Applied Animation - Week 3

This week mainly consisted of developing the research side of the project and coming up with some basic story structures. Guy created a mood board and we each contributed old pictures of relatives. This is a good idea as it builds up the visual library for when designing characters and especially in terms of the clothing and environments. When searching through my parents old pictures i made sure to capture to wide spectrum of what it was like around that time. For example i made sure to get pictures of various subject matter such as environments, objects, experiences, not just people. This is important to get a feel of the world we are creating.

This specific mood board is more for the character design and also based around a sequence that we are thinking will be our base story concept. This concept is the idea that the Alzheimer's patient remembers the past and perhaps holds on to that feeling of security and comfort in certain points of their lives as the confusion caused by their condition has turned them into a shell of what they once were.

Early in the week we had a meeting where we could just bring all of our research together and talk through everyone's ideas. This also consisted of watching relevant short animations and taking notes of the things we liked about them all. We were really struggling to get any interesting ideas for the story so we began just sketching out concept sketches to bring inspiration. We all liked the idea of linking patients with Alzheimer's to the idea of a child being lost and confused. We feel that the two experiences could be similar from what we have gathered about Alzheimer's disease.

At first i came up with an idea of a boy being lost at sea on a raft and when he finally reaches shore, the shore is just blackness and there is nothing anywhere and the child is confused about where he is.


When developing this idea further i took inspiration from one of the mood board pictures displaying a child with his parents at the sea. I thought it was a brilliant picture, i like how the child is almost turned around to look at the camera whilst the parents don't acknowledge the picture being taken, making the scene have more of a connection between the child and the viewer.

I used the idea of this image to produce a short storyboard sequence in which the parents are swinging the child by the arms and then the child looks back, almost at the camera. The parents then almost disappear or smudge away (since we're using charcoal as our medium), the child kneels down and starts to draw in the sand, oblivious to anything else. He then realizes he is all alone and seems confused, he starts to look around with a panicky look. He then curls up into a ball on the sand and a wave washes over him, transitioning to a carer putting a blanket over an Alzheimer's patient.

In addition to the photograph this idea developed from a previous sketch sequence i visualized previously based on the idea that the patient is exhausted from confusion and therefore curls up into a symbolically safe position to present the idea that the patient wants safety.

We also thought it could be interesting to have the world build around the patient when transitioning scenes, for example the backgrounds, objects and people build from the patient. Guy showed us a short animation called 'Out of Sight' which employs this idea in the context of a blind girl trying to find her way through unknown areas.

 

The basis of the idea is having a narrative which combines the child and Alzheimer's patient. Although We like this idea, we still want to put a lot of emphasis on how the disease effects family members and people around the patients. Although combining all three story aspects could feel a bit busy for a short animation i think it could work very well if done right.

Later on in the week we all went to guys house to watch some movies together which were relevant to the project. The first film we watched was called 'Wrinkles', it was a 2d animation film with a narrative based around Alzheimer's. Many of the ideas we had already thought of were incorporated into the film but in different ways. For example i mentioned previously about showing the similarity between the disease and being lost as a child. In one sequence of the film, when he first enters the home, there is a flashback to the first day of school and him feeling scared and confused much like he feels when he first enters the home.

Parts of the film connected with our previous factual research about Alzheimer's disease, such as when he tries to use his spoon as a knife because he has forgotten the individual uses of the cutlery and cannot distinguish between them.

Wrinkles also uses flashbacks or hallucinations a fair amount, such as the woman who always thinks she is on a train staring out the window smoking a cigarette, when really she's just sat in her room staring into the garden area of the home. This re-enforces our idea of having flashbacks or hallucinations of our characters past.

The next film we watched was 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' which is one of my favorite films and is relevant to our project in terms of cinematography and screenplay. The story is about the characters having part of their memory erased so the story is still loosely related to our topic but we picked this film to watch mainly because of the screenplay.

The atmosphere of traveling through memories is brilliantly established in this film. It manages to visualize memories and capture the mood of each memory simply and effectively. The combination of intimate, sensitive memories and light hearted, more humorous memories. I think humor is important to incorporate into our animation, not too much to overthrow the serious tone of the sensitive topic but to apply a lighter side to approaching the disease would make the viewer more involved with the narrative. A relevant quote from Walt Disney is "For every laugh there should be a tear."

