PRE-PRODUCTION
When we decided on the story we started to think about characters apart from those involved apart from the main characters – the passanger, the driver and the other passanger. We thought about who else could we feature and we decided to choose an inanimate or a omniscient character.
We thought since the entire conversation took place over text, we decided – hey why not Siri? and thus the fourth character was born.
I thought about the tone and voice of Siri to be more neutral and omniscient. However, it was feedback that being omniscient was not enough to create a compelling character. Giving Siri no voice was a challenge as it was one less method to give character to it. I thought about how Siri could influence the story and decided on something very commonplace – the auto correct system in text messages. I gave siri a voice of non-violence and allowed audience to see Siri to have a peace-loving nature, thus that’s more character to him.
PROUCTION
Our group set out to shoot the scene (even though it wasn’t really featured in the final edit), and we thought it’d be comedic for it to be low-production budget. So we got a friend, who looked suspiciously ahbeng, to act as Raymond.
I shot while Athirah directed and Christianne was playing Rachel. It was … interesting process but there was a lot of experimentation involved with the shoot as we had the challenge of not being allowed to move or drive the car with some camerawork.
To see the final outcome from the shoot, see Athirah’s or Christianne’s OSS!
Post Production
I first created the ‘bases’ that I needed to animate; the message screen, lock screen, inbox and a all-purpose ‘base’ with photoshop. Then I imported it into aftereffects and animated the graphics. I used AE to create the typing animation as well as the speech bubbles.
I then exported from AE to Premier to work on sound design as well as fine tuning the animation. Including the voice overs, the sound effects and the background hums.
If you would like to see the final edit. Click here.