Design Practice

Ident 01: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Production & Design Development

The last of the idents is actually the first and being the first it had to set the mood of the season and be the most engaging so that an audience would be interested earlier on. And in so doing the design became very slightly different, the iconic heart/five image that i created would remain as it hangs, but his time it hangs from a tree within a field setting, being "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" the film is set within rural Texas and precisely that was the visual that i wanted to create. My target audience would recognise what films would later appear as this ident sets the tone for all of the films.

01. Setting the scene of the ident is crutial, so initially i set up motions for the leaves on the tree which slowly rock back and forth as if being blown by a breeze. This havig now had lot of experience within motion graphic was very simple and easy to achieve, again hee i also used the Graph Editot tool to give acceleration and deceleration as the leaves move in space. This was applied to each leaf including the Five leaf.

From here i set about creating the hardest part of the motion, making a realistic running. I decided to arrange the elements of the body into 7 separate parts and what really helped here was the use of the parent tool. The parent tool acts as a link between two components, the 'parent' controls the whole motion including any opacity or movements, the 'child' as Mike described it can move independently but its movement is linked to that of the parent so even if the 'child' rotates it may also have to rotate/change according to the parent aswell.

So using this tool i started to animate the legs of the woman, as you can tell from the video the upper legs move, the lower legs also move but also move with the upper leg as it's 'parent'. From here and using the torso as a parent to the upper leg i could move the whole thing across from one side to the other as if it were running.

From here i then added and animated the arm movements and also adjusted the pace of the movement so that it would run and decelerate as the woman comes to a stop at the base of the tree. As i intended i also started to look at making the woman jump upwards as if trying to climb the tree, although i feel i could have worked much harder on creating more accurate movement, the essence of a frantic scrambling up the tree is there.

02. In a similar way to the animation created for the woman the male killer figure would also walk into the scene and chase the woman until it is hit by the falling Five leaf. I decided after creating the movement for the woman i had not left enough time for the killer to complete his actions so instead i decided to have him simply come into the scene which would leave the audience wanting to see what would happen next, this would rely on using sound to get the viewer engaged into the ident.

The killer therefore does not need to move far to enter the scene, yet his movement would be much harder to animate than anticipated. Because he is a front-on character, the movemnt in his legs would look rigid and stiff and not representational of accurate movement. After think about what i could actually do to get him into position with better looking movement i had an idea which i had not thought of in the idents, a moving camera.

03. Using the added camera tool i decided spontaniously to add a camera to the action which would first pan the scene of the grass, the woman in turn would then run through then the scene would be revealed as the camera pans backwards into position. It was really quite simple, after using cameras within the Silent Movie brief i was confident in using the camera tool effectively i did however find out that by using a vector based graphic you can in fact continually rasterise the frames making for a better detailed animation which proved useful when panning very close to the objects.

04. The final part of creating the ident was adding the sounds. The library of sounds used didn't provide every type of sound that i needed to create a realistic scene, i ended up downloading free sound files from the internet such as chainsaw rips, insect sounds (to fit with the field scene) and also a scream of the woman.

After tweeking the sound and slight camera movements the idents were finished. In particular i feel i have used the software in an intereting way by using tools to create movement in in-animate objects creatively. I have realised however that it is not simply just the visuals and movements but sound should also be considered and how much of an influence that can have over a viewer's perception.