Explode expressed in 33 1/3 seconds, explained in 3 minutes
The first project for James Grady’s Spring 2020 Motion Graphics elective is ‘1 Word, 1000 Pictures’. A play off of ‘a picture worth a thousand words’, we were each assigned a simple word and tasked with conveying a narrative responding to the word as a noun/verb, without audio or typography.
The requirements were:
- It must be exactly 33 1/3 seconds long (1000 frames at 30 frames/sec)
- It must be a seamless loop.
- The assigned word doesn’t appear.
- Conveys a personal aspect about yourself.
- No audio; black and white, 1080x1080 px.
My word was explode. My first reaction was that I didn’t want any bursting or characteristically ‘explosive’ gestures to be in my vignette. If anything, I wanted to represent the moments leading up to an explosion, using clips from my everyday.
I tried to brainstorm obvious moments that represented explosions to get those ideas out of my head before I tried to go deeper. Thinking on how to lead up to an explosion, I just took as many clips as I could before filtering through them.
A lot of my thinking was directed towards creating the feeling of tension leading up to some sort of explosion. If it was going to be time-based, then I really wanted to express the creeping seconds before some sort of explosion, and then put clips in between to create the tension.
For the sake of volume and capturing the everyday, I decided to capture my shots with my iPhone. It’s a nicer iPhone, and it was to my advantage that I could capture at 60 fps for really smooth footage.
Deciding that my explosive moment was dropping an egg (having an obvious outcome), I went to shooting footage with my phone until I was satisfied with the volume of clips. I decided not to use stock footage because I was afraid of how they might fit with the rest of my clips.
After watching and filtering through nearly 75 clips, it was about labeling them in order to sequence them together in an intentional way. Then, I laid them out on paper before going into After Effects.
The next step was bringing everything into Adobe After Effects to sequence the clips.
There’s a more direct way to convert each clip to black and white in AE, but I wanted the final product to have a more impressive color grading so I followed this tutorial:
Once I knew how the narrative would look, I put the clips together and cleaned it up.
Here is ‘explode’.
Overall, I found the process to be pretty time intensive (more so than I had imagined) and strongly feel more dedicated time will give a stronger result.
