Share of the work

Annabel:
Photoshoping/making the people and the zombies
Animating the people and zombies individually 
Blogging
Making the textures in the marketplace at the start
Audio

Emma:
Animating 'whole' scenes and placing the zombies and people into the scenes
Audio
Designing/making the locations on illustrator for the beginning and end scenes
Blogging

Final

Rationale

Our Kaitiakitanga is the sustainability of the local markets and the community and innocence that comes along with them. In a modern age, big corporate businesses are looking for any sort of way to make money. Many that are among their prey are the innocent stall holders at many of these small town markets. They take the general essence of the produce and products, including the handmade and crafted aesthetic, and strip it down to something boring and generic. We represented this through creating a fun styled, animated poster using media that was bright, colourful and textured, similar to that of Annabel’s Puna project. This signifies the feelings and emotions associated with markets. To physically express the corporate businesses we decided using zombies would be a good negative connotation. The zombie infiltration into “The Cute, Local Market” communicates the corporate rebranding and take-over, with the literal representation of the zombies ripping the colourful textures off the stalls. The final scene shows the repetitive nature of such rebranding practice when such things are pushed through machines and big business factories, the hand, loving effort and community feel is lost. Here the creators hand is completely removed and all emotion has been lost, putting a distance between the producer and the consumer including a lack of community and interconnectedness within society.

Emma Dowman

Annabel Wennekes

Audio and finishing

Final minus audio

We next wanted to add audio, this would help to differentiate the market and the zombie take over and also help make the zombie/corporate take-over seem more dooming and evil in a way. We found audio tracks of laughter and busy chatter for the market and then found erie music for when the zombies come to make it seem more scary.

Next we added simple animations just to make sure the whole story was clear. We added signs to people could tell what was becoming of the market and what it was pervious.

Zombie Infiltration

Next we worked on combining the zombies into the next few scenes. They already moved around on their own but now we wanted them to move across the scene and move down into the market.

This is what we ended up with

More Animation

Next we placed the figures of the people into the photoshop made background as shown in an earlier post.  We had them moving as we panned up the market to show the busy people going about their day before reaching the graveyard. The gravestones have corporate logos on them each so we know the zombies represent big businesses and organisations.
Next we worked on making a zombies hand come out of the ground. First we animated a moving hand to look as if it was reaching upwards and next we used the layer mask tool so that it could come up out of the ground slowly with more arm showing as it gets higher. 

Combining and Rotating Layers

Next we wanted to animated all the villagers and zombie individually before putting them into the final scene. This is so they could all have their own animation, therefore each figure was doing their own movements and had their own personality.

Some figures have larger 'roles' or movements aka one zombie has a leg fall off and he then falls over and cannot walk and chase away the people. Where some zombies and people only move slightly so there is not too much going on in the scene or the viewer won't know where to look.

To make the figures move we first combined all the layers to organise the composition and layered them up correctly. Then we moved their anchor points on each layer so they were in the right spots on the body aka where the joints were on an actual body as the layers were all separated by body parts so we could move it like a person. 

First we tried out the puppet tool but decided that it wasn't needed as we had already separated the layers by body part and the puppet tool distorted images which we didn't want as we were working with collage.

So we rotated certain layers to make an arm, leg, head or whole body move which worked perfectly with the aesthetic we were aiming for.

Villagers

Next we created the humans/ villagers that at the beginning of the animation. They are all very bight and colourful to match the feel of the market at the beginning where they don't know whats coming.

Animation

We started working on animation trying to get a hold on how to work after effects which we were both new to. Starting off simple with our end scene. This scene is the zombie market after they have torn down the original colourful market and have it now looking bland and boring to represent the corporations. We started here because the main animation was just a conveyor belt moving towards and another moving away from us with zombies placed on it and connected so they move along in time with it. 

Second Critique

Talking to the teachers we decided that first off, we needed to make the market place more obviously a market. This could easily be achieved just by putting a sign up. We also wanted to do the same thing to the graveyard and also for the zombie market at the end just to give clarification. Also to clarify the zombies representing businesses we need to create a generic logo to put on the gravestone that we are zooming in on.

