deadline

A short film by June Ho Park

A student has work to do.

Author’s Notes

The first step I took when creating this was to pinpoint a visual style, which was inspired by various artists who’ve used rotoscoping to create beautiful animation, listed below. The story stemmed from the stress and pressure I felt from doing work this semester. I also love working with ideas that cause discomfort or anxiety in the viewer, which you can see in some of my previous works. I think deciding what objects to color was an important factor. I wanted to emphasize that so much of what I do revolves around my hand (coding, photography, drawing).

The main technique I’ve used for this project is rotoscoping. I shot my raw pictures and footage on a Nikon d5500 and tripod. For most shots, I imported footage into Adobe Animate, rotoscoped the scenes, and brought them into Adobe After Effects. For some shots that involved static drawings (like the watch and crumbled papers), I imported pictures into Adobe Illustrator, traced those, and brought them into After Effects. I used a Wacom Tablet to draw digitally. To bring in the real-life textures, I used an alpha-matte the Illustrator/Animate assets and placed the images below it. The pictures used for textures were taken by me while I was in New York City. Most sounds used in the video were recorded by me using a ZOOM H6 Recorder. The following sounds were downloaded from freesounds.org: birds chirping, static noise, clocks, and crushing.

The biggest lesson I got from doing this project is to cut down on ideas. My original idea for this project had much more content, such as including multiple people having a deadline, but I realized over the course of the project is that this is an issue for several reasons. One is that it’s impossible to convey that many ideas clearly in under 3 minutes. Each idea or object should be presented with enough time so the audience can digest it before moving onto the next idea. The other is that I simply didn’t have enough time to execute the more complicated ideas. Instead of introducing new ideas I reused ideas introduced in earlier scenes in different ways, which creates a more cohesive narrative. It’s better to have a film with less, more refined ideas than a jumbled mess of half-baked ones. The other lesson I took was to learn how to use shortcuts. This doesn’t necessarily mean to cut corners. For example, I spent less time making details for objects that moved fast because it’s not noticeable, and also animated some scenes in After Effects instead of doing frame-by-frame work in Animate.

For a future project I want to try animating with even less color, maybe with just two colors.