Starting to understand stuff

A good week this week in terms of getting to grips with things; messing around on Flash and After-effects for live at five has helped me gain a better understanding of the programmes, and I am now happier with my weather graphics although they still need cleaning up and I fear that this could mean having to start the whole thing again, although now I know what I am doing it hopefully will not take as long.

Anyway this all helped in yesterdays workshop as I could focus more on getting the lip syncing right instead of trying to remember how everything works. I think I got the lip sync about right on my self portrait but as Andy pointed out the animation dose not really fit the mood of the sound recording. Hopefully I can go back and re-record my characters quote or change round the animation to fix this, paying more attention to the character’s emotions.

This conveniently brings me onto today’s screening; I thought that the emotions conveyed in lot of the films were really effective and well animated, for me this especially stood out in Pencil Test which showed how much could be achieved despite having a very basic character to work with. I also thought that Geri’s Game was really good; the character’s walk and movements, I thought, where very well done, creating a feeling of frailty. I also liked the use of quick cuts between camera angles to condense time and make it seem as if there where two characters playing each other.

I mentioned last week that I was becoming interested in cinematography so this week I have got myself Hebert Zettl’s Sight Sound Motion, Applied Media Aesthetics, which looks big and complicated. I have not actually started to read it yet but that’s this afternoon’s job.