Full Film

Behind the Scenes

Trails

Waaaahh I forgot to post this fun picture. It's every frame of my dissipating smoke cloud displayed at once. A happy accident.

Stills

The Journey Ends

Well, that's my film officially finished and submitted. I'm calling it complete. As usual there are a few things I would like to go back and work on, but you have to call it quits somewhere. I feel the film works and serves its purpose for me. The things I'd like to do I probably wouldn't do even if I did have more time. It has been a bit of a rush scramble to get done in time, but I feel I don't feel the work has suffered as a result - I instead sacrificed socialising, meals and sleep… not something I would have done if I wasn't so passionate about the project I suspect.

I think what really made things tight was the compositing. Having backgrounds all filmed and ready for me a little over confident with my schedule, and I failed to anticipate how long some scenes would take to put together - not from a lack of planning, but from finding more and more ways to integrate the animated characters into the scene - and of course the odd bit of motion tracking that didn't work or an object that had to be tracked manually due to parallax issues.

Having a team of volunteer undergraduates certainly made this possible. Although I animated all but five shots the proved invaluable when it came down to cleaning up (inking) the frames and colouring them. Having those jobs outsourced allowed me to focus most of my efforts on the composite. The top priority, if I couldn't have it all, was to make sure the FX side of the project was as good as it could be rather than focusing too much on producing my best character animation (however the film does contain some of my best stuff yet).

Over all I think the project has been a success. I've learned a lot and achieved a lot with little-to-no experience on what I sought to do, as well a learning the limitations and pit-falls that come with this technique which I know to be aware of in future projects.

Finale

This scene took longer than any other to render.

Floor

Elwood's Entrance

Work in progress.

Alpha Channel

Another Shadow

This scene is a work in progress, with another animated shadow to help tie the animation into the scene. This looked good in After Effects but when compressed the shadow gets a little lost. I don't know if I should make it more intense or not. Choose '480' quality below to reduce some of the blurring on the surface of the desk for a better idea of how the shadow looks.

Fun Freeze Frames

(Not the real background)

Colour

RE: the last post.

Cleanup

For digital cleanup I put every frame of the scene into a Photoshop file as layers and ink over each one. This allows me to use the previous frames as reference to reduce line boil, and sometimes I can even copy and paste certain elements that don't change between frames rather than drawing them over and over - for example, Trooper's hands on the floor. It didn't seem worth dividing just those onto a layer of their own while animating when I can keep it simple and only ink it once on the computer. Here's what you see if you look at all the inked layers at once.

Shot 14

Using shadows to help integrate the characters into the scene.

Completed Shots

Well shot 32 (the "money shot") is finished and rendered - but I'm not going to post that here, I want to save that puppy for the screening, so instead I'll show you shot 19, which rivals shot 32 in terms of how much rotoscoping was involved. That's about it though, the animation was pretty minimal in this one.

If I have time I'm going to animate his eyes, but not until the rest of the scenes are finished.

Sh19 in Progress

This scene is the last of the pain-in-the-arse rotoscoping. Transparencies and extreme motion blurs to deal with.

Shot 32 in Progress IV

Some more work in progress from the hardest shot in the film. I hope to get this one finished tomorrow at the latest.

Shot 32 in Progress III

Elwood is now animated. This complicated jumble of layers is actually still easier than trying to animate this whole thing frame-by-frame. And gives a much smoother, less wobbly look which helps blend it with the live action. Time to animate Trooper now.

Shot 32 in Progress II

Same deal as the last post but with some animation and a blocked out and some better blocking out for the rotation. The more 2D animation seen here benefits from a few cheats in Flash to reduce the number of drawings I need to do, but I'll be unable to employ as much of that for the rotation. Back to frame-by-frame drawing.

Shot 32 in Progress

These are just some stills from Flash so there's no proper compositing yet.

And here's a rough reference for position and scale of the next bit of the animation.

Progress Update

Today was my first proper test of the production pipeline. I cleaned up (inked) a scene on paper and then scanned it and coloured in in Photoshop. I developed a complicated set of actions to make it a semi-automated process which lets me clean and colour the scanned drawings incredibly fast, and also prepare them for compositing. I then started a composite to test the cleaned animation and camera tracking, although didn't have time to finish it before the college closed. So far the process seems to work without any problems and is a lot faster than I had hoped, which bodes well for the deadline.

Performance

Since I'm not using dialogue in my film, I had to try and convey a lot purely through expression and body language. This scene has a fair amount - I hope it works.

More Line Tests

A couple more of the more interesting scenes I've animated. See if you can spot the frame from the previous blog post ;)

Frame

HQ

This is where the animation is taking place.

Chucking Out Time

Another wee sneak peek of the animation in progress. I rather like this shot.

The characters are on separate layers so it'll be easy to adjust the timing on who gets chucked when - though I have tried as much as possible to animate them so that they can go at similar times without synchronised nor overly distracting movements.

