Markus Lupher Advert

Markus Lupfer is a London based clothing brand. Dannie Bennett is a 3rd year fashion student who wanted to to collaborate on a live project she got from Markus Lupfer. The brand is quite quirky and each video is very stylized  as can be seen from the videos on their website.

http://markuslupfer.com/video/

Here is a copy of her brief, showing how the collaborative video fits in to the project:

The final major project will conclude in three separate final outcomes. All three of these outcomes will be produced in collaboration with London fashion brand, Markus Lupfer. Through liaison with the Markus Lupfer brand I have defined a brief requiring me to produce an initial outcome in trend predication,  a second outcome in print design and illustration and a final outcome in marketing and branding. Through the trend prediction outcome I will liaise with the brand in order to understand and assist in the development of their conceptual trend basis for Spring/Summer 2014. Through this I will then develop my own further 4 conceptual trend ideas, which I will finalize in a trend prediction book. Further to think I will develop a range of conceptual print ideas based on Markus Lupfer’s key trend for Spring/Summer 2014. This outcome will require me to produce a fully illustrated capsule collection and a range of professional print and fabric samples in order to present to womenswear design department at Markus Lupfer. The final marketing and branding outcome will be the key focus of the final outcomes within the final major project. Through my brand research I have identified Markus Lupfer’s failure to actively market their brand. This has lead to a poor consumer brand image and also a poor level of brand awareness within consumers. Through this research I have identified three key areas to develop. The first area within the marketing and branding final outcome will be to produce a commercially relevant lookbook for the brand’s spring/summer 2013 collection. Further to this I will seek to produce a commercially relevant video advertorial campaign for the brand’spring/summer 2014 collection. The final branding and marketing outome will be to redevelop the brand’s packaging and labeling in order to be more in level with the brand’s premium price point and identity."

I split this collaboration with Brian, another animator on my course.The director wanted to project interesting imagery onto the models. Before the shoot, I took a few of the videos she liked and used the tools on AE to make them weird and wonderful. I also gave a few of the videos to Brian to edit and Suraj (a 2nd year), so that we had a variety of videos to project over the models on the day. Here are my edits:

On the day of the shoot I was in charge of lighting and staging the models. The original look that Dannie wanted to achieve was similar to  these images:

This created an unusual lighting set up for me because the projector created an unusually large shadow behind the model and Dannie wanted to be able to control that. Also with the models  being shot from the front they looked really flat. After a while of experimenting, I took the projector away and decided to light the models correctly and overlay the images on top in post. This way we would have even more control over  the video shot. I put a strong light infront so the models still had that shadow behind them and the final piece would look as though it was projected onto them. Here is a making of video showing what happened in the 2 day shoot:

While the shoot was taking place I was taking the footage and creating daily edits. These may not be in the final video but they would give the director a good idea of how the final will look. It gave me an idea of the footage fit in with the music. Fashion is not my forte so i used this time to really get into the directors vision and give her something that she would like. The music is not my taste either but it was appealing to Brian and Dannie, so this was a good chance for me to get to know their style. The daily edit turned looks really good and influenced the way the final piece was edited:

The final piece was edited by Brian. I took the footage and perfected it that little bit more by removing any cracks and pieces of tape from the stage where the models stood. Its not a very noticeable part of the video but because this was going to be projected on a large screen I wanted to make sure there were no imperfections any where. 

Sugar Water Music Video Directed by Michel Gondry 1996

This music video by Michel Gondry is very inspirational to me, It has taken me several viewings to figure out how he has created the effect. but every time i watch it, it seems as though I have missed something. I believe that the video is played normally on the left and in reverse on the right  but also flipped over. then half way through, both videos are played in the opposite direction but also flipped over. there is definitely some sort of weird transaction when the camera zooms into that message reading ' you killed me' in the middle of the video. and because our eyes are naturally used to reading writing on the screen forgetting that its a split screen, we miss the change over. I may be wrong. 

This video reminds me that special effects don't always have to be complicated to be amazing. Some times keeping it simple creates more of an impact.

