Animation for Nottinghamshire County Council

I have recently completed this Animation working with the great folks at Nottingham County Council. It has been a real pleasure working with them and I feel like I got a lot out of the job. From a conceptual point of view this has certainly been one of my favourite projects so far as I was let loose to storyboard the entire piece myself. It was also left to me to source a voice over artist, so I thought of a friend of mine - Laura Bozic who did a great job. For the soundtrack, I came across audionautix.com which is a great website for music which is free for commercial use (so long as you credit them.)



A summary on the development of style..

In the process of creating this animation, I have learned that it's important to get the style confirmed early on in order to save time later. I knew that style/concept visualisations were an important part of pre-production but in this case, time was a limitation. I had my hands full working on and making suggested changes to the 6-7 minutes worth of content for the animatic.

My initial animatic was met with a surprising amount of enthusiasm, given that it was the result of quick photoshop sketching from a storyboard I had drawn by hand. Some were even questioning whether it was the final product. I had found that my standard procedure of doing things, co-coincided with the style/concept that they were looking for, but I hadn't yet realised this.

Still from original animatic

I thought "great - they will love the final version," and got cracking. Previously they had provided me with reference from Powtoon.com - the black silohuette characters - to provide me with a final finish to aim towards. I had always wanted to get more experience with vector graphics and using Illustrator so I saw this as an ideal opportunity. Here is the first "final look" I created for them ( I spent several days on applying this look to a portion of the animation, before our scheduled feedback session.)

Whilst I was quite proud of this - the subtlety of tonal change to define the horizon, the texture, the smooth motion blurred motion and the perfectly symmetrical characters, I sensed in the Skype feedback/development session with the chaps at Notts CC, that they were slightly disappointed with it.

So later that day, I emailed the client to ask whether there was anything they didn't like about it. This was then followed up by a call which was the turning point of the project. I had a massive "aah ha!" (eureka moment) when I realised what they liked about the animatic was the simple naivety of the style; the way it looked like a child had drawn it. We discussed ideas around this theme (e.g. using a pencil texture and keeping with the stickmen) and it was also suggested I physically draw in the character (or create the impression I'm doing this.)

The audience (0-25 with special educational needs & learning difficulties, their families and linked professionals) became a prominent part of my understanding on how I should approach the style. I researched and found that the key things that appeal to children are: characters clearly depicted in their environment, colours and a simple, accessible style. I remember the maths books I had at school with the squared paper. So, I threw all these elements together and hey presto! Everyone was happy again!

New technical/business skills gained

So aside from learning to nail down the style as soon as possible; I've also picked up some new technical skills - such as using the pen tool in Photoshop to create smooth lines and curves then applying a brush texture to fill the length of this line. Also, filming my hand drawing in the character. For this, I printed the already-created Photoshop stickman onto green card. Then I filmed my hand drawing the character (only the pencil isn't touching the page but just following the printed line.) I removed the green in After Effects and replaced it with the background and character. I applied a stroke effect to make it look like the character was forming as a result of my pencil.

A final positive outcome from this experience is picking up new business skills, including working with a large client, making proposals, subcontracting other professionals (i.e. the voice over artist and her agent) and communicating via Skype. It has been a fantastic project to work on and I look forward to working with them again in the future.

Royal College of Art animation project - Love Soldiers

Love Soldiers directed by Chloe Feinberg

Recently, I have been asked to offer some assistance on a project being created at the Royal College of Art on the MA Animation course. Love Soldiers is a hand drawn 2D animation, which draws inspiration from the likes of David Lynch. Chloe described it to me as "a surreal dreamlike fantasy with 80's male sex symbols set on a luxury yacht. A lot of it is reconfigured pieces from films of the 80's (usually with macho cop guys.)" Having watched the animatic a couple of times I can safely say that it is quite interesting, unusual and unconventional to say the least! Here are a few images that give some idea of the look/content of the project. The top right image is how Chloe intends the final film to look like.

So far, I have helped out with a bit of animating, producing and compositing. As there are only a handful of us working on the project, the nature of my role crosses different areas which keeps things interesting. Having said this, I believe compositing will be the main area I will be working in, as I have a good knowledge of After Effects and Chloe is keen to get the majority of the hand drawn animation done herself. Below are a couple of stills from two shots that I have animated.

