#exercise03

STORY SHOTS EXERCISE

An exercise from former Pixar creator, Emma Coats that takes a film and breaks it down in its simplest form by each shot to determine the type of shot it is and how it's working in the film. 

I decided to take the film Princess Mononoke and break down the scene in which the protagonist Ashitaka is going against a demon boar, Tatarigami. I was interested in the action of this scene and wanted to break down how Miyazaki frame this sequence. In the beginning, the shots are wider shots showing the characters and the environment around them. This also helps understand the larger scale the demon is to Ashitaka and the girls of the village. As the action picks up so do the shots, they become quicker and the camera starts moving in closer to the characters to show their emotions. A few will be close up and fast but right before the audience can get confused the camera takes a step back again to understand the path of actions of the characters and then the camera pulls back in for more action. By the end of the sequence once the board demon has been shot with an arrow to the head. The camera becomes more static still shots to indicate the fast pace action as stopped. Scenes also get heald a little longer almost like taking a depth breath. 

To me, Wes Anderson’s style is pretty light, subtle, and even when there are dramatic scenes that carry a lot of emotion, it’s very conservative. I wanted to go with a more minimal approach in my exercise. I wanted to bring in some colours, but have them pretty muted, washed out, and very faded and light. I wanted to bring in some gradient into the background music as the choir continues to sing, and I wanted to play with textures, and “jittery text.” The jitteriness made the text feel a little bit more organic, and played of the textures and grain I was going for.

I didn’t want to have super large text, because I felt that the dialogue was soft-spoken. The different typefaces for each character, and adding in different colours, helped differentiate who was speaking in the conversation.

I won’t show too many videos, because unfortunately I spent more time building out the entire thing, then I did with getting to refine things.

To start with, I worked on getting a skeleton framework for my type. I knew I wanted to work with kinetic type, and I knew I wanted it to be based on the syllables rather than the words. I found that when I was doing it as words it felt disconnected at times, and doing it by syllables helped created a better rhythm.

I love textures, but as I was trying to work with the sounds I found I was getting way too similar to my project one (when the girls were turning around), and needed to go in another direction.

With the clothes being pulled apart I wanted to mimic that using an abstract method. I started by using rectangular bars with a gradient and a grain. I was using very dark colours at first, and it just didn’t quite feel cohesive with the lighter colours I was using later. This was, however, where I started.

I got the movement how I wanted it, but something wasn't right about the colours. Also from my previous videos I knew I had the skeleton of the type done, but it was boring... I needed to figure out a way to brighten the curtains without making it feel super saturated, and also bring a bit more life into the type.

From here I spent a lot of time trying to bring in gradients, play with the type, edit the colours, and here’s the final result. To be honest, I’m not that happy with it, and I think it needs a lot of work still. I think I got some things right, but there are others that could have been improved if I had allowed myself more time to work on it. Alas, I must move on to the next project.

As a happy accident, I found using the gradients I put in for the background noises as an overlay for the “curtains” helped blend it into the video, while still muting the colours and not making them feel too bright or saturated. 

I added in the growing circles to represent the indistinct whispering of the birds before Sam announced his presence.

I really wanted to bring in a moving gradient background to play off the choir, but it was taking me sooooo long to try and sync it well. It’s not timed quite as well as I wanted, but I still wanted to hint at something else going on. It was supposed to be very subtle, but I think it might also be a little bit too subtle. I’m sure on the projector it will disappear entirely, but I didn’t want to compensate by having it darker and then make it way too noticeable on a computer screen.

For many of the text transitions, I wanted to have it blur out to stress the pauses. When Sam asks for the second time “What kind of bird are you,” the ellipsis are meant to trail off to Suzy, as if directing which of the birds he’s talking to.

When Suzy announces she’s a raven, I wanted that little bit of moving texture to draw attention to her statement. If you go through it slowly, you can actually see details of a raven (the feather and the head). It’s also supposed to mimic a sort of Rorschach test (which can be used to “examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning” (Wikipedia). It was meant to play off the idea that Suzy is a problematic child for her parents, and throughout the movie shows that she’s a bit darker than first glance.

When Sam announces he’s be leaving soon, I wanted to have it fall off the screen, mimicking that he’ll be leaving soon, and going back into the choir. When he asks about her hand, the text colour and size for hand change to something closer to Suzy’s type treatment, indicating that he is talking about her.

The mirror treatment is pretty obvious. When Suzy talks about losing her temper at herself, the type gets distorted, hinting that Suzy lost control and gets into a frenzy.