Responsive - Evaluation

I really enjoyed this project and leant a lot from it. Because the module was organised and executed so poorly it taught me to use my initiative and to think for myself instead of relying on estudio for the information. Besides this, I developed my hand drawn animation skills and also my animation skills in general. Also I did something unconventional for one of my personal competitions, I competed in a programming competition. The reason I did this is because rigging/technical development is an area I am very interested in and would like to explore further.

For the first study task, we were instructed to apply to competitions relevant to our practice. The competitions I submitted entries to were 11 second club, loopdeloop and codechef. 11 second club was my favourite competition, which made me consider doing hand drawn animation more often. My favourite roles in animation are essentially polar opposites, hand drawn animation and CG rigging, my plan at the moment is to pursue both of them, I don’t think this is too ambitious because I am very passionate about both and love to learn about both of these practices.

In line with this subject, for 11 second club I did one hand drawn animation and for another submission I made the models and rigs and another member of the class animated it. Although this is still the individual task i believe this was an intuitive and professional way to approach this submission. This way we both gain experience in the area we want to specialize in and also doing the bits we are best at will make the final animation better because we each stuck to what we’re best at. If a storyboarder or set designer was making the rigs, the rigs would not be a good standard and damage the rest of the project.

For the codechef competition I didn’t really know much about programming before entering the competition but I realized that this was the best way to learn, through reflective practice. After the competition I used this new developing skill when rigging character, for example I used programming to help with my COP practical rig and it has really opened up more complex rigging solutions for me.

For the loopdeloop competition, I submitted twice and both were 2d photoshop animations. In my opinions these were my weakest entries, this is because I am not a big fan of this medium and have little interest in it. At least these entries made me realize to focus on the areas I am best at and have the most interest in. I believe these things go together, Passion and being successful at something, but the passion always comes first, the success is a side effect.

The second study task was to work collaboratively with students from other courses. Unfortunately, the execution and organisation of this was awful but I made the best of it and found a group with 2 other animation students and an illustration student. Me and the 2 other animators worked hard on this brief and learnt a lot from it. The illustration student hardly did anything compared to us but it didn’t matter because we’re not here to do the minimal amount of work. We’re here to learn as much as we can.

The brief we chose was the thirsty planet brief, we chose this one because it seemed like it was for a good cause. We decided to do a cut out animation because this would suit the branding and message of the product. One of the main things I learnt from this project was in a way unrelated to this project, it was that rigging is quite common in general animation practice, not just 3d animation. I realised this when making the card puppets and thinking about the requirements of how they need to move and thinking about how I am going to implement that into the puppet with the tools I have available to me. This is exactly the same process as making a rig for 3d animation.

I also learnt a lot about personality of the characters. In the first scene we animated together, I was animating the baby elephant, as I was animating I realised who the character was and based on this how I would make it move. I think this is very important because to make a character animation believable, the animator needs to have an understanding of who the character is and their personality.

In conclusion I really enjoyed this module and learnt a lot from it, to improve I would elaborate on the things I have learnt such as considering the character’s personality before animating them and extending my knowledge of rigging by learning as much as I can and putting it into practice. I found working collaboratively really enjoyable and much better than working alone because different people have different skillsets and the project required lots of different skillsets which we had when we combined our skillsets.  

Responsive - Project Report

Responsive - Collaborative Art Boards

These are my collaborative art boards:

Responsive - Individual Art Boards

These are the art boards for the individual responsive competitions. These sum up my journey throughout each of the competitions.

Responsive - 11 second club (second entry)

For this month's 11 second club Guy had an idea planned and asked me to make 3d models and rigs of his characters for him to animate. This is good practice for me so i agreed. Guy gave me specifications for the rigs and character drawing of both the characters. I did my best to keep to his idea of the characters, i think this is very important when creating characters in 3d.

Although these rigs were relatively simple, i still learnt quite a bit, mostly in the form of solidifying my knowledge of the fundamentals such as using groups as just empty transformation nodes for setting up accurate rotation orientations. I am also starting to use the node editor a lot more in my workflow which is a very healthy habit, as this gives more control of the way everything is working together and is great for figuring out problems and faults with the rig.

Responsive - Collaborative

After finishing the animatic and getting the final character designs from our illustrator, we began working on designing the card puppets.

One thing i realized when i started making some of the tests for the puppets is that this process is essentially rigging. The process is a more practical application of rigging used in 3d applications such as Maya. The same considerations need to be made, such as the range of motion needed for the arms and legs. For the different heads of the characters we used replacements, this technique can be likened to blendshapes in Maya.

When making a prototype for the arms, i realized just having joints for the shoulder and elbow wasn't enough to give the arms realistic movements. Therefore i added a scapula/collar bone joint that allowed the arm to access its full range of motion.

When designing the legs i had to consider what direction the character is facing in the shots, luckily the characters legs only needed to be facing right as the only scene of the characters face on was a mid shot which didn't include the legs. Working efficiently like this reduces production time. 