The workflow goes like this -

1) Filming or sourcing reference
2) Drawing a style frame to get the sketch and shading right
3) Rotoscoped hand drawn animation, (just the lines)
4) Inking the lines
5) Batch scanning
5) Colouring in Photoshop
6) Comping in After Effects + layering on some actual film textures
7) Editing / Sound

More recently, I have been compositing. Putting together several different layers of hand drawn animation. The technical hitch was that the paper used for animating on had it's peg bar holes punched in slightly different places which meant once I had batch scanned all the work in, the animation wobbled constantly from frame to frame which is not how Chloe intended! To get around this issue, I drew 2 little crosses in the same place on every frame and voila! - a bit of position/rotation stabilising in After Effects led to a much smoother playback of the animation, as it was intended. It was quite satisfying letting the computer sort it out rather then trying to manually adjust each frame in After Effects.

The experimental nature of this project makes it a joy to work on. It's great to be back in a small team again collaborating on a short film, and quite a novelty to be at the RCA. 

Pre - Production Update

Wow, what a busy term it has been! I think things will only get busier as well - but that's cool as I enjoy all the work that I'm doing and have never in my life worked on such an exciting group project. It would be amazing to get 'Kernel' finished and it seems like we are off to a strong start with a Pre-Production bible consisting of 79 pages.

At the start of the term It seemed like I was destined to work a tiny bit on many different projects but as time has moved on I have found myself getting more and more involved with 'Kernel' which we have just found out, will be the only 3D animated short film going through to Production. Olly (the Director) and the rest of our team are very keen to get it finished so it is pretty important that we aim for less than 3 minutes long.

Our Lecturers have said that the Storyboard must be made clearer and suggested that Dan, Hugh, Max and myself have a go at editing the Story and Storyboard to make it clearer. Whilst this is adding significantly to my Christmas workload, I am happy to have this opportunity as I really enjoy Storyboarding. For anyone curious about how the Kernel Animatic is looking at the moment - see below.



Other work I will be showing on this post will include work for Shell and Paddy, Fentil and Box Boy. Out of these 3 projects only Shell and Paddy is going through to Production. Having said that they are still allowing Dan (Director of Fentil) to produce one polished shot for his project. My background for Shell and Paddy will probably not get used as I have only produced the one - which would break the consistency of Joe's backgrounds.

Here is all of the work I have done so far (since my last post.)

Kernel

The 'Cathexis Tree.' Reference, Concept and Design.

'The Shed.' Reference and Designs.

Plants that will be placed around the Dome shaped Greenhouse. Reference, Sketches, Photoshop experiments and Final designs.

Final Designs.

Top view of the Greenhouse. This shows the colour range of the Plants and where the plants will be placed.

Side views of the Greenhouse. These concept shots show the placement and size of the plants on both sides of the Greenhouse. The other 'green-ness' will be built up with long grass, and generic foliage, this will help unify the plants.

Fentil:

My job for this project was to produce a Matte Painting. For this I speed learned some techniques and covered about a 1/3 of this book. Thanks David B. Mattingly :-) Very helpful.

It was useful following along with the techniques outlined in this book and interesting building up a photo real image from scratch in layers. Here's my work in progress leading up to the final piece:

A quick 20 minute concept sketch:

Line Drawing:

Adding in the Tones - Light, Dark, Core, Cast Shadows and another layer (Final Darks) which is like doing an Ambient Occlusion pass in CG:

Applying a texture:

Here, I have warped a couple of textures to fit more snugly on the bottom centre-right side of the Rock. This has made a big difference but I felt with my time schedule and with what was required that it wasn't necessary to warp every bit of texture.

I repeated the process above to the other rocks, layed down some Colour Correction and a bit of clone stamping to neaten things up at the end.

The rocks were the main thing Dan wanted me to produce so the Ground, Clouds, Sun and Moon received much less attention. I learned a few more tricks and useful Hot keys with Photoshop doing this piece.

Shell and Paddy:

Here is my initial layout:

Final background (produced using Photoshop):

Box Boy

Darrien asked me to do the Bus Interior for his project. This was the last bit of work I produced this term and I did it from start to finish in about a day.

Sketches from Reference:

Final Layout:

Final Piece - here I borrowed some colours of Darrien's Concept for 'Box Boy.'

Added Graffity and Shadows.

Added Depth of Field (just for fun ^^)

What lays ahead...

