Some line-tests

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A jolly Good Update

I’m back!!!!! Yes I know its been a while but never fear for I am here. As of late the blog has died a bit of a death due to the big nasty scary dissertation deadline looming but that is now all finished and done so hopefully I will be able to find time to keep you updated on animation going ons at least once a week…maybe even more often!

Right, if I remember correctly, I was on the cusp of explaining the development of the piper character in my final project, this I will put off a bit longer as for the time being I think a jolly good update is in order.

So where am I at? Well I am successfully forging my own path to doom by treating most of the advice I am getting as ‘optional’ and hence I am going into production with only the slightest inkling of what I’m going to out with at the other end. I appreciate that this is not the most professional way to go about making a film, especially one on which so much of the rest of my life relies but planning stuff out like a good little boy wasn’t working. I do have an animatic, storyboard and shot plan but I am treating these more as suggestions of what should happen – I know how most shots are starting and ending but not necessarily what goes on in the middle…always fun.

As for the production itself I am well into the 2D animation which is supposed to be finished by the end of the week. I am a bit skeptical about this imposed deadline mainly because I thought I was going to be getting a ‘2D animation assistant’ this week, it turns out that I don’t get assigned someone till Friday, ho-hum. The actual animation is going quite well, apart from a few teething troubles early on I’m churning it out at a reasonable rate at a standard I’m happy with. As a result of my dirty mind and the sniffing of too many permanent markers the whole animation is becoming a bit of sexual farce with bouncing cleavage and suggestively shaped flutes galore but it makes people laugh and I think I’d rather have something which was funny and didn’t make sense to a film which is over analyzed and wooden.

Anyhoo, I will give a bit more of an in depth look into the animation in the next couple of days.

The Creatures

The time is finally here! Yes, I am going to talk about the development of my characters – I can hardly believe it myself. Today I think I shall talk about the development of the ‘creatures’ as they are now known, mainly because I am feeling a bit lazy today and I have lots of videos that I can show you rather than describing everything.


Here we go then, I am sure I have mentioned on numerous occasion the origins of this project but just for kicks I will go through it again. Way back when in the first year we did a project with Kathy where we where given a poem which we where supposed to turn into a storyboard. My poem was The Dog by Ogden Nash, which was basically all about how wonderful dogs are – until I got my hands on it that is. I successfully turned it into a delightful ode to sexism, ageism and animal cruelty in which a crazy old lady who threw puppies in a river. After completion this project was promptly forgotten about until it was unearthed last year as something to play with in my spare time. I didn’t really touch the storey but instead focused on character development – here are some quick doodles I did. Although a long way off from the final design I was still going for that cutsie roleypoley look.



Over the summer these characters where significantly simplified and stylized into blobs with tails. This clip shows an early prototype which I gave eyes and a brow as both Derek and Andy suggested this would give them a bit more expression.




Last term I also spent a lot of time experimenting with different types of armatures for the creatures. Originally I intended for them to be made of solid plastercine with wire for the tail but this just fell apart during animation. Through trial and error and a lot of help from Georg I found that the best method of construction was to sculpt the plastercine around a Styrofoam body in which the wire tail was mounted. I also used a bit of wirte for a neck joint. The problem that I found with this was that the movement was quite restricted and wooden, as these tests show. However, I did like the weired glide effect that could be achieved by shooting everything on ones.




The other problem which is blatantly obvious is the dead expressions, tis was remedied with some nice big beads which gave the characters a good puppy eye look. At one point I was also toying with using replaceable heads to try and get some emotion into the characters. Georg lent me some Nightmare Before Christmas toys to have a play with. It worked quite well but I came the conclusion that i didn't fancy building umpteen heads for my horde of little creatures.

I can't remember if it was my idea or somebody else's (probably the latter) to change the shape of the characters to try and work in a bit more movement and loveability. Regardless, the general idea was to simplify everything to make it as easy as possible to animate. I ended up with the wonderful blob, here is the moment i discovered it. I then spent the rest of my time playing with the blob to work out the best way to animate it, the best examples of which can be seen in the design bible, everything else can be viewed at:http://www.youtube.com/user/ShadyJoe47 .

Design Bible Explained

Back again! In case you hadn’t guessed yet I’m having a bit of a blogtastic week. Today I’m going to revisit and explain my design bible which was rather hastily posted at the beginning of December so Andy could see it. I’m reposting it here to save you having to find the old post because the kind of nice considerate person I am.

