Alfie Dennehy Vazquez – Page 3

Lip Sync Overtime

The review session on Friday left me feeling a little bit better about my animation. Despite there being many clips shown that I found incredible, mine was still well generally recieved. I did want to implement the feedback I got more thoroughly, but between work and the interim Informed Practice film we have to make I simply don’t have enough time over the holiday. I decided to focus on compositing and familiarizing myself with the node view in Harmony as I am very interested in exploring compositing further.

I began with shading and highlighting my characters as well as applying textures, and I used several different methods of doing so for each character. I began with the rabbit character.

As the base color was already a bright almost-white, I opted for only shading. I created a new brush using the paper texture function to make it a screentone, created a new drawing layer where I manually painted the shadows on each drawing, and used that layer as a matte for the tone node connected to my character layer. I also made sure to turn off anti-aliasing on the layers for this character. This gave it the pixelated, hard edge, flipnote studio look I wanted for the rabbit.

Next I worked on the fox and man for a character that does basically nothing in my animation, boy did I spend way to much time trying to figure out some things for him.

I created offset shadows and highlights using peg transformations, following a guide from ToonBoom. That way I didn’t have to manually draw the shading in for every drawing. Then I wanted to create a blur on the line art, which in theory, should not have been hard (I mean, look at the nodes, there’s TWO). However it took me several different configurations, about an hour of googling and half an essay of an email drafted to Jess and Mariana, before I realized that the connection output port linking to the lineart blur was simply not connected to the overall composite outside the group. I was proud to have figured it out on my own but WOW did I waste time. Like my highschool computer science class all over again.

For the big bird-like character I just added a texture matte and some textured shadows.

It was getting late and I was determined to finish the whole animation that night.

Finally I went back to the sloth and edited all the lines to either be fully gone, or just made them smaller, to give more of a lineless effect.

I also went back through each character duplicating certain body parts and rearranging the layer order as I had animated everything on one layer, but certain bits had to be behind the table while others had to be in front. In future I should animate all of these in isolation. I think it would also help to have all the lip-sync on a different layer just parented to the head, so I have an easier time making bigger changes.

Then I exported the video making sure the layering of the tables and other props was correct, in order to put some final touches on in After Effects.

After this the spring break began and as I was out of town (shoutout Antwerp and Dublin), I did not continue to work until we finished the second elective. I used this very interesting guide by Manu Mercurial to add some little effects to tie the whole thing together. His tutorial was very comprehensive, relying on exporting every little layer separately. I unfortunately didn’t organize my ToonBoom file well enough to be able to do this efficiently so I didn’t go into as much detail with the edits.

In summary I added 1 ligh mask in the first scene for integration, a wiggle effect during the last scene, atmosphertic particles, and a bloom effect. I didn’t want to go too crazy with the edits as I wanted it to feel natural but not hyper-realistic. I really enjoyed compositing and I would definitely like to explore it in more detail in future.

Finally, I exported and uploaded to YouTube, as seen below.

Lip Sync Week 5

During week 5 I did not have time to write a comprehensive reflection, however below are some things I noted as I was working. In essence I spent the whole week purely animating.

Ive realized I don’t really like only doing roughs for keyframes and then drawing everything else clean. I need to at least rough in breakdowns as well in order to animate in the future.

Because of the lineless style I think having the Nathan character be rigged would have made the animation easier because I spent so much time trying to make every vector line perfect, but I didn’t have time to teach myself.

The more I work on this the more I hate it, I feel like I could have done so much more if we’d had specific workshops on character acting instead of character design. I would have loved more practice animating certain movements and using timing charts outside of the project. Everything just feels so rushed and I am quite unhappy with how this turned out.

On Friday we presented what we had so far. I got very limited feedback and theres much more I would criticize myself for as seen in this reflection post. Feedback from peers:
– emphasize where bunny character is looking during “he’s dead”
– animate fox’s laugh more
– make the rabbit more dramatic
– add a few frames of follow through on the feathers

what was shown on friday

I also realized after compositing that none of my characters blink, luckily no one else seemed to have noticed and because the characters are so cartoony it doesnt feel too weird

I was also planning to have the background glitch out but I don’t think i have the time to do glitch art and I’m not sure it would make any sense, it is something i might try after both electives finish.

