256 layers later.

When I started this project I'm not sure why but in my head it was a lot simpler. Maybe it was just my nerdy excitement but I have found out that there is a lot more frame by frame animation than I anticipated - which is fine. I mean would be better without but it is fine.

For the past week I've been working a lot in W104 just powering through, having things go wrong, freaking out for a bit, going back and fixing whatever went wrong and powering through again. After the first night of working I realised quite quickly that the effect I wanted to use wasn't going to work the way I thought it was. In my head mapping the binary text around a 'wave' shape was going to look good, however just trust me when I say it didn't. The shape was off, it moved funny - it just didn't look the way I wanted it to. So I started playing around with After Effects, I had the idea of animating the code in it's own composition and then mapping out the layer shape from that and seeing what happend.

I found a binary translator online and started translating the monologue the actor will be saying into binary, from there I then changed the colours of each number and started layering them and animating them to look like waves. 256 layers later this is what I had. And whilst the fact the computer wasn't even flinching to preview it (Something my laptop just couldn't handle) it still looked a bit off.

That's when I remember something, I remembered when I was trying to come up with an idea for Time Art last year I spent far too much time on Video CoPilot and one of there tutorials was how to make cool sound waves in After Effects. Now I just wanted the wave part but a stylised sound wave, coloured blue and instead of showing sound showing binary code, that could work. So that's what I did 

This took a lot longer than I expected in all honesty but having previewed it I think it's going to work. Hopefully once I've built up more waves they will move across the screen and 'take out' the island with a splash leaving the screen blank ready for the next part of the scene.

Now I had worked out that problem I went back to my first one. In one of my scenes when Ariel is first conducting the storm I wanted to show it through hacking, to this I wanted sot to appear on a world map one by one and then change colour to green as if Ariel has gained access to them. However once I got over my image vector problems with the world map and returned to After Effects I was face with the problem of having another 250 layers individually timed to appear, change colour and track with the image as it zooms in all without pixelating - I'm not even sure that it's possible.

So after googling for solutions and coming up dry I decided to work in Illustrator again and just create loads of vector images containing more and more dots, then another set of vector images containing the same dots just a different colour. I then put them into After Effects as if they were drawn animations. They look good in preview for now but I'm not sure how they are going to look when they are blown up bigger so I'm classing this as a temporary solution whilst I get the rest of the base down.





Other than the technical side of things I also reached out to Acting and Performance and the UCA Freshers Pages to search for an actor.



'Hi guys, I'm casting for my 2nd year project a modernised performance piece of Shakespeare's The Tempest. I'm looking for a male actor to play Ariel (a computer genius in my version of the show) to say a short monologue and interact with a projected computer based background. Whilst it is a performance piece there is a chance that the project could be exhibited in the James Hockey Gallery after christmas so there will be some filming/Voice over work next week (VO Wednesday 11th/ Filming Thursday 12th).  I can work around class schedules and will pay expenses for the days of the actual performances, other than that you will be paid in chocolate :)

If anyones interested just message me, thank you! :)

PS The monologue will be said true to text so if you've worked with Shakespeare before that would be great but not necessary.'

However after realising that most of the actors here at UCA are actually female I started thinking about switching the roles because - why not? There is nothing in the script that says Ariel has to be Male and there is nothing in my adaption that's gendered, so why not? After that I had an actress message me about the role and I'm hopefully setting up a meeting her for Monday, after which I'm hopefully recording voice over on Wednesday and filming in the studio on Thursday.

It's been a bust week, but hopefully once the bulk of this is out the way it will be smooth sailing.

However it is me and it is my project let's not speak too soon.