Animation

Since the beginning of this entire project, I wanted to do something special with it. Something unique. I mentioned earlier that I was inspired by "The Freedom Fighters" documentary. There was a part in it where they used animation to show a story as they couldn't get hold of the B-rolls related to it. And so I was inspired by that.

I took interview of a lady who didn't want to reveal her identity on the screen nor reveal her face. So, I came up with the animation to show everything that happened to her. The struggles she faced, the animation skill set really helped.

At first I was really confused as of how I was gonna create the characters. I had a three day constant consumption of thoughts thinking as how to create characters but every time I failed.

After some time of failing again and again, I thought of trying something new. I looked up online to free animation making websites and came across Canva. I started experimenting different things on it and realized that I had used all of my free passes and so I purchased its Canva premier.

With n ease of mind of unlimited tries, I continued experimenting and came across a light bulb in my head.

I asked Canva character makers to draw me a my characters. Then after a million times of generating characters after characters, I found mine.

Once I was done with these characters, I started animating them. I selected parts of the characters and moved them frame by frame. Further, I color graded each frame one by one.

After hours and hours of hard work and fun discoveries, I finally made my first moving image video.

Editing Schedule

I started my editing on 21st of December. This included making animation and then started to join all my clips together in Adobe Premier Pro. Bits my bits I edited my video.

I color graded the shots as well.

I used an editing technique where I used yellow hues more in the beginning shots to give the feel of a rural area. Then later the shots were brighter and more active.

My software didn't let me add captions as well, It didn't support it.

Problems Faced

Wouldn't say that everything went smooth during filming, editing, or animating, but it was a fun journey.

Filming:

During filming the biggest problem I faced was not fitting in with the villagers. On the first day of shoot, I went in wearing regular trousers and shirt, they all wear traditional clothing like shalwar and kameez. People over there felt reluctant conversating with. I couldn't record my interviews properly and was not allowed to go in houses because they did not like my dressing. So, I learned from the first day and wore their traditional dress on the second day of shoot. Because of that, I noticed that those people felt much more comfortable being me around them and they were more welcoming then before. This helped me in capturing better footage then the day before.

Moreover, I had shaky footage because on the day of shoot, my tripod stand fell and broke. Although I recorded the interviews by putting the camera on stand and holding it still so it does not move that much. Later used stabilizer in editing to smooth out the videos a little. Also the grainy footage was fixed by de-noising the footage and then rendering it.

On the second day of shooting, during the interview, my camera crashed and stopped working out of nowhere. I had covered all the footage and half the interview. I tried to fix it, keep it on charge and google what was wrong with it but it still wouldn't work. So, to record the last bits of the interview i switched the mic to my phone and recorded it on it.

Editing:

Editing part was fun but very time taking. The only issue I faced was the rendering part. Even after rendering, my footage kept on lagging and I had to render it again and again.