So maybe I like animating....

After fixing the resolution issues for my animation I am having so much fun creating cool effects like fog and fire. And everything looks so great when you can have control over so many details. Now I cant imagine using Final Cut and After Effects separately. One picks up where the other program leaves off and together they allow you to do almost anything you can imagine! And boy I have an imagination.... I already have an idea to finally use some footage I have lying around that was unusable because I was missing two crucial shots. But problem solved! I know what im playing with over break :)

Venting

So of course being one of the least prepared to take a class on something I know essentially nothing about I insist on making my final consist of way too many parts and the quality of the images is making it logistically impossible to work on them and thus I sit here in the editing lab after approximately 16 hours trying to render my looping background and getting every error message known to man. I have literally started over on my file 19 times and as I sit here having a nervous breakdown due to frustration and general lack of sleep I have come to the conclusion that I will never make another animation if I can help if. This is just not for me.

Last Storyboard Frames

2nd Storyboard

Storyboards

Production Schedule

Week One: Work on backgrounds. Find non-copyrighted picture of a ravine. Begin looking for an actor. Reserve black-box for shoot. Reserve camera equipment. Find footage of a train crash to rotoscope. Find footage of a swan dive.

Week Two: Film actor and begin rotoscoping the girl and train. Take pictures of the sky for the background.

Week Three: Finish rotoscoping.

Week Four: Composite the two images in After Effects. Add the backgrounds to the animation.

Week Five: Add sound-scape and music. Put the animation into the correct format.

  A dark-haired girl in a billowy white dress walks down a train-track, her hair whipping across her pale face. She stares stoically ahead. She reaches a ravine, which was once bridged by a train-track, but time or disaster has rent the track asunder and only the wreckage in the pit of the crevice tells a story of better days. She reaches the edge and stops. She looks down into the ravine, a craggy, menacing mess of jagged rocks and track fragments. She hears a train whistle and she calmly looks up, not surprised. A train appears in the distance. She calmly watches it approach smiling slightly. It draws closer. She continues to watch calmly. The train begins to screech to a halt, sparks flying up from the brakes. She continues to stand motionless watching the impending doom. The train catches fire from the flying sparks and draws yet closer to the ravine. Everything slows and the train begins to hurtle off the edge. The girl stretches out her arms and closes her eyes smiling calmly. The train hurtles down to its end, the girl swan dives off the cliff.

The concept of this animation is actually the opening scene for a film I want to make. After this scene, the film will go backwards to show the events that lead up to this moment. The idea for this visual came when one of my best friends was talking about what she believed different friends would end up doing with their life. When I asked her to do the same thing for me she paused and said, "I really don't know. I can't really picture your future. It's like I'm watching a burning train hurtle off a cliff." That comment really stuck with me, as much as it bothered me, and I do understand it in a strange way. This is my attempt to explain the emotion that the mental image triggers.  

I intend to film an actor against a green-screen and rotoscope her body except for her face. I also want to rotoscope the train. I want to take real photos for the various backgrounds and have them moving in the background in a very experimental and fantastic way. At the end of the animation, right before the swan dive, I want to animate the moving sky behind the female to look like a 3-D picture so it seems to zoom away from her, separating her from the rest of reality.