Love Hate (Teaser Video)

Love Hate (Teaser) from Alice Nightingale on Vimeo.

Easter Update

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:

Cracking On

To save my sanity, Hugh has been an absolute hero this past week while I pieced together my draft dissertation for Monday. The final voicetrack (for the forseeable future) is now in place and we're going to be working to it (perhaps with a few twaeaks here and there for timing).

When we showed them on Friday, Rosa and Derek seemed pleased with what we've accomplished so far, and the track got a few laughs even without the visuals to accompany it...

(The video is rather boring, but has some storyboard of what we've got planned thus far).


We're still looking for ideas for some sections of audio, but this next week is going to be about animation tests, ready for when we get our second years sometime next week.

Here's two Hugh made last week:

Donut Run Test. from Hugh Herbert on Vimeo.

Old Lady transformation test from Hugh Herbert on Vimeo.

And two I made today:

(It glitches slightly as I hadn't realised there was an additional frame when I switched from 25 to 12fps).

The pleasing thing is that these ones didn't take very long at all... I find it much easier to make my animation neater on paper than I do on computer, there's just something about having it there physically on the paper that makes it easier than a graphics tablet for me.

Love Hate - Animatic Storyboard

Blam! You might want to full-screen it...

LOVEHATE Animatic Storyboard

Tomorrow is Judgement Day...

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!

Animation Test [1]

Probably the first of many...

Inspired by this drawing:


Combined the drawing with a bird cycle I animated roughly for practice last year.

Research/Concept Art

Third Year Beginnings.

I was tempted to name this post "The Final Countdown" or something equally as corny, but nobody wants to start the year off with a terrible pun, (unless you're my Dad, then it's standard practice).

So, yes, third year, the beginning of the end and yet it feels like my University experience has just started... (Obviously this post already appears to be filled with clichés and all that jazz). After a lovely (albeit very geeky, but not very productive) summer, I'm back and ready to work my ass off. Currently this has involved acquiring a large wall chart and marking all the important (and scary) hand-in dates for Final Major Projects & Dissertations, it also has days marked off for when I need to update my blog... The plan is to update it at least every other Tuesday, so we'll see how successful that is. Days are also marked off for when I need to attempt to do academic reading for said dissertation. For those of you who wonder exactly what a pile of dissertation research is looks like, it's currently a little something like this:

Rather intimidating, yes? Especially when I tell you that the yellow folder is filled with photocopies and printouts of essays and book chapters as well. Eep.

However, on a slightly better note, this term will be spent developing our ideas for final films ready to pitch (in front of all three years of Animation, the tutors and a panel of industry professionals... although perhaps this is just as intimidating as the dissertation) and, hopefully, get selected to be put into production.

After spending the first half of the summer fretting because I had a complete lack of any creative ideas, I had inspiration hit me while I was on a train (somehow trains appear to be good for my creativity, in the past I've had a couple of ideas for other projects suddenly come to me while train travelling). Being paranoid about the possibility of potentially having to stand on a six hour train journey (Falmouth really isn't the most easily accessible place), I always book a seat reservation. And someone, it doesn't matter how empty the carriage is, will always pick to sit in my seat. Always. It annoys me so much. And then I thought, well, why couldn't I make this into an animated film? Obviously not just about a train seat, but why not ask people about all the random little things that specifically annoy them or they really hate? I could run around with a sound recorder and ask people the same question (a la Creature Comforts), then take their responses and turn them into an animated sequence.

Everyone I ask will have different opinions, so I want to replicate that with a range of different animation styles. In my Foundation year for our first 'Time and Image' workshop we had to create two images of ourselves and animate from one to the other, then we had to take our last image and animate it to the next person's first, it was really effective and despite everyone having created very different images, the piece worked as a whole. Sadly, I do not have the original video of everyone's work, but I have the section that I created, which you can watch below. I want to do the same for this project, animate all the 'phrases' separately, then take the last frame from one and animate it to the first of the next. I also want the film to have a kind of spontaneous feel, like the 'Lightbulb Boy' animation I did at the end of last year, each bit was really different, but it all flowed together.

After telling Andy and Derek and a few of my classmates my idea, it was suggested that instead of doing just things people disliked, that I include their likes/loves. So, currently I am in the process of juggling between the ideas of creating two separate films, a "Love" film and a "Hate" film, or making a completely combined one.

My idea is a relatively simple one, but I feel that if it is picked, it will have a much higher chance of getting completed than an a 5 minute long scripted idea. Working so closely (well, practically as a third year myself - I even got a 'medal' for "Wannabe 3rd Year" in our 'award' ceremony at the end of term last year) on Barista, I know that even with the best intentions and time management, it is not always possible to get everything done in time. Hopefully, by having an idea that works in segments, even if a section is not working, it can be scrapped and work without it. Even if I only worked with two other people on the entire thing, if we created five 10 second segements each, that would equate to a two and a half minute film to hand in.

Some inspiration:

http://www.postsecret.com/

And I leave you with a screenshot of the fruits of about an hour's work on Maya achieved (I've attempted to make something in order for a little test sequence I'm planning...):

Musical Lightbulb Boy

With the aid of my amazing school friend Rob Allen, who has just graduated with a degree in Creative Music Technology at Huddersfield University, Lightbulb Boy has music... This should be the first of many collaborations and hopefully one will happen over the summer before he starts a Masters at Birmingham Conservatoire.

End of Term! [Negociated Production Report/Animation Technologies/Pitch Project]

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:

Alice Negotiated 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:

Alice Nightingale - Animation Technologies Essay

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...

