After ensuring all the settings were correct, we exported our final video as a .mov file, then opened it in Quicktime to be converted to the correct format. The video is done!

100% Printed is a parallel between the way we think about food today and the way we will think about food in the future. The video starts by depicting a restaurant that heats up frozen pizza replete with chemicals for its customers. Then, we see the same scene in the future, but instead of frozen, preserved pizza, the restaurant serves its food from a 3D printer. The video ends with four customers each taking a slice of their fresh, 3D printed pizza. 

Three main ideas were utilized in the making of this video: seductive and misleading advertising, the trouble with factory foods, and one possible way that 3D printing can fix our broken food system. The advertising component gets tackled through our "authentic" restaurant and the factory system is debunked in our factory scene. 3D printing becomes introduced about halfway through the video to show how a restaurant can control the ingredients of a food, make that food fresh in a short amount of time, and do so with the precision of a computer.   

In one file, mountains.ai, we wanted to separate three aspects  and save them individually for use in the video. In After Effects, the mountains, hill, and water would have to be saved as three separate PNGs for animation. We deleted all but the hill, exported, then undid our changes and repeated with the mountains and water, allowing us to import each one at a time for animation.

We also began saving backups to our computer at lunch, the end of the day, and after making significant changes.

We started off the studio by watching videos all about food. Videos about dumpster diving, and food made in factories, we noticed that a lot of the videos left us with a negative feeling. We then started to brainstorm about possible topics for our animations.

We decided that we didn’t want to go the industrial/manufactured food route or dive into the future with 3D printing food. We knew what we didn’t want to make an animation about, which made it a lot easier to find the topic we did want to make our animation about.

We wanted to make an animation about slow food and how satisfying it is to grow your own food, nurture your food, then eat it.

First off, we storyboarded the whole video. We did this so we had a plan, and would know how the whole animation would fit together. Our original plan for our story went like this: The beginning of the animation will show the manufactured gross food we eat now. It will look gross, and probably have a few facts on the screen about the gross food we eat. Then it will show the opposite side, and show this guy planting a seed and watching it grow, until he picks it and turns it into soup. This will be beautiful and nothing like the first hunk of the animation. Once the soup is done being made, we will show the screen split; on one side will be the soup guy slurping away and on the other the manufactured food dude is pigging out. The final screen will probably say something like “You ­Choose” or something similar along those lines.

We were then told that it was impossible to animate our story that we had planned out. Our story had characters in every scene, and characters are the hardest to animate.  We decided to filter some of the scenes out of the story, rather than completely starting over.

We then decided that our story would go like this. It starts out with our main character pouring out a can of soup. The soup looks really disgusting, and maintains the can shape. Some of the soup goo flies into his eye. Gross. The Character then “sees the light” as he looks out the window and sees an open field. The light shines on him through the window as he realizes the opportunity. It then shows the character walking out side and he drops a seed. The next frames are watching the seed grow. The character then comes back to the plant, picks it and takes it back home. The next scene we see is the plant (onion) being cut up, and put into a pot. The pot transfers into a bowl, and shows the character happily eating soup. He winks at the end.

After we completed our storyboards, we taped them onto the wall in front of us, so we wouldn’t loose them. Kate started doing some of the drawings on Photoshop, while Nathaniel set up the shots with shapes in Illustrator.

We had a good system. Kate would do the art, and Nathaniel started animating. This way, both of us are working while its fresh in our minds. Once the drawings were finished, we both worked in After Effects on the animation.

We have learned that it is much easier to animate objects than people. We are animating our character with the puppet tool. The puppet tool allows us to put key points on our character. We then manipulate the placing of the key points, which allows us to move the character.  The puppet tool is really awesome, but it is really easy to screw up. It was hard to make the character not look like he was made of rubber. Moving one point might completely warp our characters body. It is completely frustrating when all you want him to do is move his arm, but instead his waist gets twisted up.

We continued animating for days. Once we were done with the animation, we looked for background music. We knew we wanted foreign music, because we didn’t want words to be a distraction from all the animation work we had done. We Googled the top ten foreign songs, and we found our song pretty quickly. Our song worked out extremely well. It was the perfect length, and different sections of the song would come in just when the animation would change. It added a lot the overall zen of the animation.

This story focuses on the character's dissatisfaction for the canned and processed soup that he was planning on eating. Clearly unhappy with the contents of the can, he sets out to create his own soup from scratch. Gathering an onion from his own garden, and preparing it the way he pleases, he was finally satisfied with his meal. 

Seed to Soup is a video representation of how the slow food movement needs to be reignited in society. Food of today has become faster and more efficient as opposed to being home grown and organic. Being more efficient doesn't always mean better. Food starts to lose its taste and wholeness, and it just feels less personal. Seed to Soup helps portray our distaste for the fast food ideal. Instead of driving to the store to pick up fruits and vegetables that shouldn't even be stocked all year, we want to entice the viewer into growing it themselves.