Next off we decided that we could even just work with the big long picture made using Illustrator and Photoshop. This meant we cut out the scene from the zombies point of view walking down the market and replace it with a long-shot from the original picture with the zombies dispersing down the market and just zooming in and out when need be to focus on certain parts. The zombies also didnt need to be moving so much they could just 'waddle' in a way like south park characters instead of having so much detail. This meant the image had to be very large to be able to work with. 

Zombie Making

When making the zombies we wanted the same aesthetic to match the environment we created which was also part of our Puna. So we used the Waycom to create many different zombies to suit our needs. Some are just body parts while others are half a body, these are to show the zombies coming up from the graves. We also made full body zombies for when we show them walking around taking over the market and chasing the people away. They are wearing business suits to create the business/cooperate vibe but as they are zombies they are slightly rugger-ed and tattered looking. 

Photoshop Designs

After designing the scene in Illustrator we used Photoshop to create what the scene was actually going to look like by adding colours, patterns and textures. This meant importing the Illustrator file and on top of that covering it all up with many different layers for each stall. Each layer had to be new so it could be played around with in After Effects later if need be. The stalls were all made to be unique and colourful to truly represent what we wanted in the poster. We wanted the humans to be the fun loving, happy and almost 'good guys' in the sequence. Who would soon be taken over by the 'cooperate' zombies. This meant we wanted the first part to look as happy as possible to contrast with what was to come. 

Further Work in Photoshop and Illustrator

Using illustrator we have designed a background set to work from that is in block colours. This allows us to then 'paint' the background in patterns using photoshop. First using illustrator meant that we could easily get the perspective for the 3D environment correct and the sizes of everything correct. This was very important as our end work is going to be very busy full of patterns and many colours and textures so the base order and perspective of everything needed to be accurate or the whole sequence would look like a mess. 

Critique

During our critique we realised we had strayed slightly from the brief in that we hadn't portrayed Kaitiakitanga and sustainability enough in our work. This was easily fixed by added another element to our work. Previously we had zombies taking over the market. Zombies being a negative connotation  we now have the zombies represent big corporations and businesses that are over taking the fun loving and unique and crafted market people for a bland office building vibe market where the zombies live. This is represented when the zombies chase the humans out of their markets and take them over making the the stalls less unique and creative and more similar and dull. The bright streamers and signs and colours will fall off and the zombies will be on a conveyor belt moving down the market with zombies on it showing the fast paced (zombies are slow so this helps convey that idea by putting them on the belt) environment that is very bland. 

Inspiration

 Block colours, digitally produced:

Irena Zablotska

Todd Hale

Cut out and photographed:

Eiko Ojala

Final Narrative

Looking at our two development ideas, we settled on having 3D illustrations as we felt that this was quite a dynamic approach to the aesthetic and gives the poster a lot more depth. 

Storyline Scene Development

We decided that the concept with the zombies reaching out of the grave with a book ending showing the contrasting market scenes was the best idea to continue with. However, we were still uncertain how the scenes should look and whether to have the illustrations 2D or 3D so we used this development process to explore our options. 

Initial Thumbnails of Scene-By-Scene Concepts

Narrative Outline

Brainstorming Ideas

Main Foundation

Ideas

We are basing our animation story on Annabel's first VCD project which was Markets. This project was made using collage which gave it a simple and almost 'childlike' mood. 

Examples of illustrations used:

Storyline

After a lot of brainstorming we decided we wanted to work on tragedy and things that could be improved in relation to the environment. We new we had to use one of our previous work ideas for our Puna so we decided to take the idea of Markets for our location and work from there. The tragedy we ended up choosing for our market was a zombie apocalypse taking over the marketplace. So a small scale zombie apocalypse. We wanted the take-over/change of an environment not just to be destruction from zombies so we choose to make the zombies chase out the humans and start to control the market instead of just focusing on the destruction and killing aspect of humans. So in the end it becomes a zombie market with the humans which have scattered.