Final Piece

No Strings Attached from Chloe Debonnaire on Vimeo.

I enjoyed doing this project as I liked being able to experiment with different things in After Effects. I  did however find the puppet really difficult to animate as it was so different to anything I had ever done before. It took a lot longer than I thought it would to animate each limb and I realised I wouldn't be able to get in as much movement as I had hoped to.
I did like the comparison of the two screens, and I spent quite a lot of time trying to match up the puppets movements with the alert from the phone. This was intentional to show the pull technology has on our lives.
If I did it again I think I would spend more time animating the puppet, and getting it to do more movements as I think that would be a lot more interesting for the viewer. I also think I would do something different for the background of the puppet, perhaps some thing more simple that wouldn't distract from the rest of the film.

Second Screen

In contrast to my animated puppet, on my second screen I am going to have a live girl going about her daily life, and getting pulled away from what she'd doing by her phone.
I initially thought of having her physically jerk her arm up when the puppet does, like as a stronger link between the screens but I decided it was a bit too much of an 'in your face' idea and wanted to make it more subtle.
I instead just matched up the times of the puppet moving its limbs to the girl picking up her phone.

During filming I experimented with lots of different types of shots, such as point of view and wide angles.

Puppet Development

I knew that the first problem I had was that I had a very limited knowledge of After Effects, so I began watching tutorials on Lynda.com. I eventually found one that suited what I wanted to do, it taught me a technique called 'parenting' which is where you link one limb to another, making the one you want to be the 'dominant' limb the 'parent' and the other one is the 'child', so when you move the 'parent' limb the one thats connected to it moves with it.

I made a basic stick man on After Effects using shapes, and practiced making a character move in different ways, and getting used to the technique. 

I wanted to make my character look more human-like and so I did some practice drawings, adding in more joints and body segments that theoretically should make the puppet easier to move.

I wanted to incorporate some characteristics from the puppets I looked at for research but also keep it simple for me to animate, so I added the big empty eyes that seem to be a recurring feature in most Voodoo/Mexican skull puppets.

I drew each body part of my skeleton individually and then imported them to After Effects where I assembled the puppet as a whole.

Puppet Research

As our theme is humans and technology, I came up with the idea of being controlled by technology, and by extension I thought about puppets. I wanted to use this as a metaphor for how technology has a constant presence in our lives and often pulls us away from things that we're doing. For example when I'm out with friends/family or doing work, if my phone goes off I'll usually stop what I'm doing and check it.
This lead to my decision to do my dual screen with one screen showing a person going about their day, and whenever they get distracted by their phone the one of the puppet's arms or legs gets pulled up.
My first thought from this was what should me puppet look like. It needed to be relatively simple as I knew I would need to animate it but I was quite interested in the idea of voodoo dolls and Mexican skulls, so I looked at images of them as a source of inspiration.

Mexican 'Day of the Dead' puppet

Skeleton Marionette 

African Voodoo doll

Twin Screen Project Initial Idea

Initially I thought of doing something to do with constellations, and having an animation created on after effects of a specific star sign being drawn on one side and on the other side a live action film of a person to whom that star sign belongs and them doing an action that links them to their star sign.
I began looking at lots of different videos of constellations created on After Effects such as:

I found this graphically very interesting and I thought it might be something I could try out, and it also linked to the After Effects tutorials we had been given over the past few weeks, where we learned how to use shape layers and made things appear as if they were moving in across the screen. My thought was that it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to do from what we had learned and would be very visually interesting.
I soon moved on from this idea as it seemed very superficial and didn't stretch me creatively.
I began looking at examples of dual screen films and and other short films, and I came across some interesting films involving shadow puppets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrpMncSZe-I

Final Edits

Aries

'Upbeat and magnetic personality'

'Always look out for their friends with caring and generosity'

'Natural optimism'

Capricorn

'Deep, mysterious and full of intrigue'

'They live by self discipline and responsibility'

'Concerned by public standing'

Libra

'They have mastered the art of relationships'

'Lazy when getting their hands dirty and doing work themselves'

'Likely to be underachievers' 

Taurus

'Not a total social butterfly, and can be shy to strangers'

'They have a stubborn streak that can result in laziness'

'Avoids talking about their emotions'

Virgo

'They need to learn to calm down and not over analyse a situation'

'People might find them cold or detached'

'Can tire themselves out without even moving'

Photoshop

After importing my images into photoshop I was quickly able to see that I had to do quite a lot of colour editing as I had done my photoshoot over the course of an afternoon and was using the light from a window, so the sun changed over the hours I was there, which created different tones and colour hues on my subjects skin. To compensate for this I use the adjustments tab in photoshop and used the 'exposure', 'brightness', 'contrast' and 'saturation' tools to play around with the colours and make them match each image. 

I also cropped the images down to help with the framing.

I had a slight issue with the composition, as when I took the photos I was too focused on the subject and when they showed expressions to notice the framing at some points, which meant that I ended up with some odd areas in the background. 

An example of this would be in one of the photos I had cut a photo frame in half, which distracts the attention of the viewers from the main subject of the photo. 

To overcome this I used the clone tool to edit out the photo frame from the edge of the image, so it's just plain wall. I also cropped the images down to help with this.

 

I wanted to try out something that was inspired by Amy Friend, and I was thinking of trying to incorporate star signs into my work but when I did it ended up looking tacky and so I decided that it would look better without.