Edinburgh Project

Group 1 The Grassmarket from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

In this project we were told to go out a choose a street in Edinburgh that we could tell a story within, this project brief was quite open ended and so our group opted for the Grass Market. Our first original idea was to have a set place in the grass market which we would time travel through showing the many things that happened in the grass market, from hangings to bombs being dropped e.c.t.
However we thought that this idea was very boring and un-original so we came up with the idea of filling the grass market entirely with grass. An idea that we all got behind and were generally excited about.

To achieve this effect we firstly wanted to make it seem like you were actually moving through the grass market from one end to the other. We came up with the idea of capturing a video of the camera literally traveling through the market, which we would then rotoscope on Dragon Frame, allowing us to animate over the footage which was quite a neat idea! We also knew that we wanted to use paper cut outs to animate with as it would give the grass, characters and objects a nice contrast to the surrounding video.

We used the rostrum camera to do our animating, this is a machine that allows you to animate on a flat plane, that can be moved left to right, while the camera is rigged above and this can also be adjusted up or down for easier animating, its a pretty cool set up and I really did enjoy using it! 

Once animating was done however, it was time to move onto editing, this was were the problems started...  One of the problems we encountered was when animating we used just a plain white background for animating onto which actually caused a lot of problems as we the color of the grass was so light it made keying the white out very difficult and made the process twice as long, a lesson learned there!

Another problem was our time management, coming up with our new idea a week into the project meant that we were down on time and didn't really help either. I think what held us back was spending a large chunk of time animating and leaving not much time for editing.

Finally editing was were everything went bad, as we encountered meany problems with Adobe After Effects, meany of which could have been avoided but others were things like, the software crashing constantly, problems with it doing what its told and adding sound. Overall not a very fun time!
This final version of the film (above) is a very heavily edited version as the original had a lot of problems caused by the many technical problems in our editing stage.

As a whole I thought the project was not the best project I have worked on since my recent ones but I enjoyed working with my fellow animators all the same. I thought it was great practice for building confidence, working in a team and working on a shared project. And also on the plus side I have learned many valuable lessons and skills that I can use in future projects.