For this animation I worked with Chenyu Sun and Zhe Wang.
I was inspired by images I had seen on Instagram of these impressive art history halloween costumes. I thought it would be interesting to create our animation along these lines, bringing to life ubiquitous masterpieces. Chenyu and Zhe were instantly on board!
We began our process by finding famous images for potential characters, Girl with the Pearl Earring, Van Gogh, Mona Lisa, and The Creation of Adam were some of the first finds. A few early interactions came to mind as well, for instance, I thought what if Frida Kahlo popped Jeff Koon’s Balloon Dog?
Upon looking at Micheangelo’s ‘Last Supper’, Zhe came up with what would be the unifying story line. What if the characters received an invitation to join the last supper hosted by someone other than Jesus?
Yes! We rolled along from there deciding Michelangelo’s David would be our host, along with which characters would be invited and even ones who wouldn’t. We asked questions like how would characters react to not being invited? How does David move about a space to send his invitations? , etc.
We created a storyboard where David decides to invite guests, ignores others, and the animation will culminate with a new version of the last supper.
Thus, the technical making began. Using photoshop we would remove famous masterpieces from their backgrounds and create moveable points (like arms and legs). With After Effects came magic. Using key frames and camera effects, even the simplest movements created character and story.
After Effects screenshot. An example of our teamwork, Chenyu had already animated David walking, and I animated him into the space.
We collaborated extremely well as a team. Breaking up the work load, we worked on different scenes separately or created animated assets for others to use.
PLAN:
Scene 1: wide view of David in 1museum.jpg & David’s general walking movements (Chenyu), throws invitation to Van Gogh , walks towards seurat (Maya)
Scene 2: close up of animated Seurat park painting, David walks by (Chenyu)
Scene 3: wide view David walking towards doorway to see American gothic, see his backside (Maya)
Scene 4: close up of American gothic, no invitation (Chenyu)
Scene 5: invitation thrown to Balloon dog, all balloon versus. Frida stuff (Maya)
Scene 6: Birth of Venus (Zedd)
Scene 7: Las Meninas (Zedd)
Scene 8: Last Supper, start zoomed in on David in the middle, Zoom out to see all our guests at the dinner party (TOGETHER)
Cleverly, we designed our story to have cuts that would allow for this process to become more seamless. Luckily using preexisting photos and historical paintings created a unified aesthetic on its own.
For final touches we edited our components in Premiere and added sound effects. We kept the tone light hearted with some silly sound effects and a added a classical piano track to keep with our theme.
Final thoughts:
What a fun experience. Having never used After Effects before, this was a super exciting task for me. We were ambitious creating over 20 moving parts with 13 characters alone for the final scene. We certainly condensed our story to accommodate this ambition and our time frame, but we are all super proud of the final product.