Editing with Final Cut Pro

Once all the animation is composited with the live footage, I exported them out of After Effect and brought them back to Final Cut Pro for the final edit.
As a result of good planning during the storyboarding process, the editing was pretty straightforward.

However, we spent a long time trying to work out what music would be most suitable for the video. We tried to find something that's British but not as popular as The Beatles or David Bowie. We did not want to use a commercial song neither as it makes the video seem really cheesy. The song however needs to have a beat and a certain pace to it, so it uplifts the mood as well as complementing the visual. With a good recommandation from my housemate, Kit Jennings, a choice was finally made on the last day.

The final edit for submission.

Compositing with Adobe After Effect

With the green screen layer added in Toon Boom Studio Pro, I easily keyed out the background with Keylight and composite the drawings onto the live footage of locations.

I then added shadows beneath the drawings to make them blend into the live action footage. Masks are then added around the characters to create a colour aura, which symbolises the sports bringing in colours to the city.

During the process of compositing, a problem is realised. Due to the frame rate of the camera, there are repeated frames in the live footage in After Effect, but these frames were somehow not repeated in Toon Boom Studio Pro. As a result, the animations do not match up with the live footage.

I solved this problem with After Effect's Time Remapping utility by increasing the length of all the frames on the animation, which are not repeated, in order to match them with the live footage.

All the other Olympics sports are done with the same method.

Hand Drawn Animation with Toon Boom Studio Pro

With the live footage shot in various locations as reference, we started looking at visual references of various Olympics sports. Firstly I did a rough cut with the live footage using Final Cut Pro in order us to have a good sense of timing and the overall pacing of the video. 

I then found a lot of useful clips on the Internet and composited them onto the footage of locations with After Effect. Some of the clips from the Internet were badly shot so when I composite them onto our live footage, the characters would move randomly due to the clip's camera motion.

As a result, I key-framed all the characters throughout the entire video to compensate for all the camera motions contained within the sports clips from the Internet.

Using exported clips as reference, we started drawing various sports on top of the referencing videos frame by frame in order to get the stylistic hand drawn 2D effect, which is more artistic and stylistic comparing to rotoscoping the characters.

We started off by doing different sports separately. I personally drew the discus thrower and the rowing crew, while Reno drew the running woman and the cycling man.

Then we realised that it would keep the drawings more consistant by having one person doing all the black lines and another person filling the characters with white paint. As a result, Reno started to draw all the character outlines and passed them on to me for the white fillings.

The referencing clip of athlete clips on top of our location footage exported from After Effect and then brought into Toon Boom Studio Pro.

The black outlines traced off the referencing clip frame by frame.

The white fillings to give the characters a more animated look and basic texture.

Props like discus, javeline and paddles are then added as a separate layer.

A final layer of green screen is then added behind the drawings in order to make the compositing job easier by keying out the greens for transparency.

Above videos are tests of animation working together with live footage.

Location Shoots

We have encountered a lot of problems during the shoot. Even after we planned out the shots and transitions during the storyboarding process, there are still things that are difficult to control on the shoot and thus hinders us from getting the shots we want.
Weather was a big problem as we arranged a day with the female runner and the male cyclist but it was raining very hard on the day so we had to call it off. Everyone became very busy for the next two weeks and propounded our schedule. The final shot in Borough Market near London Bridge took the longest, because the actress was very busy but she was already in the tracking shots which we did at the very beginning, so we could not replace her unfortunately. However, when we finally managed to do it, the result came out great.
In conclusion, the process of shooting itself was the most time consuming factor. By taking on two extra projects made it even less manageable in the end.


Below are examples of the live footage we shot on different locations.



As we anticipated, the street was very crowded with a lot of delivery trucks most of the time. After evaluating the shots, we decided to change the transition of the shot and the sports being animated in this shot. So we went back and reshot it.



This is the footage from the reshoot. For this shot itself, we had to stand there for a couple of hours in order to finally get the takes that we are satisfied with.



After we shot this footage we decided to have archery for the previous shot and thus had to come back and reshoot this one as well, allowing the arrow to lead the audience into this shot.



This is the one that we decided to use in the end.

H-Frame and D.I.Y. Track

 

For the intro of the video we decided to have two still shots of two locations cross-cutting with close-up tracking shots of a female runner. With the still shots intercutting with the tracking shots, implicitly suggests the theme of the action from sports contrasting from the still city of London being awaken and brought to life by the Olympic Sports.

Track material list:

Heavy Duty Tripod

3 Meter Plastic Tubes x6

Wooden Spacers x9

In order to do these tracking shots, we booked out the H-Frame from college and bought the items required to create the tracks from B&Q. The location for these shots were originally planned to be near the London Eye. We were unable to get a consent for filming in that location, also traveling with the tracks out is very expensive and time consuming. We decided to shoot them in the Millennium Village near North Greenwich due to conveniency. Another reason being the shots are so tight, the location would hardly be recognisable anyways.

This is a test shot of the track, which is a great representation our track's effectiveness.

Storyboarding

Above is the storyboard Reno and I discussed and later drawn properly by Reno. We planned out the animation from the angles of shots to various transitions thoroughly throughout the piece. However, a couple of transitions and certain bits had to be neglected due to heavy amount of work and lack of time towards the deadline as a result of our attempt of taking on two extra projects at the same time.

Locations

We selected three primary locations due to each and everyone of their own unique cultural differences: China Town, Brick Lane and Greenwich.

Before we initiate the storyboarding process, each location was scouted beforehand in order us to be more familiar with the location as well as the possibilities of various shots.

We discovered limitless amount of possibilities in China Town regarding the creativity and substantiality of the cinematography. The only anticipated problem is timing and obstacles because the main street is usually crowded at most times of the day, the deliveries trucks seem constantly parked along the side of the street as well. We hoped to absolve this problem via arriving at the location early in the morning.

After reviewing Brick Lane as one of the locations, we felt that the location lacks obvious quality of cultural recognition to it and hence might be difficult for the audience to relate especially for foreigners. As a result, we changed the location to Borough Market in London Bridge and added Camden as an extra location.



Beautiful and locally known Borough Market.

Camden is an interesting tourist spot which is somewhat less pretentious and commercial as the Big Ben and the London Eye we felt this could thus bring forth a more powerful cultural impact to the piece.