Before Monday’s session Ian completed the turn around for the doll, as I had work over the weekend. We also agreed on a color palette for the doll going for warm tones to contrast the cooler tones of the setting we wanted her in.
My (unfinished) turnaround sheet with Aki’s color options
Ian’s turnaround.
I spent the week working on the background for the first frame which is a wide shot of the house. I used reference from our pinterest board for architecture and went for a fisheye perspective so it would look distorted and imposing.
Amelia put together an expression sheet and Saf and Aki started familiarizing themselves with Storyboard Pro in order to put together our animatic. However, due to time constraints associated with learning a whole new program they opted to draw the frames out in procreate and then export the video later.
We put all of our thumbnails together and picked the best version of each frame to make our first pass of a timed storyboard.
We presented this version to Jess and while she was confident in our idea, she asked us to do another pass to unify the style and make sure the story was much clearer. She also gave us a few changes to make to keep the story consise and within the time limit.
We also spent time coming up with a logline for our story so we could bring the whole film together thematically. We came up with:
Broken and forgotten, a small doll awakens after years of loneliness in an attic and desperately tries to put her fractured self back together, accompanied only by her memories of a better time.
On Wednesday Saf and Amelia began a second pass of the boards while Aki and I Worked on design. She tested out color palettes while I began a turnaround for our doll so that we had a consistent design to work from. Ian worked on music for the film.
We began Friday’s session putting together the new timed storyboard and Ian also sent us a clip of music he composed for the film. We had applied most of the changes but kept our initial idea for the ending as we believed it would be the most impactful for our story, as the doll repeatedly tries to put her arm back on in one slowly zooming shot.
We then presented our final version to Jane as well as Jess and Mariana who gave us the final greenlight for our project, as it was a lot clearer in the second pass. o(≧∇≦o)
On Wednesday, we refined the timeline a bit and finished our written outline.
After some advice from Jess we filmed ourselves blocking out the beats so we could check the timing of the movie. We ended up having to cut some of our ideas and cheat by having our opening and closing scenes play during the title and credits so they don’t count towards our 20 seconds.
We also assigned ourselves production roles based on what we were each interested in leading, however we agreed these would be flexible as we all want to participate, and help where needed.
Finally we also kept adding to our Pinterest where we have been gathering ideas.
On the Friday we came together to edit Akilah’s concepts for our main character. We wanted an idea of what she would look like before we did our thumbnails so we could get the style down a bit more.
initial design by Akilah
Amelia had created a more concise written outline, so we each created thumbnails for what we think the boards should look like and then we presented them to each other. I really liked Jess’ advice on ideating separately and then putting all of our ideas together afterwards in order to get more variation. On Monday we plan to pick the thumbnails we like best from each person and create our final set together in order to pitch our idea.
Today we began work on our Out Of Your Head project. The team I chose to work with consists of myself, Amelia Fell, Saf Choukah, Akila Fahad and a later addition of Yi-An Lu. Our team feels quite well balanced and although we don’t know Yi-An that well he seems to share our vision and I think he will be a huge asset to our sound and music design. I began today’s session by figuring out when our screening and submission dates were so we knew exactly how many weeks we’d have. Then, at home I drafted out a timesheet with vague estimates for when things will get done. This absolutely will be edited on Wednesday with input from the rest of the team.
Then we had a bit of a brainstorming session we began, as advised by Jess, by picking the words we were drawn to (highlighted below) and quickly writing out ideas. We repeated this a few times throughout the session.
By the end of the session we had our basic concept and an idea of the main character. Below are all the notes of our session and I will try to upload a higher quality scan before our submission.
Our basic idea follows a little porcelain doll who wakes up broken and missing a piece. Her goal is to find her missing piece and mend herself while recovering her memories in the process. We want the environment to be dreary and somber juxtaposed with a colorful tender flashback the doll experiences when she finds the broken piece. The doll recovers memories of a family who cared for her and mended her when she broke. But now as she tries to piece herself back together she can’t keep it together and falls back apart. We would like it to be ambiguous whether the doll actually had this previous family or it is simply a wish of hers to have had a family. We want to focus on 2D animation with some possible mixed media with photo cutout.
Next class I hope to revise our timeline and assign specific roles to each person. I am looking to do background drawing/painting as well as compositing/editing because I am quite confident with After Effects and Premier Pro. I would also like to work on drawing in-betweens.
We had a workshop with Stuart on Object and Subject in Art and Film. We went through several pieces of contemporary art as well as some animated films and discussed interpretations of the subjects/objects. In all honesty I find the analysis of a lot of highly regarded art very boring. For example Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is brought up in every art course I’ve ever taken, and I get it. It’s subversive, it is an icon of dadaism, it redefined what art truly is. So what.
