This is an advertisement for the Campus Community Farm as
part of the aspect of my SMP where I implement a publicity campaign for the
farm to get people to experience the spiritual benefits of gardening. This
project will ultimately be shared on my website, and also as a projection on
the day of my SMP presentation. This
particular commercial is supposed to share the importance of the gardening
ritual of planting. Planting is something that has been done since before the
beginning of agriculture, and the metaphor of planting extends into the
metaphysical and mental aspects of our everyday lives. Humans and plants are
connected by this metaphor. By animating a person and a plant growing out of a
seed, I wanted to show that both are capable of growth, separately or together.
The abstraction of the animation would allow for the possibility of a human
growing out of a metaphorical seed, developing into a better person, but also
the rate of growth together would mean that this process of planting helps to
create a relationship with the surrounding environment. The background of the live
action stop motion helps to enhance the context of the farm.
I used
four programs in order to create this project. I started with Photoshop to
resize the photographs that Sam helped me to take at the farm of my hand
planting a seed in the ground. This is where I learned how to use the “Actions”
feature on Photoshop, which saved me a significant amount of time in other
endeavors, such as adding a green backdrop to my illustrated frames. I then
used Illustrator to draw my animated frames. This was the painstakingly long and
arduous step of creating the piece. I was expecting to make at least 80 frames
of hand-drawn Illustration for fluidity, but I ended up only drawing 38 frames
of the human and seed growing. Toward the end, I think the growth happened more
rapidly, perhaps creating a choppier and quicker transition than I had earlier
anticipated. I had to sacrifice some fluidity and slower action for my own
sanity and for time’s sake. I also learned how to delete particular sections of
the pen lines using the white arrow tool in addition to using the warp tool to manipulate
my images for subsequent frames. When using the white tool to delete and recreate
lines, however, I had to be consistently wary of the lines not meeting at the
right point because this small mistake would cause the image to be transparent
in the incorrect place. Using only the warp tool made my lines very wavy and
hard to smooth out, but it worked wonderfully for the degradation of the seed
pod and its shadows. I then used iMovie to create separate projects for the
live action planting stop motion and the illustrated animation. iMovie is
incredibly user-friendly, and it offered basic overlay features for creating
the movie. The first one I tried was the
cut-out effect, which was terrible. Basically, the clips cut from one clip to
the other, and overlay can occur when the opacity levels are tampered with.
However, there is a black or white film on the overlay clip, which did not
offer the aesthetic I was looking for. iMovie also has a green screen effect; however,
iMovie automatically cuts out a certain portion of the image in order to
compensate for the deletion of the green, which did not serve well for maintaining
the thickness of my lines. In all reality, I probably could have used iMovie
entirely for the creation of my project, but I decided to use Final Cut Pro instead.
Learning this program was interesting and not incredibly difficult for my
purposes. It was a lot more flexible than iMovie in terms of giving me more
effects options and manipulating the clips. Instead of the green screen effect,
I ended up using the Chroma Keyer to key out the green, adjusting the luma and
saturation levels to key out the Photoshop green background from my images.
This was incredibly easy. Achieving the zoom feature correctly and flawlessly
was more difficult because I had to zoom in exactly the same for the five “GROW”
stills so that the word “GROW” did not move on screen. Once I figured out that
the coordinates could be typed in rather than merely dragging the red cross, I
was incredibly relieved. Adding in the audio was not difficult, but picking out
the music itself was a painful process. I downloaded my audio from Creative
Commons, via the website Free Music Archives.
I went
to the Mac Lab to work on this project at least every other day for three to
five hours at a time, in addition to in class studio hours. Aside from the plaster
sculpture I made two years ago, I have not spent so much time on a single art
project. Though I was familiar with most of the programs that I used, there was
still a lot of learning that I had to do, which was incredibly frustrating and
took up much of my time. Much of my time was spent looking up instructional
tutorials because I was determined to attempt to figure out the inner workings
of simple solutions without additional help. The Internet was my Godsend, in
addition to the help of Sam and Billy. Once I figured out easier ways of
working the animation, the process of my illustrations became much easier, and
making the animation a little choppier and sacrificing some fluidity definitely
helped to save time.
The
commercial is successful in its intended purpose of advertising the farm. The
beginning of the commercial starts with a story, drawing people in with a
singular hand. The purpose of this faceless hand was to help the audience
identify with the hand in some way, and to serve as a metonym for the whole
person. The music starts out slow, but changes with the introduction of the
illustrated animation. The slow piano marks the slower and less dynamic action
of planting the seed, while the accordion crescendos with the growth of the seed,
enhancing the fantasy of the seed and human bursting from a seed pod. The text slides change at the start of each
measure of the musical piece, introducing a dynamic change where one would be
expected to happen. The audio was a last minute decision, and a decision made
without much confidence, that effectively helps to improve the quality and tone
of the commercial. The overlay of animation on top of the live background
contextualizes the commercial, and also maintains the earthy atmosphere where
the transformation and growth suggested is expected to happen. The mixture of
reality and illustration serves to make the transition between physicality and
mindfulness, noting that the physical action results in a nonvisible
transformation. The white color of the animations also serves to provide a nice
contrast from the dirt; the white is pure, clean and smooth, while the dirt is
rough, shaded, and consistently shifting. This notes that though the farm is a
very dirty place, there is still some sense of purity there. An accidental
success of the piece comes from the background shifting while the text is on
screen, so as to make the commercial consistently dynamic and changing throughout,
rather than ending on a very static note. Overall, the commercial seems to be a
success. There are a few things that could be improved, though. First and
foremost, the sizing of the video does not translate well expanded, and should
have been fitted to an HD screen. Secondly, the words “Life”, “Energy”, “Food”,
and “Together” are in a darker shade of black than the rest of the outlines in
the animation. This does not help with the sense of unity of the animations and
also makes these words stand out more than everything else. However, this might
be an accidental success because it adds additional focus to those words
instead of “GROW”, which is a word that remains static throughout those four
frames. I am also wary of how the word “GROW” expands on the frame. It seems
somewhat cheesy in the film, and transitions like a Prezi presentation, which I
had hoped to avoid. I don’t know how else the transition could happen though.
I
believe I deserve an A on this project. I put a lot of effort and time into this
project, and was willing to learn a lot about the different programs. I did not
effectively fix the project to fit an HD screen, nor was I attentive to the
image sizing in the beginning either, but despite that mistake, I think that
enough time and effort was put in to deserve an A.
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