So the blog has been poorly neglected these past couple of months, which I tried to not let happen, but the juggle of dissertation, team management and animating in time for a professional guest sweatbox meant that the blog was last on a list of higher priorities. Now dissertation is done and dusted which means there's A. time and B. less pressure now I just have to concentrate completely on Love Hate.
There's a more up-to-date version of our work in progress, but this is the version we showed at the Sweatbox (and the latest online version):
(In an attempt to be a bit more professional, I'm gradually migrating to Vimeo, got to love those YouTube names created by your 15-year-old self).
Love Hate was well recieved by the guy from Industry (whose name escapes me at the moment, this is what happens if I don't write everything down), with only a few suggestions for change, some me and Hugh had already discussed before the sweatbox screening. The main concern is getting rid of the swearword in the beginning (I have promised the school I recorded at to send them a copy, however as it's a primary school the edit really needs to be clean). Since this is the only slip up language wise, we're going to hide it with the sound effect of steam (the coffee cup is going to morph to a teapot - or kettle - that spouts steam, thus to a 'sh---' noise. Cheeky.
This section of animation is being done by Lydia, my second year who has stepped aboard. She has been super speedy to recitify any changes I've suggested and she's not afraid of After Effects which is a big help. She's done some cool tests for the coffee already, using pastels (which fits great with the whole hand-drawn/graphicy style I want the film to reflect).
Lydia is also working on the fish falling onto the girl (another shot with suggested changes, the shot is no longer cut between the shot of the bird dropping the fish, but now a single shot):
Other team members who've been given things to work on over Easter are Dan and Paddy, Dan is set to work on the Slot Machine/Purple boy sequence and Paddy is working on the bird catching the fish.
The goal over Easter is to get all the rough animation done, and then proceed to get as much of the neat animation done as possible for the rough cut deadline on the 27th of April. I leave you with some shots that I've been working on the past two weeks, so you can see how far it's come along since the Sweatbox.
Bus design:
For the credits I'm contemplating using the speech bubbles I designed as concept art for the pitch:
Puddle Girl is now completely (fingers crossed) finished:
So, apologies for the lack of blog updates, but the past week has been dedicated to finishing (and starting) the animatic for Love Hate.
Today we had to present our animatics in front of our year, tutors and an industry professional (Morgan Francis - not Freeman as I accidently typed before - Co-Director at Spider Eye). After this the number of final projects going forth to production will be cut down to around 10 from the 16 that got through the pitching stage.
The animatic was made alone by yours truly and I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out. I wasn't particularly keen on the first 'doorknob' section, but after a few people have each said this was their favourite bit, I've had my faith reassured in it. Not bad for six days of solid work. Even if it meant I didn't leave the house for a couple of days in a row. I swear when/if I get a job in inudstry I may forget what sunlight looks like!
Quite alot of people used Storyboard Pro to create their animatics, but since I have never used it and get easily distracted when I attempt to work in the studio... (it appears solitary confinement is the best way for me to get stuff done), I created it using a mash of all my program knowledge: Flash, Animate, After Effects and Premiere. A wise choice since these will be the programs I use to make the actual thing (if it gets picked...).
So, we shall find out by the end of the week which films are going through. If mine isn't picked I have my eye on a couple of other projects I'd love to help out on. But we shall see.
Alas, this doesn't mean the workload is over. Far from it. We have a deadline on friday for the pre-production deadline where we have to produce a bible of nearly all the pre-production work we have so far. Currently mine is about 55 pages (mainly because I've had to include the 30 pages of storyboards! To be honest I think I'll have to separate it into lots of separate parts to get the file size to fit the upload limit!).
Aaand, to finish up, here's a new and improved taster of the music, since I changed the soundtrack the visuals play to, I couldn't use this version since it wouldn't match up! Pretty pleased with how it's gone though:
Well, the last week has been a pretty eventful one and been super busy all in the run up to the pitch on friday.
Since my last blog post I've created a whole load more of concept art and some test animations...
Kathy suggested I put together a visual research file of the things that had inspired me to create the concept art, some are more relevant now than others, but in the process of trying to get the look for my project, they all inspired me in some way. Style Inspiration Bible
One of my own loves (which I'm told by my housemates is very weird...):
"I love watching the sun rise" Sequence:
Newer version of Birds (as it would be animated):
"I hate fish":
Sea animation test done in After Effects:
The fish I hand animated... It was super frustrating, because it took me two hours to scan in, only to discover that it didn't work... it's not great: the tail flops around all over the place, but I feel my timing has vastly improved since last year. I think now, (well, all depending if my project is picked...) that any rough animation I do will be done in Flash or ToonBoom Animate and then, when I know the timing is correct, I'll draw the animation in graphite or whatever other medium I'm using for that section.
The fish and sea combined look a little something like this:
Ah, I'd almost forgotten to add this, a video of the rough soundtrack that my good friend Rob Allen has been working on for me, which I was contemplating playing it at the pitch, but I have collected many more voiceclips since sending him the (very) rough edit I put together for him to play around with. This is only a rough version done in Midi, put gives an inkling as to what the final thing could sound like, however I think I need to spread the soundclips out a bit more, it's really rather quick at the moment. _____________________________________________ So, this is something I forgot to write on here earlier, but a couple of weeks ago I emailed six local primary schools asking if I would be allowed to come to the school and ask the children (and staff) the love/hate questions. I had two responses, one yes and one no. Paula Ross, the deputy Head Marlborough School, was kind enough to invite me to the school on Thursday to record the students. The students were forewarned of my arrival in asssembly and many had already thought of things to say when I turned up at lunchtime. Paula's class separated into two groups and sat in a circle as I recorded them one by one, which worked really well, although the children who couldn't think of anything quite often said similar things (it turns out, alot of boys hate the colour purple...), Paula then led me around the rest of the school to interview smaller groups of children which provided a much larger range of responses and some absolute gems which I'm certain will go into the final film (if it gets picked). After interviewing the children, who ranged from 4-11, I asked the staff the same questions. The school was so helpful and accomdating, the whole thing was much easier to pull off than I expected thanks to Paula's organising. If the film gets put into Production, I'm going to keep in contact with the school and send them updates as progess (hopefully) continues, however it may not go anywhere, it's beyond my control now! Which leads onto the deciding power... ____________________________________________ The PITCH. Both Kathy and Derek said that I should create some more concept art to show at the pitch, which made me think, why can't I explain my idea through concept art? So, to explain the process behind lovehate, I decided to do just that, have a corresponding picture to what I was saying. My actual pitch was really quite short, my idea was very simple to explain, so it really didn't need long. I thought I'd try and keep it short and punchy, and the corrseponding pictures helped to do just that and even got a few laughs which was great (and intended I might add). I was second to last in the pitching order, which made me mildly annoyed (I really wanted to just get the thing over with - I tend to get more nervous the longer that I have to wait to do something), it was probably better, as the rest of the third years relaxed around me, I felt alot calmer when it finally was my turn... Lovehate Pitch
The presentation probably needs some explanation, so here's a small summary essentially of what I said: - Everyone in this room has at least one thing they really love and one thing they really hate: it might be something completely unique to you, or something that you share with others. My current hate is standing in front of a room full of people and trying to explain my idea, something the other third years will share with me. I want to make these individual love and hates come to life on the screen. So the idea behind lovehate is quite simple: - I will take a number of peolpe of different ages, - Stick a microphone in front of their face, - Ask them to tell me one thing they love, - Ask them to tell me one thing they hate, - Record their reply. - Think about their reply. - Visualise their idea. - Storyboard the idea. - Animate the idea, taking the last frame and morphing it... - ...So that it becomes the first frame of the next sequence. And then I showed the concept art of previous answers. The panel (made up of 4 industry professionals), complimented me on my pitch and (I think) overall were fairly positive and quite liked the idea. I feel I got away quite lightly, quite a few people got some grilling from them and struggled to answer some of the trickier questions. I feel I did quite well, but I guess we shall see tomorrow when we discover which projects are going through to production. If my project hasn't been chosen, there's a multitude of other ideas I would love to be able to help out on. But then, if mine is chosen, that's a whole new fear altogether!
Today marks the end of Second Year! It's insanely scary to think that next year will be my last...
Lightbulb boy at 12fps (ignore the disgustingly pixelated thumbnail, the video doesn't look like that):
My Barista videos are still failing to upload to YouTube and Vimeo, despite me exporting them in a variety of different formats, I can't really understand why this is other than it must be something to do with the export settings from Animate. I plan to edit them all together using Premiere or After Effects when I'm next in the studio, hopefully then I'll finally be able to post them to my blog! Anyway, here's the production report:
Animation Technologies presentations were also this week, I think I did alright, however I made notes to stop myself going off on a tangent but only remembered I had them about half way through my presentation... subsuquently I'd gone off rambling a little. Some people's presentations and essays were much more focused on the technical aspects and specifications of the technology, but mine was a on Digital Cameras and focused a little more about the effect, so I hope this was what Georg wanted... I've uploaded it here so you can have a little look if you wish:
Aaaaaaaaaand, finally, the pitch project. We had our presentations this morning and I think ours went pretty well... we even managed to keep Derek from asking any questions at the end! Our practising at Emily & Sasha's house till 11 last night paid off: Sasha and Paddy did a great job of presenting our idea to the audience while Insa and I held a screen that Emily held up cut-outs of our characters behind (think puppet show/punch and judy type thing)! Insa has the finished Design Bible, so I'm sure it'll be uploaded to her blog at some point soon, so I leave you with the teabag band The Herbals rockin' away...
