Elements Animation Development: Slowly but Surely...

It is the 28th of December and even though the process of developing my animation is slow, sometimes it feels like glaciers move faster, I feel I am making real progress even though I only have a few seconds to my name.

So, where am I at? Well the frames in which the little girl jumps off the swing before running off are tidied up with the exception of two at the end in which her leg disappears off screen.

Then the frames in which grass covers the teddy bear's face are entirely cleaned up. These frames were perhaps the most concerning to me in the case of time management because I wanted to solve the issue of the girl rediscovering the bear shortly after she lost it by covering up the bear but in the process of having each blade of grass individually grow... I'll let the drawings speak for themselves...

As you can see, when the grass starts to grow there are relatively few grass strands to deal with. But then as the grass grows longer and dozens of new grass strands are introduced, the frames become increasingly difficult to map out. Anyway its safe to say by the 17th frame I was completely lost in what was grass and what was still bear. But I was given some good advice about how to combat my problem of frames taking too long to do (by this time each was taking around 40 minutes to draw and to add insult to injury I misplaced my 12th frame, forgot I had drawn a 12th frame, redrew it, then rediscovered my original 12th frame, both frames looked basically identical and I'd just wasted 40 minutes.) The feedback was to instead of only having grass cover the teddy, introduce ivy to the picture and have it grow up and cover the teddy. Ivy is a lot bigger than grass and takes a lot less time to grow so introducing this plant seemed to be a nobrainer. 

 

If sketching these frames out proved to be time consuming the first time, retracing the sketchy lines on Photoshop proved to be just as slow, but that's what I did for the first frame. After that I new that in order to get 20 seconds of animation done there had to be a faster process. that is when I realised that using the magic wand tool to erase the background and then with the lines on a seperate layer I could alter the levels to bring the contrast right up and brightness right down to turn my originally sketchy dull pencil lines into nice thick black lines.

 Before

After

Something that could have taken another 40 minutes to do was accomplished in around 2 minutes which was hugely time saving. 

The above image is the initial first layer and in a way serves as a background for all the frames to come.

As you can see frame 2 (above) has far less grass strands, that is so I wouldn't get too confused I have only drawn the frames I was going to grow, the rest of the background grass strands are on a separate layer. At the end I merged every layer with the first background layer to create the final frames.

Elements Animation Development: 18th December

So since I last blogged I have been mainly working on layout paper so these frames are sketched out first then scanned into the computer. Next the lines on each frame are drawn over with the pen tool to give each frame a nice bold line so it doesn't look like each frame has been sketched out with a pencil.

The frames I am currently working on are the frames in which the girl jumps off the swing and runs off screen. We've these frames they all look good as a sequence so I am now in the process of tidying them up by going over them with the pen tool on Photoshop. This process is taking a lot longer than I had hoped and I have only done 11.

 After

Before

                                                               
The other frames I am working on are the frames in which grass grows and covers the teddy bear to the point where we cannot see it anymore. (Just a quick side note; I believe I have solved the problem of 'wouldn't the girl just rediscover her teddy bear after losing it if its only at the back of her garden?' 

Because, now in the story I had the idea that the element of earth, not only is alive but also aware of its existence and the existence of others around it. Earth hides the teddy bear from the young girl in an attempt to teach her the lesson of being responsible for her things. Then 10 years later earth uncovers the teddy bear for the girl who is now around the age of 19 who is now old enough and mature enough to be responsible for her things.

Anyway the shot is an aerial shot of the teddy bear and we are watching as grass over takes it... As you can imagine there are a lot of grass blades to animate, a lot of grass blades. All moving at the same time it isn't too complicated, it is just very time consuming.

I feel that I am getting more and more behind as the deadline is fast approaching. I think that in order to finish this thing in time I am going to have to change my techniques and processes for animating. Either I stop retracing my lines on Photoshop which is a hugely time consuming process. Or I abandon the idea of coloring all 240 frames which is probably the more likely outcome.

Elements Animation: Glen Keane's Duet

Something else that inspired me to get away from animating on Photoshop and to move to paper. Computers are an incredibly important part of the modern animation process. No matter how traditional some animations try to stay, computers will always be used just because with out them the process would take forever.

