Commentary Texts

Rob: The original idea for our Jainy song by Five For Fighting was we wanted to put a spotlight and use a piano and use an artist like using an Elton John concept and like Jack Johnson. That later evolved into giving it raw emotion and trying to make the music video memorable, we used a pencil effect which is used in like-

Jon: Like in the take on me song by aha song and a similar effect used in the JCB song by nizlopi where you project the real footage that you film on to a wall and then trace round and it and take pictures and that makes your animation, like the JCB song was all animated around sort of like a scrap book type thing, so we wanted to like incorporate things like that as though it was like opening up memories of the artist and that with his time with the girl who he sings about in the song so we then can basically bring out more emotion and things like that. Our original idea was to film the footage and then cut between bits of real performance of the artist and then we would like pencil draw all of the

Rob: Yeah show pictures of the time, that later evolved into actual animation which we used and like for instance we have a Romeo and Juliet balcony scene giving intertextuality to Romeo and Juliet shown with a pencil effect, she's walking down the stairs which she meets the artist in this scene.

Jon: But the main real effect for that was to bring out more emotion because obviously in Romeo and Juliet thats quite an emotional scene, so by adding that into our music video, again it adds more emotion to it and I think it did suit the song we chose with that sort of idea.


Jack: With the rough cut we did we had an underlining shot with just from the artist on the side, so we could then overlay other shots, but we didn't have enough time to do that with the rough cut so it looked a bit samey throughout the whole piece. We also looked at lighting, we tried to make it darker to fit more with the tone of the piece but again that was a bit of the same. Also the artist wasn't that visible with the darker light and then it meant that some of the shots didn't quite work.

Jack N: So from our feedback from our peers we found that they found that the performance was quite boring because there was similar shot all the time. So to improve that we did some tracking shots using the dolly which added various different shot to make it interesting.

Jack: With the preliminary filming we did, we filmed bits in chunks, mainly from the side of the artist, but we found that it made the actual footage a bit jumpy whenever we cut between them. Another way we got over the jumpiness of the preliminary filming, we did a single shot as like a base and then we put all the other varying shots over the top, kinda like as an overlay so it was more of a smooth transition into the change of shots rather then just a quick jump through.


Rob: The original concepts behind the production of it for instance the pencil effect for example we had difficulties getting art students together and the whole concept was going to take 600 traces of the same shots and it was going to get-

Jon: But also the actual time limit I mean we tested it on one shot just a normal image that we had but projecting that up and copying it, although it was one person doing it took half an hour to do one frame and in the end we turned out for the animation to have something like 800 or more images and I mean if you take half an hour for each one of those it's gonna take a hell of a long time to do anything and then you've obviously got not with having a whole group of people you gotta organize all of them all the time so we then started to look for other ways basically round I mean Rob you err-

Rob: Looked at the pencil effect, so we had the problem and over the weekend I looked up I thought "right what can we do?" so I thought "okay let's have a look at Photoshop" so I went on Google (as you do) and I looked for a pencil effect, typed it in and I found a relatively good one and then I showed Jon and Jon improved it and he added-

Jon: Yeah well I mean it was mainly the fact that Rob was using an old version of Photoshop at home and then we brought it in and used the version that we have here-

Rob: Cs3 isn't it?

Jon: Yeah it basically seemed to need more fine tuning because it didn't look anywhere near the same as what Rob had. So I just had a bit of a tweak using the curves adjustment on Photoshop which basically removes certain colours which with it being a gray scale image removes certain shades of gray and black that we then could incorporate the animation, but the main problem with even that is it was taking 10 minutes per image, so you got the best part of over 8000 minutes to do that. So we then had a quick look into the actions you can do on Photoshop very similar to sort like macros in Word or in something like that, where you can record a set of commands, execute them and then it did it in a couple of seconds it had applied all the filters and effects and everything that makes the pencil effect. Then the only thing we needed to do, how do we make a nice easy way of doing it on a mass of images, so we used an automated batch process that then went through every image one by one, added the filter, saved it and then we got the initial animation effect. But were going to try and change like the one where you look at where their sitting there at a lake area and the camera tilts up we were going to change that and include stars weren't we?

Bob: Yeah you were, you were thinking of. But the problem with that is that in the dark the pencil effect wouldn't work on the stars. We also faced others problems with the pencil effect for instance indoors, we tried to do a shot with the artist and the lady walking in to the piano and walking out and each time this happened the pencil effect got distorted because not enough lighting weren't it?

Jon: We were originally because obviously we were going to try and tie everything in with like the notebook effect. We were going to have the camera zooming in on the notebook in the performance and then a fade into the notebook effect. But the problem with that was the piano was an upright piano instead of a grand piano which really it wasn't easy to get the camera to zoom in effectively, so we then scrapped that idea and then the only other way to tie it in was which is in the end of the animation/performance where you have like an animated bit at the end which then fades into real life we used that idea which is obviously where we got the lighting problems because indoor if it was too dark then it just couldn'tcope, it would just remove most of the picture and it was more or less just a massive piece of white.


Rob: From our peer feedback we found out that our pencil effect that we did was a bit too white, a bit too vibrant on the eyes and so we thought "what can we do about it" and I thought of a parchment effect and the parchment effect worked a bit but it kinda distorted the colours because it was brown.

Jon: But what we did because of that it obviously made it washed out so with the parchment effect that Rob explained that we put an overlay over all of the images and changed the opacity so you could still see the animation. Problem that we had with that is that it looked like it was just a single piece of paper with a moving animation in the paper. So it was sort of a good idea but it kinda looked a bit old and didn't match the style that we were looking for. So then I looked into posturing and darkening it with a charcoal filter instead of the pencil brush because obviously it was obviously darker charcoals obviously darker then normal pencil, by doing that it was thicker and darker lines so it looked a bit better but we then decided to stay with the original idea because it was the one that looked the best when it was in full quality because with peer feedback it was still very much in a small window that people couldn't see very easily, once we do a full quality version of it we found that it looked fantastic so, we left it at that.

Rob: Charcoal didn't really do it justice anyway.


Jack N: Basically the original idea for our DVD and music cover was to incorporate a notebook. And within the notebook we were going to put lyrics to the song which has continuity because our original idea of our music video to put a notebook into the music video and zooms into our animation. Our continuity from our music video to our digi-pack is shown through the images that we put on our dvd cover and poster. This helps the audience to recognize our artist and the music video, the artist on our dvd cover is in the same animation as shown in the video and the back of the dvd cover.

Jack: Yeah we used the piano on the back.

Jack N: Yeah yeah we did.

Jack: And for the magazine advert we used an image from the video of the live performance and did kinda half and half in animation and the actual picture using opacity masks. Then we used that to show the continuity with the video and the animation at the end of the video when it goes from memory to real life, it flows from that to the magazine advert.

Jack N: The main focus of both the DVD cover and the poster is to sell the artist as much as possible and how we did that was to incorporate both the same pictures in both the DVD cover and the Poster.