The Process of Creating Snake in the Grass

For my Experimental Video project, I decided to create a short film with the idea of it having different animation styles on top of live footage, as well as having no dialogue, but all the sounds and music were created by me. I decided to call the short film Snake in the Grass, as not only was it because the film featured a literal snake around some grass, but because it is also a metaphor that means “someone you heavily dislike because they pretend to be your friend, but they eventually betray you”. The story was inspired by a very early Pixar short film, The Adventures of André and Wally B, which was about a character named André who wants to rest in the forest before being awakened by a bee named Wally B. André tricks Wally B, runs away, Wally B gets miffed and hi jinx ensues. Although it’s not very strong in terms of story, it's efficient as an inspiration. At first, the idea of me working on an animated project sounded like a tedious one, seeing as I had to not only create 2D animation for the child character, but also claymation for the snake, and that sounded like it would take forever to make, with that element being inspired by Who Framed Roger Rabbit and how it mixes animation on top of live footage, but for me, it was on a much smaller scale. 

To make sure I knew what I was doing, I decided to work on some tests for the animation. I created two tests: one that featured 2D animation on top of live footage, and one that featured claymation on top of live footage.

I created these tests so that I could get some experience on how working on animation was like, and as the project continued, I would understand more and more on how the animation process was like.

However, I didn’t actually have many real problems with either medium, bar for some minor ones. For example, a lot of the shots in my storyboard were not actually done because with the timeframe that I had, it would be unrealistic for me to create them, so as a result, there are a bunch of recycled frames of animation and the animation is a lot simpler. But thankfully, I was told that wasn’t an issue, seeing as cartoons like Mr Benn also had really simple animation, but the stories they told were still good. For the claymation, it was actually surprisingly simple and managed to get all the frames that I desired in a day. I even propped the claymation snake on a green screen so it was easier to edit out. 

There was one big problem with the green screen though, and that was it was difficult to chroma the key out, because the green screen had a certain pattern on it that made it difficult to remove. Fortunately, this also had a very simple solution, as I was shown that on Adobe After Effects, there was a feature of Chroma Keying called Keylight, which really helped out with getting rid of the pattern, and that proved to be an easy fix. What came out from this was animation that felt like a big focus, similar to that of The Thief and the Cobbler. 

So that was the animation out of the way, now what I needed to do was the shooting, which was possibly the hardest part of creating the video. It may have sounded like an easy thing to do, but there were a lot of factors that I initially never took into account. For the still shots, they were fine, since all that I really needed to do was prop my phone (which I used as a camera) onto a tripod and film still video. The good thing with this is that it didn’t matter if I made noise, because none of the sound from the video was going to be used anyway. The close-up of the grass (where the child character was laying down) was a more difficult shot to do as there was a big shadow in the way which couldn’t really be fixed, besides from cropping it out, which did work, but the grass shot looked lower quality. 

 

The panning shots weren’t too difficult to do, so I don’t have much to say on those. What I do have to say a lot on, however, were the shots with the scrolling backgrounds. What I wanted to do to begin with was to use a skateboard to move the camera along the grass, but this proved two big problems. The first problem was that it wasn’t very stable. Even with the tripod taped to the skateboard using duct tape, the camera was very shaky and having to put the skateboard along made me worry about the phone coming out and potentially breaking, and even if I were to do it incredibly slowly, the grass wasn’t the smoothest to push along on, and it was really rough to even move the skateboard to begin with. I did ask a friend if they had a wheelbarrow, but they didn’t have one, so in the end, I used a still picture that I had to scroll using software. To be honest though, I think the still picture gave a more charming look to it so in the end, it wasn’t a problem that I missed badly.

Now onto the sound effects, and all these sound effects were created via Foley sounds, which was to reproduce the sound effects yourself, and because this was an experimental video, I could get creative with this. This element was inspired by the British series Clangers, where the characters all spoke with a whistling sound. This was clearly originally made, so I wanted to do something similar, but for all sounds. And for this I could even have some fun origins for sounds, such as using me walking my fingers on some tissue for the footsteps, me rubbing a hairbrush on myself for the snake moving around, the snake’s hiss being done by me opening a can of Coke, me popping a bag for an explosion, not to mention, a good amount of recorder, whenever there is movement. Most of the sound I recorded using Audacity, but there were a few times (mainly when I was outdoors) where I used my phone to record sounds.

I also had to record ambiance for the short film, though that proved difficult, especially since it was one of the last things I did, I had to find a perfect time to record it. There was a lot of wind during the recording, so I decided to edit a small loop where it didn’t sound so windy. I feel like that loop was very effective. 

Finally, I had to create some music. This was another part I had a lot of fun with while making the video. I composed all the music using Fruity Loops Studio, and while I needed to focus on the timing of the video, so I knew how long the songs should be and at what tempo, I feel like what I had was an effective and playful soundtrack. 

Then, once all the ingredients needed are gathered, I cook them up in my preferred video editing software of choice, Vegas Pro. Trying to gather all the assets and put them into the program felt a little bit tedious at first, but seeing as the short film was only a minute, it’s not the hardest thing to make. The program does use a lot of RAM and my computer is not the best, admittedly, so I couldn’t draw and make the video at the same time.

But overall, as a final video, I’d say that it came out really well, and I had a lot of fun in the end.