Animated Exeter

Check out our Animated Exeter blog for our work on the trailer for the festival..

11 Second Club - Final Animation

I'm pretty happy with this. It kept me up to the last minute and I uploaded it at around 4.30am before the 5am deadline.

I did it by going over my final Animatic drawings in Flash using a Wacom tablet. I was happy that I could just do each final drawing in one go and so it wasn't too time consuming.

11 Second Club - Final progress

Since the last post I have now completed the final Animation in time for the deadline. This post will show my Works in progress and feedback I received up until my final piece.

The last Animatic showed my animation just keeping to the timings I predicted on my dopesheet. On this one, I changed around some key poses onto different frames and swapped some poses around. It definetly resulted in a slightly smoother animation.



After receiving some feedback both from Cathy and my girlfriend Nina, drastic possible improvements were identified. Mainly, that the fox was not reacting enough. Cathy helped me to visualise the Fox showing more fear/dread of the Chicken saying to imagine its like a child getting told off by their Mother. She also mentioned that it would be good to make the Chicken fly.

So I went home and took some more video reference of me acting the scared Fox. Then did the following drawings from them:



I also looked at some very handy YouTube videos featuring a Chicken flying in slow motion. YouTube is such a great tool for research! I did the following drawings from the YouTube videos:



I also posted these in to the 11 Second Club forum and got some useful feedback saying I needed to give it fresh poses on the 'why would I put it there' from the Chicken and also the last 'Youuu stole it' from the Chicken.

With all this new reference I was able to construct a whole new set of Poses for both the Fox and Chicken. Here is my final Animatic I did before constructing the Final Animation..

Our final experimental music animation

So, here it is the result of all our labours :) Sit back and enjoy...

To see it without the right side of the frame cut off, its best watching it in YouTube. (Click the link in the bottom right of the screen.)

Experimental - jet pack penguin + progress

This post will report on our last couple of weeks of experimental work leading up to the deadline...

I worked on the following:

-The Smarties tube creature Animation (This took 2 attempts to get a good version.)
-Helping with Animating and photographing Ryans Toilet roll Loch-Ness monster
-Layering a 'Live Action' grass background for the Frog
-Animating Bird cycles and filming live action back drops to layer behind them
-Creating and filming the jet pack penguin (see below)
-Photographing the last scene
-Editing and compositing, fitting the visuals to the music

I was a bit concerned about the time running out and wondering whether we would actually complete our project before the deadline, but it all turned out allright. We organised a full day of going out and animating.

On the night before this day I had an urge to create another creature for the animation as I knew we may need a bit more footage to help fill the 55 seconds of music. I came across Ryans accidental 'Jet pack penguin' he had created in my bag of Origami creatures and decided to give it a bit of a funky makeover:



I cut out and stuck coloured paper on every face of the creature, initially I thought 'yeah.. this won't take long' but it took about 3 hours and kept me up til 2am..

The next day we met up and went towards the beach. We were lucky as it was nice and sunny. It was a highly successful day as we managed to get most of the rest of the footage needed. On the way to the beach we filmed the Jet pack penguin taking off - using wire. We got the toilet tube creature animated and we animated the final scene where all the creatures come together. This included Scotts DJ turtle and a paper fire. It was a good day as we got a lot of the missing parts done and dusted.

The only thing that remained with about a week and a day left was all the editing and animating Ryans Toilet roll monster going into the toilet ! Ryan and I did this a couple of days later. This was surprisingly hard to animate it as we had to work against gravity. We got around this problem using blue tack and thread. We also decided to have two seperate cuts of the creature. So you end up seeing one shot of it forming itself out of toilet rolls, then you see another shot of it diving into the toilet!

Thursday came along and we all did some editing and got most of it done except a couple of clips. Later that evening/night I spent a couple of hours perfecting the synchronisation between imagery and sound by cutting clips and speeding bits up and down. I quite enjoy this side of things matching the sound with the visuals. I worked again at this on Friday morning for another couple of hours. The following Monday, Scott and Ryan handed me the last couple of clips and I spent another couple of hours working them into the final composition, then on Tuesday we were able to render it out and hand it in before the deadline :)

A working process of creating visuals to fit sound

Here, I have posted up a sheet that I think made a difference in terms of helping with the timing/synchronising in the first half of the piece. I did this after we created some of the creatures and after doing preliminary tests with the origami bird. I also had the idea of the Loch Ness monster in my mind.

These little thumbnails helped me to visualise how it could work with the sound before actually doing the animations. Then when we did them we followed these storyboard thumbnail ideas and in the end, with a bit of editing around it worked with the music quite successfully.

