Now onto Making the Animation!!

High Wire Act Animation.

Now that we’d completed the Rockmount workshops and we’d got all of our other visuals, we were now had to put it all together.

We decided to take the frames by having it on the floor with lighting either side as it would be easy to move everything around easier this way and have more control on our changes. The camera was on a tripod directly above the set strapped to a ladder – we used tonnes of duct tape for this. Don’t want to go breaking any of the school’s equipment now!

Set for High Wire Animation.

We had a system in creating other animation sufficiently by having 2 of us in the studio taking the stills whilst 2 of us in the Mac suite putting the previous stills together using Final Cut Pro. I would say we stuck to our strengths but we found it was best to occasionally swop roles for a bit to get a fresh look on things.

The whole process was pretty straight forward, just very time consuming considering the number of frames we were making. We constantly had to make sure the camera was aligned properly (this allows us to avoid cropping the frames when editing) when we put it back on the tripod after running the memory card back up to the Mac suite.

I was new to using Final Cut Pro so it was daunting at first but Clara Garcia Fraile (our artist in residence) was there to help and she gave us a booklet that explained each step. Using this programme we were able to increase the scale, level the angles, change the sequence, adjust the brightness and the timing of the original frames. IMPORTANT RULE: SAVE WORK REGULARY!!!

Using Final Cut Pro.

Once all the editing was complete and we were packed up in the studio all that was left to do was burn it onto a disc. Typically, this was the most frustrating thing of all – it took so long due to its size.

Clara actually said this was the software many TV/Movie makers would use, so who knows: This week Bloomsbury, next week Hollywood!!