All the photographs for the experimental are complete, going to stick them all in After Effects tonight, 80% of the production report is typed up and the 11 Second Club makes me want to kill myself.
Voice One: "You stole it! I..." Voice Two: "I thought you put it there!" Voice One: "Why would I put it there?!?" Voice Two: "Kindness?" Voice One: "Kindness?! You stole it! He stole it!!"
My initial idea was to have two squirrels arguing over a nut, pretty basic, but also pretty obvious so I'm glad I didn't use that idea (also I'd've had to try and animate squirrels, despite watching lots of Disney films throughout my youth, I doubt I'd probably fail epically). This idea arrived almost instantaneously after listening to the voice clip, (a transcript can be found above), which was a minor miracle as this was early Monday morning.
My second idea appeared not long after while we were in the 2D session breaking down the soundclip to begin the start of our dopesheets: An Angel and a Devil (like the two little guys who you always see in films acting as the characters conscience) arguing over a stolen "feeling", the ending, where the Devil would shout "He stole it!" would've panned out to reveal the character who was having a battle with their conscience, and the Angel and Devil had been sat/floating by their shoulders.
After speaking with Derek he raised some problems with my idea (he's good at doing that), in that it wasn't obvious what my characters were arguing over, whereas with the squirrel idea it was too obvious, this wan't obvious at all. He also suggested changing the Devil to the one who says "kindness?" to make it more ironic and add a bit of comedy to it. So, my revised idea is still having an Angel and a Devil arguing, but this time, the Angel is the angry one, because the Devil has stolen his Halo and got it stuck over his horns.
Now having finished the storyboard, I have recorded some reference material (with horrendous acting once again) in order to make a quick animatic this week. I still need to use After Effects to composite the two clips (since I couldn't act for the Angel & Devil at once), but I have the cut that I want to use to emphasise the "kindness" line. Also note my amazing props. Yeeeah.
Aaaand finally (this has been a mammoth update) this is a quick drawing I did in Photoshop to give a (very) rough idea of what the final thing will kind of look like:
(The background picture is from ForsakeWolf at Deviant Art who put this up as a Stock photo so that others can use it for free).
As I don't own a copy of After Effects myself, I was cheeky and nabbed my boyfriend's computer for a bit when I went to visit him to convert some of the finished frames into some clips finished animation. So, this is what the finished article will look like, the pet one is still a work in progress...
They're only 720p because I had to use Windows Movie Maker to mash the clips together and add some black bits (so Youtube doesn't hack off the endings/beginnings like it normally does...).
Finally, after a grand total of 26 crashes in Flash and 8 in After Effects, here is the finished Title Sequence:
(you need to get on to YouTube and watch in HD - yay!)
I'm also going to upload my production report, but as it's over 1000 words, I'll do it in another blog post so you can skip the boring bit and just watch the video!
Lots of pretty videos to watch... Posted in chronological order (well, the bits of the animation I've been working on anyway). Pretty excited to get it wrapped up soon. Should be looking good :) I've just got one more scene left to do, which I can hopefully complete by tomorrow, then we'll be off to export them with an alpha channel and have a play around in After Effects. EEP. With the last video, I wanted there to be flying flies (confused yet?) like the ones in the second video, along with the black dotty ones, but as you can guess: Flash crashed. Epically. And it rendered out crazily jerky. So the freeze/crash count stands at an impressive 16 times. (10 from just one morning, what an efficent service).
Oh, and for some reason, because YouTube likes to mess with me, the quality is crazily bad, which makes no sense because when it's on my computer, or on Facebook video it works fine. Stoooopid.
Being the neurotic I am, and in preparation for the Formation project, I sat down this morning with the help of (a not very enthused) Jake to work out the exact length for every part of the Animation. Besides my neurosis about needing to know exactly how long everything is, I have some good reasons for doing so... ...Flash is notorious for crashing (Jake suggested we keep a tally going which sounds like a good idea: it currently stands at 1), so hopefully by making the animation in separate files will ease the strain, and also make it easier to edit any mistakes... We can each work on our bits of the project separately (from the comfort of our own homes!) knowing that when we come to edit the animation together, it'll (hopefully) be the correct length and bits won't overrun. It's also been easier to share the workload, so that we all have an even ammount of things to be getting on with.
