Applied Animation: Project Evaluation

As a whole I have really enjoyed this project. It has taught me a lot, but it has been a challenge. I might as well start from the beginning. Matt and I were really happy that we were once again working in a group together. Of course our working partnership has not always ran smoothly as we worked together in the first module of second year Character and Narrative where the main issue we had was time management. I really like working with Matt because we share similar interests in what we like to watch, particularly in animation. So that's great considering half of animation in my mind should be watching stuff. Therefore, the fact that we like to watch similar stuff means that we also like to create similar stuff. In the first project we were so eager about our idea and it came so naturally to us that we just assumed it would happen again in this project.

Unfortunately the idea generation part of this project was the part we really struggled with. and that's not just Matt and I, because we were also working with Jemma and all three of us were initially finding it quite a struggle to come up with an idea. We also felt that the brief this tme was a lot more complicated than the previous and we were struggling to think about what we could make with the documentary format.

What I also really like about working with Matt and now with Jemma also is that none of the ideas we were coming up with were boring in any way. But the problem with the ideas we were coming up with were that they were simply too big and too complicated to create in a minute to two minutes of animation.

We did originally pick am idea that we all as a group found very interesting, but we went a bit too fast with it and developed it in a few weeks with research and concept art before receiving feedback that it did not really fit the brief. In retrospect I do agree with this but at the time we were quite disheartened because here was this idea that we were each passionate about and had already dedicated quite a bit of time to and now were basically having to scrap it and start again, for the right reasons. This put us quite far behind on schedule and unfortunately would have significant knock on effects further down the line into the animation development process.

It got to a point where as a group we decided to shut ourselves away in a room for however long it would take to come up with an idea for our Animated Documentary, this time that fitted the brief. Eventually we thought of an idea I still feel was very strong.

Working with Matt and Jemma was a unique experience because I had collaborated with people on projects in the past, but that was only with one other person, this was the first time I had collaborated with two other people. It did make my job as director more complicated because I had to make sure we all knew exactly what we were doing at all times. I felt like throughout the project I was pretty good at this. I knew that if I was working individually I would often neglect pre-production work such as the storyboard and animatic because I would feel like in my head, I know exactly what I'm doing so don't really need to worry about stuff like that too much.

But in a group, communication is one of the most important aspects I have come to realise and the project will flow much smoother if everyone in the group understands exactly what it is they are supposed to be doing at all times. That is why I did work quite heavily on concept work, for example so the other two knew exactly what kind of style and look we were going to give the characters in the animation. Furthermore I also made sure we spent time creating a LAV video so that if we acted out all the scenes we could each better understand the personalities and practicalities of the characters we were trying to bring to life. And lastly, this is also why I spent a great deal of time on the storyboard because, particularly for Matt who was creating all the background designs the shots needed to be planned out exactly as to how they would look on screen.

The main problems we had as a group was time management. Time management has always been one of my weaknesses and as a director it was my responsibility to stay on top of time management. I felt like it was okay for us to only have a rough schedule of when we needed to do everything by because in my eyes, the important thing was not when individual tasks got completed, it was just that they got completed.

Unfortunately we were unable to fully complete the narrative we wanted to tell and had planned out in the final story-board which sadly did effect the viewing experience of the final animation. Once again I take full responsibility for this because as director it was my job to organise the project and organise exactly when each task should be completed. If I were to do this [project again I would make sure we concentrated more heavily on coming up with an idea for our animation that completely fits the brief. Furthermore I would have also created a far more detailed schedule and made sure that as a group we would complete certain tasks in the animation development process within a certain time frame.

Overall I am happy with how the final animation turned out. Although I felt like if we had planned our time better, which again was my responsibility we could have finished animating all the clips that were originally planned out in the storyboard/animatic and the quality of the final piece would have been higher.

Applied Animation: Reflecting on Being a Director

Okay, I realise now I'm not exactly Steven Spielberg, but I did have a lot of fun with being director. I really enjoyed collaborating with Matt and Jemma and also trying to steer the animation process in the right direction. I don't think we really had any problems in terms of conflicts or disagreements and I feel I really did my best to make sure everyone was satisfied and on board with exactly where the project was heading. But unfortunately my skills lacked in time management. Therefore I do accept full responsibility in us not completing all the individual clips we wanted and it is for that reason I don't think I will be too eager to take up the director role again in another collaborative project anytime soon.

Applied Animation: Creating the Final Storyboard Part 2

Essentially, all the story-board panels have been drawn from reference. This is due to the fact that referencing in this case is too easy not to do. The entire duration of the animation takes place in Leeds College of Art, where we are everyday working. So I figure referencing for every storyboard panel is very important to create a higher standard of drawing that aides both Matt and Jemma so when it comes to animating it is as clear for them as possible where it wouldn't have been had the drawings been very scrappy.

Obviously I don't want to draw the story-boards exactly as carbon copies from the reference material, it is not very creative and would become incredibly dull to animate. So that is why I insert my own made up elements. For example in the above panel, I have made Matt look a lot rougher (as this is five years down the line of intense animating) and I have also inserted a tally (representing the many, many, many days spent animating).

Applied Animation: Creating the LAV Part 3

The LAV was a lot of fun to make, but also very beneficial for us because it contained all of the reference material that we would use for our final animation. The characters we were going to be animating were literally myself and Matt and all the settings and locations we were going to animate and use for background designs were throughout the college we work in every day.

The LAV was very positively received in the interim critique although we did receive criticism. The main complaint was that it was too long and it was with a run time of around three minutes when we were aiming to make our animation a run time of around a minute to two minutes. We were advised to get our Animatic put together as soon as possible to combat this problem. So we were able to understand the timing of our animation better with individual scenes such as how long it takes me to walk down a corridor and how long I should aim to make the animation of that movement. But in understanding the run time of our entire animation, the LAV was not as successful.

Applied Animation: Creating the LAV Part 2

The idea for our animation was complicated enough so we felt that if we did not plan out the timing of each scene this thing could end up being far longer than previously anticipated. Therefore as a group we agreed to make a Live Action Video that consisted of using the script Matt had written for the animation and the storyboard I had drawn and acting out the entire animation.

Matt and I had done this previously in our Character and Narrative module and it worked out great. Not just because it helped us time our piece, but also because it helped us plan out things like how the characters react to each other, their physicality, and their emotions, this is very difficult to accomplish with a script alone.

Applied Animation: Taking Inspiration From the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Using That to Set the Tone

That is the tone I wanted to set for the animation that on the surface everything is fine and it's just two animators making an animation but under the surface things are a lot more ominous than they seem.

To represent this ominous tone to Matt and Jemma I went about filming other animation students. The footage was completely natural and most the time they didn't even realise they were being filmed, and when they did I would cut away. I also just wanted to film this footage to better understand how to go about animating animators in a way that is realistic and true.

Applied Animation: Animation Continues with a Walk Cycle Part 2

Now the side view walk cycle proved to be incredibly easy to create. The reason for this is because I had already created a nice flowing walk cycle in the past when I made a Loop De Loop animation. It flowed very nicely and was a very small part of that animation so I felt like it would be a great time saver to use this footage as a reference and simply draw my character over these frames.

Now the really complicated part of this animation process was transitioning smoothly the walk cycle of Max walking side on into Max walking towards the camera. This had to be done very subtly like he literally steps into it. When watching the footage back I feel overall it looks very smooth although he does float when the transition is happening, luckily I feel the actual animation is smooth enough that the viewer may not automatically notice.

Applied Animation: Finishing the Animation

Unfortunately due to poor time management we were unable to finish all the clips we wanted to for our animation. So the final animation unfortunately does not entirely replicate our final Animatic. I inserted a title card at the end of the animation explaining that 'due to lack of funding the team of animators were unable to finish project GREATEST ANIMATED DOCUMENTARY OF ALL TIME' so the animation should still make sense to the audience despite not having the ending we had originally intended for. This was very disappointing although I a overall, very happy with the final animation as a whole and feel like it is of a high quality. The upfront animation works very well against Matt's backgrounds and watching it back it does have the feel of a real documentary. If we were to do this project again I would make sure we were more on top of time management, but I will go into this further with my Evaluation.

Applied Animation: Colouring Frames and the Endless Battle Against Time

Colouring frames to me (if it's without shading) has always proven to be pretty much the easiest part of the animation process, but that doesn't mean it's any less time consuming than the other parts of production. I felt our animation needed to be fully coloured, I feel we all agreed on this. Although as time progressed it was looking more and more likely that we may not be able to complete all the clips planned out for us in the Animatic.

