In building the prototype of my project I have finalised the technical workflow, thereby enabling me to be free creatively with the materials I bring to the audio and visual timelines.

1. Rotoscope the gestures in FLASH (from video footage) as white splines on black. I find that rather than keyframes at regular intervals the motion is better if I keyframe at key moments in the gestures. This makes the animation of the lines more fluid. I am not tweening the keyframes as the lines are too complex when the hands twist and turn in relation to the camera view. Therefore it is more of a stop frame style and the irregular keyframes draw the emotion out of the gestures and move away from clock time.

2. Take a rendered .MOV of the white on black gesture into AFTER FX. The original football footage was shot in slomo (to get better quality of the fast moving action) so my gestures need to be timesquashed. They look best rendered with motion blur but without field rendering as it blurs the purity of the line.

3. In AFTER FX I use the timeline and layers to create my symphony of gestures. I will use the white lines of the hands as alpha channels to fill with colours from my palette. In FLASH I will render versions of the gestures as white fill shapes to use in AFTER FX to make solid coloured shapes of the hands. Where the gestures intersect I will collide the colours. I will perhaps experiment with the 3D camera to play with the position of the gesture in the frame.

4. I am constantly moving back and forth between AFTER FX and PROTOOLS rather than creating the whole visual timeline before the sound or vice versa. In PROTOOLS I am loading all of my raw sound files into the library. These come from my ever expanding collection of field recordings. I have been collecting sounds from (unrecognizable) film soundtracks as its main function is to heighten emotion in the viewer. In PROTOOLS I can compose these sounds on the timeline while playing my .MOV of gestures. I also record ‘live’ sounds from my electronic musical instruments to the .MOV. This can then be exported back to AFTER FX either as picture, sound or both for me to re-edit the gestures in response to the composed music.

I aim for the whole composition to be around 3-4 minutes in duration. Over the next few months I will spend time researching how this will be projected with sound within the exhibition space. This is a vital element to the production of the piece.