Animation Project: "Ode to the Actor" dedicated to TCNJ Musical Theater

final project proposal

My final project is going to stretch my understanding of gesture and special effects in both final cut and after effects. It is going to be a heavily animated sweeping romance. All of the scenery where I will place my characters will be shot in video with the exception of zoomed stills for close-ups on small gestures. I am extremely inspired by imperfect animation that has artifacts of the animator’s hand. I think it adds warmth that plain photos and videos lack. I want my project to have a very overcast feel with subtle and graceful colors, maybe even black and white. I think the combination of animation with manipulated video made to look as if it was filmed in the silent movie era is very compelling.
I am torn over my plot. I am very drawn to history and anything period in it’s look and feel. I want to make a silent animated film with dialogue pages. I want the characters to move and act like Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin, and Errol Flynn. Everything will be very melodramatic with characters that mimic the smooth and swooping lines of the early 20th century. For the plot’s setting, I’m torn between Edwardian, Victorian, or turn of the century costuming and subject matter. It will be a corny, yet poignant forbidden love story that ends in tragedy, as if the characters are ghosts haunting the locations.

"Ode to an Actor" self-critique

I am very proud of the result given the immense amount of technological difficulties I encountered during the process. I was greatly inspired by the rotoscoping examples on the blog for the darkened figures, which I just now realized are almost identical to iPod commercials. That's one of my self-critiques. The similarity didn't cross my mind and I hate the unoriginality, but I'm hoping that the animated feature changes the overall feel enough so that it doesn't look like I directly copied a commercial. If given more time, I would like to have included more intricate animations that are interactive with the figure. I would also like to expand the genres so that the audience receives at least eight different settings and visuals. On the whole, the masking done with the figure is quite clean and I'm happy there's no fuzz around his movements. For a small project, I'm happy with the result but would like to expand and pay more attention to detail