Fugitive: Animatic 3

Fugitive: Behind Making the Sounds

A large majority of the sounds in Fugitive were recorded rather than just having a bunch of regular stock sounds. This was to give the animation life and a feeling of depth that cannot be found in some stock sounds. Areas which the sounds were recorded were Rochester, Maidstone, Gillingham and Gravesend.

As for altering and editing the sounds, there was a lot of work done around the theme of Paranoia, having odd sounds that didn't really fit in with the atmosphere really give the idea that there is something seriously off about the fugitives current situation.

The sound plays a huge role in this project and there was a lot of time spent refining and altering certain aspects of the sound to give it an original mix but still recognizable in the scene. I did all of the sound of design but Samuel Johnson gave me a huge hand when it came to getting a hold of some of the stock sounds i needed, and he did a couple sound tests, so we could refine and see what did & didn't work.

Animation Animatic - With Sound and Alterations

This is the altered animatic with sound.

The music for the video is copyright free and is called:

'Sad Urban Noir Background Instrumental | Royalty Free Music'

Narrative | OGR (Updated Version)

Due to some quality issues within the prior presentation, I have updated it and ensured that all of the work inside is a fair representation of everyone's work. Therefore below is an updated and newer OGR.

Stride OGR Presentation (Updated) by Samuel Johnson on Scribd

Research: Art Styles & Artistic Methods & Technical Development

Project Breakdown

The Story

So to begin with each group was given certain themes for their animations such as "Man vs Nature", "Man vs Man" or "Man vs The Universe", we were given "Man vs Machine".

With our idea, instead of going with traditional "Man vs Literal Machine" (Terminator, Megatron, HAL) we decided to go down a much more diverse path, focusing on the machine of society rather than a physical machine. Originally the idea was about a father who had lost his son, who later replaced his sons absence with a small robot. Given our genre the story then developed into something much more different, our storyline now follows a wanted thief in a stolen car, paranoia prominent in this thieves mind. We aim to build the paranoia through light and shape, our inspirational focus being Saul Bass. Bass's work involves extravagant sharp shapes and brilliant colours which will incorporate nicely with our use of bright lights to convey paranoia within the character. With the 'chase' becoming more prominent the colours of Bass combined with the shapes will create an intensity that will build on the paranoia and urgency of the characters. The use of Bass in our city can also be used to our advantage as we can exaggerate the city, make the builds larger than what they should appear - adding to the effect that the character is beginning to feel enclosed. Our animations end sentence is as follows: "His Knees Steadied, His Heart Beat Fiercely And He Began To Run Again", we put this into a literal context by having our main character meeting his demise at the end, he was on the run but isn't anymore.

Art Style

Zaha Hadid

An influence on our art style is a piece created by Zaha Hadid. One of our main goals for this project is designing objects that can only be seen with motion. These thumbnails have a sense of deliberate 'speed' to them, the angles used and the color combinations allow you to see these shapes as objects, but never as a solid.

Overexposure 1

Overexposure 2

Having overexposure lights as an artistic asset in the animation should allow us to give some real feelings of speed and movement. Going back, some of these photos are a good example of showing speed when it is merely a still image, when this technique gets put into the animation we should see some nice results in terms of movement.

Saul Bass

With our main influential artist for this project being Saul Bass. he mainly focuses on minimalist shapes to create organic and easily recognizable shapes. With our concept and production art we plan to incorporate these natural lines in our car, character and buildings to make it simplistic and to add to the paranoia.

The Technology/Development Process

There will be certain methods used in terms of "Creative Assembly" to create the final animation we all want, having certain aspects of the animation more complex than others so some artistic/design choices are able to stand out more.

Software Requirements/Colour Palette

The main production tools that will be used for this project will be, Adobe PhotoshopCC.2015.5, Adobe After Effects CC 2015.3, Maya 2016, CC Adobe Audition 2015.2.,CC Adobe Premier Pro 2015.3 and CC Adobe Media Encoder 2015.3. Photoshop will be used to create our basic concepts and textures After Effects will be used for giving the animation some colour management/rough editing. Maya will be used for rendering and creating our main animation and Audition will be where our sound is edited, created and stockpiled. Premier Pro is where all of the assets come together to create the final animation and Media Encoder will export the video a whatever quality is chosen for the end product. Methods for some of our animation will include characters that are moved around on 2D planes, which can be layered and swapped to give the illusion of 3D. The car will be modeled in 3D as will most of the roads.

The Soundscape

The Soundscape is a priority for this project to achieve this idea of paranoia in conjunction with Bass, the sound will give a feel to the animation without a clear physical visual input. Already we have a big stock of field recorded sounds from some members of the team and we have more coming in soon.

The screenplay for the animation has got two versions, the first is the storyline of the animation, how it flows and acts. But the second version is of sounds specifically tailored for certain parts of the screenplay, so we can get an idea of what it would sound like.

Screenplay Link

http://strideanimation.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/sounds-to-screenplay.html

Soundscape: Sounds Mixdown

Acceleration

Car Ambience

Heartbeat

City Ambience

There are 50+ sound files that can be altered. These are just some examples of what some mixtures/edits of the sounds could be like. These sounds were collected in about 3 days, trying to capture raw audio so the project seems more alive, rather than made up of cheesy stock noises. Also it will give us much more diversity in our soundscape, which is what our project will be heavily based on.