'Imagine Cup' Game assets

I was asked to create backgrounds and characters for a game that students were going to make for a competition. The game story was of an astronaut who crash lands on an alien planet, level one he is on the planet surface  Level two is an underground city on the planet where he has to find the parts to fix his ship. He ends up leaving on an alien ship in level three. 

 I took this opportunity to organised a few of my piers together and be the art director for the game. I created level one above and then asked my piers to create the other levels, sticking to my art style and after a few mock ups, these were the final level previews.

Stigmata

This project was originally my tutors idea and after talking to him about it we decided to collaborate on it. The original idea was to have a group of people around a table and a camera continuously filming. As the camera goes round once, an effects artist goes in and makes marks  on the actors faces. The whole thing is done live. This was influenced by The Perfect Human:

This project then developed into two people, a couple who would be seated a meter away from each other and be staring at each other with no expression what so ever, but the effects artist working  on the live in shot would be show the emotional abuse going on between them. The violence they inflict on each other would show up as bruises on their face and torso.  This idea used less people and the message was less subtle. I started a story board for it:

The idea I had here was to make the actor preform really slowly, if they were to move in the shot at all. so the effects artist can come in and create their art. I made a test for this:

The Feedback from this test was that the FX artists would be in shot and would therefore be under pressure to finish a wound on time. This may effect how believable of the wound is. I did not want to carry this risk so I decided to have a rethink about the whole story. By this time I knew it would be difficult to work with two actors in this story, if it would have to be re thought. So I cut it to one actor and decided the conflict would be self inflicted. Here is the first story board i came up with:

I really felt like I was on to something with this new story but it was a bit borderline. I definitely knew that I wanted to play with the MILO camera rig for this project and create a singe world through a mirror for this young lady who is trapped in an abusive relationship and looking for a way out. I was told to mix the story up a bit more and really put in some physically horrible deformations as the video played on. I wrote these down as a bullet points and then made a story board out of them:

By this time I had found an actress for my effects artist. I had gone through the makeup routine with  my actress who is a burlesque dancer and had a scar  painted across my cheek to see how the effects artist works:

Now that I had a good idea how the effects art was done I could go about perfecting my story and then planning the shots in the three days I had to film. I asked a friend to be the actress so I could take actual shots of the story board and put them together  in the way i see the final film:

This gave me a good idea of the bits I wanted to change. It was not big changes, but subtle ones to make the final film look better. first of all, the camera would not need to pan  180 around the table because she will well in shot with a smaller pan. Secondly, the prop table needed to have the bottom drawer removed so she could sit in front of it comfortably. Also I realized that after i had all the footage i would be able to pick and drop the best footage to  create the best edit for the film. It may not resemble the original story board. But to have this opportunity i would first need to go through the story board and create a shot list so i knew what to film.

through out this process i had kept my actress and FX artist informed about what was going on, so on the day of the shoot i had a good connection with them. I was able to tap into different emotions with my actress and make her cry and smile  when  it was time to film a particular shot. I made a quick test edit from the first day:

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I sent this to my piers and it received some positive and constructive crit. I knew that i was  on the right track. Using a piece of unidentifiable music I edited the rest of the video and i am very happy with the out come. it means different things to different people who watch it but definitely connects with them. The thought of no background, the only item in the scene  is the table draws alot of attention to it and i think that creates a dream like state in the viewer and then thy openly accept the weird and frightening things that happen to the actress as her own thoughts and imagination playing tricks on her or memories from the past coming to haunt her. Here is my final piece:

'Our Natural World' Opener

A 3rd year media student asked me to help her on a group project. They were making a webisode mockumentary series which looks at humans in the same way as safari documentaries look at animals. I was asked to animate a camera in space zooming into the earth, through the clouds and into a building where we come close to a dish with germs in it which form to create the title. I used the opening of The Big Bang Theory as my inspiration for this piece.

I started this process by putting all the main parts of the animation in the right place. I then sent it to my piers for their opinion and was told that it looked really fake when the camera came in through the ceiling. I fixed this before adding some extra bits to jazz it up like a beam of light around the earths circumference and colour correction. unfortunately I was not able to supply sound for this project but all was well because they did not ask for it.

Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov

Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov (1899–1970) was a Soviet filmmaker and film theorist who taught at and helped establish the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School. For Kuleshov, the essence of the cinema was editing, the juxtaposition of one shot with another. To illustrate this principle, he created what has come to be known as the Kuleshov Experiment. In this now-famous editing exercise, shots of an actor were intercut with various meaningful images in order to show how editing changes viewers' interpretations of images.

   

In addition to his theoretical work, Kuleshov was an active director of feature-length films until 1943. Since 1943 Kuleshov was serving as the academic rector of Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mosjoukine was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mosjoukine's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the plate of soup, the girl in the coffin, or the woman on the divan, showing an expression of hunger, grief or desire, respectively. Actually the footage of Mosjoukine was the same shot repeated over and over again. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience "raved about the acting... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same. Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The implication is that viewers brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images, and then moreover attributed those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings. Kuleshov believed this, along with montage, had to be the basis of cinema as an independent art form. The effect has also been studied by psychologists, and is well-known among modern filmmakers. Alfred Hitchcock refers to the effect in his conversations with François Truffaut, using actor James Stewart as the example. 

 Hitchcock, in the famous "Definition of Happiness" interview, also explains in detail many types of editing. The final form, which he calls "pure editing", is explained visually using the Kuleshov effect. In the first version of the example, Hitchcock is squinting, and the audience sees footage of a woman with a baby. The screen then returns to Hitchcock's face, now smiling. In effect, he is a kind old man. In the second example, the woman and baby are replaced with a woman in a bikini, to which Hitchcock exclaims, "Now look, he has become the dirty old man." Kuleshov demonstrated the necessity of considering montage as the basic tool of cinema art. In Kuleshov's view, the cinema consists of fragments and the assembly of those fragments, the assembly of elements which in reality are distinct. It is therefore not the content of the images in a film which is important, but their combination. The raw materials of such an art work need not be original, but are pre-fabricated elements which can be disassembled and re-assembled by the artist into new juxtapositions. 

I found this effect repeated and developed further in ‘Forest Gump’.

 

Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry's vision and career began with his emphasis on emotion, according to Gondry himself much of his inspiration came from the film ‘Le voyage en ballon’. 

‘When I watch this movie, I dream I’m flying and then I do stories where people are flying. I think it’s directly influencing.’ He pioneered the "bullet time" technique later adapted in The Matrix.

How to create this effect in Maya and After Effects:

Gondry made his feature film debut in 2001 with Human Nature, garnering mixed reviews. His second film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was released in 2004 and received very favorable reviews, becoming one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year. Eternal Sunshine utilizes many of the image manipulation techniques that Gondry had experimented with in his music videos.

   

His following film, The Science of Sleep, hit theaters in September, 2006. This film stars Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, and marked a return to the fantastical, surreal techniques he employed in Eternal Sunshine. According to the Guinness World Records 2004, Michel Gondry's Levi's 501 Jeans "Drugstore" spot holds the record for "Most awards won by a TV commercial".

On January 3 2013, Gondry released his latest animated short Haircut Mouse on his official Vimeo channel.

 

4Seven Ident

One day when experimenting with After Effects I wondered to myself if I could create a paper rip effect completely digitally. Its one of those things that I have seen on TV but I can remember where. If I could, it would make a fantastic transaction for videos. I think it comes from those cheesy scene transactions that I saw on 'Kenan and Kel' when I was younger.

I thought the best way to make a reusable torn paper transition would be to make a matte that any layer can be track matted to another layer in After Effects. I began by ripping  up a dark page in a magazine and scanning the two half into Photoshop. I then used the magic wand and colour grading tools to separate the pictured part of the paper from its torn edge. I isolated the torn edge and made it a separate layer. Then I isolated the the two image pieces, making them a seperate layers, Top and Bottom. 

This is what the final looks like, you can not see the tear because it fits nicely under the Top (black) layer. this can later be luma invert matted to any layer in After Effects. The Bottom (white) layer must have the torn layer parented to it and can be luma matted to a copy of the same layer as the Top. Both couples must be pre-comped  and then the page turn effect can be added to the Top layer and animated to create the illusion that the paper is being ripped in half. If this is used as a transaction, the next piece of video can be layered under these two layers.