Lip Sync Week 3&4

The first lesson of the week was an introduction to Harmony in order to beging keyframing our animations. I forgot my USB at home so I had to use what I had uploaded on my blog as my references, but since we were just setting up our files for the first time, I was able to upload it to OneDrive and move it to my flashdrive at home. I spent most of this lesson helping out other classmates as my Out of Your Head group had already used ToonBoom for the last project. I did feel quite fortunate for this, because this entire project feels a little too fast paced, and I felt as though those without prior experience in Harmony struggled to take in all the new information so quickly. I definitely would have. I also updated my character sheets with more angles.

The amount of time I spent going through the Rio artbook to figure out wings…

At home I worked on my backgrounds some more and finished my xsheets (uploaded to last post). In Wednesday’s class we went over character acting and reviewed the principles of animation to keep in mind while keyframing. We then just continued to work on our files.

On Friday, we reviewed our keys with peers and continued working on inbetweens. After watching some of my classmates work, I was honestly in awe, so much of the work was incredible with very good posing and acting. I realized I really needed to push my animation a LOT more. Unfortunately, this project (and my work schedule) did not allow me enough time to redo all my keys which would have been ideal, so I instead, tried to add a little more subtle background movements to the background characters in my animation.

Week 4 was spent mostly sitting down and just working on our animations. We got two more presentations on inbetweening and rendering and compositing. In class I was working on inbetweening and coloring while at home I would be working on my backgrounds. I really want to improve my layout design and background painting, as I am very interested in those positions as a career. Compositing is also something I am very interested in so I want to find some resources to practice comp in After Effects outside of this project.

Lip Sync Week 2

On Monday we looked into backgrounds and layout. We explored industry jobs in this field which are very interesting to me. I feel like one of the only people who leans much further towards environment design over character design and I am definitely interested in background painting and layout design. Big points of reference for me are Devin Elle Kurtz, Nicolas Saltos and Patrick O’Keefe.

We specifically reviewed color theory and tried our hands at creating our own value paintings.

I was going for a light midday scene with sunlight coming in from above. I didn’t want huge contrast between the shadows and highlights so the value range was very restricted and light.

We were then told to create our own backgrounds at home for our animation. I managed to do the line art for all 3 before sharing on Wednesday.

Wednesday’s lesson was a peer review. We got into small groups and shared our work. I feel like people are a little hesitant to give constructive feedback but I prepared questions for specific areas I wanted input on and I got some good advice. My group helped me decide which composition to use from my two storyboards as well as adjusting the order of the clips I wanted in my animation. I also got to enjoy seeing classmates’ work and in giving others advice I got to think about my own work and implementing my own advice. At home I continued to work on my turnarounds on Thursday.

On Friday we looked at sound breakdowns and x-sheets. This was my first time preparing an x-sheet, but MAN does it make animating seem much less intimidating. Knowing in advance what is going to happen during each frame and for how long makes the process of drawing keys much easier and streamlined. During the lesson I finished the sheet for one character and the others were done in the following weeks. I didn’t write out the frames where characters weren’t speaking because they either won’t be on screen, or won’t have big movements to pull focus off of the speaker. I struggled a little with the overlapping speech, but I made my best guess and will fix it if needed later.

Lip Sync Week 1

On Monday we were introduced to the project and shown some examples of lip synced shorts from previous years. Jess got us to really think about the reasons we were attracted to certain aesthetics and visuals over others, in order to be able to develop our own styles and voices. We were also given until the end of the lesson to pick our audio. Luckily, over the February break I had already been looking for audios and had narrowed it down to these four.

While this one was quite funny with well established characters, it contained a lot of overlapping talking, and I couldn’t imagine a scene as visually dynamic as the chosen audio.

This one had very clear audio and good timing, however, like the first audio, I couldn’t imagine a really engaging visual scene for it.

This audio was much too long and I couldn’t decide where to cut it. It also contained a lot of overlapping talking which I figured would take more time to animate as several characters would have to be drawn moving and talking for each frame.

Ultimately, I picked this audio because it was funny with succinct comedic timing and I could imagine a lot of variation for expressions and defined characters. I cut it down to right after the “he’s dead!” to be 13 seconds.

I watch Drawfee all the time, and they just say weird stuff and do silly bits, so I knew I would find something, but they tend to reference existing IP a lot, so I looked for bits that did not contain existing characters (they sure love referencing Sonic and Goofy) in order to be able to be creative and original with my characters and setting.

