Finished Prologue!!

Beginning to notice all of my posts have titles with exclamation points. Whatever, I'm excited all the time! Anyways, YAY I finished the paper animation! I think this will be all that I reveal of the episode until it is totally completed. I decided to post it as sort of a self-contained promotional thing for the project.

When edited into the actual episode, there will be narration to give it a bit more clarity. I know it's not the most cohesive thing right now, but I promise it will make sense in context.

Everything in this was done with layers of cut out paper. I would have liked to use a multi-plane set up with sheets of glass and stuff to give it more depth. Alas, we work with what we can. I can safely say that this is the fastest animation I've made ever. I was able to print/cut everything out, animate, composite with some slight ae alterations, and organize sound all in 1 week. So glad I could kick this out quickly and get back to focusing on the claymation stuff. I'm not too sure when everything needs to be done, but I know it's quickly approaching. My hope is that I'll have a hodge-podge of different clips that I can just edit down into an interesting episode using the video portion to string it all together. That's not a part I'm too worried about either. Back when it was just video, we were kicking out episodes over a weekend's time.

I'm particularly excited about those birds. To get that weird video-ish effect I printed out an image of a big flock of birds flying away, and picked out 5 different birds that were in different flying positions. Then I ordered them 1-5 and switched out the different birds for every 2 frames as they were moving across the screen. Stumbling across this idea makes me REALLY want to explore it. I think I might try to find more animals to animate this way and make a kind of Eadweard Muybridge style collection of movements.

Anyways, I can't think of too much else to write about this little guy. The music ended up working out really well. I only had to transition it to other sections of the recording a couple of times, like when the battle scene starts, and near the end when the woman is in the woods. Otherwise, there were a lot of awesome unintentional music cues, stuff like the band of warriors popping on screen in-sync with those little harp strokes. I saw it when I played it back the first time with this music and nearly exploded from happy. Pretty much all of the sound came from Freesound.org. I can't express how great this site is, and after this project is done I intend to upload my library of recorded ambient noises to it for public domain use. It's the least I could do to give back to a community of people who just love to go out and record whatever random noises they think of for anyone to use. So cool.

So yeah! Hopefully you guys enjoy this stuff as much as I do, I intend on returning to this style when I get the time. Meanwhile, it's 1:33 am and I still have a paper to write for tomorrow. So I'll end it there and stop my yappin'.

(ps. sorry mom, I know I said I'd have this uploaded so you could see before it was really late at night, oooooops.)

(pps. my friend kelly made this a while back, and I feel that it belongs here)