KATIE WADE - ILLUSTRATION - SECOND YEAR - OUIL504 - STUDIO BRIEF 2 from Katie Wade on Vimeo.
This is my finished sting! It took me around 6 hours to make this overall. When I was making the collages for my final pieces, I originally made 5 to reflect the different scenes from Norwegian wood, After Dark and Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage. However after I had made the five, one of them didn't fit in as well as the rest. It still retained the same aspects as the others but it wasn't quite the same composition and not as intimate as the others.
I could have gone back and arranged it to make it more of a scene but instead I decided that this was what I would use as my background for my sting. It was inspired by the book After Dark so it still kept in with my idea of a city. Up until this point I had not done too much on my sting other than decide some basic animations for it, and planning to include a cat within it. I found it hard to make the sting before or during my making of the final pieces so waited until the end to make it so it would fit in better.
The concept I had before worked well with the collage. At first I tried to create individual bits that moved within the collage and take it into after effects but it wasn't matching up very well and it was hard to animate them in a way that was believable.
Scrapping this I then went on to make it more stop-motion animation by moving the objects in photoshop, saving them as individual tifs before bringing them into After Effects.
This did make the process longer and I think that there are probably shortcuts around what I did eventually, I ended up with a lot of layers to manage but luckily I gave them individual names so I didn't loose track of what was going on.
Once I had finished the sting, I started looking at the music to put to it. For my Murakami playlist I have been listening to a lot of jazz and blues on spotify (as it's something that influences the author heavily and reflects on his characters/mentioned numerous times in his work) over the course of the project. The only problem with this was that if I used a song from that playlist, it was most likely not free and I would have to put a disclaimer on my work and risk it coming down in the future.
If I could have picked any song it probably would have been Five Spot After Dark by Curtis Fuller (1959) as it was mentioned in the novel After Dark.
My search for the perfect song for the sting continued, I trawled playlists on Soundcloud for artists allowing their jazz performances to be downloaded. There were quite a number of these I considered but none of them matched the animation well. I moved from Soundcloud onto the Free Music Archive and listened to even more free music. I thought about using some exerts from the audio book I had found in my work but they didn't match up so well and were hard to edit. I stumbled across a really catchy song, that wasn't as dark as I would have liked but it worked so well with the sting I decided to choose it. This song was called "ain't misbehaving" by the Quartet Barbette.
I'm pleased with how the sting came out, it fits in well with the whole project. If I could change anything I think it would be the transitions on the type (make them longer for the viewer) and perhaps I would have translated some into Japanese for an alternate audience.
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