Melia McCubbin
Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Octave
Objective: This animation is about realizing when you are in a one-sided relationship and deciding to do something about it.
Tools used: For each frame I drew a single black outline of the figures with a thick marker. I used Photoshop® to scan each frame, then set up actions to delete the area around the characters to remove dust, stray marks, and registration holes. The actions would then select the surrounding empty space and use the Expand, Feather, and Fill functions to create the white outline and the surrounding black area. I used the Batch function to apply an action to groups of frames at the same time. After I assembled the frames in sequence as QuickTime movies, I used After Effects® to move the movie of a swim cycle of a character across the frame and to composite the facial expressions with the bodies. The final individual sequences and sound were then edited and cut together in Adobe® Premiere®. Since each sequence of drawings was scanned at a different time, I had some problems with registration. It was really helpful to be able to import the whole Adobe Premiere project back into After Effects so I could shift the frame of each clip a little to the left or right, or up or down, to get it to line up with the previous clip, without having to re-assemble the whole thing again in After Effects. The final movie was then rendered in After Effects.
