Adventures of a Distant Mind-SD, med quality export-

Adventures of a Distant Mind- SD-medquality export from M. Johnston on Vimeo.

This post is really ironic, considering my post from 2D last spring.

This edits soundscape is still very rough.

This is my final animation, which will be part of a bigger animated series.  I tried to incorporate a lot of the techniques we used in the course of this semester.  Primarily, I animated it using after effects and photoshop.  I really wanted to create an authentic feel to a lot of the layers, so I scanned in a bunch of different textures (like cotton balls and saran wrap).  I hand-painted most of the backgrounds and used colored pencils to trace and shade the leaves, and scanned those images into the computer.  I also incorporated a little Gif animation, for parts like the silhouettes.  I hope you enjoy it!

If all goes as planned the entire animated series will be finished in Spring 2010.

Storyboards and Production Schedule

Adventures of a Distant Mind, Part 5

My final project will be based on an excerpt from a short story I wrote called, "Adventures of a Distant Mind." In the long term I want to animate the whole essay into a segmented series. Here is the part I want to animate for my final project:

"5. We drive by an open field and I ask to stop, just give me thirty minutes. I want to go explore the huge boulders that look like they grow out of the ground. The sun is out and the clouds glide by, faster than clouds should move, making the sunlight stencil shapes on the swaying grass, it’s like a dance, it’s magic. There is a stone wall extending along the horizon and a storm in my stomach. The car riders are bored, they call after me,

“Em, let’s go!” I wave my arm high and call back,

“Just a minute.” I run, pleading, wishing, maybe I’ve found it. The stone wall becomes greener as I get closer, the moss telling its age. My mind runs through walls of leaves, around crying statues, cold and grey, women lounging, grass rushing, leaves broken as my mind runs, running, hurry or you’ll miss the robin. The horizon breaks and a green expanse unfolds itself for miles, spotted with little white fluffs of sheep, or dogs, or maybe mini unicorns, there's no telling. I lean against the wall, climb it, and my heart drops, not for the first time. I won’t ever find it. You will never find it, because I will get to it first. But I will never get to it and it will not come to us. "

The general feel I want to create is one of a brooding broken imagination, an animated storm of images. To do this I plan on making lots of textures through photoshop for the different objects seen (boulders, grass, the stone wall, statues, crushed leaves, a field) and compositing them in After Effects. For the sun and cloud stenciling I want to hand write, photocopy, and then scan into the computer the words of the excerpt and have them phase in and out, the way light would on a landscape. The second paragraph I want to flash back and forth between a point of view shot of someone running through a maze and someone running into a field, and I plan on rotoscoping this part.

While my idea is really obscure and heavily image based, I do have a clear vision in my mind of how I want the final product to look, and how I will go about making it.

Exquisite Corps Series

My sentence was: 

"He began to sweat profusely and started to look for a source of shade amongst the wreckage."

Take Two of Cheese Festival Bumper

Here is my second version, I thought that it was pretty funny with the song "Vueltecita" playing in the background. 

Filename: CheesePornRoto

This is my bumper for the Cheese Sandwich Film Festival: