Emotion Task...

The last task was the ‘emotion’ exercise. We had to make a character change it’s emotion distinctly. I decided that I wanted to have the same character as from my last exercise; the Bride chasing after the Bus. The storyboard shown in the previous post of the Bus story shows the Bride missing the bus and then starting to cry. I wanted to try and animate the character in her wedding dress again, but in a slightly more cleaned-up and different style.

I firstly looked at a few acting videos on Youtube. There were a variety of different videos which teach people how to ‘act’ convincingly for certain emotions. I specifically looked at the “crying” emotion guides to get some good facial reference. However, all the videos weren’t quite right, so instead I took some of my own video reference on my webcam, and used this instead.

This time, design-wise, I was inspired by the absolutely incredible work of animation company “Headless Productions” most recent film project called “I’m A Monster”.

Vimeo Link: http://vimeo.com/17840692

I absolutely love the design of the characters. Especially the ‘mother’. I adore the nose design, so I incorporated her nose into my emotion exercise to try a different and simplified style in a design sense.

The 'Mother' from "I'm A Monster"...



My 'Bride' Character...



The background is a continuation from the background portrayed in the final shot of the Bus animation exercise. She just misses the bus, so I wanted to show a medium close up of her as she stretches her arm out in a distraught way; her left arm holding on to the Bus stop advertising platform. The design of the background is black and white to echo my prior inspiration from early 20th century New Yorker Illustrations. Though I feel that, if I had had more time, I would have loved to colour this background in the style and design sense of “I’m A Monster”. I will experiment more in the future.

The Background:



*The animation will be featured on my final CD hand-in*

This exercise was done quickly, but I loved using Flash to the best of its advantages with the limited knowledge I have in it. It was fun to do, I wish to go back to this particular animation and perhaps refine and polish it up more, as well as extend the animation and improve upon certain aspects which are not quite complete i.e.; the crying at the end is only two frames, so appears to stutter. I would like to go back to it and fix that.

I also attended Stan’s final workshop on the Z-plane in After Effects. I really enjoyed this workshop, as I’ve been wondering how the effect of it was achieved for a while. I was glad to have been taught it. I took notes and found it relatively simple to understand for once!

So I went back to my first animation (Fifi and the Jam Jar) and decided to apply the z-plane on it. Unfortunately, the camera zoom has not worked, so it is difficult to see that it is on z-plane, but I have taken a screenshot to prove it actually is!



I also coloured the foreground briefly on Photoshop. I tried to keep the colours saturated to bled with the background, but I also added a downloaded wood effect for the kitchen counter as I loved the added texture it gave the scene.




Overall:

Although I did not fully initially engage with the set brief due to a giant misunderstanding, I have enjoyed experimenting with different clean-up and animating methods in the last few weeks. I have learnt a lot in a short amount of time, and it has only made me more curious and excited to explore all the things I have learnt further and in far more detail.


---jkl

Bus Task...

I started drawing ideas and designs down for the Bus sequence over the Christmas holidays. At that point I had all my dialogue planned out and was about to start on it when I came back, so I thought it’d be a good idea to at least plan what I intended to do for the next exercise to save myself from a bad idea. So I began to think of an interesting situation where someone could be running for the bus. The idea of a bride running to or from her own wedding leapt out almost instantaneously, so I began to draw some ideas down. I really liked the idea the woman wearing a big, flouncy dress running down the street with bystanders looking on in bewilderment. I originally wanted her to be running TO the wedding, but this seemed unlikely (in a social aspect; i.e.: driving in a car with your family to the wedding is usually the norm for most Church weddings) So then, she will be running AWAY from the wedding service. I liked the fact that it was the woman running away, and not the man, as it is stereotypically the man who is more afraid and “most likely” to run away.



After I returned to Newport, I began designing more, to try and vary what the character could look like. Here are some more designs with ideas of storyboards and other background characters.



Some ink character practise designs:



Some Photoshop designs:





Some Background character designs:



During the later designs I was being influenced by early 20th century cartoons and illustrations from the New Yorker. I bought a book at the Uni book sale a few months ago. It was a huge book containing hundreds of illustrations featured from 1920-1950. There are some beautiful illustrations, as well as funny and political ones. A lot can be applied to life and society now, but it is so interesting to see just how different our ideals and social acceptance is today that it was not even a century ago. I tried to look up a few artists (as their signatures are featured on their illustrations) and I was surprised to see not a lot of information on them! One of the only artists I could find a fair amount of information on was Peter Arno. His illustrations (in the book I own) really stand out. They were always very large illustrations, and he used very bold and confident strokes in a very simple form, but beautifully done. It is obvious that he was one of the favourites for the New Yorker. Here are a few examples of his work:







After I was happy with the designs, I drew a storyboard in Photoshop to show an idea of the story behind the lead up to the woman running away from her wedding.



