Today we finally exported our video. It took two days to get the audio done, after re-exporting all our files due to a formatting problem of the originals. The originals were 5k and far too big to edit, export or play on the macs we were using to edit.


The title of our video is 'Where Alice Went'. It is a combination of both of Lewis Carroll's books about Alice. The title is not taken directly from the books, but it felt really fitting with the strangeness of using London as Wonderland. We did use the colour blue for her dress as happened in most movies and tv shows.
There are a couple of shots that have not been used in the final video due to not having sufficient material or not being quite sure where to fit tis in. The video is highly surrealistic due to the nature of the source material. As the books are both made up of short scenes that seemingly have nothing to do with each other other than alice being in them, this is similar in our video. We were however restricted in our video due to the labour intensive animation process and the need to learn more about After Effect before being able to make our puppets move. This mean that the video is not as good as I hoped it would be, but it still is an incredible feat I feel due to the limited access to recourses and the short time we had to work on this video, especially considering the 2 week holiday in the middle of our production. 

The end of this production might also mean the end of this journal. As it is part of my coursework, I'm officially not allowed to add any more posts after 11am (BST) today. So as much as I would like to continue, I can't. So this might be the end. I do however have another blog which has nothing to do with my coursework , and everything to do with Film and Tv, so feel free to find me at 'A Touch of Iris' =)

Altough the script has never really been finished, there is a shot list which can be found below. It came out of all the shots we had taking around london and in Kingston in combination with the characters we were most interested in during our research. The highlight colour indicate who is animating the shot, the strip-through shows if the shot is done and the red colour indicates if the file has correctly been exported. As you can see, all of the files and shots have been done.

Next to making working on my own project, I'm also helping out others. In this case, a project Amanda and Rosie are working on about international students and as an international student myself I've been helping them out.

Past Sunday we filmed several scenes at my flat, to be used in their video. Before the filming, however, I wrote a short piece about being an international student at Kingston. The whole text can be found below.


This text has been recorded in the FASS audio suite. I've been using the recording studio for a while now and know very well how to get the best recordings. So when we recorded the voice-over before the filming I helped Amanda out, although Neill explained most of the basics to her. Not all of my text was used, as there would be an intercutting of four international students in the video and only parts of each text would be used.

The recording of the shots went very well, especially because Amanda and Maddy had made a shotlist and knew exactly what they wanted. I've never acted before, so this was a very new experience. I'm very glad I did not have to learn any lines as everything is done through voice-over.

While this might be a video project, mostly still images are being used. This is to make the backgrounds of our video stop motion but also to animate drawn (still) characters. To make any of it move, the pictures need to be brought together in a pleasing way as to create movement.

For the background, Teresa worked in Premiere Pro. It should be noted that she took all the photos in RAW format on a Nikon D60. This means that the images are larger than your regular image and that they cannot just be used, but need to be colour corrected and exported first. Luckily, Teresa already had experience with the RAW format and thus how to colour correct it. Although it is mainly her work, she did teach em how to import and change RAW photos as well. In turn, I helped Teresa with Premiere, but as all Adobe programming shares similar functionalities and shortcut keys, she got into it quite quickly. 

As Director, I mostly oversee what the other are doing. This includes them constantly asking me to look at their work to se if it is as I wish it is. I'm very grateful that they constantly want my input instead of just going of to work on their own. It does however keep me from doing my work creating puppets sometime.

A skill I definitely still need to work on is managing/directing. When it comes to setting self imposed deadlines, I've not pushed hard enough or be certain enough of when I wanted something done. To add to that, officially, the script still isn't done...

Adobe relatively recently allowed Creative cloud users to use the preview version of Character Animator. This program is specifically made to animate photoshop puppets in a fluent manner. For this is uses a webcam and a multitude of layers and maps in photoshop.

The last project of this module is a group project, meaning that I need to have a group. Last year my group project was not the best experience I've ever had, as the other members of my group did very little and I carried most of the work of the project, by both writing, directing and editing the video. 

Luckily Teresa and Rita found my idea of making stop-motion/digital ink animation about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland interesting enough to join my project. I expect much better work, due to the input they had early on in the project. As Teresa is very interested in taking photographs, it really helps that our background are going to be stop motion and thus all still photographs put together. 

Working with a group can either be a blessing or a curse, depending on the project and the people. As this is a project that requires a significant amount of work, being in a group is going to be better. Animation is very labour-intensive we will be needing all the help we can get. It's going to be long hours and much preparation before the actual production.


As the director I am the leader of the group. This is both a role I chose as well as a role that I usually happen to fall into. I ask to many questions of people, wondering why to do things a certain way and annoy them into saying I should do it instead... Not the best trait to have. In this case, the original pitch and idea were mine, so it was a logical decision to also have me as the director and writer. Both girls did say that just because it was my idea, it was not a given that I should also write it (look at hollywood movies, which are written by someone who usually does not direct the end product).

In our case, animation comes down to making puppets and moving them in After Effects. To create the puppets I used references and mostly traced the outlines of the figures. Part of these figures we photographed while in London shooting on location while others come from stock pictures. 

The puppets are part of the environment in that some of them came out of the backgrounds we are using in the video. The colour scheme of the puppets also came from the real world, with the exception of the caterpillar, whose colour was described in 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.' There are very few words that describe the characters visually, which makes the story interesting to adapt and to give a creators own twist to what the characters look like.
As for us, we've kept our puppets relatively realistic.