So the 3 main areas of work that I would like to cover over the Xmas holiday are:

-The Storyboard for 'Kernel'
-The Draft Dissertation - Planning and Writing
-Making a good start at learning Nuke

My Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Film - now available to watch :-)

My film entry for this competition is now officially open to the public to watch and review! Please feel welcome to watch and review it :-) It appears that 'When I grow up' is just one of four in the 'Chance of a lifetime' gallery that has been shortlisted by the judges. Ouuuu exciting!




When I get a bit of free time spare I will upload more information here about the 'making of' this film. It took about 4 months to make it (on and off) so it feels like a very nice achievement to have it handed in, in time for the deadline (with at least 24 hours to spare - result!)

Some Art I did before term

This first image I made following a Photoshop tutorial from the magazine " Illustrate with Photoshop - volume one" by a chap called Magnus Kjall. I thought it would be especially useful to go through to get a feel for matte painting. I found it quite satisfying to produce. 

Here's an album cover I produced for my friend Nathan. The music is a groovy blend of trip hop and ambient electro. Nature is a theme that features strongly in his work. He wanted something a bit Kandinsky. You can listen to the tracks for free here..

This is a painting I did (using Gouache) of the view outside my bedroom window. Its quite vibrant for a car park! After doing the drawing, I got the paints ready at which point I looked up and the car had gone. I decided to paint the rest anyway - I quite like the look of this. Gotta love serendipity.

Negotiated Brief - Music Video - Finished!!

I am pleased to announce that I've completed my Negotiated project good and proper now..
If you want to skip the 'making of' and see the final video - I've embedded it at the bottom of this post.

I was quite inspired by the Richard Morrison talk earlier this term and took a couple of things from it. With reference to this project I applied what he said about letting the idea come out naturally - and not forcing it out. This was partly due to juggling several other projects but also a result of my way of working.

I acted on moments of inspiration and combined the results of these creative impulses with a methodical approach. In other words - doing some storyboarding and visually responding to the music (see earlier post) as well as thinking 'hmmm - I'd quite like to put in a sunrise timelapse' or 'I feel like going out and doing some creative night photography'.

Some results of these experiments are below:

Also during the term I went to an Audio Visual and Projection mapping Festival at Geneva with Simon which was great fun and inspiring. I will do a separate blog post on this. The point of me mentioning it is that I was able to get some great shots of being above the clouds.

So around a week or two ago my head was full of ideas - I had lots of footage filmed in mind of the project, I had some initial artwork to go on, and some timelapses and photographs. I just needed to somehow condense everything into the 50 second audio piece. Essentially I needed to go 'back to the drawing board' and do some final preparation work. I still needed a proper storyboard (the first one was done before getting a lot more ideas/footage etc.) , a dopesheet -which turned out to be very useful and a place to put all my ideas:

I got to work following the storyboard and produced some artwork designed to be composited into the piece (whilst listening to the music I was doing it for) Eventually I had all the raw material I needed and worked the different elements into After Effects.

One fun idea was to dress up in a suit and incorporate pixellation of me holding a heartbeat (using a video but having it printed off so literally holding up a frame at a time.) I was planning to do the same with a sunrise - but due to time constraints I decided 'hey I'll just composite it onto a blank sheet of paper that I'm holding ' This was a massive time saver and looks a lot smoother. There is a nice hand-done quality to the Heartbeat however. If you have any opinions on this feel free to comment! Getting muddy whilst wearing the smart clothes was Ninas idea (who is also featured in the film.) This was great fun. Also see if you can spot the additional prop in the shot. Here are some elements I put into the final video:

I cut out these cogs by hand using a scalple and some card. Then I scanned them in and animated them in Flash. These fed into the people timelapse shot below - for this I used After Effects.

These were initially hand drawn using pastels on black paper. Then I put them into photoshop and
used a pallett brush and liquify effect. I designed them carefully on photoshop to be able to be looped.

So you get the idea - inspired creativity is what it is! I Love it!



Presenting an Audio Visual piece I produced for my 'Negotiated Brief' project at the Digital Animation BA course in Falmouth.



I really enjoyed doing this, it gave me a chance to be quite experimental and incorporate a range of techniques. Hopefully I will continue to do this kind of audio visual work. Its great to have an idea and then make it happen.

The highlights have to be dressing up in a suit and getting muddy - great fun!



Thanks to Nina Cumberbirch for allowing me to feature her in the video. Thanks to Lazulene for the music.

What does it all mean?.. well I leave that to your interpretation.
Now I must go out and celebrate ! Wooooooooooo!