Experiments using my chosen characters

Okay, so I realised jumping in and rushing to make my animation wasn't a good idea so this time I am taking my time to make sure I am making the right decisions! When I was doing researching for this project I looked into various animation techniques including stop motion as it looked like an interesting technique and something I haven't tried before.
When coming up with my idea and drawing my storyboards I did come to the conclusion that I should do my animation digitally as I thought my characters would look better made on illustrator than hand drawn and I wanted that 2D cartoon appeal like the work from Tado. I still think I should do my animation digitally however it doesn't hurt to try new things so I thought I would do a few small stop motion clips using my characters to see if making my animation is definitely the right decision.

I have made my bird and doughnut character out of felt fabric and toy stuffing. I decided that I would put the eyes on digitally as I thought I may want their expressions to change in the animations. The birds legs are separate from the body so I could make them move easier.

Here is my green screen! It is a piece of paper stuck on my cupboard!

Here is the first one I made- I initially filmed using a green screen so I could have a background however I really liked the movement of the shadows on the paper and thought it added to the organic look of the animation so I decided to do the animation with and without a background! I decided to make Doughy spin as in my storyboard he spins alot!


Fabric Doughy spinning from sarah chester on Vimeo.


Fabric Doughy spinning with background from sarah chester on Vimeo.

After this quick stop motion I decided to challenge myself a bit more and make the eyes change in my next stop motion. I also experimented a bit with type at the end, I went for a fun looking type to match the humour of the clip and also had a play with some of the type effects. I put offset on and character offset as well as making the text fade in and out. I think there is a lot going on with the text and I will make it more simplistic on my final animation but I wanted to see what basic effects I could create.


Don't look up! from sarah chester on Vimeo.

This one includes 2 cameras. I experimented with the zooming in and out. This stop motion was based on the last bit of the story board, I think it worked well in stop motion. I liked mixing digital with stop motion however think I will still make my final animation digitally as there are somethings I want to do that I think will look better done completely digitally.  By making these experiments I have learnt the basics of stop motion and I have learnt how to input my photographs into After Effects as a composition. I have also learnt how to use the camera and null object layers and how the use of parenting is needed to make the camera zoom in on the null object. Furthermore I tried out different effects of my type so these experiments have definitely been worthwhile.


Love is... FOOD from sarah chester on Vimeo.

Audio

As we were given the audio I didn't really need to think much about the audio side of my animation. By picking 3 key words that the music reminded me of made sure that my animation fit with the music. 

For some reason I decided to use Garage Band to make cut my song, the main reason being because I have used it before. I also wanted to make my music fade in and and out and you are able to do this in Garage Band. I then imported my song from iTunes into After Effects and put it on an audio layer.

I listened to the music a few times to work out which bit I wanted to use for my animation. I wanted my animation to start off with a happy feel and then change when the Doughnut got bitten so I picked the part of the song with major chords and then after about 20 seconds the percussion and drums come in and the melody stops and the mood of the song changes. I thought this part of the song would fit well with my animation because at the start of the song everything is fine and then they fall in love but then right at the end the doughnut gets bitten and he is unhappy. I then wanted the song to start fading out when the credits appeared and then become silent when the blank screen appeared.

Making things move in After Effects- Uni session

In uni we were shown how to make things move in after effects using 2 different techniques.
One was using the puppet pin tool and putting 'pins' into where there should be movement on your character for example, the joints. We used a skeleton picture for the tutorial as it was easier to see the movement. I found the puppet pin tool didn't work well with the skeleton because it made his bones go bendy. We used the starch tool to 'spray' where we wanted parts of our skeleton to not move such as the bones and that made the movement look better but I still didn't like the effect. I thought learning this technique was useful though as I think it could possibly work well on my characters just for slight movements for instance if one of my characters walk there body will need to move slightly too.
The other technique we were shown I preferred and will be using this technique to make my character move it's arms and legs. It is a bit more difficult though as the characters body parts all need to be on separate layers so there are more things to organise and I found my layers panel started to get a bit clustered.
Once all the body parts have their own layers you have to adjust the points to make sure each centre part is on the joint as this is where the movement will originate from. Then the complicated bit is the parenting bit so you have to make sure the body is the parent of the upper arm and the upper arm is the parent of the lower arm and so on! Once that is complete you can use the rotate button to make the parts move as if they were joined together.
Here are a couple of examples as it is easier to show then explain it!

Skeleton from sarah chester on Vimeo.

Skeleton 2 from sarah chester on Vimeo.

