Monday
Going into the final week of the project I had a much clearer vision of my final film. To resolve the issue of the camera going out of focus, I photocopied the receipts and enlarged them.
The only downside to this, was that I lost some of the original texture from using the actual receipts, but decided that it was better to do this.
A lot of my shots so far were focusing on the barcodes and the numbers, so I wanted to try and look at the words in the receipts and see what I could do with them. The main words that are repeated on multiple receipts are, total, please, change, balance, and card. The words that stuck out to me were please and change. Paired together I think they create a powerful message.
I also did some lighting changes, I realised through my tests from week 4, I wanted my final film to have a cold and gritty feel so I made amendments to the lighting.
I wanted to have these two words pop up in the midst of fast movement, almost to catch the viewer of guard and break the fourth wall. As it goes on I wanted these words to have more and more screen time until it is the only thing to look at.
Tuesday
I decided to come in on Tuesday to continue working as we wouldn’t have Fridays session to work.
All the shots I had done so far were really close up and whilst it was still obvious the material I am working with, I wanted to explore some shots zooming out.
I did some replacement animation with the receipts on the multilane set up. I experimented with the lighting and found that a really low light from one side worked really effectively as it displayed all the crinkles and folds in the receipt and created some beautiful harsh shadows.
Originally I had the black foam background directly underneath the receipt but soon realised my mistake and that I needed to move it to the second layer of the multilane as when the receipts were moving, the background was moving alongside them.
I was pleasantly surprised by this test and really like how it looks as though they’re floating in a void.
Wednesday
I came in early for the session as I knew I had a lot to get done, so first thing I did was put all my clips so far onto the timeline to see where I was at and where I needed to fill in the gaps.
I found that my shots were working really well so far and I really loved the mix of closeup and wide shots. I started experimenting with intercutting clips together and really got a sense of what this film should look like.
As an experiment earlier in the week, I tried photocopying a receipt onto another receipt and the printer messed up and it printed it diagonally with big blocks of black ink covering areas. At first I discarded this as a fail and was going to put it inside my sketchbook, but then thought it would be interesting to animate with.
Prompted by this discovery, I wanted to try photocopying onto clear acetate and animate the acetate moving on top of the original receipt.
This was also extremely effective and if I had more time for this project, it is definitely something I would explore even further as I feel it has a lot of potential.
I spent the rest of the session playing around on the timeline and figuring out worked well and what didn’t.
Thursday
As my animation itself was finished, I dedicated this day to sound. I was already thinking about sound throughout the whole production process, so the weekend prior I went to lidl and recorded the soundscape.
I started by just putting the sound alongside the visuals and see what stuck out to me. I immediately picked up on certain sounds like paper bags crinkling, basket handles being slammed, beeping, trolley carts, and the instructions from the self checkouts.
I spent the whole day testing and playing with the sound. Chopping up certain sounds and different beeps. As my intention for the film was to get more intense as it went on, I followed that with the sound.
I found this process extremely enjoyable, much more than I anticipated. I found it really fun to assign certain visuals, to sounds. When the numbers go up, I chopped up the beeping noise to make it really fast and match the speed of the visuals.
Overall I am extremely happy with how the sound turned out and it completely changed my view on the final film.
I would definitely be willing to explore sound as a primary inspiration for a future project.