Dissertation

Greetings once again and welcome to largely dissertation themed blog. I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by the reading week task and I’m hoping that that and the literature review things we are doing will help me get back into the swing of essay writing.

At the moment I am not too sure what I want to write about for my dissertation. I’m probably going about it completely the wrong way and looking at individual’s work rather than a specific theory as a starting point. Nevertheless I have carried on and looked at some interesting essays involving the Quay brothers and Jan Svankmajer, who I am interested in but don’t know a huge amount about. So that could be an interesting way of finding some theory’s to look at. On the other hand I am also quite interested in the whole 1920’s/30’s German art scene, DaDa and all of that, particularly the work of George Grosz and John Heartfield but I’m not sure how I would link that to animation.

The other are that I have considered looking at is acting theory as that would hopefully benefit my animation at the same time, the only drawback to that is that, from the little I understand of it, there are so many different theory’s and approaches to acting.

So the jist of what I am trying to get across is that I don’t really know what I am doing.

Anyway just a brief mention of my crazy old lady who throws puppies in the river story. I have had a play at developing my character designs from the original exercise. The originals, as you can see, where quite crude and sketchy and focused wholly on the puppy killing bit of the story.

I have been trying to soften up the character a bit so that the audience will just think it is a nice story about an old lady and her puppies, then I can spring the horrible truth on them!

What a forgetfull day I am having

The blog returns and you would be forgiven for thinking that after such a lengthy absence I would have a lot to talk about…Well I do, so there.

I think a logical place to start is to have a little natter about the various bits and bobs I have been up to for the past week or so, so assessments. I didn’t think that they went too badly all things considered, with the lip-sync stuff I already had a rough idea of what was wrong with it all and had re shot it, twice, however in fixing the problems I merely created more. I think this is mainly because I rushed the re shoots because I was eating into time that I had set aside to do the storyboard stuff, with hindsight I could have actually afforded to slow down a bit and taken my time as I was able to get the storyboards done quite quickly. Ho-hum, I was going to have another bash at doing the lip-sync today (inspired by the lip-sync workshop at Exeter, that was very good) but after traipsing up the hill I discovered that I had left my dope sheets at home so I will do it tomorrow.

I’m not too sure how the storyboards went really, the feedback was a bit mixed and last time I checked there was no mark on moodle but I’ve got a nagging feeling that I focused too much on the artwork and not enough on developing the story, we shall see though.

Now, on to the reading week…I have actually surprised myself and done some reading! So far, I have read the passages in Paul Wells’ Understanding Animation and Andy Darley’s essay in A Reader in Animation Studies because I already own these books and therefore it required the least effort to find. I went to the library today to get the others and came back with The British Avant-Garde Film and a book which I thought was From The Mouse to The Mermaid but is actually completely the wrong thing altogether (its not been a good day). The other books I couldn’t find but as I have to take that other book back I will have another look tomorrow.

And finally, my other little assignment for this week has been to try and second-guess the next project, a decision I will probably live to regret but I will carry on nevertheless. So what have I done? Well, I shall tell you… since I know that the next project is a 90 second film I have started to develop a possible idea which I have adapted from an exercise Kathy gave us last year when we had to story board a poem, my poem was The Dog by Ogden Nash which I turned into a cheerful story about an old lady who through puppies in a river. My plan was to plan on the character designs as well as trying to bulk out the story, which I have done mentally, but the only actual progress I have made has been to come up with a soundtrack for it, which at the moment consists of me making lots of funny noises on the guitar which by sheer luck rather than skill sounds ok when its all layered together although I think it could do with some kind of percussion baking and maybe an overriding harmony, so I will get on that.

Short and Sweet

I’m sorry if this seems a bit rushed but I am bit pressed for time this week but I might have some time to add some more to it tomorrow.

Stop-motion has been a little frustrating this week; I tried to re-shoot it, twice but I still can’t get it right and the first one I did is by far the best so I’m just going to have to submit that one. I have prepared for you a lovely montage of all my animation tests and whatnot that I did with the puppet (the lip-sync stuff I did in flash is on my missing USB pen and the files with the hand drawn animation on have buggered themselves sidewise and refuse to play and have therefore been omitted from the montage). The first little bit shows some basic keying out that I did of the main poses just to get the timing sorted out and the rest is just experiments that I did to try and work out how to animate the puppet. I think it is safe to say that I was a little rusty on animation theory when I started the project and it shows, thankfully a lot of the kinks where worked out in the tests but there are still some issues with the hands in the final one.

