Last summer I filmed a short video of my dog, that does not swim, but will float around on the pool raft so he can chill with the family. The little clip always made me laugh and it became the inspiration for my final project: A little dog enjoying the pool in his backyard, dreaming of a bigger life outside of the fence. I felt I could combine rotoscoping, After Effects, and my own drawings for this animation.
The animation starts off with the real footage of the dog in the pool he yawns and then I plan to rotoscope his eyes to shut and a dream bubble coming from his head. This dream bubble will have green water and it will expand counter clock wise and fill the scene around the raft as the dog wakes back up and stays a true image. The dog will now be floating on a raft in a pretty beach setting. For this part of the project I will slow down the clip into rotoscope speed and color the animation on top of the footage.
The next part of the movie will be completed in After Effects. I will cut out a bunch of layers in photoshop and work with them in AE. I will cut out a few different layers of the dog on the raft from different camera angles so it will look like he is looking in different directions, and animate him accordingly in each of the backgrounds, until the end of the movie. Next I will draw the fifteen background slides, they will consist of the sky, UNCW water tower, NYC Harbor, an ocean liner in the Atlantic, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the pyramids and the Sphinx, a Himalayan mountain side, the Great Wall of China, a whale jumping in the Pacific, clouds surrounding the Golden Gate Bridge, the national park in Utah, a dinosaur excavation site in Utah, and then finally a close up of a gigantic bone.
The next part of the animation will cut back and forth like a movie, until the last shot that will return to the original footage. It will have a close up of the bone that I will make move towards the left of the screen, and a picture of Scottie's face licking his chops moving to the right of the screen, I think I will make that picture in a CU photograph. Cutting these shots together I will make it look like they are getting closer and closer together. Next I will have a CU of Scottie's mouth licking the bone and then a CU shot of his eyes opening up, and the scene will cut back out to the original footage of him floating in the pool and it will end with the suburban house in the background.
I realize that the beginning and end of the film do not use animation, so that is why I drew up an extensive middle story to make sure I have a full one minute animation. As of now I am going for a 90 second clip, making each storyboard square of action to equal 3.75 seconds of animation each. If this project turns out that I have bit off more than I can chew, it will be easy to trim down a few of the locations Scottie will travel to.
I hope to get so more ideas and input from the class to help make more decisions for this five week project.
