VCD302 Blog Post 4- Call of the Wild Animatic

The function of my project is to explore movement in After effects. I want to explore and have it be inserted into my project as part of a narrative. The area of investigation is small and is pretty much limited to serving the narrative of my piece. All of the editing in After Effects will likely only involve the transform, scale, and blur tool, but they will also stack on one another, making the scenes more complex to pull off in the end. I will also try to incorporate camera effects, and possibly lyrics as well. Though it will depend on how much time I have at the end, as it will be last priority. I aim to use these tools in service of a narrative to make it more impactful.

My project is a narrative video. The whole video is telling the story of ‘Call of the Wild’ by Jack London. Written in 1903, it is a short story about a dog named Buck that gets shipped off to Alaska to be a sled dog and ends up as a wild dog. I will be drawing pivotal scenes from the book and making it into a narrative that fits a song I chose. The song is “I know I’m a Wolf’ by the Young Heretics. The song itself is completely unrelated to Call of the Wild, but the lyrics fit the overall themes of the book, hence why I chose that song to go over the top of the video.

I will be using my own drawings and inserting them into After Effects to be edited. This involves a lot of drawing, as I have 70 frames to complete, including the dogs and the backgrounds, so it will be a lot of work. It will be a methodical process that involves me doing sketches, then lining the art, and finally doing base colours of the art. Then it is ready to be inserted into a scene and then edited for movement. This project is half a design work/art work, and there is a huge focus on composition/designs on the art side, whereas After Effects is only for editing.

I have a lot of references for this project, and the one that I am taking the most from is ‘Ivypool-Ain’t it fun?’ video. The video shows what I want to achieve for my project. It is a contain narrative about a character that is indirectly explained to us through the lyrics of the song. It is also based on a book, and only people who have read the source material will get the whole story, but is still somewhat understandable to a public audience, which is what I am aiming for.

Ain’t it fun- the major inspiration for my project

For my proof of concept, I have sketches and completed frames to show, as well as character designs for Buck and Spitz. My goal with this was to make their designs distinct and stand out as important characters among the others. I used the movies (2020 and 1981) as a reference for both of their looks. I portrayed Buck as more softer and friendly features (round eyes) and gave Spitz some qualities you would find in an antagonist, like a scar and exaggerated ‘demon’ eyes.