I decided for this exercise that I would use Adobe Flash to animate in for this and the next exercise for time purposes. It would be a chance to experiment, which I was looking forward to in Flash. I learnt the basics of how to animate in it from my friend, Bry. I looked at some video reference on the internet, I did not have time to video reference fro myself, as our other deadline for the sound scape project was also taking up a lot of time at this point too. So, I found reference in Disney’s 2007 film “Enchanted”. The character ‘Giselle’ (in live-action) wears a huge white dress near the beginning of the film when she finds herself in the middle of New York city. I watched these scenes over a few times, but found that, when she was running, it wasn’t a very fast one, and not appropriate for the intentions of my character, who would be trying to run as fast as possible. So I had a hard time trying to find exactly what I wanted. In the end, I found a music video to Shakespeare’s Sister’s “Heroine”, in which it features a ‘Bride’ running in slow-motion and real-time throughout the film. So I referenced the placement of the hands holding the front part of the dress for my own animation. But due to the very quick jump cuts in the video, it was hard to focus on the woman running. So in the end, the whole of the bus sequence, which you will see, was not referenced at all. I was trying to experiment and push myself in this new medium (Flash) and I really enjoyed it. Not only was it brilliant for its ease of erasing and instant playback, but it was really fast! I was able to spend a good few hours on each part of the sequence, not a few days on each! So I definitely want to explore the boundaries I can push in Flash.

*Again…All animations will be present on the CD handed in at the end of this project if not embedded in this post…*

Also, after the week 11 critique with Matt, I started to clean-up the last scene of my Bus exercise. I wanted to keep the black and white feel of the New Yorker illustration inspirations. However, I started to draw everything in Photoshop, and when I came to bring everything into Flash, nothing seemed to work or go together. This is due to my lack of knowledge in the programme, but I knew I couldn’t waste any more time trying to sort something out that I couldn’t understand. Therefore, I went back to cleaning up and colouring my past two exercises instead.

Here is an example of what the clean-up would hopefully look like:




---jkl

Dialogue Task...

I will now discuss the rest of the dialogue task in one entry. Over the Christmas holidays I unfortunately lost track of time, and therefore find it easiest to discuss the work for each exercise in one post each, rather than trying to relay all in “week” format.

In the previous post, I presented my designs, storyboards and story behind the dialogue. The first week back from the Christmas holidays, I began to animate the scene. I started with the “girl” (Molly) as she had the most amount of work to focus on.



I really wanted to make her seem nervous whilst standing next to her Boss. So to start I animated her breathing whilst closing her eyes to show her calming herself down. She raises her hand to her head as she begins to speak and frowns as she is doing so. This is to show her forcing the words out, to show her overcoming her fear of speaking to him. As she begins to speak she becomes a bit more confident, though little imperfections show, ie: she is still moving a lot and squinting her eyes. One part of the animation I was happy with was when she began to hold her hand behind her head, then, realising this; she immediately retracts her hand and uses this same movement to relay what she is saying at the time. (ie: when she says; “…when you’re finished…”)

The boss was somewhat easier to animate, as he was standing relatively still for the most part. I had trouble with the character growing and shrinking; a common problem I face. I will remember now to put the first drawing underneath my current frames to keep the consistency throughout.

Another problem I faced, though mainly this was at the timing stage, was the Boss’ speech. He speaks incredibly fast, so in the end, I had to put all of his speech on ‘ones’, whilst the rest of the animation (including the girl) was on ‘twos’. Other than those problems, the Boss was a relatively simple character to animate due to his not moving around as much. He had to have a very pompous and disinterested air to him, which I portrayed through his sleepy-eye expression, as well as having his arm casually in his trouser pocket.



I produced the dope sheets before the official ones were sent to us via email, so they look very rough and messy, but they worked well for me. I opened the sound clip in Adobe Soundbooth and zoomed in so I could see the sound at certain points in the timeline accurately.



Although I did film video reference for all parts of my dialogue scene, I actually didn’t use much reference at all for the first shot when both characters are together, as I wasn‘t convinced by the performance given, and I wanted to exaggerate it further. However, for the last part of the dialogue task, where there is a close-up of the girl, I relied on the video reference a lot.



