Power of Place - Parkour video

During 2010 an exciting project: Power of Place – Shetland’s Year of Architecture and Place 2010 took place in Shetland.

Throughout 2010 Power of Place hosted: lectures, workshops in youth clubs, themed architectural articles, an international architectural conference, an architecture film festival, and held Architects’ Doors Open Days.

This short film about Parkour in Shetland features local Parkour group "Northern Focus Parkour" utilising Shetland's architectural environment.

The original footage is courtesy of Northern Focus Parkour (youtube.com) and mixed media animation was filmed and animated by Jono Sandilands (jonosandilands.com).

Power of Place Final Fling events:
Saturday 5th March, Shetland Museum & Archives, Lerwick.
Saturday 12th March, Sandwick Carnegie Hall.
Saturday 19th March, Mid Yell Hall.

All from 11am – 2pm. FREE. Everyone of all ages welcome.

Power of Place - Parkour

Over the past week I have been filming and animating a mixed media video for Power of Place - Shetland's Year of Architecture (Shetland Arts, Shetland Architectural Society & SIC). (That's the videos rendering just now - and they're being shown tomorrow! Eeek!)

Northern Focus Parkour kindly jumped in to help with the short film clips which will be shown alongside loads of other things at the Power of Place Final Flings (poster for events).

Saturday 5th March, Shetland Museum & Archives, Lerwick.

Saturday 12th March, Sandwick Carnegie Hall.

Saturday 19th March, Mid Yell Hall.

All from 11am – 2pm. FREE. Everyone of all ages welcome.

www.shetlandarts.org

Hot Topic Taxi

Recently I was asked to visualise "Hot Topic Taxi", a segment featured on BBC Radio Shetland's monthly programme, Sideways, a sideways look at Arts & Culture in Shetland hosted by Mark Inchley. The animation will be used on Facebook/Youtube etc to 'visualise' this part of the show online.

Mark originally came to me with the idea to have a static drawing of two people in a taxi (see sketch of idea by Mark below) with the area in black in the back window transparent with a video of a road moving in the background.

After a bit of brainstorming over the idea - I proposed an idea, and a challenge for myself to work within a tight budget to produce something more usable and dynamic than the original brief of a static image.

The challenge I set was to produce 3 or 4 very short animations (around 5 seconds long each). They would be of a very rough quality, which I supply for the Sideways guys to cut together themselves using some sort of movie software.

I had a listen to the audio and started quickly sketching out what I thought the characters, taxi and setting looked like. Once I had an idea for what I wanted them to look like the final elements were roughly drawn with a soft pencil then scanned and saved each element as a separate transparent file.

I used Adobe After Effects to create a really basic set of the flat layers with a camera positioned in front of the placed elements to create the look of a 3D world with elements moving at different speeds to create a depth of field. View from right of the placed camera in After Effects.

Next to make the action - the backgrounds were set to move using two keyframes for start position end position. The characters and car were set to wiggle randomly to look as if driving in a real car. The mouths only had to loop a basic speaking pattern and this was quite quickly done by making a photoshop file with the 4 different mouth positions required.

In After Effects I trigger which layer should be visible at a given time using time remapping. I type "0" for what is called "layer 2" above, "1" for "Layer 3" and so on. I looped a segment of the mouth movement and used the same mouth for both characters.

I like to use this project as an example of what you can do working to a budget.