KM VID
C Studio / Spring Sem
hi all…
The End (of the semester) is Nigh
The last leg of Design Hero is here! Get ready for After Effects crashes, minuscule keyframe adjustments, motion that persists in looking not-quite-right (even after 3 hours of tweaking), and other juicy tidbits o’ fun
for the whole family to nosh on!
After a good 10 minutes scouring YouTube, I was able to compile a list of 5 or so Karel Martens interviews with real potential. Then, after a good 3 hours watching these videos (most of that time was devoted to 15-second rewinds and trying to get past Karel’s accent), I had a nice list of KM anecdotes which could be frankensteined together into a script.
The voiceover requirement presents me with 3 big challenges:
- Karel is Dutch. His accent gets quite thick at times, making him difficult to understand.
- Karel is elderly. All love to him, but as the body ages so do the vocal cords, and his voice is showing the effects of a good, long life well-lived.
- Karel doesn’t necessarily do speeches or formal talks. He does a lot of interviews, but they are casual, unrehearsed, and full of riffing. Because of this, it was tough to find concise, polished stories — instead, I ended up with a google doc full of punchy KM one-liners, as that’s where he really shines.
Top this off with the asinine background music in most of his interviews, and you get some pretty unusable audio clips. I’ll need to cobble together a script-collage, and I’ll need it to be read by someone other than Karel.
Here’s what I settled on:
A cocktail of miscellaneous Martens quips mashed into a neat little lump. Actually pretty proud of this — I was hoping to focus on his exploratory process & his mono-printing techniques, as those are my favorite aspects of his character / practice.
I enlisted my dad to read my script. He refused to be serious about it for like the first 3 takes. Should I turn the last 10 seconds of my video into a blooper reel?
He was eventually sent over 4 good takes, which I spliced and diced into one final cut.
Now for music:
I’ve had this playlist in the works for a week or so. These tracks all remind me of KM in their own special ways, but most include delicate plinky noises and layered percussion, which says “mono-print on museum card” to me.
I’m going with Definition by Kruder & Dorfmeister. Love acid jazz, love these guys, love the woodsy flute and the rising/falling chimes. Also a huge fan of the drum beat… I think this song sounds like lead type on pulpy paper.
And don’t worry, I uploaded this song to YouTube to check the copyright status and there have been no issues! I know I’ll be dissatisfied with any royalty free music because I’ll spend hours looking for one that sounds just like this… but such a song does not exist.
The final arrangement. Feeling surprisingly good about it (please ignore the minute of dead air at the end, I’m going to pretend it’s for artistic purposes). My dad sounds serious, the intro before the beat breaks in the song feels well paced, the voiceover synchs nicely with the music… it’s coming together!
Last Weekend of March
The feedback on my audio in class was reassuring. As I was splicing and dicing, I became worried that my story was too simple, that the narration was too sparse, and that I’d gone too “small” with my story by intimately describing KM’s explorations with color. Turns out, these are all positives! My story is relatable and easy to digest, and the gaps in narration leave room for animated action. Locked in! Onto the animatic.
As a Hamilton veteran, I’m well familiar with the world of animatics. I took a shot at the first 25 seconds of my video and whipped out a draft. Even though I usually block out the entire video before moving to audio synching, this narrative segment was the clearest in my mind so I went straight to it.
Notes for myself:
- Redo the first scene. I don’t want my animation to feel grounded in “real spaces,” which means no detailed, painterly roadside backgrounds (though I will keep the picking-up-object motif). Probably also means no shelf in the money jar scene. The action should feel fantastical, intentionally divorced from actual physics… it should take place in a warm, colorful void.
- This may also mean removing the frequency of hands. The paintbrush scene could be executed with a floating, spinning coin and a paintbrush operated by an invisible appendage. Though I do like the visual of a human hand creating a print… keeps it relatable.
- Some hands are definitely ok! In scenes where the audio references Karel’s actions (collecting metal objects, looking for a solution) I can bring in the human body. A hand, an eye. I won’t reveal the whole face.
- Revisit the paintbrush scene. Maybe ask Brett to give an opinion. Right now I’m leaning towards including hands, but severely reducing their level of detail. Talking vector art sausage fingers… way more designerly than my usual illustrative style. Easier to animate, too.
Monday Draft
Slogged through the rest of the audio and finished up the animatic! Hopefully Brett doesn’t think it’s too polished. Even though I definitely blocked out more motion than I had to, I like working this way. Since I’m planning on being very ambitious with this project, I wanted to draft at a higher fidelity, both to cut down on the work I may have to do later and to see what parts of my vision are actually viable for execution.
Still, I’m not feeling precious about it. If I have to rework and iterate, that’s all good with me. Sunk cost fallacy-shmallacy. Regardless of the crit I receive, I think sinking this many hours into an animatic has prepped me for the rest of the project nicely.
Storyboard: All Laid Out
Post-Crit Update
The animatic got a warm reception… save for a couple of scenes, but nothing that more brainstorming can’t fix!
Brett pointed out that a few keyframes felt cheesy, corny, cliche, or any other negative word that starts with a C — particularly the curiosity sign and the crumpled paper. This is so true. I don’t wanna be the “I saw this coming” guy, but as I was sketching these scenes out, I had a nagging hunch that I could do better. I get that hunch a lot, but this time it was right on the money.