I must give an honorable mention to the “Educational Duck Armaggendon” bit which was way too long for me to choose, and has been animated by DeepBlueInk. I just needed to make sure the world (you reading this) watches it.

For the next lesson we were to have also created some moodboards and sketches based on our initial ideas for the chosen audio. On my art Instagram account I keep folders of art I find, separated by the different aspects I like like linework, color, texture, etc. so I always go to this resource when I’m starting a project.

I did the activity suggested by Jess, where I listened to the audio and quickly sketched whatever came to my mind. I ended up with the idea to juxtapose the hilarious, emotionally devastating quip with a serious setting such as a business meeting or support group. I also drew lots of little guys/creatures because putting animals in serious settings is also quite funny to me.

I also started a Pinterest board just saving random images referencing different styles I was leaning towards, as well as different ‘little guy’ characters.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/cosmicCactoos/lip-sync/

Finally, I looked at some more style references on Instagram saving them to folders, as well as specifically noting down the studio Science SARU. I really like how they comp their backgrounds and characters together, especially in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off and Devilman Crybaby.

Wednesday started with a recap of narrative structures. Below I made some notes from activities we did to think about the structure of our own animations.

We then looked at scriptwriting, with examples of screenplays and beat sheets. I transcribed my audio into a screenplay style script.

Throught production I’m referring to each character by the ‘actor’s’ names because I had not named or designed them yet.

Then we recapped storyboarding and created thumbnails for our animations. I couldn’t decide between some compositions, as well as the order of clips when I created the animatic so this is something I want to ask for feedback on during our sharing sessions next week.

I created two different animatics to show the two ideas I had for the order of shots.

On Friday we looked at character design and did some exersises in our sketchbooks. We looked at structure, shape language, and aesthetics. We did some sketching activities to loosen up where we created characters from silhouettes as well as turning objects into characters. I feel like I struggle with design in general because I find it difficult to come up with details to add character to both characters and environements, but these low pressure sketches really help with just drawing and getting over the first hurdle of a blank page.

Over the weekend we were to design our characters and create turnarounds and character sheets. As I had four characters and work on Sunday, I didn’t quite get to finish or refine my designs, but I finished at least 1 drawing for each character. I wanted each character to be in a different style, A) to stand out from the gray drab setting at the beginning, and emphasize each personality and role in the group dynamic and B) to make the lauging sequence even more chaotic and colorful.

Julia: Tall with sharp features for refined, authoritive energy and some softer round shapes for familiarity and to undercut some of the malice in her line in the audio. Greeny, blue hues for erudition but a some murky morals >:).

https://www.instagram.com/stray.somnium/saved/julia-chara/17940472418790543/

Nathan: Best boy main character. Soft round shapes and lineless to make him squishy and sympathetic. The markings on the face will move according with facial expressions. I want to change the textures.

https://www.instagram.com/stray.somnium/saved/nathan-chara/18049772851588731/

Karina: A menace hiding in a cute fluffy body. I went for solid pixel, pencil tool lines and big empty eyes in reference to y2k art styles and emos on DeviantArt. Shading on this character will be done in screentones.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/cosmicCactoos/rawrrr-xd/

Jacob: This character doesn’t really play a big role in the audio so I just went for a little mischievous fox. I referenced splatoon eyes because they also give mysterious but silly energy to the character. I also used soft/blurred edge line are to give its a distinct style from the other characters.

https://www.instagram.com/stray.somnium/saved/jacob-chara/17955150038729974/

Storyboarding Day 1-5 – 23/10/23-1/11/23

On day 1 we covered the basics of storyboarding and cinematography, looking over different shot types, angles and compositions. This was more of a recap for me as I took a lot of film classes in highschool, but you can never know too much about the basics.

We were given a list of prompts and asked to draw a single thumbnail style board depicting what happened, and the class would have to guess which promps we used. I did one for ‘running away from a monster’ and one for ‘knocking down an antique vase’. I had to pick one to get feedback on. For the vase image we discussed pushing the angle more and making the character smaller to push the perspective and make it more dramatic.

On the second day we looked at some short films and discussed narrative structure and story telling. We were also introduced to our first assignment, a 20-60 frame thumbnail style storyboard following the prompt of ‘two characters meet for coffee and have a disagreement. I used the rest of the lesson time to work on my boards as I wasn’t going to be in class on Friday.

