I Swear, We’re Going to Have an Actor
Idiom & Visual Storytelling Process Book Rachel Bender 1
Idiom & Visual Storytelling Process Book
Contents Foreword
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Week 1: Pick Something
9–12
Week 2: Finally Moving
13–19
Week 3: We’re Gonna Have a Human
20–21
Week 4: We Have a Human!
22–23
Week 5: Refinement and Final Motion Piece
24–25
Final Thoughts
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Foreword Hey There, The end of this project coincides with the end of the school year. Not gonna lie, it’s been a stressful period. I’ve been enrolled in a lot of units, and my bizarre sleeping patterns have left me feeling semi-permanently drunk. I pushed myself to the limits of my sanity to get everything I needed to do done with a tight schedule. So for this project I only had one goal I wanted to accomplish: have fun. It started off with picking a great partner to work with, Elyse, who had a similar attitude towards how we were going to handle managing our time and efforts. (Side note: we agreed to be partners by vaguely grunting at each other and nodding our heads, no words were actually used.) Plus, she’s such a mellowing presence that it made me feel less stressed out about everything to be around her. We wanted to work smarter, not harder and end up with a video that was funny, short, and sweet. It was our first foray into stop-motion animation, and I think we learned a lot about storytelling, production, and editing. We also learned that it’s very hard for a group of people to trust you’re actually going to have a live human actor in a film when you show them a person made out of paper for three weeks in a row, hence the title of this process book. Overall, we stuck to the goal; this project ended up being relatively stress-free, and I like where we ended up. Hope you enjoy reading about the journey of how we got there. xo, Rachel
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Week 1: Pick Something “When It Rains, It Pours” Essentially, our idiom is the snowball effect: when one thing happens everything else happens too. Good or bad events, they can’t be avoided. We thought this sentiment seemed like fun to express visually, especially since it’s rather certain we will not actually be using rain to communicate our message. We are targeting college students because we can represent a relatable narrative from personal experience. We think that using stop motion will be an effective medium because it’ll show fluctuating changes in size and number of objects in a way that the audience can understand. It’ll allow to create more comical narrative vignettes. We want to have an extreme touch of ridiculousness in our video, and we think we can do more with this idea through stop motion. We do think however that traditional live video could also be effective if executed properly. Our narrative might start with an initial challenge and our protagonist working with it pretty well. Then, more challenges are added, they try to cope with them, and reach a chaotic breaking point where everything falls. Our imagery is going to symbolic. (Ex: someone juggling a ton apples, and them all falling eventually) We may reference the I Love Lucy chocolate factory scene, taking inspiration from the sheer ridiculousness of being overloaded. Any additional text would be written by us; we feel we can confidently write about the experience of having too much to do.
After looking through the options, we decided on the idiom “when it rains it pours” because we figured there could be some fun, easy for our audience to understand ways to represent that idea. It was also one that we both immediately recognized, no explanation from Google needed. A lack of experience in After Effects made us both lean towards the idea of a stop motion project, something where we could easily retouch a frame or two if needed rather than having to reshoot or reanimate an entire segment. Also it seemed like it would be the right filming format to convey comical and unreal ways of being overwhelmed. 9
Week 1
While out at lunch our first day working on the project, I had an idea that we should somehow incorporate spaghetti into one of our storyboard concepts. It ended up contributing to the bigger idea of shooting a movie involving foods that you can’t just have one piece of, such as noodles, rice, and french fries. I also became fascinated with the idea of making a type treatment out of pasta. However, we were more excited about the details of production, and we didn’t give enough attention to creating a narrative arc, so we left this idea behind. Also please note the beautifully rendered sketch of Elyse’s head used in the 3rd frame. 10
Week 1
Group messages are a modern day evil. They cannot be avoided easily, and it always seems once you’re in one, there is no escape. We thought it’d be fun to make something that only exists digitally out of physical materials, confetti and construction paper to exact. There was a stronger narrative in this storyboard, and the concept was well received during the first crit, but it felt a little too simple.
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Week 1
While our mood board for this idea was a little vague, we could clearly picture the film in our minds. Items of comically weird value and weight being thrown into a scene where our protagonist can juggle everything‌until they can’t. We saw the greatest opportunities for moments of comedy in this concept, so even though we knew it would be an additional challenge to shoot the piece with a real person and real objects, we wanted to give it shot.
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Week 2: Finally Moving
Refined mood board
A new iteration of our mood board helped us to better communicate our concept: bright, comical, unrealistic and fun.
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Week 2
You & I (Pixelation) Cristian Narvรกez
Her Morning Elegance Oren Lavie
Still Life Mark Janssen & Mink Pinste
Our inspiration videos all explored similar ideas shooting from above with a steady camera that occasionally changes angles for close ups. We liked how all three films created spaces and scenes that could not physically exist in the real world.
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Week 2
Nama by RapidFflow
Bubble Control by Tipper
Lollipop (Squeak E. Clean & Desert Eagles Remix) Our audio choices were criticized for seeming random, but we thought all three of them were quite related. They all use the sound of bubbles popping and are generally pretty upbeat. We decided to go forward with using the Lollipop remix and hoped it would be clearer how it was related once we had a rough draft of our video.
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Week 2
It was pretty easy to expand our storyboard into twelve frames, we experimented more with the idea of multiple camera angles. Putting our stills into an animatic made it clear that in order for our piece to work and be entertaining, it was definitely going to run on the short side.