I decided to use this effect to create the 4Seven Ident and enter it into the competition. I thought it could be a nice quick animation which I could use to learn a new skill, and if it worked out well I could make into a little tutorial and give back a little something to the motion graphics community.

Here is an image which influenced me a bit. Its a very unusual effect which seems like it would be too difficult to achieve  physically but can be done very effectively using digital means. 

Watch the animation at:  http://vimeo.com/60763684 

My Final:

I'm very happy with my final piece, It has been a nice little break from my other, longer project and I have learnt a new skill! I don't think I need to make any real improvements on it, but I have the effect in my catalogue to use when ever I need it.

Chime Animation

For the longest time I have wanted to do character animation in After Effects because I could not achieve the quality I wanted in Flash. I looked around the web for tips and tricks on how to do this and found a fantastic tutorial on building a puppet in Photoshop and rigging it in After Effects. Daniel Gies has made a brilliant tutorial which I followed to create my character. It incorporated a good mix of coding and creativity to control the character.

vimeo.com/danielgies

   

I knew this character was going to take a long time to rig and animate correctly so I had to create an animation around 1 character with limited movement, because he would not be able to turn past 90 degrees. I was confident that the character would influence the story.

I created a test character head using some of the skills I learnt in the tutorial and was amazed at how smooth the animation looked. This raised my confidence in creating a believable character to animate with.

Password: chime

I wanted to create a character who could act and hold a scene by himself , so the top two names that come to mind are Charlie Chaplin and Rowan Atkinson. I used to watch Mr Bean alot, as a child and still do. I also took influence from his style of acting, I saw a making of Mr Bean and saw just how much of the show is improve by Rowan. The show usually contains simple goals, which are reached in a way that is out of the box and comical. Alot of the background and props are also influenced by the show. The wallpaper is a typical example, the repeated pattern sets the 90s stage for the animation.

I wanted to style my characters clothes on a modern gentleman. I did not want the animation to look too aged. I feel the mix works well. I really like the bowler hat and umbrella/ walking stick.

 

I started drawing sketches of the character so I could visualize the image of the character in my head. I had to then upload the face on Photoshop and break the pieces of the face up into different layers. The hair was the hardest thing to break up because I wanted the hair clumps to look seamless in the final. I colour graded the layers in Photoshop before importing the into After Effects to move them around in 3D space.

Final Design Sketch.

I continued working on the contrast and colour of the hair and face when I was constructing the face on AE, This project has to have the most compositions I have ever used in a project and it required me to use almost all the AE tricks i know and learns some new ones. I have full control over the eyebrows, eyes and mouth sync.

Final Character Design.

Im quite happy with the final design, its meant to look like its made out of textured cardboard. The final image is surreal but It fits the scenery and therefore makes a convincing animation.

The backgrounds were made with a mix of textures and photographs I took. In the above image,  the rack with suits is a picture of my wardrobe  and the wooden paneling are textures arranged in 3D space to get the shadow correct in After Effects. The pictured taped to the door was composited in Photoshop by combining a character i drew and painted with a background of a landscape, marked into a textured photograph piece. 

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To finalize the images I colour graded the comp and added lighting in the appropriate places with alpha mattes. Once all this was done, I was ready to animate the character. The story was simple, a mans race against time to get ready for the moment the clock chimes so he can see the woman he likes. I thought an appropriate deadline for this animation was the clock makers competition that was soon approaching. I have created the animation and entered it into the competition, but feed back from my group indicated that i needed to make a few changes, which I plan to have ready for my final show.

Here is the piece I entered into the competition:

Password: chime

Improvements to be made:
1.Variety of footstep sounds.
2. Some scenes drag, not enough happening.
3. Acting is not good enough.
4. Clock Sound building and animate second hand rather than minute hand.
5. Make clock 3D to emphasize second hand coming down.
6. Don't show credits until animation is finished.
7. Final tick on door opening.
8. Show that he gets close but never gets to kiss her.