Experimental here we come!!!

Well I've changed my direction and I feel much happier with the results, the edit works better and the music that Ben has produced has made all the difference to the believability. I have now re-titled my project as I felt it needed to reflect the changes that I have made to the piece. It is now called 'The Uncanny Doll Valley'.

Here is my final image for you all to reflect upon.

Editing

I am at the stage where I am editing my footage. I have done a first draft and I don't think the results are very good, the overall effect is quite disturbing because the animation is lacking realism and the dancers are scary looking. This isn't working out as I'd planned. I think I'm going to have to think again and maybe produce something in keeping with the style so far. I think I need to make my composition more experimental as this is the only way that this will work.

This is the first draft:-

Getting around problems

I decided that I would go the simpler route and duplicate my characters using after effects and green screen. The decision was also made because the animation that I'd done so far wasn't perfect and I felt that it would be easier to composite footage together with some effects and make the overall project more interesting. I have used my first model to create two other girls and I have adjusted their costume, lip and eye colour to make them different. I'm quite happy with the results and now that I have done this I can render out all my footage with a green screen background and use After Effects to removed it.
I think the best way to remove the background would be to use colour keying. I have done this before, however, I thought it important to source a few pointers from the internet for doing this in a more accurate way and I think the results that I have produced work quite well. It's obviously getting very close to the dead line for this piece and therefore I need to use this week to edit and composite my footage. I'm also going to have to get a hard drive to transport all my footage because the files are too big to fit on a USB stick as I need to use a more powerful computer to render out the After effects project in university. I tend to find that my computer doesn't give a very good finish to projects when produced with After Effects, maybe it's too memory intensive.

Frustration

I've tried to copy the the animation from one character to another using the trax editor but it's not really working out as I'd hoped. I'm not sure whether each individual element of movement needs to be duplicated as so far I've had not luck. I've tried copying the pelvis movements as a control but it's just not working as I;d hoped. There seem to be just too many variables for me to get the combination right. I think I'll try one more time. I haven't got time for this problem with everything else that needs doing. The rendering of the character and camera choices and movements will no doubt take a week or two, so I need to get this finished and move on to editing.