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
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