Final Evaluation

Initial Ideas

This brief was a very expansive one, as such coming up with an initial idea wasn't very difficult; but it held so many potential ideas that it did consume quite a bit of time to narrow it down.

The moodboard

To begin, I made a moodboard of classic and contemporary examples of murder mystery stories. I got pictures of styles, films, tv shows, video games, and comic books to get a wide range of stories, characters, clichés, and tropes. This helped me find out which stories were better known for shaking up the genre, and which cemented the genre. I also looked back to my initial research to refresh myself on techniques and styles other artists use.

From this I was able to create 2 initial ideas.

The first idea was one that would correlate more with classic murder mystery stories. I would photograph an 1920s styled office with a paper model of a Jonah Felker in a sketchy style and his story of finding a close friend dead in his office, and how he comes to work out the killer is his boss. It would be in greyscale, and any drawn elements would look messy and very sketchy to contrast with the background. I also wanted to use a lot of depth of field in the photography to make everything sync up and work better together visually.

First Ideas initial character design

The second idea would be about baby Jonah Felker (8 years old) and how he got into detective work when he found a baby deer dead in the woods and followed the clue to his killer, who he defeats with a slingshot. He would be drawn in over photos, this is so I can make the style of it much cuter and use better effects to integrate the drawings with the background.

At first I didn't know which idea I preferred more so to help me decide I started designing and planning both films to realise their potential better. In the end, I preferred the second idea more as it conforms to the brief better and it differs from my comfort zone of doing darker, more serious pieces.



The character planning sheet and an initial pose design for young Jonah.

After the initial designs I drew up a storyboard for the final film. This helped me when I began shooting the locations as I knew what sorts of shots I wanted and even though I couldn't draw them successfully as a storyboard, I could easily shoot them which helped my final film look better.



The Final Storyboard

After I shot the backgrounds outside, I imported the photos into photoshop I did key animation frames for each one, using the storyboard as reference for dialogue and movements. When imported, I would generally add a full layer of white and reduce its opacity to help the keyframe animation stand out. After each keyframe was created, I exported them as a gif and imported the gifs into Sony Vegas 13 to edit together as a film.

Freesounds.org

Incomptech.org music site

With the initial cut sorted, I recorded sounds for my piece. I had to do it in this order because I would need to know the rough pacing I would need for each sound effect. Recording sounds was easy enough, especially to get background garden noises, and walking; but for the sounds I couldn't get (such as the gun cocking) I went to the sound site, Freesounds.org because each sound is uploaded by users and its royalty free. I also had to download a soundtrack as I'm not capable of making myself one in this short time, or a even good one with infinite time. This was also a good option because again, its royalty free, but it allows people to search songs by feeling (like uplifting, bright, and aggressive) which definitely helped my film as I knew the music I was using transmitted the emotions I wanted the audience to feel properly.

Editing in Vegas.

Finally this was then edited into the film in Sony Vegas. This was actually a bit irritating as to get the sounds to intergrate properly, I had to put a lot of them on separate layers which slowed the process down as I had to scroll up and down violently to make sure sounds were placed right on each separate timeline.


To edit the sounds in, generally I put them into the trimmer window to get the section I wanted, then I dragged and dropped the section into the timeline and synced it up with the action. I would occasionally use marker to highlight the action where a sound was required, this helped me to keep track of sounds I needed to place, but hadn't, or sounds that required multiple overlaid clips. But this hassle I think was worth it  in the end.

Here is the final film:

I'm actually really happy with the final film, because although I didn't have the time to fully animate it, I think it holds good potential for a final film and I want to finish it off properly in my own time. I'm quite proud of my sound editing as well as I haven't had to flesh a world in sound in a very long time, but I think I pulled off the effects I want and added enough sounds to make it realistic without butchering the effect, or over filling a scene with sounds and making it too busy. Using image manipulation as a technique was a very interesting experience as well because I have never used it before; It allowed a much better visual idea for my film as combining a separate image with a background is pretty difficult but the challenge and the constraints of the medium really spurs more creative thinking. But if I could do it again, I would spend more time on the storyboard, and do a script for it first so I can improve the dialogue as well as the story. I didn't like how simple the clues were and it would have been better if I could make it smarter. But it was a good brief and I like where I took the ideas to conform to the brief properly.