Jack the Ripper - The Script

After doing extensive research onto the case itself, it was time to write the script, which I was not planning to do originally. Originally I was going to give it to my team mate who had written the scripts for the Burger King brief, because I have no experience writing scripts for other people to follow. However I took my best shot at it anyway. There is not much more to say about this, I think I am going to have to revise the script at some point.

For now though this will be the script we are using for the storyboards which will be my role for next week. 

Jack the Ripper - Research Time

Now that we had pitched my idea to the rest of the class, and been given the go ahead of approval, over this easter I had set stuff for the group do. For this I knew we need a schedule to stick to so that we were all aware of what was going on.

This schedule includes my Director notes on it, on each week for the other 2 I have notified them on what they can be doing if they should finish early, as well as some wider expectations on what they should be doing specifically in the weeks. For example on the layout section of Oliver's, it says:

"Using my storyboards i'd like you to make the full layout for the final outcome, I don't imagine this will take all week, but i'd like these to be in depth, so if the rough layouts get done you and myself will work on getting the textures and stuff down to overlay the animation on to.
Also in this layout section, i'd like for you to add in some space for of the time ads which can be input into the corners of pages so we can make it feel authentic" (the screenshot was too small to put in without being pixelated).

My next stage was to do the research so that I could plan out the story so that I could script in the most factual way possible. For this I used a few different sources. Firstly I used 3 books which I had been reading before the project.

These books were incredibly useful in introducing me to the story of Jack the Ripper. My next sources were the documentaries, which I will link down below: 

Jack the Ripper tour Documentary  ( this one was written by one of the people we want to contact. 

Time Line Documentary

Criminals and Crime Fighters Documentary

All of these documentaries proved an interesting watch and were easy to follow. I want to use some of these as reference points into ours to be so formal and easy to follow. 

My next point of research was to look at the casefiles website which exists for Jack the Ripper. The case has such a following that people have set up this page to include all the facts and news articles which have ever existed on him.

CaseFiles website

This has been the most useful link of all, as it explains the timeline perfectly and gives a lot of information about the case itself and the wider context. 

Jack the Ripper - A New Project

I knew towards the end of the last project what I wanted to do, so before ending the burger king project, so I decided to enlist the help of 2 of the people in my class, one of which being my director on the last project, on the understanding that this would be my project and I would be the director. I chose these people specifically due to their great work ethic, and for their skills.

For the project I will be pitching I will be doing a Jack the Ripper documentary, specifically on 1 case which would be the 2nd murder on the night of the "double event" Catherine Eddowes. I wanted to do this case as it was the most influential of the murders overall on the Police, and the whole thing happened in around 10 minutes. I had the idea of doing it in kind of a wanted poster kind of way, but I didn't know how to pull this off. So my team mate offered the suggestion of turning into a newspaper format, which would allow us to work in a lot more.

From this I made this proof of concept for the other 2 to work from. As one of them was assigned backgrounds, and the other was assigned asset creation and animation. For this we knew we had to do a lot of research, so we made a list of possible people to contact, some documentaries to watch and some books to read. 

Burger King - Animation

This is the final week of the burger king project, we are finally able to animate after myself and the director backed all of the assets, he also had to make some assets due to time constraints and our other team mates not meeting our deadlines. This week I animated 3 different small sections of our brief, I animated the original story idea, "campfire" i also animated "the bard of burgers" and "a funeral fit for a king". I am very happy with how these turned out. Using after effects in this way presented some problems, and with me and my director Oliver animating at the same time, we were able to animate together and help each other when we encountered a problem. A problem we faced was with the "auto bezier" function when making new key frames. As the animated was supposed to feel quite rough to emulate the hand made aspect of it, the auto bezier caused nothing but issues.

These are the final versions, they had sound added by our team mate, however for the reason of them being submitted to a competition I cannot post the full thing here. I am proud of the product we have made, and it has been successfully submitted to D&AD.

Burger King - Asset Creation

For this week it is one of great distress for me, we were under the assumption that we would have the assets done by now so that we could animate and have lots of room for post production. So this week I am now having to take on his work so that we can still get finished on time, as I designed all the assets it was easiest for me to do these as I already know how they are supposed to be. This is obviously not the most ideal thing however we cannot animate until we have the assets. I also did some tests with the backgrounds so that we could change the colour of the background as and when we needed it.

These are the assets I had to create, I had to do this so that we could animate with them on time, I also had to back my teammates assets on to the textures because for reasons unknown he had not considered the textures when creating the assets. 

These are just examples of assets I had to back on to the textures, and incredibly time consuming job, as they were to go on paper to seem like they had been hand drawn (with a brush I created to seem like a pencil) and then go on to cardboard to seem like a puppet show. There was also a drop shadow that needed to be added, as well as consideration into how they would look had they been glued on and cut around with scissors. 

These are the background experiments I made. When doing this I considered the colours that were on the burger king briefs and essentials pack, we also did this when creating the assets. 

Burger King - Finished Storyboards and Cows

This week was more or less the continuation of last week because I had not yet finished the storyboards. I wanted to prioritise the storyboards first as we wanted to be animating as soon as possible. Although we have seen minimal assets by our other team mate, we are still confident in getting all of our animation done by the deadline. I also made the assets for the cows this week, there had to be a few different versions in order to made them seem more animated, and keep with the humour we were going for instead of seeming more morbid.

These are the cow assets I made afterwards, they are from a stick free png, I did an advanced search on google to make sure that it was for commercial and editable use, which is why this specific cow was used. 

After this I had time to still do the character assets I was to make using my character design. With the stories we ended up choosing, the character design's are only to be used in 1 of the animations however it was still a necessary part of the process as this allowed us to just slot it in where we needed. 

These are assets interchangeable as we need them and where necessary are on separate layers for some movement in after effects. On the next week we are expecting the assets to be done by our team mate so that we can begin animating. They are still running late however we have decided to take on more of the animation between ourselves (myself and my director) so we will be animating 3 each as opposed to animating 2 each so that our other team mate can get the assets done. 

New Project - Burger King

In this new project, we undertook a competition brief in which we were required to create an ad campaign for Burger King. We considered many different ways of going about this, but ultimately, whilst watching some cut scenes for a video game called battle block theatre, we decided on the idea of a puppet show esk concept, in which "hand made assets" would be animated to create short narrative's revolving around the Burger King brand. I will link to a video of the game cutscenes which inspired our idea below.

Battle Block theater cutscenes

From this idea, we sat down together to come up with some story ideas off the bat, having looked at a few ad campaigns from Burger King previously, we knew they were not after anything too serious, so we went with comedy as a theme for our story ideas. Our story ideas are shown below, with our favourite 6 circled, some of them are based on general theme's or potential movie/book parodies which we can play around with.

During  this week, each of us split up to research different areas of what we thought to be the main aspects of our ads which would make it stand out, and brief specific. Our director was in charge of looking into previous Burger King adverts, to see what kind of thing the brand was looking for when they release their own advertisements, my other team mate was in charge of looking into styles similar to the one which inspired us, looking at other video games and animations such as; Little Big Planet, which has cardboard backgrounds, the Paper Mario games, in which all characters are made of and behave as if they were paper and scenes from the animated film "The Breadwinner" as some scenes use paper cut out puppetry put together digitally. Also from tutor suggestion we looked into cutscenes from the video game "Lego Pirates of the Caribbean".

I however, was in charge of looking into potential character designs as we knew we wanted to have some character's interact with the Burger King's titular character "The Burger King" so it was my role to create the character that would interact with him, therefore I looked into popular cartoon characters which are simple and could translate on to stick based animated puppets.

This is my original inspiration board where I used specific design choices based on simple shapes. I decided on something genderless which would be inclusive everyone, this was an important design choice as the ad is supposed to reach 18 - 24 year olds on social media.