I blame myself for this because as director, it is my duty to ensure as a group we manage our time effectively and from the start I should have worked closer with the schedule to carefully plan out exactly how much time we would be allowed to work on one scene before we needed to move onto the next. But unfortunately I didn't really think that through and by doing something I often do, in that being too much of a perfectionist, I concentrated too much on making individual scenes look as professional whereas I should have been concentrating on the big picture, in making sure the whole animation is professional.

Anyway, looking back I feel we may have completed all the clips laid out for us in the Animatic if we left all the scenes black and white, but I felt to fit with Matt's very successful background designs that were often very well thought about in terms of colour tones that the upfront animation needed to be coloured to to bring up the quality of the whole animation.

Applied Animation: Lip Syncing

So a lot of our animation is talking, and I mean A LOT, so basically all of it. That's a lot of lip syncing. Luckily I am reasonably confident with lip syncing as I had done it before in first year, and in second with dialogue that was basically backwards-speak so I felt like animating the talking in this animation would not be too much of a problem. What was going to be a problem was the sheer quantity of lip syncing that needed to be done. At the start the process was slow, this was because I was working frame by frame, I'd play the dialogue on Premiere, hear a sound then draw the mouth movement to fit the sound, then create a new layer, duplicating the previous frame pretty much entirely apart from I would alter the mouth.

Whenever I would finish with the frame I would also call it the name of the sound it was replicating, for example 'Layer 1 i'. Once I was around twelve frames in I had basically created all the mouth movements so all I needed to do was if I needed an 'o' for example is simply search the layers I had previously made and find an 'i', Naming the layers like this proved to be incredibly important and time efficient, furthermore, animating all the secondary movement first such as head scratching or head turns was also very useful because it meant I could simply dive straight into these frames and simply insert mouths.

Applied Animation: Video Editing and Taking More Inspiration

A really nice way of putting together an animation, a way I would like to always do now is editing as you go. So using the Animartic Premiere file with all the right dialogue in place, we would simply animate a clip, render it as a movie file then place it in the Premiere file replacing the storyboard panel that it once was. This is also a really good way of seeing how the animation is going as it's happening, rather than putting together all the footage at the very end which is risky in terms of time management. Furthermore, doing the process this way means if any of us get ideas we can easily place them in.

For an example, an idea I had was inspired by the movie Cloverfield. Like our animation, Cloverfield is a mock-umentary that is presented in a way that is very realistic. So the movie is represented as secret government film footage which is evident to us when we first see the title cards appear on screen, see below...

I felt it would make our animation a lot more interesting if not only were we making a mock-umentary, but also if we as animators were literally pretending that all the audio in the animation is real and has been used by animators to create an animation. Below are the title cards I created that introduce the animation...

I felt like this would help establish the tone of the animation quicker since we were only given a minute to two minutes to establish this, furthermore I feel it helps the audience to better understand the tone a lot quicker.

To push this idea further I also inserted real audio into the animation as the title cards play on screen. Essentially the audio is just of ambient sounds, dramatically slowed down and with the volume dramatically increased. This turns the mundane into the bizarre. I felt this was successful in putting the audience slightly on edge, going back to that idea that on the surface everything is fine but underneath, all is not as it seems. 

Applied Animation: Taking Inspiration from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

I don't know why I failed to mention this earlier but at the start of the project once we as a group had figured what idea we wanted to do for our animation I knew exactly the sort of tone I wanted to create. I felt like if the other two in my group understood this tone I wanted to go for they would be as enthusiastic about pursuing it as I was.

I took inspiration from an excellent episode of the anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya that essentially is very different in tone to the rest of the series but acts as a gateway to the movie. Unlike the rest f the series that is very upbeat and fast moving, this episode takes a very slow, real tome approach. And the episode is literally that.

A lot of it is animated in real time. There is this one shot that the episode keeps going back to which is a high angle shot of a classroom with no one in it, apart from one of the main protagonists that is seen simply reading a book. This is shot in real time so there is hardly any movement in the shot, and all we can hear is the occasional turning of a page and weird slightly distorted noise coming from outside. We as the viewer cannot quite figure out what this noise is exactly and even if we can it doesn't really matter anyway. Nothing major at all happens in the episode and it is very easy to see it as just boring.

But I personally love the episode because not only does it dare to be different and show that not everything needs to be conventional and have some sort of plot or characters learning anything, but also because of the tone. The tone is oddly unsettling, nothing ever happens, yet as the viewer you are slightly on edge while you're watching it, like something very bad is ABOUT to happen, yet never does.

