Cat Rap Process 5 - Final Meow

Here is my final pass at this "Cat Rap" I made in Experimental Animation Class. This piece was featured in the 134th Annual Student Show at CCAD. I took my last pass and pulled new background elements in as well as colored each frame of the cat in with white. I also added a title slate and a music credit slate at the end (music props to The Death Set and their song, "Kittens Inspired by Kittens"). This was a multi-passed rotoscope Animation! Earlier passes: http://sarahmaeschmidt.blogspot.com/2013/04/cat-rap-updates.html

Cat Rap from Sarah Schmidt on Vimeo.

Lottery Roulette GIF/VIDEO

Here's a .gif I made for Experimental Animation class! These are ticket book fronts from The Ohio Lottery. My family owns a small gas station/convenience store out in the middle of central Ohio - at the beginning of the semester, my mom gave me a whole slab of these, saying maybe I could find a use for them. I ended up scanning each individual card three times: once flat, once slightly crumpled, and once (after 'weathering' them with water and sunlight). I used a few scans to 'wipe' the card across the screen to add a different type of strobe effect. 

The concept revolves around the cycle of money associated with lottery. Have worked at a store that sells lottery, I have handed over countless tickets to countless customers: some dedicated regulars, some desperate trash-pickers, some high spenders, and some just looking for a quick jab at 'luck'. Though it can be completely argued that the lottery is a waste of time and money, it's funny when you contrast that fact to the fact that lottery tickets bring in lots of money and support to small businesses. It's also funny when you consider how many tickets come in a book, and the fact that they are all worth $1-20 - that adds up! The money that is given back to a community in kind of twisted little way is compelling - I wanted to highlight the cycle. Money is frivolously spent, intently spent, and desperately spent on lottery tickets: then, once in a while, the money is given back: someone wins. The spending continues. The business is able to stay afloat and continue to serve it's customers. Everybody wins. Upon talking to my mom recently, I heard we hit our biggest winner yet.

Here's a quick, trippy video-version I slapped up on Vimeo:

LottoRoulette from Sarah Schmidt on Vimeo.

Cat Rap Process Updates 2-4

Here are the next few iterations of the Cat-Rap animation for Experimental class. I animated/rotoscoped more or less straight-ahead - over video reference my friend shot of me - on 1's in Flash, slapping on tails at the end. For my second pass: I dropped the opacity of the first pass, cut out the video, animated on 2's - paying more careful attention to a somewhat consistent "cat" shape. The third chunk involved a push into After Effects with lots of effects added, including keying out blacks and instead pushing in colors and smears. I think the next step is to get a white color fill into the cat.
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Spring Break

Here's a little bit of what I have been working on this week of Spring Break. For Experimental Animation, I am doing a rotoscope project - which definitely involved me lip-syncing a small meow-rap by The Death Set. Animation III has me working on a scene from my short that involves an attitude-walk (a dance in this case) with an abrupt change at the end.
I also have a goal of trying to finish roughs for every scene of this cow short over break, so more is on the way!

Experimental Animation Project 2: "Rager Rick"

Rager Rick from Sarah Schmidt on Vimeo.

The second project for Experimental Animation called for cut-out animation. The hands-on process really tested timing and spacing sensibility. That being said, this clip is a fast-paced explosion of animals cut out from many issues of Ranger Rick Magazine from the early 90's. My friend and classmate Jeff Ockerse (Jefockerse.blogspot.com) worked together cutting out all the animals, drawing on some of them, and moving them around beneath the camera. We generally went back-and-fourth between camera and animator every time an idea was completed. Jeff drew all the extraneous drawings. Our biggest influence during the project was Terry Gilliam's animations for the Monty Python films (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs7WaL44_Iw).

If we were to re-vist this project, we would try and add more drawn elements as well as some extension on the time/frames spent on specific images. For example, there's a part where the vulture quickly grows a new head (of a seagull), only to have it explode instantly. On the upside, I felt like the music I found fit together with the imagery and movement surprisingly well. A sound-effect pass might be worth a shot, too.

The best part of the project was that we could keep running with new ideas - experimenting - until we ran out of animals, time, and SD card memory. The worst part was probably the mess of torn up magazines. Everywhere (we should have made a stop-motion of us cleaning it all up).

The textural glows come from the fact that we painted over every frame on Photoshop with a specific gray color. We did this to get rid of some of the messiest frames that came about when we accidentally pulled our backgrounds around too much. I added extra frames in After Effects to have smoother transitions between the beginning, the end, where the vultures come in - etc. Another thing we noticed was that the first set of animals that we shot had more of a blue tint - something we could have easily fixed in Photoshop or After Effects - but we decided to keep it to add variety (as well as save us on the time crunch). If it were to be revisited, that would probably be our first thing to try and change. I'm also really wanting to bump up the colors and vibrancy.

Experimental Animation Project 1: "Bomb Nom"

Bomb Nom from Sarah Schmidt on Vimeo.

First project in experimental Animation. It involved the blood sweat and tears of a few black pens, as well as the assistance of a few good friends, Portofino's Pizza, and lots of Post-Its being rubbed all over a cheese pizza to the point where the pizza became pretty dry. Also, proof that college students will eat anything... after filming, we donated a piece to about everyone we could find.

Nutrition, repetition, consumption, gluttony and grease. All in 42 seconds and with some piano.