Inspiration to Application

Our ideas from various places have all been inspired by something.

Originally we thought that doing an animation was a good idea. This idea changed as we realized our track had a bit of a storyline, so we added performance and a storyboard to the animation idea suggested by Jack N. Jack then suggested we should do pencil drawings for the animation, this idea was skeptical because we had to think about how long it would take, but Jack said he had many friends in the art department who could give a hand, so this made it more appealing.

In one of the next lessons Rob looked on youtube for more inspiration as he came across an old classic, take on me by A-ha. Rob then looked into how it was done in which we found out that they did the shots and then traced them. Jon took a light to this and decided on the night at home, to use his projector and trace himself in pencil.

We realised that this could take a very long time, after doing our filming, Rob looked into a pencil effect for final cut, no such luck, but came across a pencil effect for photoshop, with both Rob and Jon tried on different versions of photoshop. We found that the newer version initially was completely different due to a different technique to design the colour dodge, so this made the older version which Rob was using look better for the style we wanted. Jon then played with the image adjustments on the newer version and found that this new technique combined with the image colour adjustments seemed to make it look slightly better than the older version.

Our final problem to overcome was the amount of photos that we had to convert, which wouldn't be possible for us to recreate the same effect over an 800 image spread. So we took the idea of Macro's on Microsoft office and created a similar recreation in photoshop called actions. Jon had to adjust these settings many times to recreate the style correctly. Jon then played with the Batch Automation settings on photoshop while Rob, Jack and Jack N were splitting up the animation sections from Final Cut. The Batch Automation allowed us to allow Photoshop to executed an action on a batch of photos, so in our case our batch of 800 photos were able to be converted.