Responsive: LoopdeLoop Sisters - Animating and Using Refference

As with all my animations almost all movement I had to either act out before had or reference in some way. Referencing I believe to be one of the most important parts of animation and the more I use of it, the more realistic the movements I animate are.

I'm aware that visually my characters are fairly simplistic and not that realistic with big heads and big eyes, elongated knees etc. but if watch Studio Ghibli films has taught me anything, it's that it doesn't really matter how simplistic a character looks, it's in their personality and physicality that makes them relatable to the viewer.

I don't just use reference for animating movement, I also reference for most of my backgrounds as I can never think of how to plan out rooms for example so reference helps with understand how big a door should be in comparison to a character for example.

Now for almost referencing I prefer to use live action and real life, so nothing that has been created by humans or drawn, just because I feel like if I was referencing a hand and I just referenced a drawing of a hand it would basically be like copying and I wouldn't develop my own techniques in any way. That being said, in my animation there is a scene where the studying sister squeezes the annoying sister's head and it explodes, and there isn't a great deal of live-action reference material for that. So I had to look at how they do it in animation and the most useful reference material I found was in the animated series South Park.

The head explosion scene took four days to animate even though it was only around six frames long so half a second. The reasons for this justified the amount of time taken as not only was it highly complicated to figure out but I also had to incorporate colour which added to how complicated the scene was to animate. 

In the end I feel it looked very successful although I wish I didn't have to reference South Park so much for it as that does feel like slightly cheating, although if it wasn't for the clip I referenced I would have had no idea about how to go about animating the scene.

Responsive: LoopdeLoop Sisters - Animating

Now I had my final character designs, I knew I wasn't really going to need much in the way of backgrounds as the animation was going to be mainly black and white so I could start animating. The idea was to have the annoying sister talk loudly on the phone while the other sister attempts and fails to concentrate on her studying. For dialogue, I recorded my sister pretending to talk on the phone in a kind of gossipy style.

But I felt even though it was well acted that I needed to do something to the dialogue to make it more interesting, so I rewound it so it would play backwards. The results I felt were very successful as it now sounded very strange and surreal, yet it still sounded like a loud sister gossiping on the phone to her friend. Plus I like to think of it as 'cartoon-speak' like how Sims sound on the game Sims. It also makes it easier to watch again since it is on a loop, it's annoying after a while, but that is intended and I also feel it makes it more interesting.

I had animated dialogue before so I had had experience, but animating backwards dialogue was a hole lot harder. Last year when I animated dialogue in my PPP Dream animation, the dialogue was a lot slower and I also knew the words that were being said which made it easier to animate. But with this dialogue, where the words make no sense at all, figuring out how the mouth movements should look was a whole lot harder.

Furthermore I felt it was necessary to incorporate secondary movement in these talking scenes, this was difficult to time with the mouth movements but I felt it would make the character appear more life-like if not only her mouth is moving. I conducted secondary research by analysing how people, in particular females talk on the phone. I also asked females ho they talk on the phone and my findings suggested that they would use minor movements, such as feet twitching and playing with hair. After incorporating these secondary movements into my animation I felt the results were very successful in bringing the character to life.

Responsive: LoopDeLoop Sisters - Designing the Characters

When thinking about the visual aesthetic of this animation I was intrigued about working with different techniques that I usually do, for example instead of using lines, have no outlines and just make the characters shapes. I did like this idea, but unfortunately it took me so long to figure out how to draw and compose each of these shapes, I felt animating them would be simply too difficult and time consuming.

The above image is about as far as I got with working with shapes. Don't get me wrong, I was really liking the results but felt that figuring out how to animate with these shapes would be far too time consuming. I would still love to attempt an animation with this style but with this project, due to time constraints I really felt I had to animate the quickest way possible. 

So these were the final designs...

It is a pretty similar visual aesthetic to how I usually work but it's a technique I know and am comfortable with and with a brief where I have less than a month to submit I feel working in this way is a wise choice. I tried to make the sisters look different but also since they are on screen for less than a minute, make it obvious to the audience that they are sisters. So the studying sister has a wider more circular head and the annoying sister, I gave a taller more narrow head. But they both have similar eyes and large eyebrows.

