Being More Exciting than Boring

Creative Thought Process

I had to clean my studio this week as I finished one animated job for a client and began another (I like to start fresh with each new project).

Messy, clean. Before, after. This, that. I could simply cut from one shot to another - but where's the fun in that?

What's the most boring way to tell the story? Now, let's explore something a bit more exciting than that.

The idea of quickly changing from one state to another reminds me of studying pencil-and-paper animation in college. It's the kind of animation where you repeatedly flip between pages fast enough to create the persistence of vision to bring your drawings to life. That's much more inspiring to me than cutting between two shots.

So I have a story - cleaning my messy studio. And now I have a technique that might tell this potentially boring story in an interesting way - page flipping.

Why is this technique interesting to me? Mainly because it breaks the fourth wall and the hand flipping between the two scenes is my actual POV within the video. Bonus points because this technique is making cleaning look 'easy'.

Making the Video

1. Film a fake video of myself in my messy studio. Print out a frame of this video.

2. Film the real video of myself in my messy studio, flipping the printed page from (1).

3. Clean my studio.

4. Film a fake video of myself in my clean studio. Print out a frame of this video and add it underneath the printed frame from (1).

5. Film the real video of myself in my clean studio, flipping between the printed pages from (1) and (4).

6. Film a close-up video of my hand flipping between the printed pages from (1) and (4).

7. Use the video of my hand flipping from (6) as a masked ribbon to transition between the videos from (2) and (5), timing it exactly with the action of me flipping the pages.