Pro Juice goes behind the scenes with Nick Calpakdjian as he creates a short viral animation for the Darfur Australia Network.
Pro Juice
How did you come to be involved in the project?
Nick Calpakdjian
A friend of mine was volunteering for the Darfur Australia Network and asked if I’d be willing and able to produce a short viral piece to promote the cause.
PJ
And how did the concept come about?
NC
Well, basically they came to me with an idea to portray the journey that Darfuri people take from Darfur to Australia as shoes walking across varied landscapes. And for a reference they asked me to take a look at a White Stripes video that used stop/start animation.
PJ
So how did you undertake the project?
NC
I sat down with a couple of the creatives working on the exhibition and nutted out a storyboard. With that storyboard I went around Victoria looking for locations that would represent the various landscapes. I didn’t have to travel far because Melbourne has such a varied landscape that with some creative framing you can make a cliff face in Sandringham look like a red rock cliff face in Darfur.
I then edited these location photos into an animatic with a song by ‘Plug in City’ and worked on the timing and feel of the piece.
The hardest part I guess was making the shoes move. It wasn’t as simple as lining them all up and then moving all the left ones and then all the right ones. Doing that made it look too rigid and as though they were marching. So the rhythm was moving all the left shoes forward as well as taking e a shoe from the back of the right hand side and putting it at the front. Then I would film for a few seconds on my Sony Z1, I’d then move all the shoes on the right hand side and take a shoe from the back of the left hand side and moving it to the front. This way we captured a whole step with a slight scrolling effect by just adding the shoes from the back to the front. It took a few tests to get right and a lot of barking of orders on the day but it seemed to work out pretty well in the end.
PJ
And how did you achieve the camera moves on the final edit?
NC
After I had edited all the shoes to the beat of the music I exported the sequence from Final Cut Pro as high-res stills and imported them into After Effects. Because I had shot it in HDV, the images were about twice the size of what the finished product was going to be. I graded the individual sequences and subcomped each shot into a main timeline that was half the size of the original footage.
Then I used the wigglerama preset in After Effects and played with the settings to give an impression of a slight camera float or hand-held feel.
Then I added a camera to the comp and animated its position on the X, Y and Z axis’ to give a sense of more movement and perform zooms and pans. I also masked out foreground and background elements to put some lens blurs on the image as the camera zoomed and found focus.
All these elements added to the feel of the video and allowed it to take an organic kind of look even though these shoes wouldn’t be walking in this organic kind of way.
PJ
All right, thank Nick.
NC
No problem, hope you enjoy the viral and if you’re in Melbourne, Sydney or Canberra, get down and check out the exhibition it is promoting because its very good and for a great cause.
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THE DARFUR AUSTRALIA NETWORK presents Far to Here, a joint photographic exhibition documenting the lives of Darfuri refugees now residing in Australia. In part one of the exhibition, photojournalist Kabir Dhanji captures the inner strength of the older generation who fled the conflict. In part two, Darfuri youth tell their own story, recording their day-to-day experiences on donated cameras. The result is a suite of images that spans the chasms between continents and generations a visual journey from war to peace, old to young and far to here.
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