I couldn't start with a storyboard sheet like this without first creating some creatures/and doing preliminary tests to see what was possible. Therefore, the first step is to be inspired to make whatever comes to mind and to try it out then you have something to work with.

I will remember this working process for future projects involving working to sound.



I have posted our final experimental film in its own blog post.. Check it out :)

11 second club - Animatic + supporting materials

I drew out all my key frames for the Animatic by hand. For me, drawing on paper provides the most precision. This attitude may change in the coming years but for now I'm happy with this technique. Before showing the Animatic I would like to say that the following materials were of great help:

Character Turnarounds

These were essential for providing the necessary visual information at all angles. A great time saver for figuring out what can go where and also handy for tracing. Each key frame I drew involved tracing the head.




Dope Sheets

A very handy reference of where the sounds and words come in. It gives you a written sense of the timing. I drew rough thumbnails and action notes in the right column. Also indicated are green and red stars showing the frames on which I have drawn a key frame. The green stars show each key position of the Chicken and red for the Fox.
















Live Action reference

No need to show my Live Action video again as it is on my last 11 second club blog post. Just a note to say it came in very useful when drawing some of the key positions and thinking about the timing. I tried to exaggerate some of my acting positions in the drawings. I found myself acting bits out again to get a firm idea of whether some drawings would work or not and to get the feeling of the characters.


Animatic

So here is my Animatic. I photographed all my key frames, put them into flash and assigned them to the frames predicted beforehand on my dope sheet. It works pretty well but it will need some going over with the timing before I dive in with my final drawings.



My next move now is to re-work the timing a bit, draw over the key positions with my final characters using a Wacom tablet then if I somehow have any time left (I really hope I do); Fill in the inbetweens and hand it in before the deadline of the competion. Its an interesting combination of excitement and stress.

Rap video

Heres a nice little rap video I came across.. I like the clever use of typography and colour synchronising smoothly with the lyrics.
Its a bit cheesy but nevertheless fun..

Origami video from an Italian 80s Cartoon

This is pretty great.. They must have seen our origami ideas, then - filled with inspiration, gone back in time to make this most excellent work...hehehe

Experimental - smarties and origami bird progression

I wanted to use red wire for the smarties creatures legs so that the creature would be able to be animated on a green screen, but also so that it would stand out.

Unfortunately I couldn't find any red wire so I ended up buying some red metal paint and painting the wire. In the process of painting the wire I held them in some plastercine so they could dry well. I had to take a photo as I think these would work really well for animation - weird alien plant life forms. Actually you could probably find these creatures in the coral reef or something...



I spent a whole day in the studio making these. I think they look pretty cool. Pictured are all the tools and materials required to make them.



The Smarties creature is now ANIMATED ! : ) We have also animated it in a setting ( I will upload this at a later date.)



Me and Ryan have been working with the origami birds once again.. Its easier once you've done a trial attempt to make smoother animation as you know what you are doing more. We tried a bird taking off technique.. I quite like this.



Here me and Ryan reworked the shot we took before, only with Ryan turning his hand so it can make a bit more sense. Ryan is working at putting in a Live action backdrop to fit with this.



I quite like the smoothness of this fly cycle.. This bright green should hopefully be able to be 'keyed out' in aftereffects.



Here is a techno version! This works best at 9fps but I could only save it as an Avi which is way too big for the blog. This one here is a 7.5 fps mpeg version. 12fps is a be a bit too flashy.

11 second club - pre-production

The 11 second club is a monthly animation competition hosted here.

We have to make an 11 second piece of animation to a sound clip of some dialogue. To hear this sound clip check out the link above or see the video of me acting it out further down in this blog post. (I have entered the November 2010 competition.)

So far I have got to 'just before the animation' stage which I will start doing once I have finished blogging. I'm really looking forward to getting the ball rolling with this. I reckon it will be quite fun to do. Anyways, here is my progress so far showing how I came to my idea up until my final character designs and layouts as well as a funny clip of me acting it out.

Ideas development

Here I have documented how I got to my idea. Some brain storms to start off with (or mind mapping for the politically correct.)

Here is my first idea: A tramp who has stolen a fancy car which is obviously not his. The rich guy comes along and yells at him:

Here I have written out the dialogue along with accents. The red lines not only reflect the tonal range/intensity of the dialogue but will also dictate to some extent the movement of my characters.

My final idea. The chicken finds his egg has been stolen by the fox. The comedy comes from the fact that the chicken is physically way more inferior to the fox yet he will be the one who is persecuting the fox.

