As I am a lover of films and as a child I had always wondered how Disney movies were made, I chose to base my short documentary on the creation of animation. As inspiration for my documentary, I chose these two videos:
The first video is shows the work behind the 1991 Disney cartoon Beauty and the Beast, one of my favourite movies. I found this video accidentally while looking for clips from the movie, and found it incredibly interesting. The second video instead contains never-seen-before footage from the making of another great cartoon: How to Train your Dragon. While the first one follows the typical style of animation, consisting of drawings, the second one is made using 3D animation through a computer.
From these two videos I got the inspiration to make a short documentary about the basic steps to animation and what the different types of animation are. Since I have quite a few friends in art school who study animation as part of their curriculum, I decided to interview one of them to show me what are the basics of animation and how it is brought to life.
This is my final video:
Although it does not talk about wars or anything that would be on the news, I thought this would be very educative and interesting to those individuals who are passionate about art and would like to engage a career in animation. Thank you to Francesca Sagramoso, an art student at the University of the Arts London (UAL) who contributed to this video illustrating the process of animation and her own work towards her portfolio.
My video mainly consists of the art student talking about animation except for those part where examples of animation is being shown. At the beginning of the video and at the very end, the instrumental of the song “Top of the World” by American band Imagine is used. It is a very well-known song with quite good rhythm which I think leads the viewer to keep watching the video even after the music is over.
The footage consists of videos I took with my iPhone, examples of animated movies and videos that have been produced by the student in the video. I was quite unsure if to take the video with my camera or with my phone, but in the end I decided to use my iPhone as it was much easier. To use by myself, the camera was quite heavy and the usage of the microphone as well would have been very complicated. Instead, I used the microphone in my headphones as a microphone for the video and hid it quite well within the speaker’s hair so that one wouldn’t see it.
Since the videos were taken with an iPhone, I reckon they turned out pretty well with a good sound. The videos were taken in an empty work room in the UAL halls, although some streets noises can be heard since the room is right next to a street.
When putting the video together on Final Cut Pro, I tried to make it similar to the ones I always see in TV, with short quick images at the beginning and catchy music. I had previously used iMovie for the editing of all my videos, therefore Final Cut proved itself to be a little more challenging since it had a lot more features and was a lot more professional.
When uploading the video to YouTube, it took me quite a long time for I couldn’t quite figure out which one was the right format to upload.
I must say I wasn’t too new to the editing videos part, as I often enjoy making birthday videos for my friends that involve putting together music, pictures and videos of them. However, I was quite new to the interviewing part and footage. It is very simple to have someone speak during a video, but the really tricky part which differs a pro from an amateur is being able to distinguish good footage that can be used from useless footage. Of course, if you want people to keep watching the video you will need the interviewees to say interesting things that are actually relevant to the topic.
What's inside the closet - Cecilia Peruzzi 