Episode Three: 40 - Animation, ii

The other scene that I knew I wanted animation for was the illustration for Toshi's Logo. Again, from the beginning, I wasn't clear on my own approach to this. I thought that I might utilize the 2d logo that was already available, and somehow animate that. But in the end, I chose to create the Toshi character as a 3d model, and then animate that. In fact, I decided to stick with that character for the other animated scenes, too, which engendered a sense of unity across the animated portions of the film.

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Episode Three: 39 - Animation, i

I presented myself with a new challenge that I didn't give myself before: animation. That is, while I have done a lot of animation for both video games and short animated films, I have never incorporated animation into the short documentaries for Listen To The City Breathe. It is a solution that I have seen for a lot of documentaries before, so I wanted to test my talents in order to solve specific problems, especially those that were posed by talking about Toshi's past. Two scenes that I knew I wanted animation for were when he talked about quitting his job at a restaurant, and when he talked about seeing a gun on New York City street.

In fact, these animation caused me a lot of stress because I was unsure about what style I wanted to utilize for the scenes. While weighing the pros and cons of different solutions, and after a lot of stress around the challenge, I decided finally to create Toshi as he appears in his logo, and merely reuse other animation assets that I already had in my own library.

For the characters whom I didn't really have in my own personal library, I utilized free characters that were available by Mixamo (link), which also provided the bulk of the character animations for each of the scenes.

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Episode Three: 38 - Additional Footage.

Sometimes some of the best images that would fit what Toshi was saying was neither in my own library, or in his archive. So I had to conduct a lot of research in order to find footage that best fit the content and the vision that I wanted to portray based on what Toshi was talking about. There are a lot of resources for this, including news broadcasts, and other online archives.

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Episode Three: 37 - Replacing the Placeholders, ii

Another issue with a lot of the non-HD archive material that I had to work with was how I would present it in my film. My initial inclination is to resize it to fill the whole screen. The issue with this is that it distorts the original image, and makes the low quality of the image more prevalent. Another solution would be to keep low resolution content at its original low resolution size, but have a lot of empty black filler space on the sides of the image.

I've seen documentaries that utilize both solutions. Since I already had a sentiment as to how to solve the problem, I just resized the image to fill the screen. After all, documentary viewers are already well aware of the fact that filmmakers are using old archive footage, so I hope that makes them more receptive to seeing such images. Even thought the image is distorted, I think the viewer either doesn't notice too much that Toshi is a bit wider, or doesn't care; the eye adjusts.

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Episode Three: 36 - Replacing the Placeholders, i

Now that the placeholder plates gave me a solid vision of what I wanted, the next task was to simply go through all the archive footage and find shots that fit what I was looking for. This presented a few challenges.

The first, most obvious challenge that I had to deal with was the fact that Toshi rarely had professional or semi-professional, or even serious hobbyists (like me) recording footage for his archive, so a lot of the content was very low quality. Of course, he had amassed this collection over several years, even before High Definition footage was standard (certainly, there was no 4k content; I wasn't even shooting at 4k). So although there were a few things that I liked, the resolution was so low that I determined that it was unusable for this episode. Besides resolution issues, there was also footage that was very shaky, or otherwise ugly.

All that said, because I could only use what I had in front of me, I did end up using some of the low quality footage, especially when it was (otherwise) exactly what I was looking for.

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Episode Three: 35 - Placeholder Screens

Knowing that I couldn't quite memorize everything that I was working with, another way around this editing problem was to merely envision what sort of shots would go with some dialogue. So, I would just listen to the final interview edit, and close my eyes to envision what kind of image would go with the words he spoke. Then I would stop the interview, and layer on top of the interview a plate with words describing what I wanted to see while he said something.

If Toshi was talking about wanting to make other people's dreams come true, I knew that I wanted to include some kind of animation with his Dream Maker Logo, and I would put as a placeholder a plate that said "Toshi Logo Animation"; if he was talking about teaching kids, I would put as a placeholder a plate that said "Toshi teaching kids." At this point of the process, it seemed like this was a nice way to try to time what I needed, too; so I would see how the plate felt at 2 seconds, or four seconds, then when I found the footage that I would use, I knew exactly where it would go, and how long it would last.

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Episode Three: 34 - Examining Archive Footage, ii

One thing about going through all this archive footage was that I had to really get all of this footage into my memory, so that as I was going through the interviews, I would be able to recall something like, "Oh yeah, that shot with Toshi speaking to the kids at the school, that would go nicely here!"

The other way that I dealt with all this archive footage is to also ingrain into my mind all of the final interview footage, and the story as far as I had it. Then as I was going through archive footage, I would say to myself something like, "Oh yeah, this shot with Toshi dancing in the street, this would go great at that part when he's talking about always practicing."

So really, in working with all this footage, I had to memorize both the story and interview content that I had finalized, and also all of the archive and other secondary footage from my own library. Unfortunately, my memory isn't that good, so there was a lot of scrubbing through and reviewing footage throughout the whole editing process.

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