Mystery Workshop Response (48 hour race)

The 48 hour video response was nothing like I've ever done before. It was a great experience. I thought I would use my laptop web camera, but after deciding to do an animation, I felt that the camera would be too cumbersome. I ended up using my girlfriend's digital still camera. I took the prop line, "My god, it's full of stars!" and concocted a storyline around it. I was also interested in using green screen for the animation. I've never done green screen work before, and after learning the basics of it in Introduction to Editing class, I thought I'd give it a try. I bought a green sheet of paper, and decided to do paper cut outs of key figures. These included: The rock mountain, skeleton, cheese sandwich, and god's face. I calculated the number of still frames I'd need to make a minute. This equaled about 600 frames if I was going to have 30 frames a second. This equation worked out nicely. The majority of my problems ran into animating the mouth of God. I didn't have a good animating station. I was doing it at my work desk, and everytime I had to move the mouth, I had to go around my desk to get to the sheet of paper. I was really having trouble with the keying about the green screen. I had never done it before, and as animation took the whole day before, and some of the second day, I was just assembling the footage and color keying about 8 hours before the animation was due. But, for what the time, I think I did very well. I wanted to go back later and fix the green, but I decided that, that wasn't in the spirit of the race. I really enjoyed this process. Having a deadline, and having to be creative like that was a real joy. I felt pride in what I was doing, because it was unique and because we were all on the same level, no one had advance word on the prop, I felt this really was an opportunity to show what type of filmmakers we were. I'd love to do this again, and it has definitely peaked my interest in animation and green screen work.