During the second week we had another lecture style class on observational drawing, and we did some tonal studies of film clips. I had just started experimenting with using multicolored lead for sketching and I really liked how it let me feel a bit freer and less precious about my markmaking.

On the next Monday we went to the Tate and did some observational drawing.

I ended up with lots of floating heads from inside the museum and some very rough scenes from outside. Then our task was to pick one scene we drew and add two more panels to create a narrative.

On Wednesday we presented both our 20-60 thumbnails and our 3 panel stories to the class and had them critiqued. I was told my lines seem confident, but again I could push the poses and to expand the story, as it wasn’t totally clear.

I only had my first 11 panels from the first task done, so unfortunately I couldn’t get much feedback, other than to try use more dynamic angles. I didn’t actually get around to finishing this task until a few months later, but I was trying to go for a comedic narrative with lots of back and forth and focus on the faces. I was borrowing the character dynamics from Naruto and Sasuke, since we were told we didn’t have to create our own characters for this particular task, and they have one of my favorite friendship/rivalries.

Stopmotion Day 1-5 – 9/10/23-18/10/23

In the stopmotion block we looked at abstract transformation as well as basic stopmotion principles. In our first session we were told to create a short animation of one shape transforming into another. We cut the frames from card paper and then shot them using dragonframe.

In the next session we reviewed each clip giving pointers. Our biggest issue was a loose floorboard under our tripod which moved whenever we stepped near it. Because of this our video looks very shaky.

We then listened to 4 different soundbites and we drew abstract images for what each sound felt like to us.

We were then told to pick a sound in our table groups and plan an animation thinking about the principle of transformation. Our group picked sound #2 due to the strong imagery we all felt from it. There were lots of distinct sounds which I picked apart in my sketchbook.

We split our sound clip into four five-second clips and each picked one to storyboard and animate. Then I went home and planned what I wanted to do.

The next Monday session was spent cutting out our frames which took all 3 hours. I brought in lots of origami paper with different textures as I wanted to have a sort of circular explosion of color in my clip to represent the sound of water rippling.

On Wednesday we photographed our clip and added the sound in. The photographing took us longer than our scheduled session, but luckily the stopmotion room was open late, so we managed to film it all in the one day we had. It took us quite some time to put our set up together, as we were using tissue paper for the background and we needed to hold it up. My scene also included a perspex sheet forming a midground so the shadows of the shapes would appear on the background. We had to put a pole over the top in order to hold that sheet up too.

Out of Your Head Week 11 – 15/1/24-19/1/24

This was our final week of production before we had to submit the film on Friday for the screening taking place on Monday.

On Monday I talked to Ben about the things I was worried about and he gave me some advice on how to handle this last stretch before submission. I confronted the group member about the music and luckily they were honest and owned up to their mistake. With that cleared up I went ahead and let the other group members know so I could add the music to the file. On the Wednesday, I edited it in Audacity so we could use the bits we wanted. We really liked the opening build up of the piece but there was a bit in the middle with a key change(? I don’t know much about music theory) that suited our transition between the gloomy world and the doll’s memory so I foound a way to fade the two parts together quite seamlessly.

We held a little group meeting to clear up what tasks we needed done by when and we agreed to have our lines done by Wednesday so we could spend that day coloring, and then I would put the clips into the premier file as they were finished leading up to Friday. Ian was also going to finish our soundscape. During this lesson I finished putting together what I had so far for the final edit so I decided to work on my own version of the first scene of the doll (Ian’s part) because unfortunately, the rest of the group and I were not confident he would finish to the standard we wanted for the project. In regards to the rest of the group however, after this day, I felt much more confident in everyone and as we began to see everything come together we all started getting very excited to see the final product.

On Tuesday after work I decided to look for some sounds to put a soundscape together because, unfortunately, again, the group had lost our trust in Ian to pull his weight. I found some foley of porcelain and wooden creaks on pixabay (royalty free) and put them into the file.

