12-18-2010
At the end of every semester my visual communications professors require our class to turn in process books, which detail and showcase the thoughts, ideas, sketches and processes of creation behind each project we complete. We are encouraged to write about our thoughts and reasons behind each idea, forcing us throughout the semester to be aware of every decision we make. These books are also a great way of displaying our creative efforts in getting around specific design problems, and allow the professors to see a timeline of problem solving techniques.
Here are some visuals from a section of the book that covers the movie title sequence video I created at the end of the semester. The following is an example of writing about my ideas and creation processes revolving around the scene in the video where the dolphins swim through the water:
There were a number of problems to be solved before I began the scene containing the dolphins. First, in my original sketches and storyboard I had flying fish in the scene, but because I had just used these fish in the previous scene I wanted to keep things interesting and use a different animal. Both dolphins and sharks played a part in Life of Pi, but because they swim by bending their bodies at the mid-section (as opposed to side-to-side movements) and because the camera angle would be facing the fish's profile, I chose to include dolphins in the next scene. In designing the dolphins, I continued with the theme of using a unique texture for each animal and placed a pattern of circles on their bellies. This simple element kept them connected with the visual language used for both the turtles and the flying fish. My next problem lie in the movement of the water as the dolphins swam through it and in the transition to and from this. My first idea was to create an extremely large layer of water, have the dolphins swim through it, and have the camera follow them the whole way. I quickly realized that because the video was at such a high resolution, and because my computer was already having a hard time rendering footage for even simple scenes with few layers, creating the scene this way would be nearly impossible. In addition to that, I didn't feel that the water layers would look fluid enough. I eventually came up with the idea to have three or four overlapping circles rotate through the frame, creating an effect that looked as if the dolphins and camera were moving through the water. Having the dolphins and camera in a static state also gave me much more control over the scene. Finally, I had to get the dolphins to jump out of the water while the camera "stops" in place on the horizon. I did this simply by moving the "horizon water layers" down into the frame, and in the exact keyframe when these layers stop, I animated the dolphins to look as if they were jumping out of the water and back down again.
