For my final animation, I chose to do a sort of autobiography by focusing on my desk setup in my apartment. Throughout the semester, I spent a healthy amount of time sitting at this desk as I would watch sports, play video games, and do most of my schoolwork in that chair. I chose to include the sports and video games into the project, but decided to omit any schoolwork in favor of showcasing the photo cubes that I saw every time I sat down.
In contrast to Liz Blazer’s advice from her piece on sound that we read as a class earlier in the semester, I made the mistake of coming up with an idea prior to finding what audio I wanted to use. I had also already decided on a title, which I ended up keeping the same. If I had not come up with my specific title, I never would have found the sound that, in my opinion, fits perfectly with what I had in mind, “In My Room by The Beach Boys.” Once I added the sound to the project and marked the important points within the audio, I then began the process of animating the project.
At first, I struggled finding inspiration past my base idea, but Professor Dietrick helped me by showing me some of Yasujirō Ozu’s work with frames within frames. Because my desk consists of two screens and two photos, this suggestion gave me a direction that I knew I could follow within my animation. I looked up some YouTube tutorials about how to effectively animate a zoom effect in order to use each different frame to its maximum potential. To begin, the monitor was pretty simple, as the screen was so big relative to my source photograph that I barely had to worry about anything relative to distortion while zooming. For my laptop and the photos, I ran into some issues with the zooming as the orientations of each of these items were not directly parallel to my desk. This caused some distortion, so I had to use some of the information I learned in my Computer Graphics class about three dimensional views relative to 2 dimensional camera space in order to make each frame look as 1:1 with its actual size as I could.
Delwama, dir. 2022. Yasujirō Ozu: A Frame Within a Frame. YouTube. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVA83KAbkwA&t=2s&ab_channel=delwama
This video contains a conglomeration of various clips from some of Ozu’s movies in which he uses the framing strategy I ended up employing throughout my project.
Crescent Tech, dir 2017. Camera Zoom in After Effect. YouTube. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpi1j3qDGYk&ab_channel=CrescentTech
This is a relatively easy-to-follow tutorial about how you can achieve a Camera Zoom Effect in After Effects. It is just a basic introduction, but I enjoyed how it left me room to explore for myself and find my way through the nuances of the effect.
Odisho, Justin, dir 2019. After Effects Simple Line Text Reveal Intro Animation Tutorial. YouTube. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XJt9uXwMwM&ab_channel=JustinOdisho
Justin Odisho led me through how to do the text effects I used for both the introduction and credit scene of my animation. He goes into enough detail about every aspect of After Effects that he used for this that I was able to manipulate it in more complex ways after watching his basic video. I decided what he did looked best, but this tutorial was very helpful in my understanding of matte, text, and just introductions in general
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