Among my references was an album of digital shots I'd taken more than three years prior in my mother's family's brownstone in the South End of Boston. We were about to hand over the keys to the man who had bought it and planned on renovating it. This was in December of 2004 or January of 2005, and I had been getting into 3D graphics over the year leading up to that. I walked throughout the four floors of the building, taking snapshots of anything I found interesting: old furniture, worn-down paint, grease-caked cooking equipment, weathered sinks, pools of sun entering sky lights, battered bricks, and of course the building itself. I also shot a very choppy, grainy and blurry video of a walkthrough of the building from top to bottom. I think that because of my budding interest in 3D, I had the intention of re-creating some of the items and textures I'd photographed, if not re-creating the entire space.
As I modeled items I needed for my film, such as buildings, mailboxes, lamp posts and other urban objects, I saw myself constantly gravitating back to the reference images I had shot at the apartment. I also found myself having a difficult time ending my story in a way that was compelling, memorable and feasible given my timeline, resources and budget. The live action portion was especially governing the creative freedom of the film, because it was locking me into shooting things a certain way because I was planning on greenscreening pretty much all of it. It became more and more apparent that I was not going to accomplish what I wanted, so after meeting with professors as individuals and as a thesis committee, as well as pitching the idea to friends and former professors from college, I decided that I should save the idea for another time.
My second phase of my film scrapped the usage of live action video, and would be entirely 3D. I retained the original part about using light to help drive the emotion, and was still using many of the references I'd already put in my library. This second version was a series of vignettes, spanning multiple interior and exterior environments I had been sketching over the years, all of which contained an interesting element of lighting, color and composition. However, after I presented this idea to some people, they told me that this would be effective only if there were a cohesive element tying all of the shots together. As I tried to find a common and interesting thread to bring everything together, I kept modeling the exterior as well as individual rooms of my mother's apartment. There was something compelling about this place; family memories coupled with architectural history. The creative potential for combining these two things with lighting and texturing was strong, but the only question was how I would bring them together into a narrative, not to mention doing so without the presence of people.
As I tried to work through this obstacle, I continued modeling from my reference photos. I felt that the exterior and kitchen had the most character, because they both had indications of time periods and usage by the people who lived there, as well as very organic textures and shapes, and I started to get a feel for how I could tell a story without actually needing to show anyone. I had a slightly better sense of direction now, knowing I wanted to take the building from season to season and decade to decade, using lighting and texturing to show the passage of time, but also unsure as to how I could string each shot together. It was not until I saw my mother during the winter break that i really started to figure out a solution to this challenge.
With a dozen or so basic questions, ranging from how long she lived in the apartment to what her favorite memories were, I sat down with my mother and recorded her for a couple hours. I was asking questions specific to how I wanted my film to be: what major historical events she remembered while living there, what she did around and outside the house depending on the season, what she remembered about specific rooms of the home, what family activities they did, and even if there were certain visual memories she had about the space. In the weeks after interviewing my mother, I transcribed all of the audio into a Word document, and printed out a copy so I could take it with me wherever I went and mark it up whenever I had an idea. This was probably the lowest-tech process of my entire project over the past year, and it proved to be one of the most important steps.
I constantly read and re-read the transcript to help group certain sections of dialogue into categories, from time period to family members to rooms to activities. I highlighted the printout and wrote notes on it so that I could better understand how I could organize and edit the audio into a cohesive, flowing piece. I took the audio into Adobe Audition, and made a rough cut over the course of two days, very roughly splicing clips together and grouping them into tracks named according to the categories I'd developed on the transcript. I used the rough cut as an opportunity to get all of my ideas out and test the waters to see what was working and what I could do without; I was editing much in the same way I was taught to write speeches: purging every idea onto paper, then stripping down to the bare essentials, and replacing general ideas with concrete, memorable examples.
The first rough cut was about five and a half minutes - much too long for my project, and much too long to keep most audiences' attention if the film was not character-driven. (And by character, I mean in the traditional sense of a walking, talking one that is actually seen by the audience.) I knew that the initial cut would probably be this long, so I was not discouraged. My goal was to cut and tighten it to less than 3:00, and ideally 2:30 because I figured I should leave room for expansion once I started throwing in the visuals.
I listened to this cut over and over again, several times in a row at first, and then waiting at least a day before listening to it even once, so that I could hear it with fresh ears and be more objective about it. I also imported the audio into Adobe Premier, and began dropping in Playblast camera animations of my models. Waiting a day between listens was very helpful, because it made redundant and slow spots much more apparent, and I could cut out large chunks of dialogue without getting lost in single words or breaths. I ended up cutting it down to 4:00 and 3:30 over the next couple of weeks. Having the visuals there definitely helped to figure out the timing in some cases, as well as decide when I could do without sound altogether.
It took another couple of weeks to cut the audio down to 2:45; it was with this version I ended up working for the longest period of time, animating my camera moves and cutting/transitioning according to it. I showed various progressions of this animatic to the most people as well, and got as much feedback as I could from professors and professionals experienced with the process and creation of animation, to friends and family who were simply interested in watching animation. I wanted the widest range of opinions possible, so that I could gauge the emotional and narrative success of my film, finesse the cinematography and work through technical details. One of the most common pieces of feedback I received was that the pacing was too quick, both because of cuts and because of camera moves, and that this was contradicting the slower emotional pacing I had created with my mother's dialogue. There were several fixes to make: slow down existing camera moves, limit camera animation, extend the length of shots, reduce the number of cuts, use dissolves instead of hard cuts, and add silence throughout the dialogue.
Finally, I arrived at an animatic that has both the content and the pacing that I wanted to tell my mother's story.
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