ChildLine Animation Development: the incorporation of lego and the everlasting struggle against background design

I'd wanted to animate with lego for a long time. I'd been a long time admirer of the Michel Gondry directed White Stripes music video Fell in Love With a Girl and always wondered why there weren't other videos in that Lego style. Yes, I know there are many lego movies on YouTube but the style I'm talking about uses no actual Lego men and instead everything is built with actual bricks, including the people.

I don't have the time or the cash to animate a full animation with lego alone but I felt some incorporation of it would be cool.

That is when I had the idea that the lego could be the background. At the start of the animation, the background is made up of a generally muted use of colours, but a few bright bricks here and there. (This represents I feel the world we live in. Initially I was going to have it that the background would be made up of multi coloured bricks but that to me represents a magical fairytale world we live in. Not the real one, that isn't entirely dark and depressing but also isn't all sunshine and lollipops either.

Then when the bubble appears from her stomach in the background it is represented as a bubble of grey bricks that slowly start to take over. I liked the idea that she is also somewhat transparent, representing her mood but whether that will work is another thing. I'll experiment and if it works great and if it doesn't I'll rotoscope the background from the footage I filmed, this would take longer but might still look good.

Applied Animation Development: Reference

The very first shot of my ChildLine animation is the girl walking through a classroom/student environment. She is central and it is a mid shot of her face on so the camera tracks her. 

I knew this would be a challenge to animate but I also knew it wouldn't do the shot justice if it were filmed any other way. It's essentially the establishing shot that establishes her as the central character and the fact that she is basically the only character in the animation.

I knew I was going to need reference (let's face it, you sort of need reference for most things in animation) and the reference I got was Lauren imitating the same shot.

I was initially going to film this reference shot before easter but I was advised that filming it with a DSLR camera and tripod would be far more effective than a handheld Samsung phone. 

I filmed multiple shots, taking full advantage of the equipment and the actor and in the end I feel the shots turned out successful. Had I not been so pushed for time I would have obtained a dolly or shoulder camera holder to make the camera even more steady but if I have any hope of finishing this thing on time I can't be too fussy with footage that won't even appear in the final animation.

Applied Animation Development: The Long Overdue Return to the Drawing Board

In the last three weeks I was unable to do a lot of work on my ChildLine animation due to working 9 to 6 full time at the garden centre all easter break to save money thus when I got home everyday my brain would not be up for animating from scratch so instead I coloured frames from my Elements Animation so it meant I'd still be doing work. 

That three weeks working did take a significant chunk out of the time that could have been used working on the Child line animation. But I'm free now so am able to dedicate far more of my time to this animation as it has been neglected.

My first course of action was to figure out where I'd gotten up to with my animation. This reminded me of the wall I had hit. The only animation I had actually put together was a movement that comes close to the end of my animation where the girl finally hits rock bottom and goes from standing up against a wall to kneeling in a sort of panic position where to her all hope is lost. 

I had first animated this with pencil on layout paper and even though animating from one  key frame to the other was very tricky, particularly because I had to reposition the frames in Photoshop after, the end results I feel were largely successful and even though it was slightly rough looking, overall it flowed nicely.

I then went back attempting to neaten out the frames but then I kept editing it because I found that as I persistently watched it back, I would find inconsistencies such as the girls arm would stretch or her hand would grow. After I spent a huge amount of time editing and  making sure all her dimensions were consistent I played it back. The results, the good flow was no longer there and she looked too robotic. 

After that I guess i had just just lost enthusiasm for the whole thing and just decided to take a break a from it. But now I've come back to it I've officially stopped worrying about minor inconsistencies and have now decided to focus on making the whole thing flow well.