On Wednesday, most members were done with their scenes so the coloring went ahead. Unfortunately, Ian forgot his drive containing his files so we sent him home to pick it up/work on it from home as we didn’t have time for him to just sit around doing nothing. We had some trouble with one of the files’ vector information getting really messed up and the technicians were at a meeting so the file would lag and crash a lot while coloring, however with much patience from Amelia she was able to finish. Aki finished her scene very early so she also created some stills for a little sequence of the doll looking for her arm we had fogotten to assign. This scene in particular I feel ended up pace a little strangely so I would definitely hold the stills for more comedic effect if we had more time to edit. But that’s on us for forgetting. Saf finished during the lesson and offered to tiedown and color my roughs of Ian’s scene just to make sure we had it done if Ian didn’t pull through.

On Thursday I spent the evening after work putting our renders together in premier including the first scene that Saf and I took over as Ian messaged me saying he was sick and unfortunately could not finish his parts. I felt bad for having so little trust in him, but it ended up being very lucky that we had the foresight to put our own versions together so we didn’t show up to the screening only half finished.

Friday morning we all took a look at the final product and made some final edits, then exported and uploaded the file to the folder for screening. After seeing the full thing played out we were all quite proud of our work and I feel it came out really great!

Out of Your Head Week 10 – 8/1/24-12/1/24

This week I began preparing our premier file for post as we we’re/are on a time crunch, I animated the title sequence, and I started some roughs for the first scene in case it doesn’t get done by Ian.

I created the title sequence in Harmony with a parallax effect. First I made sure all the layers that needed to move independently were separated when I drew the background, and I saved each one as it’s own png. Then I used the ‘top’ view in Harmony to move each layer further back in the pseudo 3D space, making sure the ‘maintain size’ option was selected. Finally, I animated a camera to zoom in with a little easing to keep it natural. Et voila, the illusion of depth was created!

The rest of the week was spent in Premier Pro as I uploaded the title animation, and did the title and credits typography. I worked with some adjustment layers to replicate the adjustments I had done in photoshop to unify the colors and create a more somber atmosphere. I also began masking out the window as that will be the transition to the first scene. I was also going to add the music but unfortunately realized the piece that a group member “composed” for our film is actually a clip of a Kevin MacLeod composition. I don’t really know what to do about this. While his music is free to use and I suppose we will have to, as there is no time to find a composer / learn music theory and compose our own piece, I will still have to confront the group member about this and I am not looking forward to that discussion.

Things I am worried about:
– I feel I have inadvertently taken on the role of project manager as many of my group mates don’t seem to take initiative until they are told to do something. This has impacted our productivity because I feel like I have to monitor them while also doing my own work.
– Finally, I am just really panicking about finishing on time as we only have until the 19th and barely have the roughs done. I can admit all of us myself included could have done more over the break, however it must be taken into consideration that not everyone in the group has a device they can use at home to draw in ToonBoom, and several of us were visiting family out of town. We also seem to be finding it very hard to keep the style consistent, and even though I keep telling people to have the character sheet open as they work, I don’t see it happening. I worry that my group members will see me as controlling if I speak up more on some of these things, but I don’t know how else we are going to finish. I don’t want to be the director… yet here I am…

Unfortunately I work 3 days a week outside of uni, and on my day off this week I have already committed to volunteering at a convention, so I will have to come in for full days at uni and also try to work after work, as I am quite proud of our idea and I would really like to see it well executed.

Out of Your Head Catchup Week 4-9

Writing these reflection posts got away from me during the last week before the winter holidays so I will summarize what else we got done, before coming back in January.

Aki and Saf finished the frames for the animatic and we put them into Premier Pro again to view them in sequence (as we opted not to use Storyboard Pro).

Amelia created a design for the little girl in the flashback. We used the same palette as the doll but with a different hair color and contrasting values, so the shots with them together can be more visually compelling and the doll isn’t lost in the color of the overalls. We thought up some backstory, in that the doll was inherited by the girl from her grandmother, so while she may not look like the doll, she still cared for her and dressed her up in her favorite colors.

We also decided who would be animating roughs for which parts as shown below. Everyone got about 5 seconds, but Ian and I assigned ourselves the same bit, as I had to continue working on the backgrounds and was going to animate the title sequence and edit the film. This turned into him taking over that 5 second section. I do plan to work with everyone on tiedowns to make sure the style is consistent as I feel that is our biggest weakness so far.

Finally, over the break I finished up the backgrounds for each shot. The final one didn’t require as much detail as we are going to blur it during the flashback scene.