While making the puppets I've learned a lot about how to use Photoshop more efficiently. The shortcut keys are now part of my way of working, as is the adding of textures to otherwise plain shapes. The adding of textures can clearly be seen in the picture of the queen beside this text. My artistry is not the greatest, but I feel the puppets we are using to animate are sufficient for the amount of time and the experience I had when we started this project. My main goal was never to create the perfect puppet, but to create puppet that was usable and looked good. In total, 27 puppets are created to make the characters move and to add some extra interesting things to the background.

For many years I've loved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Many adaptations have been made and they all take a different perspective on the story. Click on the pictures for more information.

The Book

The first Alice in Wonderland book I ever read was illustrated by Lisbeth Zweger. Unlike the Disney version of Alice, here she was a normal girl with very long brown hair that whipped around in the wind as she fell down the rabbit hole. No tiny blue costume with a white apron, just a plain burgundy sweater and a white dress. It's all made with beautiful watercolours. All the animals are realistically drawn, but the story remains fantastical. The baby turns out to be a piglet, the foods make you grow or shrink and it's always tea-time. But of course, nothing can compare to the original.

Television

Just like all illustrators have created different versions of Alice, so have TV makers. One of the most recent versions is SyFy's Alice staring Caterina Scorsone as a grown up Alice and Andrew Lee Potts as Hatter. Where the book is always about the little girl, this Alice deals with relationship issues and the loss of a parent. The new interpretation makes Alice into something an older audience is supposed to relate to instead of the stories for children. That being said, the story still has the Queen of hearts and a tea party that never ends, however, the tea party can now be better compared to drugs than to tea. 


In the episode "Duped" from the Tv show Warehouse 13 Alice also plays a role. However, this is not the Alice form the books. A mirror that once belonged to Lewis Carroll contains the 'spirit' of Alice Lidell, who in this story turns out to have been a serial killer in her later life. Her spirit takes over one of the main characters, Myka. Myka herself gets trapped in the looking glass, an empty space in which she can only look out into the real world. Alice goes on a rampage, destroying relationships and threatening people who are close to Myka. The Alice from the books is nowhere to be found here.

Film

Tim Burton and Disney teamed up to make a live action remake of Alice in Wonderland. Due to the episodial structure of the original story, the movie has rearranged it as well as added characters and scenes from 'Through the Looking Glass'. Alice is once again older than the version in the books, even being old enough to be proposed to by a prospective lover. The movie tries to make a more coherent story out of the source material by making the queen of heart and the red queen into one character and adding a conflict with the white queen to the mix. The hatter is more prominent character and guide to Alice.


An even stranger version of Alice can be found in Jan Švankmajer's film of the same name. The film is a combination of live-action and stop motion animation. Unlike most depictions of Alice, she does not wear blue in this film, nor is she all grown up. The film is an absurdist and dark story, using skulls and dead fish as characters. Alice doesn't fall, but goes down a dark elevator shaft, filled with dark and dangerous things. The orange marmalade she picks up is filled with thumbtacks. The beautiful garden is just a backdrop, like one would use for a play. There are very few vibrant colours, instead we have a muted pallet with very little light.

Other Works

For the final video, we need to work with a crew and we are free to do whatever we want.Over the past 3 weeks my ideas have evolved from a cooking show to an animation.

My original plan was a cooking show for students, but this quickly turned out not to be something I would have enjoyed making. In every new project I do I look to learn something new, but a cooking show did not seem like the right type of format for that. Instead animation is something I've not yet done and something I really want to learn. I'm acutely aware that animation is a very time-intesive process, which is why I started early with creating my pitch and part of the treatment.

The current idea for my longer video has to do with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Although I am acutely aware of how many things have already been made with Alice as a basis, I hope to give it a new or at least original interpretation. The medium I'm planning to use is photography, specifically to make a stop motion animation with real people and live-size objects. Over these pictures I plan to digitally animate important objects and images from the story of Alice. As for sound, I'm hoping to get someone to read some voiceover lines, directly taken from the book. I've been reading the book an making notes for the past week to get my ideas more clearly. The idea that popped into my head while doing this is to try and only use the sentences that Alice thinks or speaks in the book and no others. 

Theresa was interested in pitch and added some of her own idea to my. She asked me if I would be interested in using building and places around London and Kingston as backgrounds to the animation, and maybe the posibility of transforming those buildings and places with animation to make them more like wonderland. I liked her idea and we will probably work together to figure it out further.

Over the past few months I've been making videos almost every day and I've called them #TinyAdventures due to them only being parts of everyday life. As part of the practical module I decided I wanted to get better at editing, especially when it involves music.



The idea of using the walking feet to introduce the audience to the videos comes from the original way the videos where built up. Usually it started with feet walking somewhere, to then show the place they ended up at, such as university. Every step the feet make shows a different day and a different background. This is all done in time with the music by Jun Miyake, best known from the trailer to the Wim Wenders documentary Pina.
In my trailer it seemed fitting due to the high tempo of the music. There is a base tempo to the music, but I tried to follow the melody lines as well, cutting on the notes. There is no diegetic sound, as the fast cutting would have made it sound awkward. This also has to do with the time-lapse footage used, which has no sound originally. 

I've shot all the footage in this video with my iPhone, using the inbuilt camera app. The only changes I've made to the original footage are cutting it, speeding it up, slowing it down or reversing it. I opted out of colour correcting the footage as that would be less like the original videos it came out off.

The decision to reverse the footsteps at the end of the video was made to create a balance with the beginning and the show that the videos will both look forward and back as I continue to make them. There will be calm moments as well as fast paced moments in the #TinyAdventures still to come.