Excerpt from Mexican Standoff - Rocketjump (ft. Key & Peele)
My idea for this video was to use content that I enjoy watching. I enjoy watching comedy shows and skits. Some of my most favorite comedians to listen to and watch are Key and Peele.
I wanted the editing style of this video to reflect the editing style of anime, which I also enjoy watching. I like how action themed anime has a dramatic way of editing, and I wanted that reflect that, while also having a somewhat lighthearted and comedic effect to it.
Key and Peele's "Mexican Standoff" is tense and holds people in suspense on what will happen. There are multiple people talking. As I watched the piece, I could envision this being turned into an anime, or at least edited in the style of an anime.
The Process
The process for making this video was simple. I used After effects and Photoshop in order to make this video. The process did not take long, and only required me to know how to use both Photoshop and After Effects.
I first had to find images that would fit the video itself and what I wanted to portray. I searched up anime characters for the people in the video, and cartoon characters and objects for the rest. I was then able to transfer all of these over to Photoshop. In Photoshop, I selected the part of the image I wanted to remove, whether it was in the foreground or background, and deleted it. I made sure I had the 'fill background' option selected, so that the space where I deleted would auto generate. I then used the stamp tool and tried my best to fill in the background so it would not look altered. I then was able to layer the two pieces back together and animate the object that is now its own layer just slightly to create the parallax effect.
For other images, all I needed to do was select the character I wanted to keep in the foreground, and delete the background. I then layered on multiple effects to get a texture on the image, and then added it onto a new background. I added some animations to give it more effect.
For the text in the video, I simply added a black box and added text inside the box. I added the typewriter effect on top of it to have the text move on its own as the character talks, similar to a video game. For the rest of the video, like the glitch at the end, I had three different colored bar images disappear and reappear at rapid succession. For the floor with the hands and guns, I simply cut out these objects and placed them together on top of a blueprint image I found.
Move
My inspiration for this project was influenced by the video games I played when I grew up. In the early 2000’s, video game graphics had a certain jerky and quirky movement that was sudden and ‘playful.’ Drawing on the way early Mario Bros. games looked like, I decided to use random little characters that had a ‘childish’ and ‘cartoon-like’ appearance.
Like in most games, the beginning opens up with an introduction that has a ‘story’ introduced to the player. Once the introduction passes, the game begins, where anything random can happen, as the player can make different decisions. Using these characters, I wanted to create a video that would start out with a storyline and move on to a more randomized effect.
My next step was to find a song I thought would fit the theme. I found a musical piece titled, Good Fellow, by Komiku, on a free music download website. The song sounds like an old video game from the late 1900’s, early 2000’s, and seemed perfect for my video. Having all the elements needed to make the piece, I uploaded the song to my work, watched the waveforms of the music and made the subjects in the frames react to the music.
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The Process
Making this video was a fun and enjoyable experience. I enjoyed making this video the most because I feel that it has the most liberty on how creative you can become, especially since you can apply effects onto the live footage shot. The process to making this started with finding a song that fit the style and idea I wanted to use.
After finding the song I wanted, I needed to find what objects I wanted to use in my videos, and what composition background I wanted to use. Following this, I made style frames and thumbnails of what I had an idea of doing. I then uploaded the song to the program I was using, Dragonframe, and and looked at all the waveforms of the song.
Spotting where the song was upbeat, having higher and tighter waveforms, and where the song was quieter and slowed down, having smaller and spaced waveforms, I took shots of my objects two frames at a time, reviewing the movements they had in relation to the music. I made sure that the movement was precise to the music, and if any problems occurred, I would delete a few frames and reshoot them. After I was satisfied with all my shots, I finished the length of time I wanted my video to be, I exported my footage as a video and all the individual images, so that I could reshoot or add to the video any time I wanted.