Lightbulb Boy

My paper animation works! It works better at 12fps, but this video export was a much better quality.

Negociated Brief

As the deadline looms for the negociated brief I've been struggling to get motivated to do as much work as should for my Barista scenes. I had a very helpful a tutorial with Andy on thursday, were we got talking about the sort of thing I would like to do if I wasn't working on Barista. Barista's style is neat and orderly and the strict style that Alex wants is very different to my own... as Andy said, I've been working on it since January and he suggested that I work on the scenes I said I would complete, but instead of working on new Barista scenes, to put aside one of the days left in the run up to the deadline to work on my own animation, and see what I come up with.

Lightbox, I missed you!

So, at half past ten on friday night (after battling with my Animation Technologies essay, which is taking forever, my brain is overloaded with information about Digital Cameras... it turns out there is such as a thing as too much research...) inspiration hit me and I decided to get out my lightbox and get drawing away without any particular plan. I continued to work on it for most of saturday and currently have roughly around 250 frames (which equates to 10 seconds of animation), until I shoot it on the linetester at uni, I have no idea what it actually looks like or wether the timing will work. But it's been very liberating and really fun to just go ahead and do something spotaneous, without a plan and just improvising along the way. I really want to continue working on it, but have to finish my Barista scenes and win my battle with the Animation Technologies essay first... So, watch this space.

[100th post!] Pre-Production Complete

Celebrating my 100th Blog post AND the completion of my Pre-Production project. It's been a mission, but it's got done :)

The Final Design Bible:
Theatre of The People Design Bible
My Production Report:
AliceNightingale_ProductionReport
My Visual Research File:
Visual Research File
All my Sketchbook work for the Project:
Alice Pre Pro Sketch Book

Barista Work: Animatic

It's been a while blog, I've been busy neglecting you and half starting and not finishing everything else...

So, here's an updated version of the Barista Animatic, the first minute and a half is by Alex and the rest is by me...


Due to techincal problems and compatability issues, only me and Alex are going to be working on the final film, we're definitley animating up to the end of the animatic and anything after that will be a bonus! No more animatic we're heading straight into animating next!

Tomorrow, with the aide of Alex's girlfriend and armed with P2 cameras, we're roadtripping to some fancy coffee place Alex has got in contact with to shoot some refererence footage for the opening coffee-making sequence, so I'll be uploading some pictures of that soon :)

I'm currently working on pre-production like a boss, after my fairly successful pitch (I feel it went well... considering I didn't have a practice and Derek & Kathy hadn't heard anything about my change of idea...) things are coming together fairly quickly and easily.

Also going to be doing our second shoot for Cinematography tonight (our first was fairly successful, but there are a couple we need to reshoot). I'm also going to take my "monkey" camera and take pictures and do some interviews for our "behind the scenes" kind-of-thing we have to do to accompany it, as well as perform my role as shot keeper (or as Frankie says, 'shop keeper'), so that'll be up on here soon too.

Pre-Production: Sketchbook

Apologies for the post spamming today, but I was waiting for this to upload before I started my other two posts, aaaaand it only just finished. Here's a .pdf of all my sketchbook work for this project, so far:

Alice PrePro Sketch Book

Life Drawing 10.02.11

Pleased with this week's work considering I had a shocker of a headache throughout our session (the people who had used the room before us had done oil painting, so the room stank of turpentine, which some people love, but it makes me feel like i'm about to pass out or my head is being chopped in half...)

Barista Work: The League

My latest work for the Barista project... I had to go home this weekend, and without access to a computer with Animate I suggested to Alex that I get designing some characters for one of the most important scenes... where Tim, the coffee-making Hero, ends up face to face with his exes. 16 of them. So, I designed 16 exes.

Being obsessed with Scott Pilgrim it was awesome to be able to create a "league" of "evil" exes for Tim to face...

Before I left for home I found a hairstyle website and saved what I thought were the most appropriate hairstyles, (the only instruction Alex gave me was for them to "be hot"), which I got Alex to approve before I went:


Rough Doodles:




Final Designs, some look more similar to the photographs than others:

Barista Work: Transitions

A week or two ago I mentioned an idea I had to Alex about involving coffee beans in the cheesy screen wipes he wanted to put in, he liked the idea and thought we could use real coffee beans in stop motion to do this (inspired by Emily's Experimental bead project), so he asked me to design a few:

Life Drawing 27.01.11

Getting back into the swing of things, I really am much happier to sit and draw in my sketchbook than stand at an easel:


Aaand pratting about with paint (I like my negative space one best):


As an animation student we tend to practise drawing a sequence of actions:


My favourites:

Pre-Production Inspiration/Research

Somehow, when Kathy told us to research Character Design, I don't think she would've expected this to pop up in what the website it's from calls "100 inspiring character designs".

However I did find an awesome blog that interviews different character/pre-production designers and showcases their work: http://characterdesign.blogspot.com/
It has quite a variety of different artists/animators on there, and the videos/pictures are really interesting, especially when you come across something you know and love. I especially enjoyed stumbling on the interview with Carlos Grangel who talked about his methods and designs for characters in The Corpse Bride (YAY BURTON!):



I recommend people check it out, it's a really cool website.

Workwise for this project so far I have been doing lots of research, mainly gathering images of wartime Berlin, watercolour artists, German wartime artists, concept art, clothing studies aaaand lots of doodles/mindmapping/scribbles.


I'm still a little hesitant to put things up on my blog at the moment, because things really are still in the rough stage, perhaps when I have more solid ideas and style I'll be a little braver.