We will start to finalize our story and details, and how to show it with after effect.
13 characters total
Story
Scene 1: Close up on Host (DAVID) at his dinning room table, bored, alone
Scene 2: decides to have a dinner party, begins walking (limping/dragging the marble platform he stands on) through a gallery with many famous paintings we’ve seen handing out invitations to a select few, WHO IS THE FIRST GUEST
Scene 3: passes seurat, then monet
Scene 4: Close up on American Gothic: “why weren’t we invited?”
Scene 5: pass Nighthawks
Scene 6: Jeff koons balloon dog gets an invitation
Scene 7: Frida Kahlo pops it to take his invitation for herself
Scene 8: passes another painting, Napoleon
Scene 9: hands out invitations one after another
Scene 10: David reviews his menu ( andy warhol campbells soup, shrimpies, cake, still life that has fruit)
Scene 11: Paintings getting ready for the last supper (las meninas, The Birth of Venus)
Final scene: the last supper, with all the art characters as guests, and Jesus is the cater waiter (?)
NEED TO DO:
Finalize all 13 characters in final scene:
David
girl with pearl earring
Magritte
Frida
Venus
girl from las meninas
Van Gogh
Mona Lisa
Saturn
Adam?
God?
Dora Maar-au-chat (Piccaso)
Dali Head
Who are the focal guests during invitation distribution?
a .Mona Lisa and Van Gogh
b.Frida and dog
c.Girl with pearl earring
These are the characters that we are doing rn
Who needs to be animated when they don’t get to come
American Gothic
Napoleon
Which backgrounds that David will passing by?
We began our process by finding famous images for potential characters, Girl with the Pearl Earring, Van Gogh, Mona Lisa, and The Creation of Adam were some of the first finds. A few early interactions came to mind as well, for instance, I thought what if Frida Kahlo popped Jeff Koon’s Balloon Dog.
Upon looking at Micheangelo’s ‘Last Supper’, Zhe came up with what would be the unifying story line. What if the characters received an invitation to join the last supper hosted by someone other than Jesus?
Yes! We rolled along from there deciding Michelangelo’s David would be our host, along with which characters would be invited and even ones who wouldn’t. We asked questions like how would characters react to not being invited? How does David move about a space to send his invitations? , etc.
We create a storyboard where David decides to invite guests, ignores others, and the animation will culminate with a new version of the last supper.
Thus, the technical making began. Using photoshop we would remove famous masterpieces from their backgrounds and create moveable points (like arms and legs). With After Effects came magic. Using key frames and camera effects, even the simplest movements created character and story.
We collaborated extremely well as a team. Breaking up the work load, we worked on different scenes separately or created animated assets for others to use.
PLAN:
Scene 1: wide view of David in 1museum.jpg, throws invitation to Van Gogh , walks towards seurat (Maya)
Scene 2:, close up of animated seurat park painting, David walks by (Chenyu) DONE
Scene 3: wide view David walking towards doorway to see American gothic, see his backside (Maya)
Scene 4: close up of American gothic, no invitation (Chenyu)
Scene 5: invitation thrown to Balloon dog, all balloon versus. Frida stuff (Maya)
Scene 6: Birth of Venus (Zedd)
Scene 7: Las Meninas (Zedd)
Scene 8: Last Supper, start zoomed in on David in the middle, Zoom out to see all our guests at the dinner party (TOGETHER)
Cleverly, we designed our story to have cuts that would allow for this process to become more seamless. Luckily using preexisting photos and historical paintings created a unified aesthetic on its own.
For final touches we edited our components in Premiere and added sound effects. We kept the tone light hearted with some silly sound effects and a added a classical piano track to keep with our theme.
Final thoughts:
What a fun experience. Having never used After Effects before, this was a super exciting task for me. We were ambitious creating over 20 moving parts with 13 characters alone for the final scene. We certainly condensed our story to accommodate this ambition and our time frame, but we are all super proud of the final product.
Check it out!