Here I wrote out brief instructions of how to act out the dialogue:

Some more initial character sketches:

A rough layout drawing. This is going to be pretty similar to my final layout.

Acting out the soundtrack

Hopefully this will be of much use when it comes to designing my key poses and getting the timing good.. As Derek has mentioned about using L/A reference I will try to intensify the key positions and not just imitate them.

Character Development

I got a bit of research first of real and cartoon chickens..

I used this reference to trace over and draw the volumes of both real and cartoon chickens. Apologies for the poor paper quality - in the future I anticipate not having tea sitting next to my work.

This sheet shows physical characteristics that cartoon chickens share with real chickens as well as physical characteristics that are are not shared with real chickens. Doing this allowed me to figure out the best approach for designing my cartoon chicken.


The chicken with the star next to it is the one I have picked to use as my final character.

As you can see I have retained the real chicken elements of small eyes, small crown, a conical body and small legs. I have played around with the wing and beak sizes. I like the tiny head because it emphasizes the comic nature that he is the persecutor throwing accusations at a fox. Subverting expectations.

I then applied this whole process to the fox:







I got my final design for the fox pretty quickly. When designing both my characters I looked back at my initial sketches (shown higher up on this blog post) so I could keep something of the initial mood I created in the characters.



Final Character Turnarounds and Scene Plan

So here I have got the volumes of the chicken in 4 key turnaround sketches. This will definetly come in useful when animating.

Hopefully I will have the animation completed in this look:

The fox gets the same treatment.

This will be my layout. If time allows then I may think about cuts/close ups etc. but for now I'm happy with this.

I actually spent quite a while drawing this second pose - trying to get the weight balance to look right. In doing so came up with a good working methodology for doing the animation. I will make all the rough key poses in this style, with the red, green and blue lines. It will be much simpler and quicker to do it this way rather then drawing all the volumes for legs, arms and neck. Then following this I should be able to layer on top the final character in a 2nd pass.

Onwards with the animation :)

Experimental - Smarties tube

Inspiration struck me this morning looking at a smarties tube..

My idea is we could have the smarties tube rolling along the floor like a bit of rubbish. When it stops we see it raise up with legs that grow out of it (A bit of photoshopping a single image to make several and sequencing them.) Then we see the tube move along a bit like a caterpillar. We could even give it eyes..

Here is the start of a constructed smarties tube, with just the one leg:



Materials needed will be some red wire or wire and red paint - the legs will need to stand out. Drawing pins to make the initial holes to poke the wire legs through. Pliers, scissors, blue tack, see through tape, gaffa tape - to secure the legs inside and double sided tape to close up the smarties tube again.

I did an experiment on flash to see the different positions needed:



Ok - so not mega realistic but not bad for 4 simple poses. Here is a breakdown of the 4 different poses + the starting pose:



So what I would like to do is make 5 different smarties tube creatures with legs all in the different positions, then stop motion them either on a green surface to allow for it to go on any backdrop or somewhere for real. I guess the other option is just to make one smarties creature with strong and flexible legs but this may be harder to pull off and more fiddly...time will tell.

Now I must go and buy lots of smarties :)

Experimental - Frog videos..

Here are our attempts at animating an Origami Frog. I'm fairly happy with it. Theres a couple of frames on the second landing that could be deleted - at the moment it looks like it loses its balance a bit on this part. I'm liking the way it looks like a bit of rubbish rolling into the shot and comes out a frog!



Here, Ryan has composited it on a video of grass..

Comp 1 from Ryan Mace on Vimeo.

I think it would be a good idea to take another video of grass to put behind it and check to mirror the angle and panning of the camera we used on the frog. Maybe if we paint in some shadows as well, this way it should look more effective.

Experimental progress..

Since the last post on our experimental project we have stop motioned an origami frog.

Unfortuantly I have had my hands full as I am having a go at the Animated Exeter Trailer. I have not got round to compositing it and placing it on a live action / alternative background so nothing to show of that yet.

Ideas have cropped into my head about what to do next.. especially whilst sitting on the toilet looking at a pile of toilet rolls! I thought it would be cool to make the toilet rolls form into a loch ness monster style creature and then we could make it look like the creature goes into the toilet and then comes out of the sand at the beach. Just an idea..

The useful thing with that idea is that I did a similar experiment for fun with my mate Carl several months ago using a clay loch ness monster :



Luckily I kept the diagram I made at the time. This could be very handy:



So perhaps construct a Loch Ness style monster from toilet rolls or maybe one could be made from origami. We would have to make several of the same if we were to imitate the technique I used earlier in the year - as you can see we did it using 3 seperate bits of clay to show the 3 humps. There were also several variations for each hump (except the middle one which tended to stay the same.)