The composition in this film and the transitional sequences are very inspiring and well done. The transitions and camera techniques used make it so the film flows seamlessly. Some other techniques are used to make the film more pleasing to watch and more visually stimulating, for example the use of negative space.

The shot shown below demonstrates my point:

Creating interesting negative space in a shot enhances the visual vibrancy and creates a more interesting composition. I am looking to apply this knowledge of negative space in our animation and make sure the shots are interesting, this knowledge will come into play when story boarding and when planning the shots.

Compositional techniques also help tell the story. Using a Quentin Tarantino film, Reservoir Dogs as an example. In the first shot of the opening scene, the camera does a circular pan around the table to establish the characters and keeps everything very tight through the use of close ups, this is possibly used to first introduce the characters and to then to show the serious tone of their conversation.

What i like about this opening shot is that it is put together so that just the conversation is being filmed, their surroundings are not shown at all within this first shot which makes the viewer feel intensely involved with the conversation.

When the topic of conversation changes, the intensity is lowered slightly and the shots evolve into mid shots.

Responsive - Collaborative

The storyboard is done for our thirsty water project and everyone is happy with it, this means we move on to making the animatic. Putting together the animatic and making the sounds for it was my job however Rosie made all the images for me to use in the animatic.

First of all i put the images into premier and animated the pan shots by keying the position of the image. I gave each shot relevant time on the screen, for this i had to bear in mind how long the actual animation would last on the screen when completed. Also i had to make sure each shot lasted comfortably on the screen, what i mean by this is that i need to make sure the audience has time to digest what is happening at all times through the animation.

To decide what sounds i needed for the animatic i watched the animatic a few times and noted down some sounds i though were essential to help tell the story. For example, drumming music throughout to help set the scene of an African landscape. These sounds are the most important because they actively help to tell the story.

Some examples of secondary sounds could be the elephant noises, various different water noises and the sound of buckets filling. The reason i would class these sounds as secondary sounds is that these don't actively help tell the story by themselves. But rather are additions to the visual story. These could be referred to as more superficial sounds.

Sound design is something i haven't done that much of besides making some simple sounds for previous animations. However whilst producing the sound for this animatic, i realized i really enjoy sound design and feel like it can be a very interesting field of animation.

Sound design is also a very important part of an animated film. In the past i have often looked past it as not being very important but i now realize just how important it is. I began to realize this previously this academic year at Manchester animation festival after a masterclass on sound design and sound compositing used in the film 'Phantom Boy'. This talk really made me pay better attention to the way sound was designed and composited in animated films.

A film i really value in terms of sound design especially is 'The Wind Rises' by studio Ghibli. Despite the fact that the sound design is excellent anyway, it was mostly done by human voices. 'A bold choice was made to use sound effects generated by the human voice for this film. Miyazaki expressed particular interest in human-generated sound effects from the early stages of this production. Various kinds of sounds, from revving airplane propellers, hissing steam locomotives and car engine noises to the ground rumbling in the Great Kanto Earthquake, were performed by human voices.'

Having the sound design done this way also adds to the crafted feel of the film which is what Studio Ghibli often strive towards. This crafted style of animation is relation to sound design also related to our thirsty water project as the theme of the product is very hand crafted and authentic. This type of sound design would also go very well with the visual style of cut out animation which we have chosen to use for our medium.

Something that's interesting about sound design and something that was mentioned in the phantom boy masterclass at Manchester animation festival was that the sound doesn't have to be made with the object that actually makes the sound. An example used in the masterclass was that a fire crackling noise could be made with tin foil. This is just an example obviously and the possibilities are endless, this makes sound design a very creative area of animation.

To record the sounds i used the sound room at uni. I wanted to keep the sounds authentic as described previously, therefore i used mostly my hands, tapping on objects and a range of basic items such as a half full bottle and my keys.

Some visual aspects of the animatic didn't have a very defined conventional sound, such as when the water drips down the screen to reveal the logo. To remedy this, instead of keeping it silent, i experimented with different sounds and found what worked well with the visual display of the animatic.

Another thing i realized when experimenting with the sounds is that overlaying two different sounds changes the sound and can make it more full bodied. I used this principle when creating the soundtrack of the drumming which runs throughout the animation. I made this by overlaying 3 different sound tracks over one another.

For the water dripping down the screen at the end i overlayed a slow shake of my water bottle with the sound of me flipping my sketchbook pages. The end result suits the visual side of the animatic well.