As promised I have the colour test that I did of Jesus here for you all to see, my finished storyboard actually looks completely different to this; it is a lot darker as I wanted it to look more moody and I haven’t used any ink splats as I have here because it just looked like Jesus’ hands had exploded.

The storyboards are now finished and I am reasonably happy with them, they are a bit hard to follow and ideally I would have spent more time developing the story and tweaking a few drawings but bar that I hope its all ok.

What connects ZZTop, Jesus and Me? Read on to find out!

Here we are again, another week, and another blogg. Right, where to begin? The lip sync project is as good a place to start as any because it is more or less finished, I have even remembered to bring a copy of it home so that I have posted for you but the sounf dosn't sem to want to work, apologies. For the mean time I can sound pretentious and talk about acting theory! Ed Hooks’ book Acting for Animators talks bout a lot of different acting methods but two that stuck in my mind were, one: feel the emotions of the character and two: what was the character doing before the scene started (or something like that). At first I found it quite hard to do any of this but after a day a very frustrating animation tests where nothing seemed to be working I was feeling pretty miserable and I think that this helped when I came back to animating the next day.

From a more technical perspective it was quite hard to do more subtle animation and as a result I don’t think that I did enough animation in the tests and it all looked a bit lifeless and mechanical. Eventually I started to use a bit of exaggeration and this looked a lot better. I would like to think that I have got the balance between exaggeration and subtlety about right, there are a few bits that could be tweaked; the blinks are a bit fast and I think the pull at the end could do with some more tweaning. There is also a rather annoying band of light across the puppets face so if I have time over the next week I will try to re-shoot it.

My attention this week has also been focused on getting on with the storyboards, which are now all roughed out and just need tarting up. The song I have chosen to interpret is ZZTop’s Jesus Just Left Chicago, a proper blues song, not the crappy pop stuff that they did in the 80’s. Anyway, I have turned this into a charming story bout a drugged-up, womanizing rock star, a sort of Jesus of the present day, if he where famous, definitely not for anyone who is religious though. Here I have for you some character sketches of Mr. Jesus, this is pretty much how he appears on the story boards, I am still not too sure on a finished style, I quite like this biro look but I have also done a test with watercolors, that’s on A3 so if I remember to scan it in the studio you can see it.

Until then I shall bid you farewell.

Ye Olde Lipee Sync

Greetings and salutations! And once again may I welcome you to ye olde blogge! This week I have been focusing mainly on the lip-sync project as I’m struggling to come up with ideas for the storyboarding thing and my way of dealing with that is to ignore it and hope a good(ish) solution presents itself.

So, lip-sync, well it has bean chuntering along quite smoothly; its all now drawn up. Initially I had put quite a lot of tweaning in as it all looked a bit jumpy with just the keys but I did a bit too much, making it look like the mouth was jittering about. So I have subsequently taken a lot of it out again, hopefully striking the right balance. My next job is tart up those drawings and mount them on card so that they can be fixed to the stopmo puppet.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do for the rest of the animation but I’m toying with the idea of playing on the fact that the mouth is stuck on. Although it is possible to use the eyes on the puppet I think I might draw those too just because I think drawn ones would look better with the mouth.

Before I go I will give the storyboarding project a brief mention, I did have a song that I picked but I fell out with it and as of yet have not found a replacement. However, whatever song I pick I think I am going to have to use fairly simple character designs as many of the more complex characters I have tried to use look different every time I draw them but If I can find a song where that sort of style would work then I’d be set.

Hurrah!

So here we are; my first blog of 2009, what a momentous occasion, hurrah! First things first, a leap back to yesteryear and the Exeter ident and apologies for the lack of the videos that I promised, they do exist, I promise but unfortunately blogger does not seem to want to let me post them, so if anyone out there is really desperate to see some candelabra things and the spinny floor let me know and I can show them to you. As for the run-through on the lighting, which I promised I would post (I lied), I can copy it from my production report.

