Animation

So, in furthering my bid to get all the old crap together in once place, here are the videos I made during my multimedia design years at Aarhus Tech. I’m trying to get into a habit of writing again so I will include a narrative and the odd puerile joke or two.

1. Airport

This video – I know, it’s not an animation – was my first try with Adobe Audition. We were given a short clip without audio and instructed to insert sound effects to tell the story. Rather than go for traditional props – Eg a coconut for horses – I decided to use music so un-tuned a guitar and dusted off the four-track. I was trying for the emotion of the scene, but mainly it was about having fun and learning the process of editing layered audio to video.

 

2. Beast

Here is the beginning of the flash animations (all done in Adobe Flash CS4 on a laptop that struggled like a sick horse on the road to the glue factory.) This was a matter of a simple animation with sound effects, an exercise in patience and timing. It’s a bit mental.

 

3. Strip Lick Bang Voyage

Next up I concentrated more on the animation side of things; this is my first attempt at rotoscoping – a laborious process that I’ll say tentatively was made harder than it had to be due to my integrated graphics card (a poor workman blames his tools yada yada.) I chose a song people may well recognise from the Fight Club soundtrack and loosely set the content to it. It’s short, repetitive and badly drawn but I was working to a deadline and had a new sexy young friend to entertain so leave me alone.

 

4. Industrial Lesbian Epilepsy

I went back to using a mouse as opposed to the tablet I had tried with the last video and found I could get more continuous, fluid lines. I decided to try something organic, a sequence that flowed together; and because I’m a pervert I chose two young ladies in the altogether enjoying a little harmless cunnilingus. I showed this during a visualisation exam to an external examiner; his frank look of disgust will be with me to the grave. It is the first of the videos using the music of Nine Inch Nails

 

5. Untitled

On the strength of, or in spite of, the previous video, one of the other students asked me to contribute something to a site she’d made to ‘raise awareness’ of the recent earthquake in Haiti. Now call me a cynic but I felt it was more about her passing than actually helping any of the victims of that catastrophe; I submitting something suited to by drunken, bitter mood (I’d been reading a lot of Derrick Jensen) – needless to say it was not included on the girl’s site. The noise in the intro of an Audioslave track.

 

6. Legos

Next up, shit was getting serious – I’d slept my way to the top and was bafflingly fortunate enough to get a distance internship with PetPunk but I needed to get put through for the final exams. I stayed with animation but this time included stop-motion and tried out Adobe After-Effects in addition to what I’d already messed about with. Thom Yorke does the noises.

 

7. Mr. Self Destruct

And finally, the final project. In short: me, jumping around naked as I acted out my interpretation of the titular Nine Inch Nails song. The project report can be found here. I got a 12, which the highest mark you can get in Danish exams. The ‘head’ consists of MRI slices of my fucked knee (yes, that is indeed the medical term.)

 

And that’s how I learnt that getting Mr Winky™ out and jumping about garners respect in higher education – as long as you can explain yourself. Watch out, Teesside University…