Below is the final animatic:

References:
"Fun Facts About The Production Of 'The Wind Rises' - Academy Award Nominee For Best Animated Feature | Cinemit". Cinemit.com. N.p., 2017. Web. 15 Feb. 2017.
  

Applied Animation - Week 2

A lot has changed this week, first of all we have decided to add an additional member to the group. We picked Meg because we feel like she will be very useful in the pre production phase and for a documentary animation the pre production process is very important in getting the documentary right. Obviously this goes for all animated films but especially in the case of an animated documentary.

Also we wanted a third member because having more members to a project enhances the possible outcome. This is because three people can produce more work than two people.

Secondly, we have changed the main basis of the animation to be about Alzheimer's disease. The reason for this is that, although the idea of animating to my grandads stories of the war could be an interesting idea. I think making a documentary about Alzheimer will be a more personal and impactful animated documentary as both me and Meg have experienced family members with the disease.

To start off the research we were unaware of what the difference between Alzheimer's and dementia was. With some quick research we found out that Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia, this is why people often use both terms interchangeably.

Alzheimer's is a horrible disease in which the brain essentially deteriorates over time. Technically speaking, the death of nerve cells and loss of brain tissue. This causes the victims of the disease to have a loss of short term memory and eventually become a shell of their former self. This can obviously be very hard for family and loved ones.

As i mentioned before in my previous blog post, we want this documentary to be very emotionally impactful and communicate to the viewer the emotional consequences of the disease rather than the scientific facts of the disease. Although researching into the disease to learn more about it is important to be able to understand the disease and to make the documentary accurate.

We are planning to get a lot of primary research from family members who have experienced Alzheimer's first hand through their family members. We are also going to get in contact with care homes to see if we can ask questions to families who have relatives suffering with the disease.

Although we are planning all this primary research, we still have to tread carefully and be sensitive to the people being affected directly or indirectly by the disease. As it is a horrible and life changing disease that has a huge impact on people especially family members and we don't wish to cause them any pain through asking them questions about the disease. We have to bear this in mind whilst deciding on the questions and it makes the manner in which we ask them the questions important also.

To organise our time efficiently Guy created a timetable for us to work to. We all went through and decided as a group which tasks would be best suited to each member of the group. However we decided that although the tasks may be assigned to one individual all of us will review the work done on this task and the work will be peer reviewed constantly by everyone in our group. This is a good way to work because it keeps everyone in check with the common end goal.

 Under the resources in the module content, i had a look through the animated documentary blog and found an interesting animation called ‘Broken – The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck (Kaputt)’. I particularly like the process of animation used which is a process of erasing each frame as it is being animated which leaves a sort of onion skin effect.

This adds an element of feeling lost or confused to the animation which would fit perfectly with our theme of Alzheimer's.

As a way of giving us more ideas and learning more about the way the disease affects people, we watched a Lois Theroux documentary on Dementia. This documentary was extremely relevant to our research because this focused extensively on how the disease effects family members and loved ones of people with the disease.

Whilst watching the documentary, i took a lot of notes and started visualising some ideas for the narrative of our documentary.

I got some important points out of the documentary. Firstly the reason people with dementia are put into care homes is that the family/loved ones are no longer able to keep the person safe. When the Dementia patient is admitted to the care home, it can seem very strange to them and sometimes in advanced cases the patient is unaware of where they are and how they got there. I deduced that as a coping method for them being in this strange place and with people they may not recognize, the dementia patient may assign people and places of the past to those in the current setting.

The carers in the home often go along with the patient's delusions. For example in the Lois Theroux documentary, the carers would often let a patient, who had been a dentist all his life, check their teeth to distract him from trying to exit the home. Going along with the patients delusions may seem like it's encouraging them to live in a delusional world however doing this avoids causing the patient unnecessary pain.

Two main points that i think is important to bear in mind whilst planning the narrative for our animation is that firstly, the main theme/issue tying in with the disease is confusion and/or isolation. When a person constantly forgets things this can lead to confusion and the person can feel isolated due to feelings of being disconnected from their family and loved ones because of the disease.

A second important point to note is that the disease is potentially more emotionally damaging to the people that care about the dementia patient than the patient themselves.    