We decided that we're going to edit the final scenes together using After Effects, this is partly because it'll be easier than doing so in Flash, but also because we want to add a paper texture to the background. As the animation's stlye is paper cut-out (and most of the symbols literally are scanned in pieces of coloured paper...), a plain white background would be boring and plain lazy on our part. Flash hates having the paper texture in the background (we're having to produce the animation at 1920 x 1080, so it's pretty large), but having it move makes it crash (hence the total standing at 1 from when we tried this morning...), but AE seems to like it, and if we export all of the scenes from Flash with an Aplha Channel (as we accidently did with an old version of the Animatic which we had a test play with... see below...) then it'll (metaphorically speaking) be a piece of cake. Hopefully.
Annnd I forgot to post this, an update of the (as yet still unfinished) fly symbol, now with FOUR legs:
(P.S. Congratulations to my tutor Andy who's just had a baby boy!)
So, here's the Ident Animatic I created to present to the rest of the class to get my idea across. For something that was literally done in about 15 minutes the night before, I don't think it's too bad.
However, yesterday I created another Animatic with the final logo's and style I want to use. I've decided I'm going to be brave and venture into After Effects to do it, because I don't think I can get the smoothness (or effects, sparks for the wire and amp - yay!) that I want with Flash, let's be fair, the tweens aren't exactly fantastic. It was also to show Pete in our AE session this afternoon, but I turned up and no-one else was there, not even Pete. Hmm.
I wanted the 'Red Room' and 'Virgin' logo to look like they were actually attached to the amp, I think it worked pretty successfully. Now I just need to wait for everyone to finish the storyboard project before I can beg for help to make my ident...
This Monday was my Live at Five day, for those of you who have no idea what the project is or entails, I’ll give a brief outline for you: A group of either 4 or 5 students work together as a team, one volunteering to be producer, to create a series of graphics needed for the Broadcast Journalism students in time for the recording of their television show “Live at Five” which they record, as it happens, at 5 o’clock to be streamed on the internet.
A few weeks ago I was feeling pretty apprehensive about the whole thing, having a distinct lack of skills in After Effects (the program that most other groups used to produce their graphics and title sequences on). Having told this to Pete, our After Effects teacher, last Friday he found me a few tutorials to do which really helped to boost my confidence with the program and about Live at Five in general. The group I was consisted of Laurence Nairne, Max Porteous, Alberto Montana and me. Laurence, had used our AE session to create some astons (title straps where peoples names appear on the screen) and weather map symbols so he volunteered to act as producer, which we all thought was fair as he had already done quite a bit to help ease the pressure off on the day. This was also a bit of a blessing too as Laurence had the highest skill level of AE between us, so he was able to help us out when Pete wasn’t around.
I took my graphics tablet thinking that it’d be a good idea and help me in creating my graphics, but the computer I was using only allowed the tablet to move around half of the screen whilst on Photoshop. Not particularly helpful, so I had to go back to using a mouse, feeling really strange after all the time I’ve been using my tablet to work on Flash. However I was not deterred and set about creating my first graphic for the day, Laurence asked us if we had any preference over which graphics we wanted to do, which nobody really did, so Al set to work on the Astons and Max on the weather. I worked on creating a medal table to show the results of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. I had to make a table showing the top six gold medal placings and the countries with the highest number of total medals and Great Britain’s position on the lists (which wasn’t very high on either sadly). I started off by searching for pictures of the Vancouver Olympic medals and a suitable winter-y background. Pete suggested I take a look to the Press photography website we had access to, where I found the following picture:
I decided I would edit the skater out, because I needed to put writing over the top, and the intense look on his face was pretty distracting! This left me with a nice blank background of the Olympic rings, I decided I would use the shapes of the medals as a part of the background, and have the number of each medal won written on a layer above the corresponding medal colour. At first I tried to fit all of the 7 rows of medals that I needed to display (the top 6 & GB) onto one picture, but after going up to the gallery with Pete to test it on a screen (I got confused with the resolution size, the computer was telling me it was at 100%, but it was far smaller than the actual size it was meant to be) I realised it would be better if I spaced them out more evenly, making it much easier and clearer to read.
I then ventured bravely into AE (with Pete standing by) and (very simply) animated my tables with subtle fades between each one. I managed to do it without Pete’s help, and was pretty pleased with the result.
