Asset Creation

For the asset manipulation, I mostly used this technique where I colour-picked close colours of the object I would be enlarging and used the brush tool to draw on patches next to it to expand the asset's size. Then to blend it in I would use the clone stamp tool and sometimes the healing brush tool. Some examples of where I used this technique is in manipulating the clouds and creating the main scenes' background.

For assets like the dove, the apple, the blue eye, and the woman's head and face I simply cut out the images using masks selected by the magic wand tool and adjusted them using the brush tool to add and remove parts of the picture. 

Regarding the assets for scene 5, I cut out the outer part of the eye along with the white and the iris of the eye and merged that into one layer. Then I cut the inner part of the eye and made a duplicate. in one of the two versions, I painted over everything using the clone stamp tool making the whole background blue. In the other version, I selected all the clouds using the magic wand tool and created a mask. There I refined the clouds by removing any extra bits and manipulating the clouds using the manipulation technique mentioned at the start. Then I positioned the blue later at the back, the clouds' layer in the middle, and the last layer at the top and I put them all in one artboard, ready to use for the animation.

When creating the man's asset I used the man from the 'Son of Man' painting and merged his face with the face of 'the art of living' painting by removing the apple, putting the face behind the hole that was left, adjusting its size to match the existing features such as the eyebrows, then slightly colour correcting the colours and finally merging everything and using the manipulation technique mentioned above to adjust the whole thing to a good state.

When creating the background for scenes 2 to 5 I took the sea background from the 'Le double secret' painting removed the woman and her face from it and used the content aware fill to fill in the empty space. Then I continued adding more detail by using the manipulation technique mentioned at the start of this document. After the sea was done I decided to do the same thing to the sky from the 'Son of Man' painting and then merge it with the sea. Before doing so I adjusted the brightness, contrast and colours to match the ones of the sea.

The assets in scene 1 were done very similarly to the rest of the assets. Here I selected all the large men in the image one by one and copied and pasted them into new layers. Then I adjusted the ones which were not whole by duplicating parts from other men which were in a close angle and shade to them and merged them together and corrected their colour using the manipulation technique mentioned at the start. Then once I was done I merged them all into one layer. Then regarding the house, I removed the big men used and used the content aware fill to quickly fill in the empty spaces. Then I polished up the image using the same tools and technique describes at the top of this document.

Animation Process

For my animation, I used a duplicated version of the animatic and continued building on top of it. This served both as a base and as a reference. Then I imported 2 photoshop files, one with the assets for the 1st scene and the other with all the assets from scenes 2 to 5.

First, I animated scene 1 where I moved the y's position of the men's layer downwards and gave it a bit of a bounce back at the end.

Afterwards, I went into the composition containing the assets of scenes 2 to 5 and grouped the assets for scenes 4 and 5 by using pre-compose. This was done to keep the file organised.

For scene 2, I animated the dove's position going from right to left and then animated the wings flapping by using the puppet pin tool.  

Here I also adjusted the speed duration by using the speed graph to slow the dove's speed when it goes in front of the man's face.

In scene 3, I animated the position of the apple falling down. Here I once again adjusted its speed as I did for the dove and slowed the apple down when passing in front of the man's face. I also added a duplicate cut out from the bottom part of the sea, put it on top of the apple's layer and animated the background moving upwards and transitioned the man out of the scene using transparency. All this was done to help give the illusion of the apple falling down into the ocean. 

While animating this part of the animation I also made the decision of removing the stone apple from the animation. I did this because when I tried transitioning the green apple to the stone one it looked ugly and felt extra so I continued the animation using the green apple.

When it came to scene 4, I started by animating both the head and the face in the scene together and then I animated the face moving to the side. I had an error in this part where the animation was not animating properly. To solve this I linked the woman's face with the woman's head so I did not need to animate the face entering with the head too. This solved the issue.

After that, I quickly animated scene 5 where I grabbed the clouds and slowly moved them from right to left.

After scene 5 was done I went back to scene 4 to add more to it and to figure out a way to transition it to scene 5. Here I decided to go with the idea of using the spheres inside the head as eyelids which would open up into blue eyes. 

In order to do this I had to go back to photoshop and divide the spheres into pairs of eyelids. Then once I went into after effects I animated the first pair using masks. My first approach to animating the eyes was with using the puppet pin tool but then I released that it would make more sense to use masks. Something which I realised, later on, is that for the animation of the lids opening up, I could have easily used the reflect action function by linking one of the mask's positions with the other and inputting the *-1 at the end of the animation's code. I will make sure to keep this in mind for next time.

Then once the first pair was done I decided to copy and paste it into a new composition and use that instead of animating the other eyelids from scratch. Note that I did not use the duplicate function to create more copies of it because the duplicate function synchs all the versions together and therefore it did not allow me to change the time of the keyframes. The reason why I wanted to change the keyframe times for each eye is that since I was using duplicates and not the original for each eye I could not make them appear from where each animation starts but I had to show them earlier so that the original eyelids do not show. 

To transition both scenes 4 to 5 and scenes 1 to 2 I decided to keep things simple and use a clean cut instead of using a more complex zoom-in transition. I did this since I felt that just some good timing was enough to link these scenes well together.

Finally, for the title's typeface I went on google typed Rene Magritte typeface and clicked through the results. While doing so I found this page Where I found the typeface where I found a link to a typeface which matched perfectly with his handwriting as well as with the theme, so I used it.

Final adjustments and extra refinements

For the audio, I asked a friend of mine who is in media to add in a little bit of a fade to it since I did not have enough space on my laptop to download more software. But I was not satisfied with it since the last scene ended too quickly. To fix this I sped up my audio as well as my compositions by a second and then added a bit of reverb to it in After Effects by following this tutorial

After this, I adjusted the timing of some of the elements which seemed off and then I decided to add one final touch by adding in water droplets once the apple falls into the sea. For this, I created one water drop using the brush tool and the eraser in photoshop and then I changed its colour for it to stick out from the sea using the shadow/highlight effect in after effects.

Then I animated the first one using position, rotation and opacity and duplicated it and adjusted the settings of the rest. Then I varied the timing of each drop by a frame and exported my animation.