But not only was this particular animation process taking a very long time. Because I wanted the girl's movements to be as realistic as possible, but in keeping to realistic movements I got to in depth with being methodical and moved further and further away from the playfulness of cartoony animation.






There is an incredible animation by Glen Keane, an animator who worked for Disney for 38 years called Duet. What is to me so amazing about the animation is that the movements of the characters are realistic in that you can obviously tell they are the movements of a boy, a girl and a dog growing up. But the animation style is so nice and fluid it also remains very cartoony and exaggerated.

As you can tell by the above sketches by Keane, they are not over-the-top methodically drawn. Instead, they are incredibly quickly drawn rough sketches, that when played back to back have an incredibly nice feel to them.

Inspired by Keane's incredible work on Duet I didn't try to model my animation on his (because let's face it, he's been animating for at least 38 years and is basically as good as it gets), but instead to take his approach of drawing fast, loose sketches that don't just have one outline, but maybe a few to get the right dimensions.

Elements Animation Development Process 7

Okay, so since I last blogged I had been using a computer and specifically Photoshop to create my animation. That meant drawing one quick sketch with pen and paper and then doing the rest on computer. But Matt told me what I needed to hear, I was being way to precise and methodical. He said I might as well have just rotoscoped my footage.

I had to agree, I had spent so much time developing a second of footage, sixty three seconds to be exact and it seemed that the only gain to me doing this was that the final second might look a bit more precise than if I had done it with pen and paper on layout paper.

Anyway immediately after I grabbed loads of layout sheets, put my head down and worked flat out for around three hours drawing frames of the girl jumping off the swing at the end of the cycle. Twelve frames and one second of footage I have now realised that technically I've wasted 63 hours of my life creating the same amount of footage on the computer.

When I played back the hand drawn animation I found that it flowed well and looked as good as what I had done just using Photoshop. Either way its better to learn this late than never. Now I draw all my frames out by hand, scan them into the computer, make sure they flow together and then trace them with the pen tool on Photoshop. Instead of a second a week I will now try to work at a rate of a second a day.

Elements Animation Development Process 6

Right, so let's get onto animating the girl on the swing and the entire process throughout the last week because a lot has happened. It began with me sketching design of the girl, inspired by the references I spoke of previously. See my design below...

Originally I intended to draw out my swing animation on layout paper. I felt like I didn't want to be solely reliant on computers because even though layout paper can be slightly rougher it also has a looser feel to it if you know what I mean. Anyway I tried layout paper, but there are certain advantages to computers and things you can achieve that are simply impossible with pencil and paper. For example, copy and paste. 

The copy and paste tool allows me to use certain parts of the girl's body over and over which keeps a consistency throughout my animation and it is also hugely time-saving, meaning I don't constantly have to redraw everything.

Anyway I scanned in the sketch onto my computer and traced the character with the pen tool on Photoshop. See below...

From then on I just used Photoshop to draw my frames, layers were far easier to see through than layout paper and if I ever made a mistake I could go back and edit it no problem.

The above screenshots are references for each frame of my animation. I didn't even think about roto-scoping them because firstly, to me, they take the animation out of the process. And also its just so much more dull to create. I couldn't just have the girl swing back and forth on the swing because that would look incredibly robotic. 

Plus a four year old does not just sit on a swing and swing perfectly. As you can see I had to observe the secondary movements of the girl in the footage carefully. She falls about on the swing because she can't sit still and she's not quite big enough to ride the swing, or strong enough to give the swing enough oomph to go very far. I copied these secondary actions and altered the girl's limbs to look like the girl in the footage. 

Its a fine balance, I wanted the girl's movements to look realistic, her physicality needs to be that of a real four year old girl for the viewers to see her as a four year old girl. But also Mike mentioned to me to keep in mind the technique of exaggeration. Not only do I need to animate her like a four year old girl, but I also need to animate her like a four year old animated girl. Very tricky stuff.

Elements Animation Development Process 5

Another issue I am currently facing is what age to make my central character when she rediscovers her dog teddy. She's definitely four at the start of the animation.

I used my sister Florence as a reference for our four year old character when she was around that age.

I also used Lotte from the YouTube video Portrait of Lotte 0 to 14 in 4 minutes as a reference on how to draw a four year old girl.

