitely an incredible experience that I would definitely like to work on again.

Although tedious and exhausting at times, what I enjoyed most about this project was the process, and the idea of creating an animation from scratch in after effects and then taking it to the stop motion lab with Dragon stop motion and recreating it.

And the idea that this is a technique that professional companies use today, which made it feel even more exciting since we are from now getting our feet wet with how it works in the actual industry!

Final Animation: