I am going to collect hand scenes in anime to show how realistic anime could be. I want to change the idea that anime are fictional and does not convey any reality.
When starting drawing human figures, many of the amateur artists often say claim that hands are the hardest part of human drawing to master. Our hands are built with many bones and are very sophisticated. Expressing hands in high quality relates directly to reality of a picture or a anime. I am going to collect the scenes with nice hands in anime to promote their closeness to real life.
The form which my final project has is a Supercut. Supercut is a genre of video meme, where some special scenes or situation is collected in a single massive video montage. My project is basically a Supercut of animation scenes that has some reality embedded into them.
I was inspired to do a supercut from the example we were introduced in class, the last words. This artwork is a supercut of all the last words in many movie, and the creator collected footages from variety of sources and edited them together. All the scenes itself does not have great meaning, however when someone intensionally collect them together and present it at the same time, then the videos suddenly possess a great power and impact as a whole new entity.
Another piece that I was inspired from is the video that we were shown in the class: a collection of all breathes in a presidential debate. We saw this example early in the course, but when it kept reminding me how a preliminary skill to use different program can generate a piece that actually is interesting and imply many meanings behind it. This piece also gave me an influence to work with Supercuts.
My biggest intention in this project was to show people that animations are not only a fiction that has no relationship with our lives. Animation creators often try to portrait the reality in great details so that the audience can dive into the contents of the movie.
At first I tried to approach this idea by looking at hands of the animation characters. Since hand is the hardest part to draw in perfect shape, I thought the Supercut of hands in various animation will help people to look at the concept of animation again. However, while I searched for the right source of my project, I realized that there was more than hands that will make animation realistic. For example, when I first tried to achieve my target with hand supercut, I immediately thought Yu-gi-oh, a card playing animation with great hands. Therefore I tried to gather all the scene where the hands are gorgeously drawn. But in the process I noticed that these animation looks so unrealistic because of the theme of the animation. This animation is mostly about card game, which does not exist in real life. Also the comical hairstyle of the characters did not helped what I wanted to achieve.
Therefore, I stepped back from where I was and re constructed my logic. I wanted to prove that animations are more than how it is considered and stereotyped in people's mind. So I changed my direction to gather scenes that could make people say "wow, I didn't know animations can do that". After revisiting what I want to express, the process was easy because I know knew where to look for sources. I took three animation movies that are famous for their aesthetic values and cut the scenes that are realistic enough to contribute to my claim. I kept some of the hand footage since I still believe that sophisticated hand movements are a component of an animation to be seen as realistic.
The outcome of this project is a supercut of realistic scenes in three animation movies. Originally in my proposal I talked about hands. However, as I researched my footage of the supercut, I realized that hands are not the only factor that makes a video realistic. Another factor is the background of the animation, where the characters live, move and present their life on the screen. Therefore, I reconsidered my original approach and decided to include beautiful and realistic background scenes to express my idea that animes can be realistic.
I worked with Premiere most of the time trying to cut and add short video scenes from all over my source. First I selected all the scenes that would represent my point quite directly than I juxtaposed them in a way that I thought will be the best alignment to grab people's attention. I inserted a peaceful music in the background since there were voice recordings over the source video, and I wanted to make the video possess more unified feeling.
In the end the video had a form of peaceful music with animation cutscenes that will calm the viewer. The product was uploaded on YouTube under the title Realistic than the Reality - Anime Supercut.
The point of my supercut is to show people that animation can do more then their expectations, and I believe I delivered this point quite thoroughly. When watching the video, people can feel that how intense just an animation can turn into. The scenes, which were selected via thorough inspection contains contents that will allow people to revisit their idea about animation that they had till now and change their perspective about it. Considering this, my outcome definitely compose some ideas that I want to tell to people.
My video is 2 minute and 30 seconds long, which is not quite long as a good YouTube video, but at the same time not that long to lose people's focus on the content. The video has a peaceful and easily listenable music at its background, which allows people just to be calmed watching the beautiful scenes and listening to nice music. Also all the scenes are measured that they do not last longer than 5 seconds, so that the scene changes before people get bored of the same scene. One thing I am concerned is that the music is too calm such that it has no tension. Maybe when I try some other project that is similar to this one, I might want to find a brighter and exciting song for the background so that the watchers could be encouraged to watch the video to the end.
I have uploaded the video on YouTube, and also on my social media. However, I don't think a video will go viral if you plan to make a video go viral. Most of the time the contents that go viral is videos that were not expected to be so popular but coincidentally caught a lot of people's mind, or the contents which is uploaded by a top YouTuber, who already has a lot of followers. I tried my best so that the video could go viral and titled the video something that I might want to click on. But to be honest I don't think this will go viral or anything similar to that.
I learned that video editing is a process where you have to pour a lot of effort in. Often a footage I searched for would not match with my intention. To maintain my idea, I had to go through a lot of information and try to cut out the scene that is necessary to me. Since video is a form of media that depend greatly on time, it was a time consuming process to select what I want and delete what I don't want.
Also there were some technical issues. It was quite hard to keep the resolution to a great level once your footage is not in a good shape. However as I worked mostly with videos from Youtube and Vimeo, the quality of the videos I worked with was not that high. At the end I compromised with with medium level.
Another aspect that I realized, which is not related to the process or the technical issues, was the characteristics of the video as a media. As I said before, video corporates with time. And often people do not bother to spend their time on the whole video if they get bored in the early part of it. Therefore I tried to mix scenes form my three source so that people could stay focused and watch the video to the end. I think this directly connects to the viral part of the project. It is hard to be viral if the video doesn't catch the viewer's eye right away.
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