Loie Vaughn

I can’t believe Mediaworks is over (except for the screening)! 

Last weekend, I reorganized my whole project, and added lots of sound effects, mostly collected from freesounds.org. During Clearing My Mind I added car, camel, chewing, popping, and ocean noises. I also re-recorded most of the ukulele and breathing sounds.

I got some very helpful feedback during this week’s screening. Beatriz and Marilyn both really appreciated the new sound effects and thought the rearrangement was much more coherent. Because the live-action working shots are separated, and the breathing is more pronounced, a struggle is clearer. And then having the animated pieces following the corresponding live-action shots makes it completely clear that the animation reflects the self-reflection of working in animation.

After two full days of final rough cut screenings on Tuesday and Thursday, I went back to the editing suites to do some final tweaking. Friday night I worked on some of the transitions, and took off the color-correction filters. Since the lighting was slightly different in each animation lab, the white balance was off for most of the hand-drawn scenes, so I attempted to correct this by bumping up the blue in the color-correction filter… unfortunately, though the images looked perfectly black and white on the computer screen and NTSC monitor in the editing suite, projected in the recital hall, the black lines of the drawings were obviously blueish. So I decided I’d rather have the images be dingy than blue.

Saturday I finished Thank You For Being. Because the flow still seemed a little off when I presented the final rough cut, I fiddled around with the pacing and placement of all the clips. I came up with this sequence: rushed breathing, the beginning of Clearing My Mind, Time, moderate breathing, the middle of Clearing my Mind, the mountains, the first part of meditation, slow breathing, the end of clearing my mind, and lastly, the whole meditation scene. In this format, the breathing scenes are more evenly spaced, and the middle part is the longest. I think this sequence also makes more sense, in that after showing the cut-out of my mind I show Time and  then Mountains, as if these scenes take place within my mind. The cut-out of my mind is also placed after all the breathing scenes, to reinforce the idea that my animation work was a sort of meditation. As well as rearranging my piece, I made the ticking in Time longer, and added some pops when the doors disappear. I am hoping the sequence really does make more sense this way and it wasn’t just a momentary impulse I had in the suite yesterday…. I did not want to fuss with it anymore… at least for a while. I think it needs to sit and be seen as it is, and if I decide to adjust it more  I will leave that for a couple months down the line so Thank You For Being doesn’t become overworked. 

Unfortunately, I have not finished Nothingness and Emptiness yet. I will continue to read if for as long as  I have the book out from the library…. but honestly, it is not very well written and I don’t seem to be gaining any useful information from it. Today I am writing my evaluations and looking forward to the public screening on Wednesday!