A-TROOP: 2013

Karen goes live!

It's done. Finally. After an insane few months, I have finished my graduate film. Although I have loads of post-production paperwork to get around to now, I present to you, Karen. Sending out masses of love and gratitude to those who helped out with the project, you know who you are.

Almost There...

After a couple months of animating, filming, editing, re-filming, editing some more and compositing like a square-eyed beast [with intervals of pulling my hair out and yelling obscenities at the computer screen], I can say that Karen is so very nearly finished. And throughout all of this, I can definitely say that I've got a much better understanding of After Effects, which was totally alien to me end of last year. Every cloud and that. To give you a little taste of what's to come, here are a couple of stills from the film so far. [These are screengrabs from Premiere so apologies for the not-so-great quality images].

Parts of the Process, Pieces of the Puzzle...

Karen is coming together rather slowly, but surely nonetheless. Here are the results of a couple months worth of frantic tests and drawings, some of which will be animated over live action footage. Although some of these are incomplete, this should [hopefully] give you an impression of the style Karen is going to be animatied in.

Ink and Watercolour

Ink and Adobe Photoshop

Karen will be played by the lovely Kathy Foote. I say played. Mysterious images of Karen will appear intermittently throughout the film. Although the storyline, in a way, revolves around her, I have chosen to keep her physical identity anonymous and represent her in various objects, one of which will be a newspaper.
[At the moment, I'm a little bit stumped over which image of 'Karen' to use in the newspaper collage, but here are the three I'm thinking of using].