Now back to the present and the brand spanking new project, which I must say is making me feel all warm and fuzzy inside as it will be a chance to do some stop-mo by myself and really get some character into the performance. In the finest uber geek traditions I have dome some background reading for this project; Ed Hooks’ Acting for Animators (with multimedia CD-ROM included!) and Acting in Animation, which have both been very useful if not slightly confusing at times. So hopefully reading them will pay off. I am still trying to come up with ideas for a scenario for this project but ideas have not been particularly forthcoming; the best I have so far is a guy in a Pot Noodle factory but that idea would have probably changed completely by next week. As for tackling the lip sync I was thinking of “borrowing” an idea from Tandem Films Flatworld (1997), which uses 2D characters animated traditionally but put into a 3D environment and filmed as if it were stop-motion. My plan is to use traditional techniques to animate the face and then just blue tack each drawing to the armature, I will need to do a couple of animation tests to get it right no doubt but hopefully it will work , fingers crossed.

Uber Blog

It’s done, the stop motion is finally done, a week behind schedule but nevertheless done. After the ritual burning of the set I now have to face up to the stark reality that there is rather a lot of stuff to do in post so I’m bracing myself for another manic week but for now: let the good times roll and the explanation of what I’ve been up to this week.

So, apart from slowly going mad, what have I been up to? Well, I will show you, through the wonderful medium of video. Here are most of the test animations that we did before actually filming the shots that we needed, which is the main reason why it actually took so long to finish everything. I will also point out that some of them have very long pauses of nothingness on the end because stop motion pro won’t let you render anything off which is less than two seconds so I just added lots of blank frames to make up the time.

First up: the nodding duck chickens, which I touched on last week. This first test shows a very basic animation (animated by Charlotte and Ralph, I think, it’s been a long week), first on twos and then on ones. This was just to see what looked best and we all agreed that animation done on ones looked much better.

We then experimented with different ways of doing the ‘nod’, in the first bit of this test we tried to ease in and out of the movement and create a sort of pecking look. Ben then asked us if we could animate it so that the head came out when the neck went down and visa versa. I animated the duck on the left, moving the head as the neck went moved and Ralph animated the one on the right; only moving the head at the end of the nod. We decided to use my method but I think that Ralph’s duck had a bit more character to it but I suppose we needed them to look mechanical. The ducks also moved around quite a lot, so we glued them down afterwards. The floor is also animated in this test, we had actually done a test with this earlier but that was on the trail version of stop motion pro and is therefore lost in the depths of cyber land, waiting for Richard to come and rescue it.

With all of that figured out I then set about trying to animate the egg-cup, I tried this first test on both ones and twos, I couldn’t find the one I did on twos but we chose to animate it on ones anyway. In this test it is propped up on plaster-scene which looked ok, and gave a nice looking rotation effect to the whole thing but it wasn’t particularly sturdy so we put a bolt through it.

In this test, said bolt is in place and affixed to the set, we were going to glue it but we seem to have been using the most lame glue known to man and just held it and everything else in place with plaster-scene; the greatest invention ever. This test was nice and pretty and most importantly, sturdy.

Almost everything was set then loomed the dreaded egg, the bain of my life; which I spent three days trying to animate. I have only included the final test as the other two tests are just pitiful and the other countless attempts to lower it that are just to painful to recall. They involved me gluing the egg to a piece of dowel and lowering it frame by frame, via G clamp and a hole in the ceiling, into the eggcup. It all looked very jumpy and it was near impossible to lower it in a strait line. So Ben came up with the nifty idea of putting the dowel through the egg – genius. With the aid of strategically placed holes and a pin I could lower the egg like a dream.

And so we arrive at the finished product, and isn’t it just lovely, Ben stood in for Ralph and animated the duck on the right, Holley moved the floor, Charlotte yelled numbers at us and pushed a big button and I just hogged as much animation as possible and animated the duck on the left, the eggcup and the egg. The egg does come down a bit quickly but apart from that I think its ok.

Ralph and I have also shot a scene of the floor spinning to a stop and the candelabra things but due to time constraints we did no tests, which I know is very bad and wrong, as of yet there are no videos of these scenes as the people in post are working off of stills and I forgot to make a separate video for my blog but hopefully I can find time to do that tomorrow as well as talk about the lighting.