Initial concept sketches:

For these initial concept sketches, i thought about how it might feel for the person with dementia and how it might feel from the perspective of a family member. I thought about how in the Lois Theroux documentary a woman with dementia couldn't recognize various items and had no idea what they were used for. I represented this by a person handing an item to the character and it transforming into lots of squiggly lines to show the inability of the brain to recognize the item.

We also though of an idea for a opening sequence with a close up shot of the dementia patient's eye. Although this shot is quite a cliche, it would give a more personal feel to the character. We played around with the idea of lots of muffled voices around the character combined with this eye shot. This would convey a sense of isolation and loneliness.  

         

Applied Animation - Week 1

Unfortunately i was ill for the briefing but Guy messaged me saying he would like to work with me so i agreed. The reason i agreed to work with Guy is because i value his character design and pre production skills in general. My main skills consist of more technical production based skills which are important but only when based on a good solid pre production foundation. This is why i wanted to work with Guy because our skills complement each other nicely. I would have loved to work with Brenda again like with character and narrative but i thought it would be best to try working with different people. Also Brenda was interested in a different side to documentary animation than i was.

We spent some time brainstorming ideas when i got back into uni. I suggested the idea of animating stories from grandparents as my granddad always tells stories about the war and about being segregated from the other kids due to him being Jewish. He has told me these stories over and over and i have a good visual representation of them already built up in my head.

Our plan is to go round and record him telling us these stories so that we can start to deduce a script and a visual representation to these stories.

We have in mind already the tone for our documentary. Which is very low key lighting to give the dark mood of the war and to really focus on how he felt rather than facts about the era. This is an important point to mention, we want our documentary to inform the audience through an emotional response rather than with facts. Therefore we want our documentary to be narrative driven rather than more of an info graphic.

In our opinion, we think having a strong short narrative would impact the viewer more than a factual documentation of the events would.

Whilst thinking about some of the stories my grandad has told me, i started making some rough early concept sketches of how the stories could be visualized.

 

Since most of my granddad's stories were from world war 2 we did some research into world war 2 and found some pictures from around that time for inspiration.

 

When researching war animations i found some interesting short animations. The first one is called 'Paths Of Hate', this is an animation about the pure hatred between soldiers on opposite sides of the war and it almost parodies the hatred in my opinion.

I found this an interesting idea to maybe explore in our documentary, about how hatred, or rather ignorance is the cause of many painful past experiences. As shown in 'Paths Of Hate', hatred is a driving force, but only towards negative outcomes.

I also really like the visual style of this animation, although for our documentary we have strongly sided towards a more traditional style of animation, which would suit the sensitive theme of our documentary.

With the visual style of our documentary animation in mind, an animation i immediately thought of as having a relevant visual style is an animation called 'Sea Child'. I first saw this animation at Manchester animation festival in 2015 and the visual style really appealed to me.

This method is using charcoal with what i suspect is watercolour. 'Sea Child' takes a similar tone to what were aiming for, it is about a girl who is coming of age, which is a sensitive issue. The visual style of using the charcoal and watercolour medium, suits this tone and complements it.

We also talked about implementing a more solid drawing style into our animation. As with old disney drawings or drawings from old masters such as raphael and pontormo. This drawing style mixed with the medium of animating in charcoal and watercolour would be an interesting combination and one that would suit the theme of our animation

.

  

This could almost lead us to Joanna Quinn and i guess it does as the style i described is roughly the style she employs. However what we're after is edging more towards a low key, rough charcoal visual representation, more like that of sea child than of Joanna Quinn.

Responsive - CodeChef

For responsive i could have just made 3 animations for various competitions but seeing as i have started to learn programming and have shown why it is important for me to learn it, and its uses in the industry in my PPP blog. I thought i would search for a competition where i could exercise my programming skills, whilst also relating to the responsive brief. I also needed tangible evidence that the skills i am learning through the programming competition are of use in the process of animation.

Regardless of whether i end up following down a road of being a technical developer or just using programming occasionally in my work, i feel that it is important to build up some programming skills. The animation industry, or rather, the world is advancing towards a technological future and learning how to speak to computers is a very useful, employable skill to have.

My goal is to be well rounded, with an abundance of traditional skill sets and CG skill sets. I do not think technology takes away from the art of animation, i think it enhances it. Or if not enhances, then provides the artist with a better way of producing artwork, therefore extending the artists creative potential.