After this, I had a quick break for lunch around half one, then came back to find poor Max (he had a pretty bad cold/cough) still working on the weather, being aided by Laurence. The journalist students kept coming in to ask when the weather map would be ready, which was pretty frustrating as the weather map is the graphic that takes the longest, especially as it has to be timed to what the presenter is going to say. I think Max had the hardest job, and despite being ill and not at his best, he managed to pull it off really well, I don’t have a copy of the final graphic, but I’m sure he will upload it to his blog at some point, so you can see it there. One of the journalist students had requested for an unanimated quote on a transparent background, so I did this straight after lunch to get me back into the swing of things, it didn’t require very much effort, and it wasn’t even used in the end, but I’ll supply a picture anyway. Al and I were going to collaborate on creating a graphic for the rugby results table, but the Journalists (who had decided that they didn’t want to use the animated astons that Laurence had already prepared, even though they would have looked far better) came down to tell us that their was a problem with all of the astons we had supplied, despite them being saved in the correct format, they were all showing a black background. So poor Al, with Pete’s help, had to change every one of the title straps he had spent the whole morning working on, which must have been very frustrating, especially when the journalists only used about 3 in the actual program. So, I ended up creating the whole rugby table graphic by myself, it was far quicker to make than the Olympic table, but I kept the fonts the same to keep some continuity within the sports section. Al had already found a logo for the Rugby league, so I decided that I would animate it leaving the middle of the screen to the top corner, and then have the results table appear in the screen centre. This looked a little plain compared to the Olympic graphic, so I decided to add some grass to the bottom of the screen to resemble a sports pitch, then had this fade slightly when the results table appeared, working solo once more in AE!
Overall, the day went far better than I expected it to go, we’d finished all of the graphics by 3:45, although the journalists came back to tell us their was a problem with another of the astons we’d given them, which poor Al had to sort out again. I now feel far more confident with AE and am pleased with the graphics I managed to produce, still having time to spare afterwards. It was really good to work as a part of team, with people I wouldn’t have necessarily worked with had we chosen the groups ourselves, I think this was probably better, as it means you pull together as a team and really focus on the work you have to get done. In the end the journalist students only used a small part of my Olympic table (it turned out the information containing the number of medals I had been given had a mistake on for one of the results, so they couldn’t show it), and a hand full of Al’s astons, Max’s weather map looked really good and I think we were all pretty proud of what we had managed to achieve.
This new term is already turning out to be pretty sic. We've got some crazy new projects (including working with Broadcasting students to produce graphics for their TV show [i'm scared shitless about that one], an Animation Background project and in the future we're being set Modelling projects in Maya and Flash projects.); new Software (After Effects [which after the first session doesn't seem as horribly scary as I thought, except it kept crashing...] and Flash [which I'm pretty stoked about]); and learning to do new things like Modelling on Maya. It's going to be awesome.
I spent most of yesterday afternoon installing upgrades for my computer in order to install Flash, which took forever. While I was doing that, I handwrote out this blog update to type up and began work on my new sketchbook/background project for Kathy (and cleaned my bathroom, on a saturday night, how unbeliavbly wild University life is). But today i've successfully managed to install it, so I'll most likely be spending my free time practising getting to grips with it. (Unlike Maya & AE, Flash looks a lot more easy to use, and it's small enough that my computer can handle it... hopefully.) I've wanted to learn Flash for a long time, but had never managed to get my hands on a copy or be taught any of the controls before now. I hope that now I've got my own copy, uit means I'll be able to do some animation of my own when I get home. At Christmas I only had Animation paper, and a combination of being ill, working nearly everyday and having a distinct lack of ideas and Rostrum Camera meant I did nada on the work front. I also like the idea of Flash being Vector based and related to Photoshop, (I think this is perhaps why I feel a little more confident in learning it), it'll also give me a chance to improve my graphics tablet skills.
I'm looking forward to the background project alot more than the animal-head one (sorry Kathy). The backgrounds have to be the weirdest sizes I've come across, it's a size called 12 Field (which, incase you're wondering the exact measurements, which you're probably not, are 267 x 330mm), which is a little annoying because it's slightly larger than A4 (a nice comfortable size), and means i've had to crack out my mahoosive A2 sketchbook in order to work at the correct size. I'm glad though, because you can't work on A4 forever and the larger size means I can add more detail within the drawings.
I'm already feeling a bit more confident with Maya (which is a relief, although i'm still terrfied of going anywhere near the graph editor), our first CGI environments tutorial/session with Georg was on tuesday and I was very pleased because I actually understood it all. It'll still be a long time before I'll be able to create anything decent on it, if I thought my computer could handle it, I'd install Maya on it to practice,though it may buckle under the weight of Flash, we shall see....
