Out of your head

out of the word blank we chose these 6 words – decay, lies, greed, forget , hope, silence

At the start we discussed quite a lot of what ideas we had for this 20 sec story like what genre we wanted it to be and the visuals/techniques we were going to use to make the outcome. Initially our story was going to based on an overpopulated world, discussing topics like class division, pollution, etc and wanting to reference artists like Lotte Reinger and John Galliano. Our story that we did start to plan out was a lot more detailed and wouldn’t be able to fit in the 20 second time frame so we ended up boiling it down to what we liked about the story we had so far, that being a clear visual of the two different classes or contrast in two groups of people and having it be set in a dystopian apocalyptic world.

The issue we came across when coming up with the story was that what we had was too long and parts would be irrelevant to the story and would be taking up time we could show to other parts. For our first storyboard, the first few seconds of the story we wanted to do a sequence of a person underground going through photos and having different reactions to the photos being shown. However it was discussed between everyone that its adds more confusing to who the person flipping through the photos is and also if it was needed, it was advised that we started on the part where we see the two characters interacting as we intended to show their story.

At the same time we established that there was going to be a protagonist and an antagonist, exploring different character designs we took the ideas of how the protagonist was meant to be the example of hope so we chose to make the character a kid and to contrast the antagonist was sharper and the character design had to show there greed and unlike-ability.

From the feedback we got on our first storyboard we focused on the interaction between our two characters, during this we also established that there wasn’t actually a conflict to change the story from the start to the end, so we thought of changing the interaction section and making it clearer that the women is actually the antagonist. Changing it to before the boy and the women’s interaction it would be shown that the boy is planting and taking what he’s grown and as the woman goes on her stroll she encounters him and sees that he has something that’s she doesn’t already possess which is food, she tricks the kid into giving her some but realises that wasn’t enough and takes everything he has. But also because she takes his things there must be a consequence to her actions and to having that change in the story, we thought it would visually be interesting to explore the transformation of nature taking over her.

We ended up changing the way she was overtaken by nature since before it took over her house and the feedback we got was that it wasn’t a big enough change and that we needed something drastic to change the end from the middle or either a change to the beginning. Instead of the vines taking over her house it would also engulf her.

combining all the ideas from the final storyboard translated well into the animatic since what we had was around 20 seconds.

Since our storyboard was formed we worked on the visuals and aspects like the colour palette that we wanted. We were inspired by these images below, taking the apocalyptic idea into mind, bright colours came to mind to show the intensity of the damage that was caused to this world.

Initially we wanted to film it rotating however the set piece was too big so to overcome this we shot a single frame and animated it digitally. I think it works well still because it still has the textures of the cardboard and if we did film it, there would’ve been movement.

The ‘Out Of Your Head’ project was my experience making my first short film and it being a collaborative first project really helped me ease into the process, Also, having a group helped with time management and getting each of our parts done quicker. Our project was a joint effort meaning we didn’t separate the scenes to allocated group members but focused on allocating different roles like set design or character design to each other which helped make our film look consistent in style. In the beginning, it was quite tough to come up with a story that fit within the 20-second timeframe especially since it’s so short but when we did come up with the story there were other difficulties like planning how big our set pieces would be compared to the rostrum setup, however, we overcame this by filming what we can and then editing it later and using green screens. For this editing section, it was quite simple since we filmed it all with stop motion and didn’t use any other media, but the sections like the world spinning had to be done on After Effects as well as the green screens of our two characters running were also edited into the shout of the world spinning which was simple and quick to do. When filming the actual stop motion, it was less complicated than I originally thought and was done quite quickly but we did come across a problem as we chose to use paper dolls, they were very fragile and it was quite hard to move them without breaking there pose as well as the rostrum camera showing the bars holding up the set up so we ended up using cotton for the clouds to the set which in the end worked out and added more depth to the scenes. In the end, the final film was shot similarly to the animatic but was missing some shots since it would’ve been too long, but the final film in my opinion still makes sense without it. Our logline/concept was ‘following a devastating factory meltdown, a hope-driven young boy attempts to replant a barren earth, only to have a chance encounter with the only other person that hasn’t run underground – a cowardly woman who only cares for her worthless wealth’, our concept was inspired by the 6 words from the start of the project and the ideas branched out to make this film and main inspirations why we filmed this way were the films “The Little Prince”, “Au Revoir Balthazar” and the artist “Aoi Tokunaga”. Overall my experience with this project was very positive and it was a good first project, especially after the 6 weeks we had before this project, we ended up getting inspired by the stop-motion lectures and the different films and artists shown during those two weeks and incorporating that into our out of you head project. The hardest part for me was the start of the project when we had to boil down our ideas into a consistent story and try to fit that into the 20 seconds.