To hate technology in my opinion is ignorance, fear that it nullifies the process. Stubbornness to not use CG methods is not healthy as change is inevitable and using CG methods is like using any tool traditionally. If the tool is used by a skilled draughtsman who understands that he needs to be in a state of peace and oneness with his instruments of creativity, the work will be beautiful. However if the tool is used by someone who doesn't know the underlying fundamentals of his craft and is disconnected, absent from his work, then his work will be absent and disconnected, as he is.      

Therefore embracing technology and learning as much of it as i can, will help me to achieve greater quality in my work.

The programming competition i found is called CodeChef, it is a non-profit, educational programing competition created by Directi, an Indian software company.

The 'long' competitions have a structure in which there are various problems in order of difficulty. Technically submitting to the competition, means completing at least one of the problems but i am going to try solve as many as i can before the competition deadline.

Because this was my first time programming anything substantial, i was throwing myself in the deep end abit, mainly because i had no idea if i would have the skills necessary to solve the problems set. Luckily the internet is an overflowing resource of help for programming queries. Because of the ability to look up the syntax i needed and to research any errors i faced, i found that participating in this competition was a really amazing way of learning programming skills. Learning through active practice is what the competition is and i found this a very effective way of extending my programming knowledge.

The way the competition works when you submit a problem is that inputs specified in the constraints of the problem are run through your code. Whether the outputs match the correct outputs determines whether the code is the correct answer or not.

When starting on the first problem of the January long competition, i thought it didn't sound too difficult. However coding the answer was quite a challenge.

When working on the project i used a mix of the python interpreter inside of Maya and the Python IDLE, this allowed me to easily test bits of code independently.

I had to test the code using a wide range of inputs, when i got an output which was wrong and i had no idea why, this is where the problems started.

I found a few effective ways of solving these problems. One method was to put in what i believe are called break points. These are lines of code that print certain variables at different times in the code, this is very useful to pinpoint where in the code the problem is occurring. If this is unclear, please refer to the image below.

Another useful method i found for solving the more general core of the problem was to visually represent the problem in my sketchbook, like so.

I found that relating the problem to a visual representation really helped me understand the problems i had to solve and helped me get my head round the problem.

When i had tested the code thoroughly and the outputs were all correct, i submitted the problem to the CodeChef website. The first few times i submitted the problem, i got incorrect answer. This was only because i put text such as 'Enter number of test cases...' before the inputs, whereas to test the code, the tester needs raw input/output data.

Once i realized this, i removed the text and got the correct answer. This problem took me about 1 day to complete.

The second problem was more challenging. However this problem was a more visual one. The problem was that if the visual representation of a resivour is unstable then print "no" to the screen, if the resivour is stable then print "yes". An example of a resivour is as follows:

BBAABB

BBWWBB

BBBBBB

Where "B" is a solid block, "W" is water and "A" is air. With a working solution the example above would print "yes" to the screen because it is stable, the example below would print a "no" to the screen because the water would flow into the air beneath and the block would submerge in the water.

BBBBWWBBB

BBAAAAWBB

BBBBBBBBBB   

I will give a very brief overview of the code i wrote for this solution and then talk about why the skills learnt from this problem can be applied to the animation industry.

First of all i had to work out how to store the lines of characters in lists which can then be compared together through for loops to look for situations which would make the resivour unstable. For example if a "A" was in a list and a "W" was in the above list at the same position in the list then this would make the resivour unstable because, as stated before, the water would flow into the air below.

This doesn't sound too difficult but what i found hard was applying responses for all the possible situations and combinations of the three characters.

To work out why i wasn't getting the outputs i wanted, i used my sketchbook to manually run the variables through the program, performing the functions by hand. This method makes it a lot easier to see what exactly is going wrong and why.

Below is my finished code, according to the tester it was the right answer but i only got 15 points. I tried improving the code, i tested it thoroughly but i could find any false outputs.

******

The skills i learnt whilst competing in the codechef competition can be further developed into skills for use in the animation industry.

Some practical examples would be, developing new tools for 2d and 3d software, developing tools to make the pipeline more efficient and speed up processes.

Rigging and programming go hand in hand to create great rigs which are easy for the animator to work with. programming is commonly used during the rigging process, especially in big studios such as Pixar. 

Above is an example of a shading artist applying an animated texture to the character Hank from the recent Pixar film 'Finding Dory'. Scripting would most likely have been implemented in making this feature of the model.