After i made the prototype for the adult characters, we made a size chart to make sure all the characters were to scale and that they would fit on the screen. It was a challenge trying to fit everyone on the screen in some scenes such as the first scene when all the characters are on the scene. However with a few altercations of the scale chart we worked it out.

After making the size chart we used it to make the characters. We used different types of card for the different characters, the characters were made out of normal matte black card whilst the elephant were made from white textured card.

After the characters were cut out we used a paint roller with acrylic paint to give some parts of the models interesting textures.

After the characters were fully complete, we split the scenes between us so we would each have an equal workload. One of the last scenes however, we decided to do all together which was interesting. We organized a day when we all came in and worked the whole day together on that scene. Rosie and Stacy both animated the children and i animated the baby elephant.

We were all pleased with the result. I think Rosie and Stacy animated the children well and i think i animated the elephant well too, the elephant has personality to it in its stumbly walk and bobbing head and it feels like a real character. Although to improve it i could have improved the secondary action.

Below is the full animation, i really enjoyed this project and learnt a lot. I have learnt not to be impatient when animating something very practical like cut out, patience is very important to achieve good animation because rushing things will not turn out well.

Thirsty Planet from Stacy Straub on Vimeo.

Below is the confirmation email for submitting to the YCN competition:

Applied Animation - week 8

This week, the medium and aesthetic of the animation was still up in the air and i set out to solve that problem whilst guy was still working on the storyboards and Meg was working on the backgrounds and set design.

Despite getting feedback from the crit, i still felt unsure that a watercolour aesthetic was right for our animation. I felt like i wanted to try something different instead of using a generic medium and style. I did a few frames of the grandmother in her chair, just to try out some compositing tests.

When looking at coloured card in the library for the backgrounds, we came up with the idea of animating with white pencil on darker coloured card. This idea was mainly for the care home scene but we are still adapting it for the first scene. I really liked this idea, i felt like it gave the animation a more sophisticated and different aesthetic, which is what we are aiming for as it suits the content and theme of our animation. I tried out lots of different effects for the test but some of them were too much and would look silly.

We were thinking of using a more realistic but still appealing style for the animation. This aesthetic of using the inverse hand drawn frames on coloured backgrounds is better suited to the mood of our animation.

Our main problem was how to link the aesthetic of the starting scene to that of the last scene. We thought it might be good to have the grandmother 'glitch out' slightly every time she says "nice day today isn't it". When i say glitch out i mean her colours could change and her shape could distort very slightly. This would continue until the end scene is just the grandmother in inverse colours.

Meg gave me a background for the first scene so i composited the grandmother and son roughly into the scene to see how it works. Personally i think the scene looks very boring and dull, however i suspect this is mainly due to the colours being very dull and boring. I'm still not sure about the watercolour backgrounds either, i feel like there will be a better way of producing the backgrounds. The watercolour backgrounds just seem to not fit with our aesthetic but again it may just be the colours. Nevertheless i want to try out more ways of making backgrounds.

In terms of the character design, me and Guy were working together to design the characters because then we can work towards a design together which we both feel is a good design and also is relevant to our animation. I learnt a few things about character design when working on our character. I learnt that to make good, appealing, recognizable characters, they need to have distinct physical features to accentuate their personality. The visual side of the character reflects the soul of the character.

I tried using basic shapes and making the character more rounded to suggest more of a friendly and kind character to make the audience feel more compassion towards her.  However having her head more rounded like this makes her feel more cartoony and leads away from the aethetic we were working towards. Having a more cartoony character doesn't mean the animation cant still be serious but in terms of fitting in with the rest of the animation i'm not sure whether this is the best option.

 

Applied Animation - Week 7

This week we had the pre-production crit. This crit was very helpful as we had things we were very unsure of such as the medium to use for the animation. Before the crit we were gravitating towards a more charcoal/ coloured pencil aesthetic, we began looking at Frederick Back and thought the medium he uses of coloured pencils would suit our animation.

During the crit however, most people said they preferred the watercolour style of one of the early pieces of concept art which i produced right after we came up with the idea for the story. Initially i didn't agree with them, i thought the watercolour style was too boring and generic but i thought if we do it hand drawn and have watercolour over the top it might still look interesting.

Guy character designs were too 'cute' and not organic enough. They didn't really suit our animation, i waited until the crit to see what everyone else thought. During the crit everyone else thought the same and said that my early concept art was the best character design produced, i was abit surprised as the concept art was just very rough and i made it just for us to get an idea of the narrative.

Nevertheless we took the advice given to us and i took over the character design role from Guy.

  
When designing the character for the grandmother with Alzhiemers it was quite hard because usually when designing a character they have a distinct type of personality but with this character she has lived her life and may have had a strong personality once but now she is just a shell of that person.

I used the mood board of relatives photos we created when we first started our research to help designing the characters. However just relying on the visual side of the character would produce a very superficial empty character. Therefore i used the script to keep sight of what the character thinks about and use that insight to inform the visual side of the character. In this way the character is built in a harmony between the soul and the superficial body of the character.

During the design process for the grandmother i went through a lot of iterations. Finding the perfect design for the character is important as this could either enhance or kill the animation.

