Critique: Michael Dibblee’s “Typewriting Time”

“For a ten-second film, the content is quite rich for something so short. From the turning of the typewriter to the moving arms of the machine, from the strong composition in every cut to the subtle touches like the texture of the metal and paper, this film is strong in both the aspects of filmography as well as design. The film itself is well-paced, the lighting and contrast between light and dark is clear, and there is clear attention to detail (the sound of rolling the paper, the ‘ding’ at the end).

The rhythm of the typing sound is slightly off, giving a sense of randomness in an otherwise very mechanical and predictable sequence of events. It was a good choice to have isolated and focused on only the elements that mattered – it kept the film focused and on target. The predictability of the sequences can be more than made up for by the high-end production and overall strong execution.”

Comment is found here .

Project 1: Animal Cookies

Five hours later everything has fallen into place nicely. Some frames have been tweaked, and now the whole thing has been synched with some appopriate sounds. If everyone said they thought it was cute there was no point fighting what it was – so I ran with the playful, cute thing instead.

DESIGN STATEMENT

This project is a ten-second leader based on the idea of eating shortbread animal cookies. Using stop-motion animation, a playful spin is put on the concept – the animals act as if they had a mind of its own, scattering in all directions and avoiding the hand when it swoops in from out of the screen to capture one of the shortbread victims. Every second mark is queued by the ‘munching’ sound, suggesting that the animal cookie captured from the preceding second is being eaten. The short zooms in on the last two animals at the two second mark, and concludes with the very last animal (a fish) being partially eaten.

The ideas of good composition, interesting narrative and light-hearted humour were considered throughout the production, and this resulted in the animals forming numbers in a fluid manner, shifting from one number to the next naturally (relatively, accounting for the fact that this was a first attempt at stop-motion animation). The fluidity of the short is juxtaposed with the mechanical precision of the second-mark sound blips, only to bring more interest to the end when the one-second sound blip is delayed to emphasize the idea of the last animal cracker being eaten.

Also, the animal crackers tasted wonderful. It was fun snacking while working on a design project.

Credit goes to: hardPCM for the burp .wav; heigh-hoo for the ‘crunching’ sound; afterguard for the diner ambience sound.

Project 1: Test

So although it says test, it’s more like I decided to save the work at the midway point to see how it looks. Some parts look more fluid than others, but overall it looks okay. Too many people have described it as “cute”…anyway, time to add in my sounds!