Animation Skills: 24th - 30th October 2016: Animate It Briefing and Brainstorming

Not much happened this week in terms of the animation skills module. Most of my efforts have been on the visual language module and trying to finish the 24 drawings task. On monday, we did get our briefing of the next task. This is one that I am very excited for.

We received a choice of 7 words to use as a stimulus for the project. These were surprise, lateness, love, hate, longing, happiness and fear. We must then take one of these words and attempt to communicate the idea of this word through a 10 - 15 second animation, after creating a storyboard and animatic for it first. This is the kind of stuff that really excites me. I instantly had ideas for quite a few of the different themes presented. 

I had ideas for an atmospheric and creepy piece for the 'fear' theme where someone could be trying to escape a spooky house before being caught by some sort of monster and cutting to black in a shocking ending, but after looking at images online and compiling this moodboard, I came up with a few more for the word surprise. 

I like the idea of this story being quite character focused. Below is the file of notes that I wrote and came up with my ideas in. I have then done a more detailed sort of script for my final idea.

Surprise:

1. A robber is sneaking through a museum or bank vault, trying very hard to be quiet. The music starts to build tension as the camera shows the audience he is about to step through a motion detector, but instead, when he turns the corner, he sees another robber and they stare at each other in shock.
2. A kid at a zoo. Looking around inside the cage to try and see the animal inside. Then a tiger jumps out of the bushes at the kid and cut to black.
3. A tired looking man coming home from work. Very down and slow. Monotonous work. He opens the door to his home to find his family waiting to surprise him. It is his birthday.

A man slowly approaching his house. He is wearing a shirt and tie with a jacket thrown over his shoulder. The tie looks scruffy and loosened. He has very baggy eyes and looks incredibly tired. He slowly and wearily walks to the door of the house. He opens the door to a dark room, the light bleeding in around him. He flicks on the lights. There is a big group of people and a big banner across the room saying ‘Happy Birthday’. The people shout “surprise!” and blow party horns. The man jumps in shock and looks around. He smiles. Thankfully, as his eyes tear up.

I can't wait to get started on this but I am trying to finish off this visual language task before I start working properly on this because I know I won't want to go back once I get into this.

Visual Language: 24th - 30th October 2016

This week I continued to work on my 24 drawings task.

I was struggling quite a lot to get really motivated. I couldn't really think of many ideas for different rockets or methods. I haven't really been liking this little project for this reason, but then that has been making it even harder to actually do it. I think it is also harder for me because I am so excited to do the new animation skills task and I have so many ideas that I just want to do that. I've been trying to make myself finish this before I make a start on that though.

I felt that I had really run out of ideas. It wasn't helped by the fact that I had been doing all my drawings up until this point at the wrong size. I had been using a very small sketchbook as I thought that was what was said in the briefing. I had gotten confused and was going off of something else that was said and the brief did in fact say that they should be done in A4. So because of this, I redrew all of the prior rockets into an A4 sketchbook. I can make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen again by thoroughly reading the brief again and asking questions to make sure I am totally clear on what to do. 

It was a really hard slog to make myself finish this off as I really wasn't enjoying it. I am happy with some of the pieces that I have made throughout this series of drawings but all in all it's been a struggle for me. I have just been really wanting to move on from it.

I like the idea of the new environments briefing. I am excited to start drawing places using perspective points. This will be a very useful thing for me because I am not confident with creating backgrounds so I really hope to improve through this. I am not sure yet where I will draw but hopefully I will make a start on this task soon. 

Animation Skills: 17th - 23rd October 2016: Storyboard Crit

Following the creation of our nursery rhyme storyboards, we all stuck ours up all over the walls of the studio. We then went and used sticky notes to give constructive feedback to other peoples storyboards.

I really enjoyed seeing what other people had created. They were all very creative and communicated the ideas of the story very well. Thought I did not get to see everyone's storyboard, I did not see any that I didn't understand. I liked seeing the many different styles and ways of telling the story.

I found it particularly interesting to see other storyboards of 'Humpty Dumpty', as this was the one I chose so I could see how others had interpreted the story for themselves. When I came to giving feedback, I actually found it very difficult. I was really struggling to find write 3 things to be improved. Maybe they were actually all just that good or I was just being too nice, but I just found it really hard to think of things. I did feel like I was repeating myself quite a bit with very similar pros and cons. 