I will be honest, the bible was cobbled together at the last minute and became more of an exercise in editing together bits of artwork and footage rather than explaining anything, but nevertheless it does occasionally hint at bits of information that might be useful to any perspective lakies I happen to stumble across. Since I have now resolved to not use any extra help, apart for sound design and comping the bible is pretty useless but it does sort of illustrate what I want to do and how I am going to do it, I think.

The title for my epic: Boobs and Violence is a working title but is sums up the content and my general “if I’m going to fail I’m going to fail as spectacularly as possible” attitude, so I might keep it.

First in the bible we encounter the animatic, this has since been edited and now flows a bit better but the basic storey line remains pretty much the same. (The changes I have made will be discussed at greater detail in a later post). I’m going to deliberately keep what happens in the animatic pretty open to allow as much scope as possible for improvisation. As of yet there is no scratch track – Georg has kindly offered to play penny whistle for me, my plan is to use this as foley for the piper and as a backing track in some other sections. The rest of the sounds will just be provided by foley.

Right, the creatures have developed from puppy like things to happy little blobs with teeth. A more detailed account of their development will be posted soon, for the time being I am going to talk about animating them. When I first started animating them I found that after a while they would start to develop a head, which although it looks nice is a right pain to re-sculpt. To solve this the model just needs to be picked up occasionally and re-rolled into a ball, you can get away with an amazing amount of jumps from one pose to the next, so its not too difficult to re-position them it on set and it be noticed.

The eyes are very, very important, infact, most of the character’s expression comes from the eyes and very limited movement of the body. One thing I didn’t mention in the bible was that the eyes do have a tendency to move up the body till they sit on top of the head, this is BAD AND WRONG as you can then see through them. This can be avoided by keeping the eyes roughly central on the blob. And of course we have the beauty of the blob, quite possibly the nicest thing to animate ever. If the model gets into a bit of a dodgey looking pose it can simply be re-rolled into a blob and allowed to roll away, consider it a get out of jail free card.

And so we move onto the piper herself. The key with this character it to exaggerate everything, nothing is subtle; the bigger and more whacked-out looking the pose the better. She also has various aspects such as her fingers and the feather in her hat, which trail behind her and generally flop about a lot, hopefully making her look a bit uncoordinated. And of course we have he most rather ample assets, courtesy of Holly and Georg, these are going to have minds of there own and are going to bounce around all over the place. I think I need to do a lot of in depth research into this in order to get a good realistic bounce.

Then there is the set, it is currently mocked-up out of card and I’m happy with the dimensions and the forced perspective look I was going for. The rough layout is going to be constructed out of foam board, and then I will just stick random stuff on it till it looks right.

life-drawing

I’m going to talk about some life-drawing stuff. The reason for this is that I have been experimenting with some exaggeration and shading techniques that I think could be quite useful for my final project. So here we go then...first up we have an example of my first attempt at some deliberate exaggeration; by making anything at eye-level really big and everything else really small. Unfortunately the models groin seemed to constantly be at eye level (thats my excuse and I'm sticking to it) so I have ended up with some rather suspect looking drawings.I quite like this sketch but I think the legs need to be tapered in a tad and maybe a bit smaller.

Despite the slightly disturbing 'Come hither' look in the model's eyes and the general nature of the pose, this is one of my favorite drawings, mainly because the amount of exaggeration and foreshortening is absolutely ridiculous. His arms are a bit iffy but I think all in all its not a bad attempt.
I do like this fish-eye type look that this technique gives my drawings and I think I will stick with it for a while and I want to try and incorporate it into my final project-maybe through some jiggery-pokery with the set design or the use of a fish-eye lens. However, I am not sure at what point this would cease to look interesting and just become really annoying.

For a while now I have been having a bit of a think about what sort of lighting I want to use on my project and I have been doing some experiments in life-drawing with just drawing the negative space around the subject. This gives a really nice strong silhouette and stops the subject fading into the background which is a problem I sometimes have. This could be a risk when I come to light my set so strong back lighting could be useful. I have found that if I put too much detail on the subject
everything can become a bit lost so I may have to do some tests to make sure you can still see what is going on.











































A prime example of this can be seen in these sketches I did the other day; the head is fine as there is relatively little shading but the body fades away a little too much for my liking. I suppose it could be quite nice if you wanted something lurking in the shadows or stuff along those lines though.

Some camera ideas

Right, today I’m going to discuss what sort of ‘look’, in terms of lighting and photography that I want to try and achieve on my final project.

