Responsive - 11 Second Club - Late Beginnings

Inconveniences with Wacom Tablet

As this month has been gradually flowing, I have experienced a myriad of inconveniences that have jeopardized my stable and sturdy practice. I am set on creating an animation for the 11 Second Club brief, which ends when this month concludes. Following my planning on how to tackle this brief during the holidays (as I have many other obligations inbound, as well), I ran into one debilitating problem: my computer broke down due to hard drive problems. Immediately I took it to be repaired, and was amazed at the level of improfessionality at the hand of the computer repairers I sent it to as it took about 6 days for it to get repaired and for all of my files to get transferred. After it was fixed, my computer kept shutting down with a "blue screen of death" every time I attempted to install my Wacom tablet, and after a few days I resolved the issue - the driver for the USB 3.0 port (iusb3xhc.sys) was preventing the tablet from getting properly installed since I do not have a 3.0 port. At these times, my mind was clouded as I was getting frustrated and behind on the project. Luckily, I fixed it, and in doing so I instantly began the brief. I was not expecting such a drawback, and this has taught me to always have a plan B secure for anything (especially an external hard drive for not losing my files and animations). Nonetheless, I mapped out every day I had left for animating (I started on the 20th of December, expected to do so on the 10th), and figured I can tackle the brief, although it is going to be a close call. With not much time left, I settled for rotoscoping as it would be a straightforward technique. Revisiting my structure of ideas from before, I reviewed the parameters and rules of the challenge where it was specified that the content must not insinuate offence nor must it pertain sexual or explicit content. Furthermore, I had been thinking about the content and, reminiscning about COP and propaganda with the consideration that it is Christmas, the color red stuck in my mind. Thus, I formulated a story: Karl Marx is Santa Claus, proceeds talking to an elf where the end justifies the "one more thing" piece of dialogue where he looks at a list of Christmas toys that need to be manufactured as the only unchecked one is "seizing the means of production". Relevant to internet assembled pop-culture, I beleive that this is a harmless piece of semi-political comedy that will meet all of the requirements of the competition. I filmed myself and a friend lip syncing to the soundfile provided with several attempts, and then synchronized it with the soundfile in Premiere so that I may have a coherent piece to rotoscope without doing any unnecessary additional drawings. However, I exported the video in 15 fps in order to lessen my workload and to add an aesthetic that will consolidate the line boil. In other words, given the inconsistency of line smoothness in every frame, 24 or more fps would be too impetuous for this style of animation. Furthermore, I figured that the natural color of the characters would be best suited, thus, I am editing out the background manually with every frame where I will use different layers of the tinted footage so that the red color is dominant. As for Karl Marx, I will use several images of him to rotoscope so that there is a dichotomy between the characters so to instill a hint of peculiarity.