Furthermore since I only had thirty seconds of screen time to work with, with basically no actual dialogue, I wanted each of the way they look to compliment their personalities. Therefore the studying sister wears an oversized male hooded jumper with the hood up, even when indoors to indicate her being slightly shy and more quiet meaning in her personality she likes to study. Yet I gave her eye-liner and spiky hair to show that she's a bit of a punk.

Whereas with the annoying sister, she wears slightly more revealing clothes, to show she is less shy, and has longer hair to show she is more 'girly'. Essentially, she is basically modelled after Emma Watson's character from the film The Bling Ring.

Responsive: LoopdeLoop Sisters - Research

As always with any brief, once I have an idea I am confident I can work with and would be successful I then go about gathering research. For this animation, since it consists of two characters, an 'annoying one' and a 'studying one' I only really needed to research these two types of people, so as always I looked to the photography website Shutterstock for inspiration.

I gathered these images when I was thinking about the studying sister...

And I gathered these images when I was thinking about the sister who is annoying the studying sister...

With the annoying sister I needed to gather a range of images with girls in different poses to create the illusion that every time it cuts back to the annoying sister talking on the phone that she's been doing it a really long time. The above images also helped me a great deal with getting body dimensions right. Now I had a good amount of reference material I could design the characters.

Applied Animation: Untitled Documentary Animation Project - Research - Setting Sun by The Chemical Brothers

I feel at this early stage in the project we are definitely not all going to be thinking the same thing for how exactly we all want your animation to turn out. It will take time to figure out exactly what each of us likes and dislikes but I think at this early stage it is incredibly important to decide on a tone we want to go for. Once we get the tone right and we all know what tone we want for the animation I feel everything else should fall into place easier. But it is that tone we need to figure out first.

A big piece of inspiration for me with this project that I feel captures the tone of what we're going for is The Chemical Brothers music video for the song Setting Sun.

The music video is absolutely insane with it's mad visuals and fast paced chaotic rhythm. It basically follows a young woman through some sort of mad drugs trip and she is constantly surrounded by bizarre individuals and intense claustrophobic backgrounds. The video is quite disturbing and after watching it I always feel slightly nausious yet I am still intrigued by it and kind of want to experience it again, kind of like a drugs trip.

I will show this music video to Matt and Jemma because I feel that the effect that video has on me when I watch it is exactly the effect I feel our animation should have on the viewer when they get to watch it.

Applied Animation: Untitled Animation Documentary Project - Research

After deciding to go for the couple mock-documentary idea we decided that since we had basically two weeks off with the assessment weeks so we each decided to go off and gather as much research for the subject as we could. And when I say 'subject' I mean 'subjects' such as…

• Satanic Rituals
• Couples
• Romance
• Found Footage Documentaries
• Human Sacrifice
• Honeymoon videos

As you can see this two minute documentary covers a wide range of stuff so it's important that we come into it knowing what we are doing. My job was to go off and research satanist cults and sacrifices, basically the messed up stuff that happens in the moc-doc.

I looked at a wide range of sources for inspiration. I feel it's always important to initially start off by putting together a bunch of imagery in a mood-board-like fashion to get ideas, these were the images I was able to gather that I felt would fit the tone we were going for…

Most of the below images aren't really specific to anything in particular, they just to me fit the mood of what I want to go for with the second half of the mod-doc, e.g. disturbing, unsettling, dark humour...

When thinking about this project the artist Aphex Twin would stick in my mind. Often when I look at his visual work and music work I feel he tries for a similar outcome as us to disturb the audience and make them uncomfortable but still keep with a dark humour tone.

The film Kill List by Ben Wheatley is also a fairly major inspiration for me with this project so I will advise Jemma and Matt to watch it too.

The Chemical Brothers also include a lot of very weird stuff in their work. For example, when I saw them last year at Glastonbury, when they began performing the song Elektrobank a guy appeared on screen covered in strange white powder shouting the exact same sentence into an orange phone over and over again. It was quite unsettling to watch but also very entertaining and comical.