But then I wanted to convey the idea that a huge amount of time has passed since the girl has lost her dog teddy. I guess its up to the viewer to interpret what happened to her in that time; she gets upset, she searches for it, forgets about it, goes through school, grows up and re-discovers it.

Originally I was fairly set on the idea to have her come back fifteen years old. I felt it would be enough time for her to have changed significantly, but also an age where she has matured enough to be more careful with the things she's responsible for. Going back to the feedback I recieved about maybe setting the story over a period of a few months instead of a decade I just don't think I could represent that idea of the girl becoming mature enough to look after her stuff over a time period that short. 

My sister aged 15 I might use as a reference for our 15 year old girl character.

I might also use 14 year old Lotte from the YouTube video Portrait of Lotte 0 to 14 in 4 minutes as a reference for how to draw a fifteen year old girl. 

I received feedback about this idea of having her come back to the dog teddy 15 years old to my friend Matt. He told me that 15 might not be an old enough age for her to be mature enough to gain a respect for her childhood toys, as he also has a sister who's 14, he said that 15 year old's often tend to be more sassy and more about rebelling. This was a very good point and something that had not occurred to me in the slightest. He suggested that a more realistic age the girl could rediscover the dog teddy would be closer to 20, maybe 19.

Elements Animation Development Process 4

Right so since when I had a final decision about how to animate the girl character on the swing, this is what I've done since.

I had a break from this part of the animation and did some photography. In my animation I had the idea that to further convey the idea of time rapidly passing by, have buildings in the background morph from small run down buildings into brand new modern tall buildings. This was never going to be a central part of my animation because it doesn't really relate to the element earth, but I feel it would give the viewer a better idea of just how much time was passing throughout the twenty seconds.

The Above building was one I spotted across the road from where I live and I felt it would be perfect for my 'before' building because the sign literally tells us it is a place in need of renovation.

Its also good to get an idea of what it would look like if I was to animate it in a nighttime setting.

I was very interested in animating this car park because I felt the transition into a modern tall building would be far smoother as it would be a similar height. 

The above is the first potential candidate for my new building, terrible photo though.

I really liked the above building and spent ages trying to get to it. The darker it got, the better and more futuristic the building looked.

I don't really know when my animation is set, maybe now at the beginning and then ten years in the future. I know I might be trying to cram too many themes into a twenty second animation but I thought it would be interesting to represent the future as more of a utopia than a dystopia. I could have gone down the route of showing rubbish piling up in the streets but I was instead wanting to keep to the basic idea I had at the start to just make something that's pretty to look at.

I also wanted to get some photos of the area I'm planning to reference for where the girl is going to be playing on the swing. Just to figure out exactly how this animated world is going to look, and also how to draw the same landscape at different times of the day.

I was given feedback about my animation and the issue was brought to my attention about where this is going to be set. My teacher Matt said that if the girl drops the dog teddy off the swing and leaves it behind, surely in the space of ten to fifteen years someone else would discover it, kids use swings all the time. I responded to this saying that perhaps the location of thew swing is on an isolated hill, but then Matt replied with the query of what a four year old girl is doing on an isolated hill by herself?

I felt this was a very good point and needed to be addressed. Matt suggested that this problem could be solved by telling this story over a far shorter period of time. Say, instead of ten to fifteen years, have it be a few months. I felt this idea would make a lot more sense, but I was worried that setting my story over a time period this short could run a threat of miss-communicating the idea I was originally going for. Basically that I wanted to show the element of earth changing over a long period of time and then to have the same girl come back to the dog-teddy a lot older and wiser. At an age where she can truly appreciate the things of the past.

That is when I changed my idea of setting the animation on a public hill and switched it to a family's back garden. But I still had the issue of wouldn't the girl just find the bear very soon after. I asked my friend Matt, another Matt, for his advice on the matter. He responded saying he didn't see it as as much of an issue, saying that he has an old trampoline in his back garden that goes months and months without being touched. 

If I can think of a way to solve this issue I would ideally like to keep to the same time period of around ten to fifteen years, but this primary issue of discovering the teddy needs to be addressed.