I started off using basic shapes which suited the character, i found that a rectangle made her too stable. Giving her body a more oval shape made her feel a bit less stable. Also the pose was important, at first i was making her too straight and she looked too proud so i changed her neck to be at an angle to her body so that she is in a slump. This is shown in the last piece of concept art below, it displays the character a lot more accurately.  

I tried to give her some defining features sure as the mole on her cheek and the shape of her eyebrows. This helps to make the design less generic.

 

Although i like this design for the grandmother, i don't feel that it's perfect. I feel the design could better encapsulate the character described in the script. Although i'm finding it hard to design a character with Alzhiemers because their character is almost lost in very extreme cases and people argue that it is lost. For example one of the people we interviewed said she didn't think there was anything of who her grandmother used to be still there.

When designing the son character, i began sketching, loosely using reference from our mood board. I tried making the face different shapes and combining different features but nothing was working very well. We only need the back and part of the side of the mans face to use in the animation but nevertheless a character design should still be developed for the son as long as its not consuming too much time. 

Guy was in charge of the storyboards, he is taking a long time to do them but in the meantime i just got on with other things i had to do. when he had done the storyboards they were the opposite of what we discussed. We wanted the shots to be very impactful and sensitive. However the shots changed constantly and there was no need for any of these shot changes.

I discussed this with Guy and after convincing him, he changed it.

We changed the ending to the shot backing away from the grandmother and through the keyhole in the door to reveal the corridor for the care home. We have put this in the storyboards but i am still unsure if this is the best ending.

The advantages of having this ending are that it can clearly show the grandmother is now in a care home and it gives the opportunity for an interesting shot for all the other shots to build up to.

What i mean by this is that in the first scene of our animation, there is essentially just one shot. We are using this to build the tension and the anticipation. In the next/last scene of the care home, the shots get progressively closer to the grandmother, building up the tension much higher. With the ending shot being the shot discussed before, going through the keyhole, this will hopefully bring the shots to a climax to release the tension but also converging the tension to a point. This point is that the woman is now in a care home and is essentially lost to the world.

Applied Animation - Week 6

We are gradually nearing the end of pre-production and will be soon ready to start production. The only thing holding us back from production at the moment are the storyboards and the colour tests. The character designs are mostly done and the story is essentially set in stone, we are all happy with the story and are confident in it.

There has been one key change to the story that we made this week. We changed the ending so that its raining and it's not nice weather at all but the old woman with Alzheimers still keeps saying "nice weather today isn't it?". This illustrates our point properly that she has lost herself and the setting of the rain illustrates the feelings of isolation and loneliness. The last shot changes to an exterior view of the old woman looking through the window and a slow pan out shows another resident being helped along with an umbrella outside or perhaps in another room. This is essential to making sure the audience know the final setting is a care home.

On Tuesday we had a full scheduled day of working on our project. We started by planning out our jobs, Guys jobs are character design and storyboarding. Megs jobs are set design and layout, and my jobs are writing the script and animation director, when it comes to production.

In terms of the script, i thought I'd start by just getting it all down on paper and writing a short story describing the narrative. I tried to be very descriptive because although some of the description will inevitably be lost in the visual representation, such as what the characters are thinking, these descriptions help the character designers and set designers get a better understanding of the characters and setting. Having the characters thoughts described before visually designing the characters is building the character from the inside out. Giving it a soul and then working out what that soul or essence of the character looks like visually.

The article below describes this idea, especially the section entitled 'connect the internal and external:'. It focuses on the animated film 'A Monster in Paris' in which the character design for the monster's face is a heart, this describes the character perfectly. Although everyone views him as a monster, he is really a sweet and loving character.

http://chrisoatley.com/character-design-goes-deep/

Describing the characters is only a part of the script's purpose. A good script describes the settings and more importantly, describes the mood of the scenes. This was something i made sure my script did well, just describing isn't enough. Behind the description has to be a rooted feeling which makes it's way through to the audience through the description. This plays a big part in making the audience connect emotively with the story.

Below is the short narrative i produced:

If i gave this to Guy and Meg how it is, it would be hard for Guy to produce the storyboards from and for Meg to produce the item designs. To make it easier for the rest of the team to work from i formatted it into a screenplay.

Screenplays are almost always used in the animation and film pipeline. A screenplay condenses and formats the story into a document which is easier for the rest of the production team to work from. 

Below is an example of a screenplay for Pixar's 'UP':

When writing a screenplay it is important to consider the formatting rules. These rules include capitalizing characters and items the pre-production team have to design, speech is central and although descriptions can be detailed, they are condensed to give only what's needed.

Below is my screenplay, which evolved from the previous short story i wrote:

Also this week i started worked more on the visual development. Originally we wanted to use charcoal and have a more sketchy style, however i don't think this style suits the final idea as well as other mediums might.

I did a test of the scene in charcoal pencil just to see how it would look and to be honest i quite like it but i would like more colour to be implemented. I like the way the lighting dynamics can be clearly established through charcoal and the sketchy look of the lines. I feel like charcoal could be used well to tell our story however i don't want to dismiss colour as colour can often be a great storytelling device.