Applied Animation: Untitled Documentary Animation Project - Developing Our Idea

So we came into this pretty eager. Matt had had an incredibly bizarre dream the night before and then the three of us discussed the idea of doing an animation based around dreams. This is a subject all three of us were very interested in and I had made an animation based around around a dream in the past so had good experience. But even though we had good animation ideas such as strutting the animation as if it's one dream leading into another, we had a major obstacle too tackle, how were we going to make this a documentary? We thought about the possibility about not having it as a documentary about dreams, but about people who dream and we could interview people about the dreams they had and what it meant to them. But we received feedback that it may be a bit of a clique. With this worry in mind and not a strong enough reason to stay with the idea we decided to drift away from the idea of making it about dreams and having our theme be that of 'mental health' which is a very tough subject to tackle effectively anyway.

(The Sopranos - The Test Dream)

We decided to move away from mental health and have a think about the other themes. We even thought about the theme of 'sport', a subject none of us were too confident about. The idea we had about this theme was making a mock-umentary sports documentary about bringing back the sport of gladiators to a modern audience.

The idea of doing a mock-documentary was very popular amongst the three of us. Both Matt and I enjoy working together because we like to not really do what we're told and surprise people by going against what is expected of us. It's not our way of 'rebelling against the system' it's just our way of keeping ourselves interested and passionate about what we're doing by doing something that people don't believe we can do and trying to prove people wrong, even if we often fail.

Another idea we had was to do a mock-relationship-documentary. The synopsis was that it would start with an interviewer/cameraman filming a couple at a table on their honey moon for example. The interview is just a standard couple interview with questions such as 'How did you meet?' so obviously it's not particularly interesting for the viewer to watch, or the cameraman. So in the background weird stuff begins to happen such as strange characters emerge and start performing a satanic ritual or human sacrifice for example. The cameraman slowly pans from the couple to focus on the madness going on in the background. Things get more and more out of control and eventually he gets spotted filming them and the cult members chase him down, knocking the camera and the footage cuts to black.

Upon asking for feedback, they decided that the last couple-moc-doc was the strongest and I feel it was the idea we each felt most passionate about so decided to develop this one further.

Applied Animation: Untitled Documentary Animation Project - New Beginnings

So it's the start of a new brief and we are all collaborating with each other again. Matt and I are working together again. Now I am aware that it is good to branch out and work with a variety of different people. But we both decided to work with each other again, not because we're mates, but because in the last project we both felt we created a really strong animation and work well together. We are both very aware of each other's weaknesses so that wouldn't be likely to surprise us down the line and we are both aware of each other's strengths and can use that to the project's advantage. We also have a new recruit to the dream team with Jemma who neither of us have worked with previously so that still gives us the opportunity to gain experience of working with a variety of people.

Don't get me wrong, I do think we can make a very strong animation together but I do feel and I don't think the other two would disagree with me saying this that each of our major weaknesses is that of time keeping and staying organised with work. That will be the major task of this project, to try to keep all three of us organised and on top of our workload.

Responsive: Loop De Loop Sisters, In the beginning...

Whoa I've been gone a month! How time flies, well we've got a lot to catch up on, let's get started. For the module Responsive we had to pick three substantial briefs set by real outside sources and then basically do them. Admittedly I had trouble initially finding three briefs that both interest me and would be satisfactory to submit. But one of the easiest choices and BY FAR most popular was Loop De Loop. This website every month states a theme and then literally anyone can submit a looping animation about that theme. Other fellow classmates had made Loop De Loop animations in the past so I had always been interested in making one myself but just never had time. But luckily having this brief was the perfect motivation for me because it meant I had to make the time. Furthermore I felt the theme of this moth which is 'Sisters' was a far easier theme to tackle than last months which was 'LOL'.

So the idea for my animation came relatively quickly. Lauren gave me the idea for my animation upon telling me a story about when she had once gotten so mad at her sister that she tried to crush her head between her hands. I then developed this idea further by then deciding that the sister would succeed in exploding the other sister's head. But then she would feel guilty about it, grab a vacuum cleaner and vacuum up her head parts before turning the vacuum cleaner from 'suck' to 'blow' and aiming it at the top of the other sisters head before having it reform itself. Then once the other sister's head is completely re-formed she then precedes to annoy the other sister again and the animation loops.

Unlike previous animations I have made recently this animation doesn't really have any depth to it whatsoever so that makes a nice change. Furthermore I have no real desire to colour any of it apart from maybe the annoying sister's head parts so that should save me a great deal of time.