I watched a video on Youtube recently; it was a short documentary filmed in the 1980s at the Walt Disney Studios, presented by Hayley Mills, called “The Illusion of Life” after the title of Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnstone’s well-known book on animation. In the documentary, the famous “Nine Old Men” are interviewed among others, and one particular interview stood out for me. It was with Marc Davies, a key member of the ‘Nine Old Men’; famous for characters such as TinkerBell and Cruella De Ville. I do not recall the exact words he used, but it was something along the lines of this. “You can use video reference wherever possible, but you can’t copy from it, it defies the point of animation.”

I feel that in this last part of the animation for the dialogue task, I really did rely on the vide reference too much. The face of the girl became very similar to that of the video reference, and although at the time I thought it worked well, once it ran through, I could see a lot of faults with it. The main one being, that the lip syncing was completely off. The mouth was open for a lot of the speech, so when the sound clip was put with the animation, the lip syncing was very undefined.

I had a session with my tutor, Matt after I had just finished the dialogue task. He went through both my ‘Jam Jar’ exercise and ‘Dialogue’ one too. It was good to hear both faults and achievements and I realised a lot of errors in my work which could have been easily fixed. Also, it was at this point to which I finally realised what the true intention of the brief was. I had thought the brief was like last year’s animated performance brief, however, it was to do with clean-up and finding your own style. It was also at this point, where I found myself at yet another art block moment of my life! So my apologies go to Matt, as I was not in the greatest frame of mind that week. I had my reservations over the idea of clean-up, as I have been a great fan of simply line, ink and pencil work for years, and though I still admire this above all, I realised I couldn’t start defining myself in such a way just yet. I need to experiment more and find a style of drawing, colouring and animating, which excites me.

Getting back to the dialogue task, I was able to line test the whole animation, though the lip-sync was out of time for some parts. I hope to go back and fix that at some point, though I think I would rather start afresh and possibly choose another piece of dialogue to animate in the future over the summer holidays.

After the session with Matt, I had two weeks to attempt some clean-up on the dialogue task. I chose to then scan the frames of the last part (close-up) of the girl to experiment with. After I had scanned the frames, I went back to my notes on alpha channelling each frame in Photoshop. I then created a background. At this point, I was being inspired by a lot of early 20th century New Yorker cartoons and illustrations. (I will discuss the inspiration more in later exercises) So the background has a lot of dark black lines. I used yellows, oranges and browns for the background colour, as I still wanted to have a Wes Anderson quality (using yellow, especially). I really enjoyed doing this background, and I loved having a very limited palette with strong strokes of colour to show different lighting elements, and to show a warm ambience in the room.



I then decided to colour each frame in Photoshop with a limited colour palette too. Molly has simply 4 colours to her, which works with the simplistic colours used in the background. I made her dress a mauve, blue as an ‘opposite’ colour to the yellows and oranges present in the background.



**All animations, test - clean up will be on my CD I hand in if not on here as an imbedded video**

Overall, this dialogue task took the longest amount of time out of all the exercises, and in good reason. However I am disappointed in myself that the lip syncing failed and the movement of the characters wasn’t put across very well. I learnt a lot from it though, about how to approach another task such as this in the future, and how to plan, reference and animate things appropriately and to the best of my ability. I can see where errors occurred and I will do my best to make sure they don’t happen again next time.


Stan’s Workshops and Matt’s Lectures:

I attended Matt’s Clean-up lecture in week 5 as well as Stan’s “Toonboom and flash paint and trace” workshop in week 6. In the prior, I wrote down notes from all the slides presented to us. They were undeniable valuable for future work in clean-up. Unfortunately due to poor time management, I have not been able to clean-up anything in the way I would have liked. I did briefly however, ink a few frames from my first exercise (Fifi and the Jam Jar) with a cartridge pen and black ink. I will explain more about the use of these materials in the later exercises. Here are a few frames of the inked frames against the original pencil ones:



As I do not own ToonBoom, I wasn’t able to take full advantage of the software in university, as I was very unfamiliar with the way the software worked. I realise now I should have asked for help, but at the time, I was becoming very frustrated with the software and my lack of knowledge about them which made me quite unable to work with them. I realise now that I was being impatient and frustrated. So I will go back and try out the software at some point in the near future. The same can be said for Stan’s other workshop in After Effects with the Puppet tool. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to save my work from the actual workshop, and although I understood the instructions and took plenty of notes on the whole process, I havent been able to properly experiment with this technique either. This is due to the realisation towards the end of this term when I found out that clean-up was of paramount importance, which put me in a position of having a lot more to do than originally thought. So although I haven’t any practise work with the Puppet tool to show, I can say that I will definitely be trying the puppet tool out in the future, and make sure I get some help with the software to stop myself from becoming impatient.

