THE FINAL PROJECT
Treatment
The idea I think I’ll be going with for the final project is a quasi-spoof of a skit from the hit 70’s show “The Electric Company”. In the show, two actors would stand face to face. The camera was located so that the audience would see a face on each side of the screen in a profile view. The colors were then ramped so that the faces were essentially black, and the background changed between various solid colors.
The first actor would say the beginning part of a word and white text would come out of their mouth in the background. The second actor would then finish the word and more text would come out to complete the word in the middle.
There is a lot of room here to mess with this skit. I plan on either spelling words that are ridiculously difficult, or spelling some obscure words that one on has heard of. Perhaps I could go with a strange set of words like ebonics words, not sure on this one, but in the end it will be some kind of comedic approach to the spelling.
The main problem that I see arising from this idea is that this video must meet a 1 minute duration. That skit might be funny alone in 15 or 20 seconds but it might be hard to draw that out into a minute long piece. How I could solve this problem is still up for debate, but I’m considering adding a second portion on the video where we have the actors fully visible,
One idea I had put the characters walking through a space created in after effects, with the background yet to be decided. I could have them moving through a world filled with all the words they spelled, although I’m not quite sure where that would go due to its lack of structure.
The other thought I had on this was to have the second portion of the video be a some kind conflict between the characters, that could result in some kind of fight in the style of an ipod commercial. The characters would be seen in their entirety, and could either do a dance off with ipods in hand or fight via spelling bee, or some other idea that could play off of that.
I want to make this short because it is some that is certainly feasible with the means I have available, it doesn’t require the tedious repetition that one finds in rotoscoping, and it has the potential to look very cool. People will be able to relate to both the original Electric Company silhouettes and the colorful ipod commercials.
To make this project happen I will be using one or two actors( if one was used I would just double the second actor with the first one), the green screen in the black box, and a whole lot of After Effects. The color effects will be made in program, and most of the background needed will be colors, text and anything created for the world behind the characters.
PRODUCTION SCHEDULE
- Week 1-NOV 1st - Plan shoot, begin background layer preparation
- Week 2-NOV 8th - Shoot the silhouettes and fight, load into project
- Week 3-NOV 15th - Begin work on color and compositing
- Week 4-NOV 22nd -Finish compositing, complete audio
- Week 5-NOV 29th -Finalize, polish, and render out