Experimental - Animating Origami

Here is our latest progress on Dereks experimental assignment..

We begun by making some origami. Here I subverted expectations in subtle ways
(giving the bird a tiger look!)- I think its fun to alter what is normally expected of things. In an earlier blog post I commented on the inventive style of animation in The Life Aquatic ie. the rainbow seahorse. I have been quite inspired by this idea.





Here we finally got round to starting some Animation. Early days at the moment.
Me and Ryan are quite happy with this..



I think it carrys a lot of possibilities. I like the idea of having live action footage of panning over grass, then a ball rolls into the shot and turns into a frog and jumps away.

The soundtrack we are using is called Redencion. Its a great track for layering things up and our current thoughts are to start with one creature and gradually add one at a time until there is a whole collection of them all having a gathering at the park or the beach or somewhere.

2D Elephant Animation - All prep. work and final outcome

To see my final animation scroll down to the bottom of this blog post.
What follows is the process I went through to get there..

This exercise was to animate a change in emotion to practise our
performance in animation skills. The character would need to have a
scene objective and something would need to happen to obstruct/change
this objective; Leading to a change of emotion in the character.

Over the last couple of weeks I have spent a lot of time on this..
The idea has come directly from experience when I saw a funny situation
whilst working at the Elephant Nature Reserve, Chaing Mai in Thailand
in 2006.

Here is a photo from the actual event that happened. At the time it was
pretty funny..



When I got back from Thailand I made this rough comic documenting the
incident which I have somehow managed to keep up until now.



I started the project by drawing elephants..


I made a very rough scene plan of what would happen:



I used a lot of reference from my trip and sketched many elephants getting used to their shape and form.







Here I looked in The Animation Survival Kit by Richard Williams and took
some essential notes and drawings from the page about animating animals.



I was very pleased (and surprised) that Muybridge had taken 24 frames of an elephant walking! Thanks Muybridge you're a legend!



Here are 12 frames I drew from Muybridges work.



Here is a reference video I made which would dictate the main actions of
what was going to happen. It was pretty funny acting this one out especially
for Marcel who played the essential role of elephant.



From this I was able to put together a really good scene plan for the animation that shows all the main key frames and timing. I also took note of what the characters would be thinking.

An important part of this assignment was to make their thoughts obvious
through their body language and performance. This is because their thoughts dictate their actions. Next to the elephant I wrote down key notes for its movements pre-empting what would happen and describing the
actions/reactions it would take. This page was absoultly essential
when it came down to making the animation.



This shows the shapes that would form my main character..



Here is the first drawing in the animation. I then drew out all the key
frames on my lightbox working directly from my scene plan using the
volumes of the girl instead of the man.



Ultimately I had this in mind as a final look but unfortuantly I didn't get
enough time to make it all look like this:



When it came to animating the elephant, it was quite straightforward and fun using all the basic shapes as seen in my first drawing (2 images up.) The elephant run required a bit of thought and so I did these rough thumbnails taking the main key poses an elephant walking.



So after a fair bit of work here is my first rough animation. It was put
together in time for feedback on Thursday so has quite a handmade quality
to it. At this stage the movement of the elephant was very basic.



On thursday I showed this to the class and got a fairly positive response
and some constructive feedback. I then spent many hours working on a more complete version.

I added a few more important drawings to get more life into the elephant. Keeping feedback from Derek in mind - I spent a lot of time re-working the timing so that the reactions play off eachother ( the girl reacts to the elephant and vice versa - not both performing actions at the same time.) Derek also mentioned I could play with the volumes a bit more - it doesn't have to be so rigid. I will keep this in mind for future projects as I did not have the time to do it with this one.

I also got feedback from my girlfriend who mentioned that when the girl
does her chin wag she is facing upwards when she should be looking at the
elephant, she also mentioned how the elephants head should move - perhaps when it starts to get agitated. So I made these changes too.

I traced over all the drawings and filled them with colour. The final touch was
adding the grass texture which I have to say looks quite nice!

So without further ado here is my final animation:



Of course it is not completly complete. If I had more time I would add all
the inbetweens and make them look like proper characters. The girl would
have clothes etc. With the 11 second club looming up I must call it a day
on this project and start thinking about the next. Bring it on!

Technical note for future reference: I worked at 250 % in Flash with brush size 1.0. and the second brush shape down with 40 on the smoothing.