Food seen from a functional perspective provides us with the chemical energy to function and do our daily work. For some, food forms an essential part of social customs, family occasions and holidays; For others, consuming certain types of food perpetuates health problems, such as diabetes and heart disease; For others, ethical concerns related to food production and the treatment of animals dictates their eating habits; And for some, food is a scarce commodity that they can only hope to have each day.

In this studio, students will look at our existing food infrastructure and examine the complex issues surrounding food, including food production/distribution, abuse of workers and child labor, fare-trade practice, farm-to-table options, large vs. small food companies and their impact, environmental impact through a product’s life-cycle, access to organic/natural food, innovations in the food industry, and new models for food businesses. Using infographic techniques to better explain food systems and their effects, students will frame an argument and create a compelling short animated informational video around a particular food issue.

Through this studio, students will learn about information design using the tools of data visualization and infographics, digital filmmaking, digital art, illustration, storytelling and production. Students will also learn how to create compelling visual effects and use them in their stories using Adobe After Effects. The studio is intended to allow students to be creative with media while being thoughtful and critical in communicating a message.

Initial Research

After watching a number of movie clips relating to food waste and the massive problems revolving around the food industry as a whole, we decided to focus on recycling. We quickly discovered that most of it doesn't actaully get re-purposed like were told, but ends up in landfills all over the world. After researching the issue and making calls to local recycling centers, we found that many water bottle companies may be lying to us by saying they are eco-friendly.

We decided to make an animated PSA video to show people the truth. We created a storyboard to organize our ideas. We based the style on a video created by BP, featuring a minimal design style with no outlines or unneeded effects.

Graphics

We picked a clean palette of bright colors that looked well together, and then used Adobe Illustrator to create graphics of all the objects in our storyboard. For many of the objects, we used a pre-existing image like a car or barrel and traced it, then removed the original and adjusted it. Once we had every object we needed, we began to use another program called After Effects, which is used for animation.

Animation

After learning the basics of After Effects we had to transfer all the images we created from Illustrator to After Effects and animate them. We exported them as images in a separate folder, organized by the order we expected to use them. We went over every scene and decided what we wanted to animate and what looked better as a static object. Each scene was created as a separate composition, and once they were finished we began adjusting the details.

Revision

At several points in the animating process, we strayed from our original storyboard. We decided clear text in a consistent font and position would be more clear than a person speaking, and that our original facts were too wordy for the average person. We simplified these facts and adjusted the details of each scene until the style was consistent.

Compilation

Once all the scenes looked great separately, we began to combine them. We created a final composition and imported all the others, then adjusted them to create smooth transitions. Using simple shapes without outlines allowed us to animate a shape or background from one scene into some other graphic in the next one, creating a more cohesive appearance. We then chose a song, Daydream by Tycho, for its smooth melody which fit well with our theme, and rendered for the first time.

Polishing

Our first few renders had minor issues, so we adjusted accordingly. We switched from a general location to specific coordinates for our text, and adjusted its size for easier reading. After several more revisions, we added credits to thank our coaches, and ended the video playfully with a drop of water.

We started off very interested in 3D printed, so we knew that we wanted to do something with that. The ideas came naturally as we storyboarded; we would start with food today and end with food tomorrow. The original idea was to have a video that zommed in to the next slide after every frame. For example, we would see a billboard overlooking a highway, then zoom in to something on the billboard that was included in the next scene. We wanted to have our music resemble that of an Italian restaurant, but ironically, the best music we could find was French.

Since neither of us had experience using Adobe Illustrator or After Effects, we knew that we should stick to 2D animations. We watched videos for inspiration and came up with background patterns and color schemes; our backgrounds are a grey gradient pattern with repeating squares and our floors are a light wood striped gradient. We struggled with keeping the same font, color scheme, scale, and style throughout different scenes, but I think it turned out well in the end once we understood what to do. In After Effects, we learned that our original zoom in idea would not work with every slide, so we tried to vary our transitions. We had to make decisions about which parts of the scenes to animate.

Working with After Effects was hard because many of our animations worked with characters. The way that we made our characters was not condusive to the puppet tool, so we had to be very precise with where we placed the puppet pins

Our main problem was that we spent so much time in Illustrator that we had very little time to animate in After Effects, so we had to stay late one day after NuVu. If we had managed our time a little better, we could have had smoother transitions and more precise animations. 

Overall, I think this project went very well. It was so different seeing the final on the screen and knowing where we had come from to get there. The decisions we made, like our color palette, characters, front view, and animation transitions, helped us to come up with a cohesive video. 

After we built a storyboard with an outline of our video, the next stage was to draw out everything in our planned video in Adobe Illustrator, a vector-drawing program. Once each object was finished, we had to convert them to PNG image files so they could be imported into After Effects for animation.

We made one AE project and imported each of our projects to it for final composing and editing, and added a track. We tried a few and adjusted the beginning until it matched our video, and added a fade-out at the end of the song as the credits play. We adjusted all the fonts to match each other in size, scale, style, height, and alignment. We also changed the positions of many objects so they align with a fairly standard grid.

Initially, our audio quality was extremely poor so we adjusted the audio settings to 96 kHz and 32-bit which made it sound much more like the original song.