I wanted to try make my own python script to play around with this idea of having objects take on the colours of objects around them depending on certain factors.

i made a very very simple script in which the user selects two objects a background plane and a cube. If the cube is in front of the plane and the script is run, the cube adopts the planes colour (shader node). If the cube is returned to outside of the plane then its default shader is applied.

 

Scripting is also a very useful skill to have when faced with technical problems. For example in my responsive collaborative module, we were working on dragonframe on two's and it exported the frames not sequentially (e.g. 221,223,225). Due to this i could not import them as an image sequence in premier. To solve this problem i used the python IDE on maya to make a script that renamed the files sequentially.

I later found out this could have been done on bridge but the methods used in this renaming script could have been used more practically to apply an effect to all vertices on a model or perform a block of code for every edge. The possibilities are vast.

Creative coding languages such as Processing make it easier to blur the line between programming and art. Processing is a good language for creating artistic creations with code.

Using the skills i learned through the codechef competition i studied the basics of the processing language and started experimenting with the visual and creative applications of the language. I started off with a very simple composition just to get used to the syntax and the functions.

I then ventured further into the software and started to employ the setup() and draw() methods which are prominent methods in many high level languages such as C++ and Java. The processing language is basically a simplified version of languages such as C++ and Java. These high level languages are often used in animation/games production so it is a useful scope of knowledge to have.

Below is an example of a more complex program i created with Processing.

I then developed the code further to create a more helpful interface by having the circle displayed on the crosshairs and i also added a control for the size of the circle, this is controlled by the mouse scroll wheel.

 

                                     

Responsive - Collaborative

At first it was a challenge finding a group for responsive but i eventually found a group doing a brief i am interested in, which is the YCN Thirsty Planet brief. I am working with 2 other animators and an illustrator.

Thirsty Planet is a charity water brand that has donated over £1.9 million, helping to provide 1.35 million people with clean, safe water. This is a very important issue because people in third world countries often get ill from drinking dirty water that can contain many diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio. 'More than 2 million people die each year due to waterborne diseases, most of them are children below 5 years of age.'

The reason they drink dirty water is because there is not enough clean water accessible to them. Thirsty Planet are trying to resolve this issue with the help of pump aid, which is providing water pumps with clean water to communities who need it.

I would imagine most people are aware of how important water is anyway, we need it to survive and its one of the fundamental attributes for life. However to get a greater idea of just how important water is and how important the issue of providing clean water to those in need is, i watched a documentary called 'Flow:For The Love Of Water', this gave me a better insight into the issue. Even though the documentary is mostly about the water crisis in the US, a lot of it is still relevant.

4 pence is donated to pump aid for each litre of Thirsty Planet water sold. This is an interesting and clever idea because we take water for granted as clean water is commonly available to us easily and effectively. So with money being donated to the pump aid charity when buying water, this starts to build a healthy system of helping those without access to clean water by buying clean water.

I am happy with the idea of collaboration, i think it is a much better, more efficient way of producing work. When choosing a group, i wanted to make sure that the people i was working with were after roughly the same end product i would be happy with. I think this is the most important part of collaborative work. When everyone is working towards different end products, resistance and hostility is probable and the end product will be unsatisfactory due to everyone diverging instead of converging to a common end goal. 

in the first meeting with the group, we settled on a few things. At first we though of making an app and i was very interested in this idea, to put my programming skills to use. However after discovering the deadline is roughly 4 weeks away we decided to compromise and make a short animation with accompanying posters.

We decided, because of the branding and theme of the brief, the animation would be suited more to a cut out style of animation, we could do this in two ways. Either in photoshop, animating over a texture, or traditional cut out animation with coloured card and other materials under a sheet of glass/thick acetate.

We were brainstorming ideas for the short animation. We thought it would be better to have a short narrative rather than more of an info-matic with lots of facts. This is because the age range specified in the brief is 18-24 year olds and all of us being in that age range we decided that we would be more affected by a short narrative about Thirsty Water. Rather than a display of facts as this would bore most people and would not hold their attention.

One of the key ideas we came up with was that we could personify the water pump into an elephant. This idea came about because the pumps provided by pump aid to those in need are referred to as elephant pumps. We decided on a short narrative, describing the elephants coming to those who need clean water and supplying them with water. Keeping the narrative simple is another consideration that we kept in mind whilst mapping out the story. This is because we want to hold the viewers attention and holding the viewers attention for a short amount of time is a lot easier.

