Sound and Image: who's in charge?

circular screen area? why not?

Re-editing...making a 1-minute movie out of a 2 minute movie. How hard can that be?
When you constructed it in an unorthodox way - as an experiment in drawing style, and the raw footage is in a ludicrous format... very. harder than starting from scratch...but it's also hard to let go of a really pleasing visual and a hard-won storyline.

So you cobble together a method and start rebuilding...and then the software, stretched to breaking point by the non-standard usage - breaks.

So you start again.

But then you realise the whole last section COULD go and the narrative element of it just be hinted at with a final image. Great, more punch, more focus. Unfortunately the very end doesn't work now. Visually, yes, but once you have remixed the new soundtrack it just peters out/ or the final sound doesn't match the final image...and suddenly you are redrawing the end , the last seconds, over and over until something clicks. And you wish you'd paid more attention to boring conventions like maintaining separate layers and keeping backgrounds and bitdepths...

And you are musing on the relationship between the sound and the image, how the pace of one affects the pace and the texture of the other. On the relative merits of the gradual fade and the big bang ending...

And then finally you finish having spent days on producing one minute of animation.

And it's a different film.

And it was worth it.

What did we learn today?

Normally, I work from beginning to end, perhaps more like writing a novel than making a film. I make a first draft - seldom a pencil test unless it's really hard to draw - and then go back over it, to re-edit, also in order beginning to end. BUT - Just because it's a cartoon, doesn't mean you can't shoot it out of sequence. So, what did we learn today... stop banging your head against the sketchbook going "wah! it's too hard to draw a little fat man doing 360 degree rolls in mid air" and - duh - move on to to the part where he's admiring his wings in the mirror. Go back to the hard part when you are feeling more energetic, have better references...or maybe rethink the sequence based on what it is supposed to show/generate/ suggest. Of course this does imply you have to have a reasonable idea where the story is going...

A proper storyboard is not in fact essential unless you want to ...maybe, work to a pre-planned deadline.
Lately I have  started annotating the cartoon-in-progress with days so I can see how many frames I actually managed in that period. This will be an invaluable aid to planning and resource budgetting  - or possibly invoke despair.

BlueSky

...has been accepted for the Amy Johnson festival,  http://amyjohnsonfestival.co.uk/ hoorah and whew and oh how pleased my Uni will be that I have something concrete (listable) to show for all the drawings Ive done. So, sometimes, it does pay off making a thing especially for a single festival/output. While colleagues discuss rewriting (dissertations. PhD papers, articles) for specific journals, it hadn't occurred to me that I could re-edit a film for a specific festival or screening...or that this would be a legitimate activity. Meanwhile I have to decide whether I can cope with time-travelling back to my old home in Hull to attend the festival! (of course I can. Too bad everyone I knew there has now moved to either Brighton or Hebden Bridge.)

Meanwhile, the strange tale of "The Slow Lane" continues, appropriately slowly.