When I wrote things that could be improved, I also gave a suggestion or two of what I would have done. Whether or not people would totally appreciate this, I'm not sure, but I just thought it could give people some other possibilities and be more constructive.

Feedback on my storyboard was all very good and constructive. The main things that I read were to do with adding details to the soldier characters as I had just drawn them simply as construction skeletons. This is likely because I have always drawn construction characters like this for any storyboard I've done in the past as they were mostly live action things so drawing the detail of the actors wasn't really necessary. 

The other main criticism was about my use of zooms. Some notes said that they really liked the zooms that had been used, while others said that I had used too many. I can understand that I may have actually used more zooms than were really needed. The zooms could have been cut down to just a few shots that I feel do need them. For example, the establishing shot, the shot as humpty is falling off the wall and a zoom into him once he has hit the floor to show emotion. 

When I was then not working on the visual language module task, I did more work on the wizard paper animation. I have completed the key poses and now just have inbetweens to do. There will be a lot of inbetweens in this because I want to really accentuate the anticipation as he is about to shoot.

Visual Language: 17th - 23rd October 2016

After receiving the brief, we each picked a random word to use as our stimulus. The word that I ended up with was 'rocket'. I was pretty happy with the word that I had been given. I felt that this had a lot of potential to make cool variations upon. First I googled the word to try and see any of the possible other ways that it could be interpreted other than the obvious, rocket ship. 

I found rocket leaf, rocket launchers, rocket raccoon, and many other ways of using the word, all of which I wrote down in my spider diagram before starting on anything else. I don't feel as though I have done all that many. I know that I do work slowly and this is something that I am trying to improve on. I attempt to work more impulsively and experimentally, without worrying about what the outcome may look like and just doing it anyway. 

One of my favorite drawings so far is the tonal Biro pen piece. I really like these line shading styles and the depth they can give so I was quite happy with my attempt at this style. I do feel that I could have done a better job with consistent proportions, perhaps I will create another space shuttle like this later in the book.

For the drawings I have left to do, I will also try to be more experimental and use different materials and techniques. I feel that I have been using pencil too much as this is my favorite practical media. I'll see what other techniques will help me achieve. I am making an effort to try and think outside of the box to come up with more inventive ways of thinking about 'rockets'. 

Animation Skills: 10th - 16th October 2016: Humpty Dumpty Storyboarding

On Monday, I had finished my flipbooks and 2 second animation, so I started a new one. I wanted to be very ambitious with this being a more detailed character animation. I have started to create the plan of a wizard trying to shoot some sort of magic blast but instead it backfires and he goes flying off of the right side of frame. There aren't too many complex movements to be done in this but there will lots of inbetweens to smooth the motion and build anticipation. This is something extra that I will continue to work on in my own time since we have moved onto storyboards in the studio.

When we started on creating storyboards, I was really struggling to think of a nursery rhyme to use as my story. I realized that I didn't really know many, so I settled for Humpty Dumpty. I started off in creating this by thinking of the camera angles and movements I was using. I wanted to make this to be as if it was a very short, cheesy animation. I open with an establishing shot of humpty on the castle wall, followed by a shot looking slightly up at him. I was originally having him fall forwards off the wall but it is harder to fall forwards when rocking like that. It would be much more likely and realistic for him to have fallen backwards. Also, this meant that the kings men could see him straight away. I wanted to fall to be sudden and shocking which is why I chose to have it cut to black before impact. After this point is where I actually got a little stuck. I was struggling to think of how to make the kings men come to help. 

I took a break and came back to it the next day and then simply had them walk over. Following the close up shot of humpty as he is on the floor. I wanted to have the shot of the men approaching to be rather close from his point of view.  

I was looking at other storyboards made for Wallace and Gromit. The main focus is always to follow the action. This in particular scene is from 'The Wrong Trousers' and is such a well made scene for its visual comedy and inventiveness. It only cuts away to show other important elements that impact on the main action of the scene which is the train chase. It has a lot of interesting movements and communicates the story very well. This is the whole point of a storyboard and something that I'm trying to do in mine.

