One of the first things I did upon receiving the brief was to listen to the five different tracks we were provided with to set our animation to, so that I would be able to choose the piece my animation will be set to and then get inspiration for what my short will feature. After listening to the tracks I decided to go for the fourth track, Mind Control, which opens with the line “Take a look at the world around you”. This then led me to start thinking about backgrounds and having a stylised setting for my animation, and so I started looking at the backgrounds used in Batman: The Animated Series. In the show, the backgrounds, rather than being painted using dark colours onto white pieces of paper, they used light colours on black pieces of paper and left areas of darkness to give off shadows and help Gotham seem like a truly dark world for the Batman to inhabit, as the series also used a lot of art deco architecture in the serie’s buildings, the process became known as dark deco. I am also a fan of animations where many of the drawings look sketchy and the pencil marks can be seen such as in Glen Keane’s Duet or in Disney’s John Henry short, and so rather than painting the backgrounds, something I would find completely out of my comfort zone as I have never been fond of painting, I decided that the backgrounds would be drawn. Another source of inspiration was comic books as were told to take inspiration form things we enjoy and so I felt like comic books would tie in nicely after already having the Batman connection. I liked the clearly defined, angulated edges of characters in comics and the way shadows are cast across their faces and decided to add this in when it came to designing the character for my piece. I toyed around with having my character move in a way similar to that found in motion comics, however I abandoned this idea when I realised it would most likely come across as simply bad animation, and chose to go with a more fluid look to the piece.
Figure 1. Rough draft of street
Originally to get the sketchy quality I considered animating using a white pencil, however it wasn’t coming out clear enough for my liking, and so I decided to use chalk instead as this would show up better when it came to scanning in. Also to keep with the sketchy theme, I wanted the world to drawn in front of the viewer’s eye, so to start I sketched out an example of the street that wanted and then on my black piece of paper, I sketched out the drawing line by line first in a HB pencil using a rule, and then in chalk going along the lines bit by bit, and then scanning the page as I went along so that the image would appear to be drawn on the screen. I had the idea of my piece ending the same way that it started – just a plain black piece of paper, and so I decided that the best way for
this to happen would be to have the frames run in a reverse order and have the background disappear.
Figure 2. Walk Cycle Test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujaCu11YS94
For my character, I first created some test animations of my character walking and of their head rotating/ the camera panning around the characters head. For the walk cycle I used one of the example walk cycles from the book Animation 1 by Preston Blair. Although this walk cycle was smooth, the animation was far too over the top and cartoonish for what I wanted, and so I filmed myself walking towards a camera and used the frames from that video as reference for my character’s walk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ7hK_8wlAo. When it came to animating my character, I first started by drawing my character in roughly the correct area of the page and then when I moved onto the next frame I kept the piece of paper in view and tried to position it in the correct place. As can be imagined, this method results in the character jumping around the page in different areas, as well as increasing and decreasing in size, luckily I was able to fix this sequence in Adobe After Effects in post-production, however I had quickly realised that this was not the way to animate. Eventually I remembered that animating is normally done with the pages placed on top of one another and then the animator would either flick through or use a lightbox to help position the frames correctly so that there would be a nice flow to the animation. I am not entirely sure why I went about the animation this way originally as whenever I have animated something before I have used the correct technique, however I think it may have been something to do with the fact that the black paper made a lightbox useless as it would not let anything through, this of course does not stop me from flipping through the pages and so can only be put down to a bad judgement call. Additionally, I was going to be animating the character walk all the way across the screen and draw the background onto each frame, however after it was suggested that I animate the background separately I could save myself work by just animating one walk cycle and then loop it and pull it across the screen in After effects, and then place the background underneath the character.
I created two additional sequences featuring the character, the first was of the camera panning around the characters head in 360 degrees. Initially I was trying to get the shading on the character’s face correct, however I forgot that as the camera panned, the lighting would fall on my character’s face differently rather than staying constant, and so about half way through I rushed to have the lighting catch up to where it should be. To make sure that my character would have a symmetrical face, I decided to only animate from the front of the head to the back of the head, and then just reverse loop the frames, and flip them so that it would look like it is panning the full 360 degrees. A problem with this turned out to be that I hadn’t animated the character’s head in the exact centre of the page, so when I ended up flipping the page, the bars on the side of the screen move so that the character stays in position, fortunately, I had played the sequence to people multiple times and they hadn’t noticed it until I pointed it out to them so I decided to leave it in as it is only for a few
seconds. The final sequence animated was that of my character doing a somersault through the air which gave my character the agility of a comic book character and looks very dynamic. Unfortunately these two sequences did not last as long as I had originally planned and hoped they would last, which meant that I had to add some further loops into my finished piece as I didn’t want to rush an extra sequence and have it look subpar to the rest of the film. To give these looped sequences some variation I had them loop in the reverse order and then have it join up with my planned closing sequence of the street disappearing.
Figure 3. E4 logo mid bounce
For my E4 Sting, I knew that I was going to animate it in the same way, with white chalk on black paper, however to keep with the E4 style, I would use the computer to change the white to purple. I had originally tried using purple chalk, however it was so light it came across as off-white, and so I decided to keep with the true white as it would scan in better. I wanted to actually animate the E4 logo rather than just slapping it on the end of a sequence and so I decided that I would have the logo coming down the street from my 30 second animation. As the logo doesn’t have any legs, I chose to have it bouncing across the screen like a ball, this would also give me a great opportunity to play around with squash and stretch. Knowing that to straight ahead animate the somewhat complex E4 logo squashing and stretching out of proportion would be difficult, I decided to animate a ball first, using simple circles and ellipses, and then going back over and drawing the logo around the ball, again in pencil, and then go round the images for a final time, this time filling the logo in with chalk. As the scene was set on the same street as my other piece, I decided to have the same opening of my street being drawn, although this time in purple, as this would take up five of the ten seconds allocated for the sting, and would use the remaining five seconds to focus on the logo. I also knew that I wanted the logo to be still for about two seconds so that the audience would be able to clearly focus on the channels logo, so this left me with three seconds for the bounce, and as this was shot on 25 frames per second, on twos, this meant I would need around 38 frames of the logo bouncing. Unfortunately I was too quick at getting the logo to its final position, I did attempt to rectify this with another small bounce, however the bounce was about 5 frames too short which meant I had a longer time on the final still logo. After completing the animation and editing it together, I tried the animation with the Disco music and the Rock music as I felt these two were upbeat enough for the bounce, I settled on the Disco music as this fitted better with the animation as the music seemed to kick in around the five second mark when the logo appeared on screen.
If I were to do this project again, there would be many things I would do differently such as animate with the paper set up correctly from the start, as I found not only would this create a better and more fluid looking animation, but it would also make the process quicker as you would not have to second guess yourself with the positioning of the character on the page as you could check easily. I would also consider timing much more as I feel like this was the downfall of my project as it meant I
had to loop much more of my animation than had originally been intended with less original animation and much more repetition in the finished animation.
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