Applied Animation: Animation Continues with a Walk Cycle

So there's a scene in which Max walks down a long corridor in the college where he is animating. The idea was to have the same scene twice but one set when he is 25 and the other, set five years later when he is 30. In this time the college goes from being up and running, full of budding art students, to a decrepit waste land, literally because it has been abandoned and metaphorically to highlight the state of mind the two animators are in in each date and time.

Matt was going to supply the background designs for this scene so it was up to me to supply the animation. This shot was particularly complicated to animate, but that's fine because I knew for time keeping purposes I wanted to animate the more complicated scenes at the start and save the easier ones for later if the more complicated scenes were to be more time consuming.

This scene was particularly complicated to animate because it was a walk cycle where the character is walking twards the camera. I had animated side on walk cycles numerous times in the past and they were no problem at all once I had done it a few times, but this was a first and the reference footage proved to not be as helpful as I had anticipated. So as always in times of doubt I looked to The Animators Survival Kit to help me.

I found the above illustration from the book to be an incredibly helpful guideline to how I could go about animating my character. But I felt it important not to put to get ahead of myself and jump straight into animating the character as it appears on screen, so what I actually did was use the image as a reference and draw out each character position as I saw it in the diagram on frame paper, as you can see below.

This process was pretty time consuming because once I had created the 'skeleton walk cycle' by hand I of course had to scan in all these thirteen frames and play them back to see if they worked. They were a bit clunky butr luckily when I took out four of the frames it flowed a lot nicer. This meant I could now animate the final character without there being any worries of how well it would flow because I had already made the skeleton walk cycle flow well, it was literally a case of putting a character on the guideline.

Applied Animation: Animating Begins

So all pre-production work had been done, admittedly we were pretty behind schedule and a lot of the pre-production work had carried through to when I had starting animating which of course slowed the whole process down a bit, but anyway.

The first clip I decided to animate was the kettle pouring water scene, why that scene in particular? Because I knew it would be complicated and wanted to get it out the way, although I felt like it would at least be interesting to animate and of course this isn't just about producing an animation, the development process is also about improving our individual skills as animators. So this scene would test my skills at animating objects with smooth edges and also my skills at animating water which I feel any animator would feel is the one of the hardest things to animate.

Animating this scene was a challenge although my job was of course far easier with access to reference footage. Furthermore I felt like it was important to colour all the frames, this is because it will make the documentary look more professional and also because rarely in the past have I actually coloured the entirety of any of my animations, this is mostly down to poor time management.

Applied Animation: Creating the Animatic

We had already created a LAV video but were advised that to better go about understanding exactly how to create our animation that we should make an Animatic.

To do this, as a group we recorded all the scripted dialogue in the uni sound booth. Both Matt and I had acted a lot for not only our own animations but other peoples too so were very comfortable with acting out the roles. Particularly since we were basically playing fictionalised versions of ourselves. It was for this reason that we came up with idea to do a bit of ad libbing. We had done this before, mostly for the purpose of messing around but here we felt it was important to insert acted clips and real clips of us actually having a real conversation. I felt this would make the animation feel a lot more natural and real.

Now we're alright actors, but there are certain things that are very difficult to act, for example it is very difficult to act real laughter so we decided that real conversations would be a good thing to have in our animation because at the end of the day it is about two mates making an animation and we wanted it to feel as much like that as possible.

Using the dialogue clips we recorded, Matt edited the clips together to construct essentially what was the final audio for our animation. I put this tidied up sound clip into the animation and placed in the storyboard.

With this completed it was now easy to understand the timing of our animation and how long exactly each scene should last.

Looking back I wish I had developed this Animatic sooner because I knew how much easier it would be to develop the animation with this blueprint. I had already started animating by the point of putting together this Animatic which does demonstrate poor project management.

Applied Animation: Creating the LAV Part 1

So I'd drawn out a very detailed storyboard that had every framing of every shot taken into account with descriptions of what is going on in each scene. I felt this was very important for this project because it was not the first time I had ever collaborated as I'd worked with Matt previously, but it was the first time I had collaborated with two other people on a project. Especially as my role as director I felt it was very important that everyone knew exactly what they were doing and as long as we were all happy with what direction the project was going in, it would be completely planned out.

I wanted to achieve the idea that if some random person picked up our pre-production work they would know exactly how to go about animating this thing. Clarity is key. Now, the final storyboard I felt was very successful as basically working as a blueprint for our animation, but there was one factor I could not take into account with the storyboard and that was timing.