Once I had finished my storyboard on the sticky notes, I then started recreating them on photoshop. This was fun because I like drawing in Photoshop with graphics tablets. For the most part, the storyboard stayed the same. There was only really one major change and that was with how the kings men saw humpty once he had landed. I made the camera much tighter on them as they turned to look. I felt that this would help to keep the tension and emotion in a scene of this kind, as it would be a proper reaction shot. Once I had finished drawing each frame into the storyboard sheet, I could then turn it into an animatic.

I cropped every frame of the storyboard down to its own image and then exported them into Premiere. I could then set the timings of each shot. For some of the shots where the action was more substantial, I created variant frames to show the movement. I did this for the shot of humpty rocking off the back of the wall, the kings men turning their heads and them then walking up to humpty. This helped to show what was going on in those frames. One issue I faced in the stage was the fact that because I had earlier changed the direction of the fall, it then made the camera zoom not work as I had envisioned. I first thought that since he was falling face down, the camera zooming into his mouth could work to show the speed and then also be what cuts to black at the same time. Unfortunately, as he was now falling backwards, this would make little sense, so I had to have the camera zooming out from him to show the speed and then just cut to black normally. I feel that this did take away a visually interesting transition but it was necessary to communicate the speed of the fall. 

I enjoyed creating this storyboard and actually found it more challenging than I had expected. I have created storyboards in the past and been fine with it but I think it maybe was to do with the fact that this wasn't my own original story. All in all, I am pretty happy with how this storyboard has turned out. I do not feel it is the best I have made but I do like it. I feel that it maybe loses some sort of interest in the second half but I'm not entirely sure why. I look forward to doing more storyboards in the future and hopefully make them better quality. 

Animation Skills: 3rd - 9th October 2016: Paper Animations

This has been the first proper week of animating! It's been very exciting. I have thoroughly enjoyed creating flipbooks and paper animations.

I have already taught myself the 12 basic principles from online resources but I felt that this was a very useful refresher. It did clear up and clarify a few details which I had wondered about, especially 'solid drawing', which is one that I wasn't entirely sure about before.

I have created flipbooks in the past so I was excited to do some more again as it's something I always loved to do. When creating the flipbooks, I tried to focus on making the squash and stretch very exaggerated. This brings the ball a lot more weight and character.

I was very happy with how my bouncy ball turned out though if I were to do it again, I would give myself more time for the ball to stop bouncing more naturally. I feel that the two major bounces aren't enough and that the ball then stops too suddenly. This is only a minor issue though, I'm very pleased with the result.

I think that this same issue presented itself in both of my other flipbooks. For the sideways bouncing ball, I feel that I didn't have enough space at the end of the page. I also did start it too far into the book so that the first few frames can't actually be seen when flipping it. I think that this could be rectified by making the arcs of the bounces tighter so that it bounces higher rather than further.

The last flipbook simply doesn't have enough frames of the take off. It doesn't give the viewer time to really process. I could fix this by sacrificing a few frames from the build up in order to let the spaceship take off totally out of frame. I was, however, very happy with the squashing and anticipation in this flipbook and I feel they worked very nicely to really build up the energy of the ship.

Traditional paper animation is something that I've been wanting to try for quite a while and now I've discovered that I really love doing it. It feels incredibly satisfying. We first created a pendulum swinging in order to get a grasp on the timing principle. I feel that my swing wasn't quite as smooth as it could have been. I wasn't too happy with it. I think that the problem came in the frames where the motion ends. The ball stops too suddenly and stays on the extreme for too long.

For my first proper paper animation, I was actually struggling for quite a while to think of an idea. I started sketching the idea for a pencil walking across the screen. I quickly decided that I wasn't as interested in this idea and then changed the idea to a pencil character who was bouncing across the screen. I drew all keyframes on one sheet to plan it out first. I tried to make the motion slow at the top of the arc to get correct timing. When I had actually finished this version, the movement at the top of the arc was far too slow. I asked for some feedback because I wasn't too happy with it and I was told that if I were to make this pencil into a character who was jumping then I should really go all out.

I then started fresh, this time I used the pencil to communicate the idea of legs and joints. I also made sure to do more frequent line tests in order to check the timing was going well. I was very happy with the result of this one. I exaggerated the squash and stretch quite a great deal and I think that along with the legs, this really sells the idea that this pencil is alive and jumping across the screen. 

From this week of doing traditional paper animation, I have found that I really love doing it. I find it incredibly satisfying and I love the idea of creating these clips just like the old time animators did. I intend to do more of these types of animations again in the future.