Otherwise, I think I’ve got the all-clear. I’ll revisit the odd-scenes-out once I’ve gotten some actual animating done… maybe inspiration will strike as I’m moving through the process!
Collecting my Thoughts
As Vicki had taught us last semester, I began laying out high-fidelity frames in Illustrator. I quickly realized that the slick, vectorized, perfect-circleness of the metal washer was really going to get on my nerves.
One of the first big critiques I got in the poster project was that my work looked very digital. I combatted this with texture, paper motifs, and the human touch of handwritten pencil notations. I may have to employ similar strategies for my animation… I want to do my best to avoid “perfect” shapes (as seen above).
During an inspo hunt on Pinterest, I came across these delicious little gif samples:
… which really encapsulate the hand-drawn / traditionally printed / playful / distressed vibe I want to capture.
I’m thinking I’ll do a lot of frame-by-frame animation in Photoshop, as raster > vector for those imperfect, hand-drawn forms. Frame-by-frame is also one of my strong-suits, so choosing this method makes me feel much more confident in my ability to execute my visuals. Plus, drawing hands in Illustrator would whoop my ass. I’ll learn proper vector animation someday, but not with 3 weeks left in the semester and a final project to crank out.
“Hey, that doesn’t look right!”
After drawing a bunch of circles and hands in Photoshop, I began the arduous process of animating my frames in After Effects. I quickly noticed that I did not like the result at all. I’m going for a very hand-drawn aesthetic, and the smooth motion that keyframing brings to my animation disrupts this intended vibe.
Something I’ve had a lot of success with in the past is using the timeline feature in Photoshop to animate. I position each frame individually, then run them all in the timeline to test how the animation looks. This gives me a lot of freedom — I’m able to make the motion artfully choppy or create jumps between frame positions quite easily. I’ve been spending more time than necessary on fighting AE to position frames correctly… as janky as this approach is, it might be more efficient to just lay ’em out in Photoshop.
Scrapping and switching my approach.
After rethinking my animation strategy, I’m happier with the result. It has more personality and was much easier to compose!
Monday Night — One “Scene” Done
Just under 15 seconds down. SO much more to go.
I’m happy with how this is coming together, but the road ahead is daunting. This is two days of near-constant work… admittedly, a lot of that was trial-and-error for animation strategies, but still!
This is gearing up to be an extreme labor of love... if I can get it finished. For that shakey-shape effect, I’m redrawing each frame upwards of 4 times, literally quadrupling the amount of work I’m doing. I’m too infatuated with the effect to give up this approach, though. I’ve heard there are scripts you can run in AE that create this effect for you, but they probably wouldn’t look as good… and I gotta admit, I’m having fun with the redrawing. Very zen, very adult coloring book. I say this now, but check in with me next week to see if I’m still enjoying myself.
If I stop updating this blog, it’s safe to assume I’ve gone insane from the monotony of tracing over the same circle hundreds of times.
Feedback from Caleb: Smooth motion of incoming type feels like a departure from hand-drawn aesthetic. Bring in printing motifs / jitters to that type?
Sunday Night — Almost 30 Seconds
Really pleased with this so far. Definitely some inconsistencies with type at the begining (no smudged effects yet), but that’ll be easy to remedy. I’m having a lot of fun with this!
Hand drawn animation isn’t something I can rush. I feel like I’m making good progress, but it’s admittedly slow. Still, I’ve gotten into a good groove, and I’m more than willing to sacrifice sleep this week to get things done.
Video for Tuesday Crit
Working my ass off but feeling good about everything.
Crit from peers:
- Lack of continuity with the fonts at the begining — this will be fixed!
- The jittering border could be lightened up a bit. It’s distracting at the moment…
- People are big fans of the kinetic type work I’m doing, so I’ll keep that up!
I’ll make the appropriate edits to rectify these issues, then keep pluggin’ along on the rest of my animation.
The only thing that’s starting to wear me down is my workflow. Since I’m creating all my motion by hand and individually composing each frame, all of my photoshop documents look like this:
Each layer here is turned on at 30% opacity. Each letterform you see in this image has been individually placed, which is in no way light work. Using this process for all 20–25 scenes in my animation adds up to… a lot of hours.
And this is my desktop! Jesus Christ. All of these photoshop files are seperate scenes from my video.
Final Animation
I did not make this easy on myself. I probably could’ve found ways around the tougher bits of my process— running scripts to achieve a wobbly, hand-drawn effect, messing with AE frame-rate presets to create choppier motion, etc… but for some reason, it was extremely important to me that I do this the meticulous, detail-oriented, almost-analogue way. As challenging as this was, I felt like I was emulating Karel through it all. He takes his time and avoids the easy way out. It seems like he places as much importance on his process as the final result: if he feels that he’s cut corners, it’s like the final result is less meaningful even if the piece is perfectly passable. I think he & I are similar in that way.
This animation is one of the coolest things I’ve ever made… and I wouldn’t be nearly as proud of it if I’d let After Effects lay out all those frames for me.