The Classical Elements: Idea Generation

To me, this is one of the most interesting briefs we've ever been set. The thought of creating an animation about one of the four elements fire, wind, water and earth is very exciting to me. But because this is an exciting opportunity I do not want to waste this opportunity with a throwaway idea. I want to animate something I feel passionate about now and I want to feel as passionately about it at the end of the project to.

I feel my last animation for 'Apply' was very character based and while I was happy with the results of that animation, I wanted to create something now that focuses less on characters, more on visuals. I want people to hopefully watch my animation, then want to watch it again because it makes them feel good. I had this sort of experience after watching the Hayoa Miyazaki Studio Ghibli film The Wind Rises.

That whole film is incredibly dreamlike. It's slow paced, and I can see why people might call it boring but to me its the perfect watch, right before you go to bed. It relaxes you with its amazing flying sequences but that doesn't mean there are no surprises, some of the scenes, particularly the flying sequences are absolutely awe inspiring.

Elements Animation Development Process 3

Well we are now about a month into the project and time has gone way too quick. In the past week we had to present a presentation to our groups for a critique. I feel the critique went well and of course the obvious issue was brought up, would this animation be created in time for the deadline if it had taken around three weeks to just animate grass. Basically I responded to this feedback with the understanding that yes, to get the right quality with this animation and to make it look like how I want it, it is going to take a huge amount of time. Therefore I will just have to complete my Visual Language brief so I can focus all my time and attention onto this animation.

29/11/14

I've finished my Grass! Now, what I mean by this is all the grass animation I needed for one certain shot lasting around a second is done. So, you could sort of say one second down, nineteen to go. But of course the second isn't yet fully complete, I still need a background.

The idea was originally to save time by instead of drawing or painting a sky, simply photograph the sky. I felt it would have a really nice effect because if I were to photograph the sky and then photograph it slightly to the left for example, when I play it back it could look like a time-lapse in on of itself, like clouds are passing over. Or if I were to photograph the sky in the evening every ten minutes, when I play it back it could look like the sun is going down at an incredible speed to add to the time-lapse effect. The sun going down photography would be slightly more challenging to animate with because of course if the lighting changed in the background, it would make sense for the central objects, such as the teddy bear to stay lit with the same lighting.

Anyway to cut a long story short, I haven't been able to get any photography of the sky because it's been grey. cloudy sky everyday for the last month. But as soon as there's a blue sky I'll be out there.

Anyway I knew twiddling my thumbs waiting for a sunny day could take a lifetime so would not be an effective use of my time. So, before I had any time to relax I moved on to designing my girl character. The idea is that since the animation is only twenty seconds long we are going to have very little time to get to know her so that's where the time-lapse comes in.

When we are first introduced to her she is around four years old. No one's going to tell us she's that age, therefore she needs to look like a four year old. I thought about having her play on a small swing held up by a branch. I've debated with myself whether we should see her face or not. I feel definitely we should when she's older (I'll explain why later) but...

No wait scratch that! It's been a day since I was last typing so much has happened. Originally I wasn't going to show her face but then I decided to show her face. At the end of the day, she is the protagonist.

There's a great website called Shutterstock that is basically a massive filing cabinet of reference material. It has everything. In order to represent the character as a four year old girl I need to animate her as realistically as possible. The easiest way to understand how a four year old girl would act on a swing is to basically find footage of a young girl on a swing. That is when I searched exactly that into Shutterstock and found exactly the right reference material I need.

As you can see its not just as simple as animating a girl on a swing, there are certain things you need to take into account. The girl in the above video swings amateurishly, like she doesn't really have the strength to push herself off the ground very far. You can also tell due to her age, she can't really sit still without wriggling. Then you look at the boy who is slightly older and you can tell that due to his maturity he has a greater understanding of how to do it and can also sit still easier.

Elements Animation Development Process 2

Well, I think its fair to say I've spent at least two weeks now animating grass. I was very close to giving up and switching to a new idea. In fact I was set on changing my idea. But, when I was discussing to my friend about how I'd given up the idea, my tutor Matt overheard what my old idea was and said he liked it and encouraged me to stick with it. I expressed my concerns about just how much work this thing was going to take and whether it would be worth carrying it on and he replied, 'that's animation'.

