Eight Minutes to Crash - The north Hollywood shootout
8 Minutes To Crash - The North Hollywood Shootout is a mini documentary created as a personal project. This blog will serve a production documentation.
This project began with a desire to test my ability to tell a story. I have always loved documentary or video essay style videos and have wanted to make my own.
First, I needed a topic for my documentary. I came up with around ten concepts, but ultimately decided to cover the North Hollywood shootout, one of the most important events in law-enforcement history. With my concept decided on, I made a pitch deck to be able to sell my idea to an investor. In order to make the concept seem more interesting to pitch, I theme the pitch deck around a LA police file.
Once the pitch was approved, I could begin pre-production. This meant Scripting, Story boarding, Animatics, and asset gathering.
Upon ironing out the rough details of the project production could begin. Seeing as almost all of the project is animation done in After Effects and Premiere Pro, there was no principle photography. The only recording being done was audio recording for the narration. To do this I grabbed my microphone and computer, squeezed my way into my closet and spoke to my self for a couple of hours. This is actually a pretty common practice for recording audio without access to a sound studio, as the small space and cloths can act as soundproofing.
I would then take my audio and edit it with Audition, cleaning up the main narration and applying a radio filter to the quotes, to give them some distinction.
With My audio recorded and edited, I could begin with the most labor intensive part of the project: The Animation.
I started with some Ideas I had already solidified in the storyboards. The opening animation with news reports on a TV was first.
Following the intro animation, I animated some maps to the narration.
I continued to make the more set-in-stone animations I had planned. Once they were done, I started to work on the animation that would take place between these larger ones. It was here where I ran into an issue, how do I make this interesting to watch. The animation was just bland position keyframe moving from off screen, making the documentary feel lazy and uninspired. I decided to take a step back and try to find a solution to this problem. My solution came from my pitch deck. I had themed my pitch deck to look like a police file, so I decided to give the animation a detective/police report feel. The first idea to come of this was the chapter animations, in which used elements from a previous project I had worked on to create an 2.5D animation of a file opening. I also decided to make a detectives desk background to place the files on.
File Animation
Constructed Detectives Desk
Chapter Transition Animated
The second idea I had was to present the information like an old slide projector. I would create masks that would reveal images as if they were pages being placed on the screen, then play a slide change animation when I need to create new space. This helped bring the visual interest the project had been lacking until now.
From here, all that was left was the slow process of animating the elements in sync with the narration. I also added relevant sound effects, such as the sound of paper being placed and writing, helping to add depth to the animations. I also added some music to the documentary.
The last part of the project that I worked on actually something I had been struggling with since animation started. It was the scene between the TV opening and the title card. I had created up to three or four different versions of what I wanted to put here before I settled on a final design.
This is easily one of the largest projects I have ever created. It was an experience full of trial and error, but in spite of that, I’m proud of how it turned out in the end. I will undoubtedly use what I learned in this project to make my future ones stronger.
