Tea Project (Week 9)

Here is my finished animated face for the seagull scene of my group film 'The Secret Life of Mugs' where Shannon has done the compositing and motion tracking:

I also included the credits at the end that I made. The editing, foley and music in that video was done by my teammates.

Tea Project Report

After we chose Shannon’s idea for our film, we all decided to think of our own ideas for the mugs/teas and their personalities, as well as where they would be set. I thought of the pier/seagull mug as well as the iced tea one, and then wrote the scripts for them both. The iced tea mug is a sweet, warm woman in her late 40s who’s slightly forgetful and jolly. She is feeling rather chilly, but comes to realise that it’s only her and not the weather because she’s got ice cubes. I found a picture of a cafe in Falmouth with bright summery tables that I thought the live action backgrounds could be shot in, however I found out it had shut, and then Niamh thought of the idea to shoot it in the Gylly beach cafe which looks out onto the beach and is very beautiful, so we ended up doing it there.

The seagull cup is happy to be by the seaside but finds it to have some downsides, namely the seagulls. These seagulls also have an understandable problem with people shouting at them for being there, and take it out on the cup by pooping in it, leaving the cup in disgust. I wanted this to be set in Falmouth Pier as my story was set at a pier and also it’s a tourist location in Falmouth and has plenty of seagulls to make the story accurate.

I storyboarded out these scripts to get some idea of what the visuals and timing would be, and did them in Storyboard Pro so I could put the timings in directly to check if each shot was too long or short in the animatic.

Then as a group we all discussed each of our animatics, thinking more about the order they could go in and also the voice acting.

I got my friend Emma to help me record the voice acting for my two scenes - Emma did the voice acting for the seagull scene and I did the voice acting for the iced tea scene. I recorded these using a zoom recorder and headphones to monitor. I also went down to Falmouth to look at the pier and check where we’d be filming, and recorded some seagulls using the zoom recorder, however it was extremely windy so they weren’t good enough to use in the film, however I did use them in my animatic to help me and my group picture the scene better.

We all went around campus filming the background shots for the posh, student, travel, builder, and herbal mugs. After discussing them with our teacher, we decided to reshoot all but the posh mug, as there were small details and problems with them, for example, in the builders mug scene, it was too obvious that Olly wasn’t a builder so the joke of that scene didn’t work. After reshooting those scenes, we scheduled a day to shoot the Falmouth scenes, where we went down with the equipment and shot in Gylly beach cafe and also at the pier.

Then when we had all our background shots, we started animating our scenes, so we did this by taking one still frame from the video and animating on it. Shannon composited my animation onto the video with motion tracking. I only animated the seagull one and not the iced tea one, which Niamh animated. We all made our animated faces with white eyeballs and colour in the mouths so they were consistent in that sense, but other than that we all wanted our own styles to show through in each of our scenes as a way of reflecting the different personalities of the mugs.

I also did the credits at the end, and drew the biscuit from the posh tea scene and a mug in the top corners to make it more interesting.