Rotoscopy- Lunamation

Kid Dream -The Jessica Stuart Few from Evan DeRushie on Vimeo.

I found this video and thought it was really interesting as each frame looks different as if it had been drawn different on purpose. I wasn't sure how it was done so I found a video explaining it:



Basically, a film is took of whatever you want animated and then it is printed out frame by frame and people trace the frames and then all frames are put together in a stop motion sequence.
For this animation they used over 70 volunteers to draw each frame and because everyone has their own individual drawing style and subliminally choose what they want to trace, every frame looks different.

I think the outcome is really unusual and interesting. This appeals to me more than cell animation as I like how they are explicitly showing in the animation that they are made from drawings where as most traditional cell animation is about trying to get the animation as fluid and realistic as possible without drawing attention to the drawing technique.

Storyboard slideshow

Sotoryboard slideshow from sarah chester on Vimeo.

I thought I would put my storyboard in After Effects to get a feel of what it will be like when I fully animate it. I am hopeful that this time my story will fit the alloted time as my slideshow takes just 10 seconds.

New Storyboard

I began to make my animation from my first storyboard but I wasn't fully satisfied with the outcome for various reasons. My reasons were:

• My background was too plain.

• My Dinosaur character didn't look good moving- I realised that the character I had come up with had no visible arms and legs so it was hard to convey movement. When I used various techniques on after effects it just didn't look very good and the character didn't come to life so I thought it would be better to change my character.

• The narrative was too complex- in my first narrative I was trying to convey all three of my chosen words: Mysterious, suspicious and love, however I found out half way through making my animation that my narrative would run over 30 seconds so it wasn't feasible. Therefore I decided I should edit my narrative and focus on just one of my words: love.

I did like how my animation was turning out but I thought I could do better and being the perfectionist that I am I decided to redo my animation. I designed a new background and a new character to replace my dinosaur and I also did another story board to work out a similar narrative that was just less complex than the previous one. 

Scene 1- Birdette goes for a walk

Shot 1- Medium shot

Camera pans from right to left of landscape

Shot 2- Medium shot

Birdette walks from left to right

Birdette walks off screen 

Scene 2- Birdette meets Doughy

Shot 1- Medium shot of new background.

Birdette walks onto screen from left side. Doughy 'spins' in from the right. They meet in the centre of the screen.

Shot 2- camera static, still medium shot.

Speech bubble appears above Doughy.

Pale pink blush slowly appears on his cheeks (opacity 0% to 100% in 2 seconds.)

Shot 3- camera static, still medium shot.

Another speech bubble appears above Birdette.

After 1 second both speech bubbles start to fade (opacity 100%- 0% in 2 seconds.)

Scene 3- in 'Love.'

Shot 1- Camera static, medium shot.

Love heart appears above characters.

Appears to be beating (scale 100%-120%-100% etc.)

Shot 2- medium shot.

Birdette's beak starts growing and opening.

Body moves to indicate pecking.

Love heart 'dissolves' (block dissolve effect.)

Shot 3- medium shot.

Birdette bites/eats a chunk of Doughy.

Birdette's beak opens and closes.

Scene fades out (opacity 100%-0% in 2 seconds) to blank screen (Same colour as sky.)

Credits

Start with blank screen.

Text begins to appear letter by letter (off set) and fades in (opacity) and then fades out.

END= Blank screen

This is the rough draft I did in my sketchbook first (below), I find it helps to roughly sketch the animation first before I do a digital storyboard but then a digital one helps me more when making my animation as I know what characters and backgrounds look like

.

Cell Animation

I decided to give cell animation ago. It takes quite a long time because you have to draw each frame (and there is usually about 12 frames per second.)
The first one I did I used a 'peg' and some thin paper. The 'peg' holds the paper together and the thin paper is used so you can see your previous drawing underneath.
When it was finished I imported it into after effects as a sequence- I made sure to change my composition settings from 25fps to 12 fps. I also put a picture of grass I had taken as the background of my cell animation.
The second one I did at home not uni so I didn't have a peg or a thin paper so it has a much more organic feel to it as it is more juttery but I quite like that about it. I tried to make the narrative fit 2 of my chosen words; mysterious and suspicious, but that is quite hard to do in a 4 second animation!
Both animations are not great but they gave me an insight into cell animation. I won't be using cell animation in my final piece though as I think my animation will look better done digitally.


Shroom attack from sarah chester on Vimeo.


Roar! from sarah chester on Vimeo.

Above is my initial storyboard idea for my cell animation- Roar! Below is some notes I made on cell animation in my book to remind me of things- click to enlarge.