Looking back on the ‘Out of Your Head Project’ I would say that my partner and I worked successfully with each other, given that we were not able to collaborate face to face. We used various means of collaborating and sharing our ideas so we could conclude on an outcome that both of us would be happy with. To begin with, we selected our five random words from the pool provided (Light, Shadow, Illuminate, Fly, and Fall) and noted down what would be achievable for a 20-second animation.
We both decided that trying to fit a full-length story into the 20 seconds would be stressful and would make the outcome feel rushed and agreed on creating an animation based on our personal experiences; particularly our experiences during the year 2021. Initially, we debated as to whether we would pick the highlights of the year, or whether we would showcase all months to show the ups and downs for some variation. The latter was chosen over the former to push ourselves out of our comfort zone.
To start the planning process after my partner and I decided on our idea, we created two separate Pinterest boards organised from January to December. We filled the folders with images that emulated our emotions during the twelve months. I picked images depending on their mood, the textures used, and colours. For example, March was a busy month for me, so my board was rather chaotic and unorganized, and had images that used a multitude of colours.
From this, me and my partner compared and contrasted our boards to see how wildly different or similar they were. In many months there were stark differences, but a few were eerily similar. One pattern that we noticed was that both boards used floral imagery. We wanted to use this as a common denominator and include it frequently within our project. Our initial idea was to label each scene with the month’s name but decided to use birth flowers (e.g., Chrysanthemum for November) to represent each month, as a less explicit approach.
Our goal was for the emotions we felt during the year 2021 to be translated through the animation. For instance, April was a very positive month for me, so I illustrated a daisy in a colourful vase. My partner, however, appeared to have a rather bleak month, and so illustrated a desolate room for the vase to sit in for juxtapositioning.
From there, we storyboarded each month and used our boards for inspiration. We then combined our ideas to formulate a final scene for each month and highlighted who will create the assets for each scene.
My partner animated many of the backgrounds for the scenes whereas I animated many of the flowers. We transferred the files to see how well the assets fit next to each other and tweaked them until we thought it would be okay to start animating. Our common software was Adobe After Effects, but individually we used separate software to produce our assets and brought our work together in Premier Pro to begin the editing process.
Compositing and editing the animation together was fairly easy thanks to my partner and I’s frequent communication with each other, we decided which transitions would look the best in-between each month, and what type of sound would fit the mood of the animation.
My partner produced the idea of using distorting the sounds of various instruments (primarily focusing on percussion) to create an eerie, somewhat musical arrangement. In-between a few of the scenes there are some high-pitched and low-pitched sounds used to indicate that the scene was over, and some sounds were used for adding texture to the animation (e.g., a ‘clunk’ when March halts to a stop, or the sound of tearing paper for October’s transition).
Overall, this project felt very successful, and the animation came out how we wanted it to even if some of our initial ideas weren’t achievable. My biggest struggle was trying to fit 12 scenes within a 20-second composition without making it feel rushed, however, though I worried about this during the editing process, the animation didn’t feel as rushed as I thought it would be when viewing the final edit. If anything, the snappy pace summarizes how quickly 2021 went by not only for me but my partner too.
I am particularly pleased with how well our scenes meshed despite illustrating them individually, and the teamwork between us was able to produce results that we were both happy with.