Aperture
The main idea that I have always run with is that I want to use a ridiculously small depth of field. This has mainly been inspired by watching too many Quay brother’s films; where your always catching glimpses of things moving about but there all out of focus so you are not sure what is going on. In an interview with Nick Wadley, in his essay Masks, Music And Dances of Dream, in the book Pix 2 the Quay’s talk about how they shot Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1987) using a wide angle lens with the aperture “wide open” so that the set would drift “off into infinity”. They also deliberately over-exposed everything to give it a luminous effect.
I have done some tests with this and you get some nice effects with objects moving in and out of focus as you animate. You can also get some beautiful things going on with focus pulls; especially if you use a wide-angle lens since there is a bit of distortion. I’m not sure if I want to over-expose anything though, obviously I need to do some tests when the set is built but I think it could be just a little bit overpowering, plus I don’t want the entire film to look like I just stole it off the Quay’s and it might clash with the trap-dooresque feel I’m going for with the storey and character design.
Even if I don’t deliberately over-expose, it will still be a problem because of the wide-open aperture that I want to use. This can be overcome by getting a neutral-density filter for the camera or putting some sheets over the lights, which is a lot cheaper because I can nab them from the media store so it is free. I would have to do some tests to get the right grade but that shouldn’t be too difficult when I decide what kind of exposure I want.
If worse comes to the worse I can always deal with this in post since I will be shooting using RAW’s but I’d rather get it right now to avoid extra work later on.

Lenses

As I mentioned earlier a wide-angle lens gives some nice effects when pulling focus. I want to use a wide angle on my establishing shots or anything that sows a lot of the set. For the anything else I think I will use a lens with a long focal length to avoid too much distracting detail and provide better framing of the subject. Plus it will allow me to position the camera further away from the set, giving me more space to animate but it will make the whole scene appear flatter, hopefully the small depth of field will hide this.
I’m also toying with the idea of using a fish-eye lens, I don’t know how I will get my hands on one, I assume they have them in the photography store, and I don’t know if you can get them in different focal lengths. Since I am using quite a lot of forced perspective on my set anyway this might be just too much for the viewer to take in but its worth a try to see what it would look like.

Filters

I think it was when I was first discussing my storyboards for this project that I mentioned I wanted to make a filter to create a ‘through the key-hole’ type look to the film. Since then I have seen this effect in a lot of stuff on the telly and in the odd film, so I need to find out what this filter is called and see if I can find one.
Georg has shown me a filter that creates a really cheesy starburst type effect on light sources, which I naturally think is the greatest thing ever. I can’t remember what the filter is called but I will probably bee using it. I’m resisting the urge to go all Top Gear with graduated filters as cool as they are, mainly because I think it will be too much to visually take in, especially with the way I am now going to animate my main character but if I have some spare time I might have a play with some filters to see what the set would look like.

Lighting

After the Talking Dog project, which was a bit of a baptism of fire, I have decided that the best thing to do with the lighting for my final project is to have roughly the same set-up for every shot. This will hopefully speed up production considerably and provide a bit of continuity; so much time was spent sorting out the lighting for talking dog, as each shot was lit separately, which when you have forty odd shots gets a bit ridiculous. The need may arise for a specific lighting effect on certain shots in which case I can jiggle with the set-up a bit but I am hoping that with sufficient planning I will only have to set-up the lights once.

So what sort of lighting am I going to use? A very good question. This slideshow of some of my concept art shows how my ideas have changed throughout the project: Initially I wanted the whole thing to look quite dark and dingy…lots of hard light, silhouettes, fast fall-off etc. Since deciding to change the entire set so that it is white, essentially making it one giant reflector, everything has got a lot brighter and sparse looking. The last two drawings show the current idea that I am going with; in the first the lighting is perhaps a bit too harsh but the second, showing the statues in more detail shows a softer light, which I prefer.

And how do I intend to achieve this? Well, I’m probably going to keep things as simple as possible and stick to a rough three-point lighting system, although I’m not a big fan of back lights; I don’t like the whole glowing outlines look. From just messing around with some lights in the studio I have found that you can do a surprising amount with just one light and a couple of well placed reflectors. These photos where all shot with just a sidelight and two reflectors, one on the other side of the subject and the other behind and just above the camera. The background I’ve used also acts as a reflector, which is one reason why I made my set white because I like the contrast between background and subject. If I do shoot with the aperture wide-open I will have to be careful that the whole thing doesn’t wash-out though.