Anyway the rest is history and since that moment of doubt my passion about the animation has been reignited.

A common theme in my animations is something I'm very interested in. Watching a huge amount of time passing in the space of a very short amount of time. This process is time-lapsing. I used it in my last animation when I had a father and son Pritt Stick age decades together in the space of thirty seconds. And here, even though I'd like to think my Elements animation is very different, it to uses the technique of time-lapsing.

One of the greatest obstacles we face with trying to tell an engaging story within the space of twenty or thirty seconds is that it is a very short amount of time to get an audience rooting for a protagonist. You don't have time to tell an audience a back-story or even give them a name really. Therefore what I have come to think of as an effective technique of storytelling is to instead of showing less, just speed up the storytelling process.

There is an amazing video I found on YouTube called Portrait of Lotte - 0 to 14 in 4 mins which is basically, like the title states, footage of a girl her dad has captured of her everyday since she was born up until her 14th birthday. Now you wouldn't expect to become emotionally connected to someone in the space of four minutes, but because we've watched so much time pass and basically watched her grow up, seen all her emotions from laughing to crying, I did find it very touching.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH1x5aRtjSQ

Elements Animation Development Process

For my Elements Animation I wanted to think of an idea I was really passionate about. Since we were going to be working on it till January, I knew that if I was working on an idea I wasn't a hundred percent into I would just lose interest and would be as committed to putting in the amount of time it would need.

It took a long time to come up with an idea, too long. I began looking into the element 'Earth', only because I felt of all of them, earth was the most intriguing. I began researching images of where nature takes over. These images were often of places that have been abandoned by humans and then left for decades for nature to take back the land.





I thought of the idea to have a young girl playing with her dog teddy on a hill. She gets called by her mother and runs off, accidentally leaving her dog teddy behind. Then we see a time-lapse of around fifteen years where we see nature take over; grass grows up around the teddy, a tree grows in the background, older builds morph into new buildings, flowers grow etc.

I felt that my last animation was very character based and while I perhaps most enjoy working with characters and creating animations that are fundamentally character based. I really wanted to try something different and go in a completely new direction. Now this animation is told through the eyes of the element earth, rather than an actual character.

A dog teddy is featured in the animation because I new I needed a teddy to reference and a dog teddy is just what my roommate happened to possess. I took the teddy out across the road to a hill about a minute away from where I live. This hill will be the inspiration and reference for where my animation takes place.

I took many photos of the teddy from every possible angle I thought I could possibly need (always better to have too many photos than not enough) and I also took photos of the surrounding scenery that I felt could be used in my animation.

Plotting out the story and creating the storyboard happened pretty much simultaneously with beginning the process of developing my animation. The reason for this is I new the actual workload of animating this short was going to be massive. This is due to the fact that I am not just animating one thing, I'm animating everything, from individual grass grains growing to shadows moving.

Below is my storyboard...

I began by sketching the dog in the different positions and then after scanning in the sketches and placing them on photoshop, went over them with a solid line. The first bit of animation I wanted to do for experimental purposes were the grass growing around the teddy.

On a separate layer I drew around ten grass strands standing at different heights in a line. Then through using the same technique as hand drawn animation I extended the grass stands slightly on a new layer and continued this process for around nine frames. Then after the grass had almost doubled in height I went back and added extra frames in between each old frame. This way we can watch the animation for longer.

Just drawing and colouring these frames have taken a very long time to do. Around fourteen hours if we're getting into specifics. I felt that to get the right effect not only did the grass need to be coloured with a solid colour, but they also needed to be shaded with a lighter colour to add the effect of a light shinning on the object.

To save time in my animation I thought instead of drawing, colouring and shading a sky, to instead use photography. I feel this could add to the time-lapse effect if I took photos of the sky at different points in the day, e.g. every ten minutes. Or I could take photos of different parts of the sky, so when I play it back it looks like clouds are passing over incredibly quickly like in a real time-lapse video in some sort of nature documentary.

Another inspiration for me with this animation is the quote from director/animator Hayoa Miyazaki...



I am very interested in the idea that man underestimates nature and that the planet doesn't really need us at all. If we were to all suddenly disappear off the face of the planet, the planet would just carry on living and the element earth would take back the land we have spent centuries developing.