Pre-production involved a very bored David at work picturing a miniature sword-fight on the counter in front of him. I was amused by the concept and did a few tests in passing with some hastily made pieces and decided that, while I had no idea what I was doing, I would probably be able to put something together. Production-wise, the materials consisted of two pictures spliced together with some slightly imperfect Photoshop magic. As with both of my projects this semester, the real heavy lifting was in the post-production. And if there’s anything I’ve learned this year across the board as far as editing goes, it is that you can take no “footage” and make it good, bad footage and make it great, and great footage and make it awesome. I went into the post-production for “Idyll” with a few general concepts and a couple of loose ideas about how to do things, but that was it. 

It probably took me about 5-6 hours to get all of the layers drawn to my liking using my poor drawing skills, my tablet and my barely-functional knowledge of Photoshop. Many of the layers were afterthoughts (the flowers, the jellyfish, etc.) and were improvised when I felt a section needed something “more.”

Then it might have taken me another 6-8 hours to get the whole sequence in working order with masks and animations and effects. I had originally wanted to animate the water and some “birds” in Adobe Flash, but didn’t have the time to learn quite that much, so I settled on a bizarre effect to get the “waves” to work with the water and some quirky floating jellyfish. The water alone probably took about 2 hours just trying to test out how to get it to look right. 

Exporting the 2:15 sequence took about 4.5 hours and culminated in a whopping 133GB file which necessarily had to be compressed to be workable whatsoever.

 

The final phase was the sound effects, which I thought would be much more difficult than it turned out to be. To my great surprise, I had a very easy time finding the sound effects I wanted off of YouTube and layering them in over the completed video was pretty easy. 

Idyll was, in spite of all its rushed-ness, fun. It’s not every day you get to indulge your cautiously creative mind and try something completely different. I don’t really see it as a “final” project so much as a refined prototype—a really involved dry run of something I will absolutely expand upon in the future. There are glaring mistakes: the background photo compositing faux pas, the water animation’s jumpy loop, some lame jellyfish “animation,” the lackluster clouds, the slightly oversized rain…the list goes on and on. 

We are, however, our harshest critics, and I can say from the standpoint of a student that for a first try and with the time I spent on it, I am absolutely thrilled at the way it came out. Sure, I would love to have overlaid the whole scene on actual video, but I didn’t have a decent video camera when I needed it. Yes, I wanted to do more with seasons and weather and dynamic movement, but I managed to give myself chills with the ending. I’m giving myself a rare pass and allowing myself to be proud of this final project because from start to finish it was an exercise in creative problem solving, and every step of the way I managed to rise to the occasion all by myself.