In week 7, I attended Matt’s lecture on “Storyboards and Animatics”. It was incredibly interesting. I’ve always loved looking at storyboards and animatics, so this lecture was great to really pick out points which we should think about when composing our own ideas into film context. It’s an area I would love to really understand and try out a bit more. I have seen countless animatics on Youtube as well as other websites, and the animatic I created last year with a friend on the Narrative Strategies module was really great to work on and was a great achievement. I think it’s the ideas of composition and layout that are interesting to me. The lecture mentioned Alfred Hitchcock’s work, and it made me really start to take in the film context and techniques employed to make scenes work, to make them clear. I wrote plenty of notes, and the printed hand-outs given at that session are undeniably some of the greatest and most fascinating hand-outs I’ve ever received! The wealth of knowledge is incredible, and seems so obvious, yet it takes years for people to truly understand it and ‘master’ it. The lecture was nothing short of inspiring, I look forward to more lectures as such.


---jkl

Dialogue Designs+Inspiration

The sound clip I decided to use for this task was from the BBC's recent TV series; "Sherlock", starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman.

I have chosen an excerpt from the first episode between Sherlock (Cumberbatch) and Molly (Louise Brealey) a colleague who "fancies" Sherlock. Here is the dialogue in 'script'-form.

Molly: Listen I was wondering, maybe later, when you're finished...
Sherlock: Are you wearing lipstick? You weren't wearing lipstick before...
Molly: I, er, I refreshed it a bit.

I liked the dynamics of the conversation between the two characters. 'Molly' musters all her strength and courage to ask 'Sherlock' out, but is interrupted by him, as he is utterly naive to her intentions of the conversation.

I went through a lot of different ideas for "setting/scenario" for the design of it. It was going to start out being a woman who is helping her male colleague at a library set in the 1950s. This is shown in my first initial sketches of the woman character:



I then went through more options, as I didn't quite engage with the library scene, and wanted to make it slightly more interesting. I finally ended with the idea of a work after-party.
Here I shall paint the scenario:
The woman (Molly) is the P.A. (personal assistant) to her male colleague (Sherlock), IE: her Boss. They have just finished premiering their work (perhaps it was a film, and the after-party has many important people in the industry there to have drinks, eat and network with others) So it is set in a wonderfully lavish old building, high ceilings, beautifully decorated with paintings and tall mirrors. The room is decorated with fairy lights around staircases; candles glowing warmly; the hum of deep and amiable conversation filling the room.
(Molly) sees her Boss and converses with herself whether to go and speak to him, after seeing him at the top of the stairs alone. She summons up all her courage, grabs two glasses of wine from the nearest waiter, breathes in slowly, gathering her strength, and makes her way up the stairs, eyes straight ahead; determined.
She nudges his arm, and hands the glass of wine to him. The Boss accepts it and stands with her at the top of the balcony. There is a somewhat awkward silence as (Molly) musters her strength and begins to speak (IE: the dialogue)...

So here now are the sketches that lead up to the final designs for the character of the P.A. and her Boss...(I apologise for the poor quality!)











Final Model Sheets:





A Rough Storyboard Layout: (Very unclear!)



And the (VERY) rough layout shots for my dialogue piece: (Not Finalised)



Mouth Shapes for the dialogue: (using a mirror for reference)



And finally; a rough sketch thumbnail sequence of drawings made (by viewing video reference which will be shown in next post) to get ideas for movement and poses throughout the conversation:



The Inspiration this week is from Richard Curtis' 2005 rom-com film; "Love Actually". In particular; Laura Linney's character, 'Sarah'.
Sarah's character is in love with her work colleague; 'Karl'. A few scenes from the film showcase Linney's ability to act nervous, shy and quietly passionate in a very short amount of time. I used these scenes as inspiration and reference for the character of the P.A. in my dialogue exercise.
Also, I must mention how much I take inspiration from Richard Curtis' films and style of direction. He has a remarkable ability to show relationships be it family, friends or partners; in a very broad spectrum of personalities. His work for the recent series of Doctor Who with (new) Doctor; Matt Smith, in episode 10 depicting the Doctor and his assistant travelling and meeting Vincent Van Gogh was an extremely beautiful and unique showcase of his style and talent as a director. It is acknowledged by many that his work focuses of the dynamics in relationships, and this is what I absolutely love to watch. When a programme, film or stage production (etc) really tries to present the dynamics of human interaction and their relationships (with a good story and good direction etc) I really gather such inspiration from it. Richard Curtis, I believe, is one of the best directors that depict these dynamics in full force, with humour, romance, friendship and grief all mixed together wonderfully.

---jkl---