I love that we as human express ourselves in so many different ways, and I can of course, acknowledge that everyone will receive art differently but so much of this so called great art makes me feel nothing. It is always the same pieces over and over again and I just don’t care about them. I appreciate the academic value of art that requires analysis and thought, however for myself, personally, there has to be some entertainment value, or else, I’m not going to bother thinking about it. It can be as confusing and open to interpretation as possible but if it it boring it’s not going to live in my head. I can live not pondering the meaning of a random urinal.
On a less cynical note, the film we were shown by Max Hattler, AANAATT, really piqued my interest. The way the shapes flowed almost mechanically with no evident purpose or structure, yet things kept changing and happening in response, evoked the image of bodily functions. The brain sending signals to release hormones, and those molecules just floating around the body until they happen to latch on to their purpose. It was very calming and rhythmic, and still visually complex and interesting.
We had a workshop with Jane focusing on framing visual narrative. We were tasked to capture 10 images of objects that do not belong to us in/outside our homes and display them in some sort of cohesive progression. I pondered this brief for a few days not really knowing what subject matter I wanted to explore, but as I was walking around my house, I realized I owned almost nothing. The door and locks that keep strangers out belong to my landlord. The radiator that gives us warmth in the winter belongs to my landlord. The stairs that allow me to reach my bed belong to my landlord. Etcetera etcetera.
My images ended up being a sort of political commentary on how the majority of people do not even own the very things that keep them alive, instead others hoard these basic necessities and leech of of our income instead of doing any actual labor.
We started with a workshop from David where we watched Journey by Daniel Szczechura. We had a very in depth discussion about our interpretations of the film and everyone got quite passionately involved. I personally viewed it as an exploration of mundanity, keeping in mind the context of the film being produced in soviet Poland. To me it was created as an expression of a common occurence, something that happens everyday that most can relate to. A way to make something out of nothing and just appreciate the mundane.
Later we had a lecture introducing the history of animation, exploring the very early stages of film and comic strips that lead to the very first animated cartoons.
On the Friday session we had time to independently work on our animations. I finished blocking out all the movement, however I had yet to edit any easing and animate the movement of the limbs.
On Monday we went over some stylization methods and began to implement them in our own work. We went over color palettes, textures and masks and using effects. For me this was more of a recap rather than anything new, but it was good to think about more than just movement. The visual style is necessary to tie everything together. I used the below texture for the liquid inside of my little character. I decided against parenting it and instead having it static because I really enjoy the styles similar to the Cartoon Network show ‘Chowder’.
I also used a boiling texture and color noise overlayed over the whole frame for a bit of an aged, retro visual effect. Finally, I transfered over a trick I use for lineart in Photoshop, where I duplicated the layers of the character, pre-comped them together and moved them below my shape. Then I set the entire pre-comp to the multiply blending mode and put about 10% gaussian blur on it. This gives it a bit of a ‘floaty’ almost beveled texture found in linework for cel animation, which I love the look of.
no blur layerwith blur layer
Then in my own time before Wednesday I added finishing touches. I followed the Ben Marriott tutorial on the hand drawn effect, however I skipped adding the posterize time effect as I still wanted my animation to run at 24fps. I also didn’t use roughen edges, mostly because I didn’t give myself enough to to play around with it on this project.
Finally, I used soundbites from pixabay to tie the whole animation together. I took bouncing sounds and layered them over some ambient sound of a needle on a blank record just for atmospheric effect. I initially wanted to be a bit more creative and make my own sounds, turning them to 8-bit but I couldn’t make it work the way I wanted.
On Wednesday we reviewed our videos and got feedback from Jess and our classmates. The list above is what I decided to change and improve. I crossed out the items as I completed them. These changes were subtle but really elevated how natural and fun my animation looked. I am very pleased with the result, and after getting back into Ben Marriott’s videos I’d like to take up some more motion graphics projects.
This is a very short post because essentially we did nothing. We had a quick lecture introducing the introduction to animation block and then got a homework assignment to take pictures of 10 things or objects in/around our house that do not belong to us. After a few days thinking about it I realized almost nothing in my house actually belongs to me, and I decided to take pictures of essential living items (eg. toilet, front door, heater) that all belong to my landlord. The concept explores the fact that so many of us rely on the posessions of a third party in order to survive.
I worked on the animation for a bit today. After having adjusted all the anchor points on each of the limbs and parenting them to the body I began to block out the general path of movement. I decided to quickly hand draw some boards showing my keys so I could better visualize here I wanted my little shape guy to jump and fall.
After blocking out the positioning, I adjusted the shape of the body to squash and stretch as it jumped and hit the top of the frame. I also edited the the paths of the limbs to make it appear as they were bending in order to initiate the jump.
So far I’ve only done the first jump and hit, and no easing yet. Some of the timing also needs to be adjusted. Then I will have to animate the liquid once the main body is done.