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Motion Study 1
Week 2
One of the silliest, but important, questions we had during this project was: what do people actually look like when they’re juggling? What are they doing with their hands? We discovered quite that people juggle with their hands right in front them and that they rarely move as broadly as we’d been drawing them. However, this was our project and our rules of physics applied, so we filmed a quick study of what we wanted to arm motion to look like to convey the idea of juggling. Since I’m taller and unafraid of heights, I made Elyse go on the floor while I stood on a stool to shoot her from above and generally attract a lot of stares from the class. Filmmaking is so glamourous. 17
Motion Study 3
Motion Study 2
Week 2
For our other motion studies, we worked on a miniature scale, experimenting with type treatment and the movement of objects to convey the idea they were being juggled. This was also the week I got in contact with my friend Jennie, an aspiring actress who wanted to be involved in the project after I described the concept. However, because Jennie lives in Westwood and has a job and life, we couldn’t just film test shots with her on the fly, we’d need a day dedicated to filming. And considering the nature of stop motion, we knew we couldn’t shoot over multiple days. We’d have one shot to get it all, or risk having to reshoot everything. Because of this reality, we moved a tad slowly in the prep stages. 18
Week 2
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Week 3: We’re Gonna Have a Human
While shooting our first draft, we discovered just how far away we’d have to be to get a good composition in frame. It involved me standing on a stool on a table and getting way too close to the asbestos filled ceilings of Otis’ sixth floor. While we grew fond of our paper man during filming, we had studio space and our actor booked and ready to shoot for the following week. We also had future plans to work on our type treatment, there just wasn’t time in our schedule to create the letters we had envisioned this week. It was still a good and helpful experience, we knew after our shoot that lighting and craft were going to be very important to selling this concept to the class. We also learned just how much physical labor 20
Week 3
Filler type treatment
was going to go into the actual shoot. I felt bad making Elyse move all of the objects around, but to be fair I was on a very precarious stool set up and could fall off and break my neck at any minute. We all suffer for our art.
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Week 4: We Have a Human!
I don’t know why I wanted to have us rotating as part of the title credits, but I thought it’d be a fun way to fill the time requirement
Obviously not the final type treatment, but time and logistics meant we’d have to wait until the next crit to keep working on this
Little moments of pixielation when new objects appeared
Jennie’s face in every frame makes this video so much better
At last, we had our actress! Jennie is a delightful human to work with and she made everything feel more real and closer to completion. We’ve worked on several student films together, so it was nice having someone else on the project who knew something about making movies. The day of our scheduled shoot, Elyse’s car got a flat tire, so Jennie and I were the first ones to show. She helped me figure out how to set up the camera on a crazy rig high above where she was going to be lying down; I switched to a smaller one last minute because my first camera was too heavy and kept sliding down the pole. My dream of shooting directly above was thwarted by logistics, but I made the shot work. 22
Week 4
So magically good at juggling the objects never touch her hands; something we wanted to fix
A stroke of genius from Jennie to add paper tears coming down her face, made out of painter’s tape
Unfortunately, everyone else at Otis finishing their finals meant we had a limited time to get our filming done, so we didn’t get the chance to set a comprehensive lighting for fear of running out time to shoot. We added in some moments of pixelation and finally had some of our final type treatment included. Initially, we had wanted to be ambitious and incorporate the letters into the scenes with Jennie, but we figured for the sake of our sanity and not accidentally moving them, we would shoot them in a different frame. Jennie also gets major props for letting us smash a cake on top of her head...we still ate some of it afer filming, at least the parts that hadn’t touched her hair or the ground. 23
Week 5: Final Version
I don’t know why I wanted to have us rotating as part of the title credits, but I thought it’d be a fun way to fill the time requirement
After the critique of our second draft, we incorporated some of the feedback into our work, such as editing some of the frames so that the objects actually touched Jennie’s hands to make her juggling look slightly more realistic. We also changed our title sequence to include more hand cut letters and tie in with our treatment of the idiom. Our giant green extended arm was criticized, but hey, we like it, so we kept it. For most of the project Elyse handled all of our editing, which meant I was the one who repeatedly watched her work and pointed out things I thought she should be able to fix easily because I didn’t know how to do it myself. At this point in the project it was all about refinement, so I made sure she changed several of 24
Week 5
the frames where Jennie suddenly jumped to different spot on the screen, or the music wasn’t cutting at quite the right moment. In the end, I’m happy with how this video turned out. It makes me smile to watch because it’s full of beginner’s charm and I think it’s somewhat funny.
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Final Thoughts This is the first group project I’ve worked on in years that I’ve actually enjoyed. Elyse is a great friend, she’s always the first to text me if she thinks I’m going to be late to class, reminding me of the time. She’s incredibly dependable and working with her made me feel at ease and also held me accountable to getting my share of the work done. I think we split the tasks rather evenly and it felt like we were both usually in sync on what the end goal of our project was going to be. Having a team I enjoy working with changes how I feel about the process of a project significantly. Working with a live human on a stop motion piece was definitely a new experience, one I may never undertake again, but it was fun to try it out at least. We worked both quite slowly and then incredibly efficiently to get everything done, but overall I think the project definitely improved week by week. And now that it’s over, I still we had another ten to work on it, but so it goes. Cheers to the end of the semester!
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