final animation

here it is! the final animation. this was such an enjoyable experience. i really liked making this. i think it was because the scene is rather feel good, as is the movie in an all too idealized way. the music in this scene is fabulous and really catches the cadence of the scene. this was brought to my attention at the final review. i think that i had known this music was the secret to the cadence, but did not perceive it analytically in my process. at the end i added the music to my animation, after a musicless process.

a bit about the music itself, which would have been interesting to analyze in tandem with the scene, had i recognized this earlier: the director of the film, Jean-Pierre Jeunet was intrduced to the music of Yann Tiersen through a chance encounter. the music is largely accordion and piano driven. he instantly became a fan and commissioned him to compose pieces for the film. some of the pieces in the film were from his previous three albumns, while others he made for the movie. i could not find whether the film maker was inspired by the music before making this scene, or if the music was made after the scene, but i would guess that the filmmaker was inspired by the music and he made this scene to go with it because of the specific cadence of the scene (the tempo, the way the camera shots are edited together, the position of the camera sometimes up close in their faces and others along side of them etc) and its direct relationship with the music.

making this animation brought me great joy. using final cut was great, i had never used it before and was suprised by how easy it was! the process of making an animation is very similar to making physical models and collages. it is extrememly rewarding. in the end, some of my final comments touched on how this animation is beautiful and happy, makes you feel good. and i definitely got that feeling as i was making it. it was pure fun. i think that architecture needs stuff like this. architects, especially in academia, are always looking for the rigor, the analysis (christine's project for example, was highly rigorous) and this stuff has a particular appeal to architects. but what about all the people that this architectural internetion/ building/ whaterever will be for? will this building make them happy? will they want to keep it around for a long time? feelings are important. this animation process was a combination of analysis and unconsiousness. in the end, there was not a lot of conceptual weight to what i had done. therefoere, the critics were less interested (or so i feel), because they weren't getting the intellectual stimulation that they were hoping for. this dissapoints me. why can't people just let their emotions take over a little bit? why can't they just say "i like it!" it's fun!" and be happy about it. perhaps i could have been more rigorous, but having little to no experience with electric image and final cut prior to this, and discovering a new lens through which to explore archietctural ideas, i got wrapped up in the making. i am thrilled with the final animation and really pleased with this course. i learned so much and look forward to exploring architectural proposals in new ways.

final board_project 2

the final board presented at the review was a combination of diagrams i had done throughout the project that reflect the analysis of the amelie scene. it thracks the spatial temporal nature of the scene through analysis of the scene's structure and subjective experiential criteria.

physical model analysis

making this model was like baking. it took careful attention and patience. this was an interesting study and i think yielded a surficial construct that has potential with this project. it could have inspired a completely different direction with the animation than the one that i took. some of the criticism i recieved at the final review of the animation was that the objects in the animation were all the same throughout, and have potential to reveal additional conditions of the precedent film with development. this model could have been a way to bring in forms that explored the morphology of the scene. for example, lofting curves from the model would have made for very different pieces. breaking the pieces up along the way, as with the current animation, would have had the same rhythmic results.

a different way of looking at it

this second video, and final diagram study (for now :) uses transparency overlays to abstract the overlayed color swatches. i am going to attempt to splice these images into the final animation using final cut pro, which i used for the first time this afternoon to create these animated slide shows! these images are very spatially rich, vibrant and emblematic of the energy of the scene that i am studying that it would be a waste to not use them in the animation somehow. here is one of my favorite diagrams from the video, so you can see it big.




using the previous studies, the overlaying of all of the scene diagrams on top of each other, i was able to study the composition of the scene further. this first video is about overlaying the true colors at varying opacities, from 1% to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5, and then accelerating the transparency change by jumping up to 10% then 20 then 40 then 80 and finally 100. the subtlety here in the first five diagrams is beautiful to me and could represent the finer moments of the scene, such as the first and final segments. there is also a great deal of other spatial implications to these images that go far beyond this exercise.

further compression

overlaying the color and line scene diagrams from the second column from the right in the diagrams below...

compression

compressing the five columns to one... in color and line

a diagramming obsession...

additional diagrams displaying color analysis. these are basically the same as what is shown in the animation below, but with dark lines to outline the elements of the scenes. more to follow.

horizontal still frame diagram

turning the still frame diagram horizontal (90 degrees counterclockwise) we have more of a temporal representation of the scene. the scene stills were taken every 2.5 seconds which is shown at the top and by markers at the bottom as well.. the original scenes and color diagrams are at the bottom with brackets for each of the five groups of seven still scenes. the main horizontal banding of color that is the focus of the diagram is basically an abstracted color diagram of the original more detailed color studies of the scenes below.

this is similar to OMA's flag for the european union, which they created by combining the colors of all the EU countries flags. it is also a sort of bar code that brands this group of countries.

scene color study

a video i made to help study the color diagrams. i is useful to play it with the dissolve feature from frame to frame because you can start to see the transitions from diagram to diagram.

color overlay_diagrams

removing the scenes from this matrix, we see these diagrams. the colors here are fascinating and the potential for this to become an animation are presented. i plan to use the color abstrations in the animation as a way to present the action of the scene.

scene stills_color overlay

taking stills from the scene every 2.5 seconds, a diagram emerged. lining up the images vertically on a sheet yielded five sets of seven still images from the film. each column of seven images turned out to represent a major sequence of events in the scene: the first was amelie's moment of clairvoyence and inspiration; the second sets up the man on the sidewalk and amelie as she gets the idea to whisk him up; the next two columns are the adventure itself, running through the streets in a flurry of motion and sensory experiences; and finally, the fifth column represents the final part of the scene, shot with one camera, where the man gets dropped off in front of the metro simulatneously stunned, disoriented, and thrilled. taking it a step further by trying to understand the scenes compositionally, i began overlaying swatches of highly saturated colors over the scenes. a similar pallette is used throughout the scene and color is also used as a kind of constant that strings the quick flickers of film together so as not to completely disorient the viewer.