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:

Production Transcript

So, here's what Love Hate consists of at the minute, if anyone has any ideas for storyboarding sections, getting in contact with me and/or Hugh would be great.

Production Transcript

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.

Into Production

So, it's already one week into term and I'm falling behind with the blog updates, somewhat hindered by my later than expected return to Falmouth due to a chest infection. That was fun.

Love Hate has been one of the final ten projects to go into production, (something that is both pleasing and extremely stressful when I stop long enough to think about it). Although it's unfortunate that a lot of my favourite projects didn't go through, this has only spurred me on to make sure this film gets completed to the highest possible standard, and some of those whose projects didn't get picked will help me on the way to achieving this.

Hugh is staying on as my Co-director and this week our job is to sort out the soundtrack and get it as finalised as possible. This will mean that we can really get to grips with pacing and storyboarding the entire film ready to start dishing out the animation asap, and give it to Rob to start playing around with some music for it. It also means organising and editing all the voice clips I collected over Christmas from my Mum's lovely workmates at Carers Gloucestershire, who allowed me to interview them all!

Emily has kindly offered her services to me and will be handling some of the design elements, this primarily consists of Character Designs, and she'll be giving my brief little stick figures an injection of much needed personality.

Currently I have no full time animators on my project, but Dan Emmerson & Tom Gameson have said they will lend themselves to a few scenes. Since the scenes are going to be short in length, I've pitched it to the other third years that while they work on longer, more animation heavy and time consuming projects, if they wanted to have a bit of a break and doing something a bit more free and fluid, they can work on a scene of mine , not only will this give them a much needed break, (this comes from personal experience of working on Barista last year - working in one rigid style of animation that you aren't necessarily comfortable with can get you into a bit of a creative rut, so it's nice to just have fun and do something different for a couple of days to get you back into the swing of things)but it will also greatly help to move my project along nicely. Although this is going to mean that the style of drawings varies from person to person, I think it will lend itself to the piece since all of the voiceclips belong to different individuals and no-one really sounds the same.

So, watch this space.

[Insert witty Pre-Production joke/pun here]

So, there's been quite alot of changes since I last updated, and it feels like time is fast slipping away, as it always does when a deadline is rapidly approaching and my timetables are looking more and more scarier...

After realising quite early on I wouldn't be able to accomplish everything I want to do for the piece on time, I asked Hugh Herbert to be my co-director. Hugh has helped to give the project a bit more of a boost to the (and I use the term loosely here...) 'narrative' of the piece, helping to come up with new sequences, something I was struggling with when sat on my own with the original ten page transcript of quotes.

After constructive feedback from my tutors, the structure of the project has also changed somewhat, instead of having the whole piece just continaully morph from one thing to the next, it's going to be more segmented - kind of like a little sketch show - with different scenarios in each bit. This should make for much more interesting viewing, giving me the oppurtunity play around with the pacing and timing as well. Hugh has also suggested tweaking the style slighty for each segment, so that the piece has the same kind of style throughout, but different variations and themes for individual love/hates, hopefully this too will make the piece more interesting than just "I love A, I hate B, etc...".

The frustrating thing about working with a soundlead piece is that it feels like I'm working backwards, normally you have the narrative idea, then storyboard/animatic from that and worry about the sound last. However, I'm having to figure out the order the soundclips are going in, which clip flows into which, can I use both the love/hate they say in the clip or just the one, how will it morph to the next one - if it does at all, and so on and so forth. Only once that's all sorted can storyboarding any visuals begin. This is why Hugh has been so helpful, just having someone to bounce ideas with makes the whole process much quicker and the visuals come along more naturally.

Trying to put voiceclips into a logical order:

Another problem that has arisen by working on a soundbased project is what to actually put into the animatic. I still want to go out and record more people so I can get the largest possible source of material to work with for the final film, which means there's no final narrative or soundtrack to work to yet. This poses a problem for my friend Rob, the music man, as I can't give him anything definitvie to work with. However, since we need to hand in a scratchtrack with our Animatics, to give a sense of what the final thing will be like, I put together a 3 & a half minute set of clips for him to work with, which is working well so far:



This again has affected what I am able to do for the animatic: after speaking to Derek and showing him the animatic script; he asked if it was going to be the same for the final film; after I said no, he suggested just making an animatic just for the clips I would like to use in the final film. This has made it much easier to figure out which clips I need to properly storyboard and work on (more schedules!.


I've started mocking up some parts of the animatic with my storyboards...



And have have also done one bit of the real animatic so far:


(Virtual cookies for you if you can tell which famous horror film that shot pays homage to...)

I'll post another update sometime later on this week focused more on the design-y side of things.

Stop Motion

I've just got back from my Stop Motion workshop with Ann. I worked with Rozi and Hugh.

It was really good fun and we got to do two animations, the first was under Ann's instruction, we had to make our Puppets touch their toes:

(I animated the puppet on the right, Hugh the middle and Rozi the left).

As we had 45 minutes of the session left, Ann wanted us to come up with our own idea to animate. We chose to have the puppets scratch themselves (it makes you itchy to look at, but hopefully will make you chuckle as well):


It was good fun, even though the puppets creeped me out a little to begin with!