Category: Principles of Character

We had a final presentation with our tutors where they gave us feed back on everything we had so far.

Animatic link

We really struggled to get a lot done over the winter break so I think we all felt as if what we showed during the interim wasn’t our best possible work. We were given a few more notes which we took into consideration for our final stretch of production.

I will admit, we probably should have taken more of the feedback from tutors on board from the first few interims. I think we panicked at the thought of changing things as we were feeling very put under pressure by the time. I did try to implement some of the lighting advice during compositing, but I realized some shading should have been done during animation in ToonBoom. We had a very process led approach to this film, which was very fun to experiment with but also left us with situations that could have been avoided with prior planning. Especially when it came to file organization. There are aspects from this interim we really wished we could have used, such as emphasizing the struggle to return to the “embryo” state, however due to our work commitments, there was not enough time at this stage to plan and implement that.

We spent the rest of our time right up until the deadline working on post production. In the drawn animation we opted to keep the brush lines over pencil strokes as we prefered the texture it gave us, despite the advantages of pencil lines. Fortunately, using the ‘convert line art to color art’ option in ToonBoom still created good stokes for adding the black matte behind our character.

I was given the all the files for rendering as I am confident using the write nodes to export. I had to make a few adjustments to the coloring on some frames from Alex, as it was on the wrong layer and the wrong colors. But I wanted to create a rough draft of the composition so I could get notes from the rest of the group. Tomas’ frames came in later so I really had to crunch to finish the compositing as I had work on the Tuesday, but we needed the comp and sound edit (done by Tomas) by the Thursday deadline.

I created a video to show the work I’ve done on the compositing as it was the majority of my time spent for this project.

Tour under “composite” section

And our final product is linked below

Starting back at uni we came together and reviewed what we had done over the break. I had finished my rough keyframes and everyone else was almost there. Some of the team decided to focus on specific shots. We are all generally a little worried about the time we have left as we have 3 projects at once for class, and two of us also work outside of uni. Another caveat is that I have been interviewing for an internship at Disney, so I’ve been dedicating much more time to that, as unfortunately, it is much more likely to benefit my career after university. I am also concerned about keeping the style unified. We found it very difficult to agree on a style for the character and we all deviated (to different degrees) from the character sheet we made in the creation of our roughs. I get the impression that our tutors were not fully satisfied with our animatic/other pre-production materials, but we had to push on and start animating anyway because we simply do not have the time, between uni and work (that’s showbiz baby). Below I’ve attached what each of us presented to the group.

Then I spent the rest of the lesson working on tweening and fixing some timings on my roughs.

On Tuesday, I spent some time getting footage of some textures for the final composition. We want to put natural textures in the backgrounds to give the audience something they can ground to and relate to within the void of our film. I took footage of leaves, wood, grass, as well as some footage of ink and milk in water.

Other than that I spent the time working on a project for another class.

On Sunday I continued animating as much as I could get through for the final presentation. We knew we wouldn’t be finished but we wanted to have at least every scene keyed out. Since I finished all my keyframes I worked on tweening and the composition. I also put together the presentation from a template of our last interim production deck. Again our biggest weakness has been the consistency in style. We really should have had one person to do all the keyframes and the rest animating because I do feel everything is quite disjointed.

The majority of the winter break was spent animating in ToonBoom. I struggled to work as I went home to my parents and I do not have a desk let alone a PC at their house. I tried my best to do some work on my laptop, and managed to finish my key frames. I struggled a lot using the storyboards Tomas provided. They looked great exported but the file organization was incomprehensible. My of the layers were incorrectly labled and some fully unnamed. I spent a significant amount of time sorting and merging layers and redividing sequences and scenes just to be able to export to Harmony. I am not sure how to go about bringing this up. I am very particular about file organization, however Tomas has definitely contributed the most to this animatic so it feels bad to pick at this issue.

Despite these issues, I was more productive than expected and I felt satisfied with the quality of my keyframes. Short post this time, as there were no other issues and the time was spent on the same one thing.

We had our second interim and presented out new concepts. I revamped the pitch presentation so it would look a lot nicer and more professional that our first interim. We presented our finished animatic, character sheets, my comp test, an animation timing test, and our production plan/schedule.

We got some mixed feedback.

From a student we were told that the audio Tomas added really helped bring the concept alive and just reminded us to make sure the audio loops as well as the images.

Chris gave us feedback that was a bit divisive in our group. He liked the abstract visual approach and the audio, but told us he found it hard to connect with the themes as it wasn’t grounded enough. The creature and the void of space made it hard to connect as the audience when our intentions are to make this a piece about creative burnout. He suggested that the moment where the horn grows with a tree branch sort of tecture was the only grounding moment and we could elaborate on that. While I could understand where he was coming from, I think we failed to explain how we were planning to incorporate more natural, earthly imagery in the backgrounds when the scene sort of explodes out.

During the pitch Su-Lynn gave us some tips and we spoke to her the next week as well. The first change we made based on her advice was to emphasize the gravity of the Other creature by making sure we animate particles being pulled towards it, as well as the first Creature being pulled in during the wide shot of both.

frankiebob.mov

She also wanted us to emphasize the human connectiong by grounding it through an extended metaphor, maybe using the horn/branch, like Chris suggested. In the wide shot we will show how the branch that was initially torn off begins to grow back on both creatures to show firstly, the cyclical nature and regeneration, but also emphasizing how if you put too much of yourself into some thing, it will begin to take away parts of you.

Hannah focused on the narrative structure, telling us that she couldn’t really see a journey/progression. We weren’t really sure how to incorporate this advice as we intend the film to be on the abstarct side and we are really focusing on the cyclical nature of our themes. We decided that in editing the film according to Su-Lynn’s advice, this narrative would become more clear. She agreed with Chris’ comments that we needed to ground the visuals with the audience more.

Overall, we are now quite clear on our direction, and will be spending the winter break working on animation.

On Monday we regrouped and looked at everything we had already completed so far. We decided by next Wednesday we wanted to essentially have all our preproduction materials done, in order to give us time to compile and edit anything we needed before the greenlight pitch.

We had a tutorial with Su Lynn, which allowed us to delve further into the concepts we presented last week. We had already edited our boards to be more dynamic but she advised us to push the horror elements even further, with extreme close ups and more anticipation for the audience. She also suggested thinking about the symbolism/meaning of each tear and mutilation the character makes. I thought that would be very useful to have in the background to allow us make economical decisions about which shots to include. We also considered the character design and she emphasized the importance of solidifying that, not necessarily in the design itself, but making sure that our choices were made for a reason. Finally, she suggested thinking about the exquisite corpse and creative methods we could use for either animating or just the visual framing. I think we may consider a split screen method for our fast sequence if we find our animatic doesn’t fit the time. And we definitely want to take advantage of the different textures we have planned and use our individual styles to create that variation.

We then created a collaged character sheet with the aspects of the design from all our iterations we wanted to keep.

We also decided to redo our thumbnails using the post-it method. We each drew our own thumbnails for what we thought the sequences should look like and then compiled them together until we were happy. I may try to create a timed animatic just using these thumbnails to test the timing.

The plan for the rest of the week was for Tomas to finish our refined storyboards, Alex was going to do animation tests of the gorey body-horror sequences to figure out how we want to animate it, and I was going to do comp tests for the backgrounds and textures. Hopefully we will be able to use these elements in the final product too.

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As we become quite busy, this post encompasses everything we completed until the second interim, where our projects may or may not be greenlit.

Tomas spent the time creating an incredible animatic with scratch sound. We would review it when we were in the college together to edit the timing and some of the colors and shapes but generally we were very pleased with how it came out. For sound, we wanted to record it ourselves but for proof of concept we just had to go with some stock sound, to have a general idea of what we wanted to record. We have a background drone for ambience through out the film, bar certain shots for dramatic effect. Then we added sound effects for the body noises as they make the breakage and body horror much more evocative.

Animaticsound.mp4

Alex got quite ill but still produced an animation test. While we agreed we wanted to change the fluid texture to be much more sinewy, the timing is very impactful.

bh1_Clip_001.mp4

Finally, I put together a compositing test to give an idea for what the background would look like. We will mask in different natural textures from footage we film, where the burning film leaves holes.

For Monday’s class we had an interim critique. We presented our logline and synopsis, concept sketches of the character and backgrounds, and our rough storyboards. We got some great feedback from tutors on which Saf kindly took notes for us.

With the feedback we got, I got the impression we were struggling to convey ideas that were so clear in our heads. We want to take the next few weeks to really develop our idea visually, both through drawing and animation tests. I’ve want to ‘lightly tap’ two birds with one stone (I’ll never kill a bird, not even metaphorically), by doing some test compositing work for the background of this project, while also exploring After Effects for my Friday toolkit.

I have been quite ill but still made it to class for Monday. Over the weekend Tomas put together some thumbnails. While, the boards followed the beat map we had established, the characters still looked very humanoid and unremarkable in design and the shots were exclusively mid shots, lacking dynamism or any indication of pacing.

I felt a bit like a storyboard suervisor giving all these notes, but we discussed reworking the boards as a team and we came up with something a lot more interesting and engaging.

We had a storyboarding workshop which was quite engaging and I got to rework one of our initial boards. I have come to enjoy working with value studies for thumbnails and not getting too bogged down with details in the storyboard process.

These first two weeks we were briefed on our project options, picked our briefs, and began to form groups. During the briefing I came up with some ideas and formed a group with Alex Fell.

We came up with some lists of references, some initial character concepts and started a pinterest board to map out ideas. Then Tomas Swann messaged me looking for a group, I pitched him our concept and he joined us. In the second week we had did a workshop on developing ideas and then had to present our initial concepts to the class.

We decided on some roles each of us wanted to take on, and I tend to find myself working as a producer because I love me a good spreadsheet. We listed all the steps we needed to ake to complete the film and I put together a working Gantt chart to keep us on track.

We also decided on a mission statement and logline for the film, as we had a lecture from Robert Bradbrook, who really emphasized having a specific statement about intention and audience to guide the filmmaking process.

An eldritch creature, isolated in the void, destroys itself in attempts to create purpose.

We are having some creative differences as I am finding myself wanting to push the concept to the more abstract, especially with character design and my group mates seem to want to go very humanoid, but I’m sure through some character workshopping we can settle on a design we like. I created a quick concept design to show what I was visualizing the film would look like.