The day after the first meeting, i met with the other animators in the group to plan out the storyboard. We had designs from the illustration student of the human characters and the elephant character. The elephant character designs were perfect but the human designs were abit too complicated, considering we were thinking about cut out animation. We notified her of this and she is re-doing the designs to be abit simpler to animate. This demonstrates that good communication between everyone is important for efficient workflow.

We decided it would be best for us to do the storyboard but we will review it with the whole group before it is finalized. This is important to keep everyone working towards the end product.

When creating the storyboard we decided to add a baby elephant and some children into the narrative to give it more appeal. Sticking to the appointed colour scheme on the brief was an important consideration when creating the storyboard as we want all the colours to work together.

Overall i am happy with the project so far and the narrative we have produced.

 

      

Responsive - 11 second club

I started working on 11 second club for this month. I decided to do it hand drawn as this would be a nice challenge and a good way to improve my fundamental animating skills.

I feel like hand drawn animation is also very versatile and can be used in a variety of ways and methods such as pose to pose or straight ahead or a combination of both, which is the ideal method for most cases in my opinion.

Hand drawn animation has always been my favorite medium for animating due to the reasons stated above. I am very inspired by Glen Keane's beautiful drawings, and how he can so convincingly bring characters to life using what could be referred to now as almost primitive tools of a pencil and paper.

I think that hand drawn animation is still very relevant today, although using the technique for feature films may not be a very cost effective method. I think that using hand drawn animation for character tests and for planning out the motion in some scenes, and using that work to set the groundings for the project, gives the project a very alive, active disposition. Exclusive to hand drawn animation.

What i mean by this is that setting the groundwork of the project with traditional animation but using, for example, CG for the final film, will give the film a vibrancy which is often associated with hand drawn animation.

An example of this can be found with films such as 'Frozen' and 'Moana' which used traditional animation for character tests in the early stages to set the groundwork and get a feel for the project before animating in a more restricted medium.

Frozen:

 Moana:

overall i think that using traditional hand drawn animation provides a good medium for learning, as  in my opinion, there is no medium more raw, more open than hand drawn animation. In this way it is the simplest medium but also the most challenging.

To begin the project i downloaded the audio from the 11 second club website, listened to it alot of times and then started thinking of some ideas for characters.

I always struggle with designing characters but i tried to think about what the characters in the audio clip are saying and what sort of character would say those things. I then began to visualize those ideas in my sketchbook and develop them until i was happy with the way they looked and the visual character matched up to the character in the audio.

 I tried to keep my characters simple and used simple geometric shapes to construct them.

I decided to have the focus primarily on the character animation and so the scene is quite empty but the objective of this brief is character animation so the other parts of the animation are less important.

To make sure the frames synced up with the audio, i used premier to map the frames to the audio. I created a makeshift dope sheet in the back of my sketchbook for reference when animating. This is a technique commonly used in the industry, especially in animation for TV shows.

 My dopesheet is kept very simple but some dope sheets can get very complicated when there are a lot of elements to a scene that need to be organized. Below is an example of this:

  I kept the composition very simple for my scene and had a very basic composition structure of each character at an opposite end of the scene.

When animating, i tried a slightly different approach to my normal method of hand drawn animation. I added alot more keys and much less inbetweens, so it was more fluid and vibrant movements. This is edging more towards the straight ahead method but still implementing the key poses but just with less inbetweens. I decided to use this approach because in the past when animating pose to pose i would make too little key poses and loads of inbetweens between keys so i would just have very boring, inorganic movements.

To help with some of the movements and to help keep the movements and expressions looking organic, professional animators use video reference of themselves acting out the scenes before animating. I think its good to use reference to help build up a better visual library and for this reason using reference can help to improve the animators skills when not using reference.

The wrong way of using reference in my opinion is to copy it meticulously, at no point should the animator copy reference. For one the animator does not learn anything out of it or only learns a minimal amount and also the animation will feel lifeless. It is sometimes necessary to exaggerate further than what is acted out on the reference, the reference is just something to go off, more of a starting point. 

I used reference of myself and max pulling the expressions and acting out bits of the dialogue. I didnt use the reference constantly but it really helped me when i was struggling with expressions and hand movements.