Before I begin explaining about how making the research animation went, I thought I should explain how forgot to say I had a breakthrough with Jeff about the Vince animation before we left for Christmas!
As Vince is going to be the introducer to Decembeard, he needs to be speaking a lot but it's going to be very difficult and time consuming to lip sync and animate Vince's mouth to the audio, so instead Jeff said why not just film the actual mouth speaking and map it to the drawn face in After Effects?
This simple idea is absolute genius and hopefully going to save me a lot of time in the long run! I also asked Jeff to be the voice of Vince since he helped make him now and he agreed.
This has led to a running joke which will be that Vince and Jeff are not linked in any way, despite the obvious fact that Jeff is the voice of Vince which viewers will find out from his obvious denial as Vince and then hopefully again when they hear Jeff speak in his interview later on.
But moving on from Vince, who is on hold at the moment until I return to Uni and can film Jeff's mouth speaking the script (which I also need to write) I have completed the research animation which shows which beard styles I am going for.
Originally I was going to show each beard style quickly but there are just too many so I have narrowed it down for the viewer but for you reading this blog here is a link to two of the websites I researched from:
The first one is Beards.org which specialises in beard culture and has a heavy influence from Decembeard and growing beards in general:
http://www.beards.org/
Next is a man named John Dyer's Blog which is a documentation of his quest to have every single style of beard that exists! So far he has managed 33 out of the 42 he knows of so far:
http://www.dyers.org/blog/beards/beard-types/
These two websites really helps me to narrow down my search and I have decided on a combination of 3 beard styles, the Sparrow (first photo, made famous by Captain Jack Sparrow of the Pirates of the Caribbean films), The Anchor (second photo) and the Hollywoodian (third photo).
However in the documentary I will not say that I have decided yet as I want the viewer to wonder for a bit longer (if they're even interested that is! It doesn't sound very exciting haha) so that the end result seems more impressive.
Originally the plan with this animation was to have a comic book of famous people all with different styles of beards and then pan over them with the camera until ending on a still image of me which is actually a frame from the final scene. The still would then become the film and the documentary would continue.
To overcome copyright I was going to re-draw each celebrity photo e.g. Mr.T, Chuck Norris etc. and put them into a comic strip.
But as I've just explained I am now going to narrow down the research so that the viewer isn't bored by the sheer amount of beard styles that are out there.
To overcome this boredom problem I have done a small animation with scrumpled up paper which scrumples out and in again to show each drawing. Each drawing is also a picture of Vince's face without a beard and in my next post I'll put some of the animation images up so you can get an idea of how it worked.
Take care,
Joe.
P.s Happy Christmas!
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