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Self Portrait | Project Proposal

Self Portrait

Reasoning: My favorite hobby is sketching, and art has a big influence in my life, and I wanted to create a self-portrait that would reflect that. I thought a stylized piece would work better with an “artistic” theme than a more conventional piece. I wanted the portrait to look like it was made out of sheets of paper; I created a layer for each large block of color (face, hair, shirt, etc.), and masked it off with a small brush to give it a jagged, torn look. To give these layers the depth of paper, I took a picture of a crumpled sheet of paper, boosted the contrast, and set it to darken on each layer. I also shifted the texture of each paper layer to contribute to make the paper look more realistic (rather than just duplicated). The result was something that was clearly a human form seemingly made of torn sheets of paper, but it lacked something to make it recognizable as me. I took the original picture, and ran it though a water-color filter, as it fit with the theme, and helped it to blend more convincingly with the paper. Finally, I put the whole paper-portrait over a photo of my desk, as that’s where I do most of my work. I wanted to include a pencil and paper, again to carry though the artistic theme.

 

Project Proposal

Title: “Procrastination”

 

Synopsis: The short is set up as a video-capture of a computer’s desktop. It begins with the user pausing the video game that he’s playing and pulling up an essay to work on. The robotic antagonist of the game escapes the window and begins to interfere with the user’s work by distracting him (playing with the volume, closing other windows, etc.). The short culminates with the user deleting the game (and thus, the rogue character), however the villain takes one last stab by dragging the user’s essay off with him.

 

Objective: To take a 2-dimensional video of a desktop and animate 3-dimensional models over it, creating a new sense of depth. Synthetic audio will be used to help add a sense of believability to the clip. The antagonist will not speak, but rather communicate with a series of robotic noises. Additionally, familiar sound clips of computer errors, notifications, etc. will be used.   

 

Audience: The intended audience of this short is older kids enrolled in school (middle school, high school, potentially college) – as they’d likely have at least some experience with procrastination. While someone who enjoys video games may appreciate the short more than someone who does not, I wouldn’t consider it a “requirement” of the audience.

 

Sources: My biggest concern was the technical aspect of animating over a two-dimensional video, so I gathered some tutorials on the process (Green Screening In Reverse). I’ve also collected some reference material to use in the actual clip.

 

  • The robot should have a simple look 
  • Some more inspiration for the character (more for proportion and face design – the character wouldn’t be a skeleton)
  • And the color pallette it would have

 

 

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