Animation Line Tests

The scenes I've been working on the past couple of days, which I compiled for the peer review. Quite a few simple scenes so far, but I've just been working through the scenes as they appear on the storyboard, minus the ones Tom, Tom or Lynsey (my team thus far) are working on.

There's still some inbetweening to be done so some bits aren't as smooth as they will be.

Animatic, Progress

All the scenes have been laid out (bar one which will be done while animating) so they are ready for the animation team. I've added them to the live action shoot to produce a new animatic for editing, animation and music purposes. I've also done some work on the live action to remove strings, props, reflections of the camera and a rather embarrassing tripod leg.

I've still not decided on a title for the film. I also need to figure out a working title to place in the film itself without giving away the ending. Contrary to this animatic, I'm leaning towards 'Conflicting Ideas', with 'Stars of the Show' being the working title. I'm totally open to suggestions though! Also, I'm thinking about shortening up the first few shots, maybe taking one out, just to tighten up the pace. What do you think?

And while I'm asking questions - how important do you think it is that a short film has the title at the beginning? I don't think it's working here. I'd like to move it to the end, before the credits. Thoughts?

Character Model Sheets

Some overall drawings of the two characters. A lot of the necessary poses will be described in the layout drawings so I haven't included any here. For Elwood, a lot of reference can be taken from the comic strip. I'm going to compile a few strips for this purpose.

Full S-Team Ahead!

Just a little update on the production front. All the other modules are done so it's fall go on the film now. I've got a good few undergrads (and some imminent grads) interesting in helping me with the animation, which is going to help a lot with the short amount of time we have left. I've posted the abridged production chart online that has a breakdown of everything needed in each shot, which can be seen here.

More to follow.

Getting Back to 2D Animation

Some 2D effects animation I did for an undergraduate film. The environment here it only a temporary render for layout purposes, it's not the look of the final film. No sound effects or camera shake were added for this render, but will be added in the final composite of the film.

Direction Workshop

In February we (MAV and MMA) undertook a direction workshop. This involved developing and producing a 60-second film in a week. Our team (Paul Creegan as director, Omar Arshad as producer, Mark Mulligan as editor and myself as director of photographer) worked on turning Adam Thomson's script into a finished film. This project was good in terms of gaining experience of working with a team to produce a live action film, and gave me a good opportunity to experience lighting and shooting a film (not that we had much time or ability to control our surroundings), both of which proved useful when it came to shooting my own film for the Advanced Production module.

Do It in Post

The live action portion of my film, cut together as it will appear in the final thing. Certain shots have rigs, crew or other things in the scene that will either be edited out or obscured with animation. Also, a few shots were taken on a tripod out of a necessaity for the visual effects, so camera movement will be applied digitally. There also appears to be a flash of black about half way through, I must have left a slight gap between shots in the edit.

I'm really keen to go ahead and start the VFX mentioned now, but I don't know if I should leave that till the compositing stage and start the animation layouts now instead.

Status Update

Been busy with the other two modules in this course, plus other work that's been taking away my time, and I've been neglecting the advanced production module - i.e. my film. Well, that's not entirely true - I have been trying to get a film crew together. Haven't had a whole lot of luck there, but with some planning and arranging I think I've got the people I need and am ready to go. I did a test shoot today to plan out the shots and with bright daylight the "set" gets lit very nicely. Might just need a reflector or two for some shots. The puppeteering seems to be working too. So, after London, the shoot will go ahead!

Animatic

I've finally gotten round to putting the first version of the animatic online. It's made from the storyboards, and now that I've got a location I'm going to add photos/video of the real location to give a better idea of how the shots will look.

Click here to see the animatic!

Foghorn Leghorn

I found this advert today, and it's pretty cool. Foghorn Leghorn and Henry Hawk; 2D animation in live action environment. Static camera and nothing moving - besides the chair at the end - so it's fairly straight forward there, but it's nice to see how they've handled the lighting on the characters, and the shadow cast by Henry Hawk and his club at at the end. Probably frame-by-frame animation, something I may have to do in my film to match lighting conditions.

The Amazing World of Gumball New Sneak Peek

Nice mix of animation styles and live action (or is that just really good CG?)

Meet the Cast

Final character stand-ins/references for the live action shoot. They've also helped me get a good idea of the scale of the characters.

Daylight / Interior light: how would a black and white character be affected, colour-wise?

Stand In

One of the cardboard cut-outs that will serve as a reference/stand in for the live action shoot.

Colour Test

A test of Elwood's comic black and white style and how it can be put into the real world.

DCA Brief

My pitch for the DCA ident brief. The animation is rough, not the finished thing. Same goes for the sound clips.

Progress Update

Just a little update for the sake of record. I've been working on the look development for the Going Live module the past few days - we've designed the character, now we need to come up with some end graphics. Then I've got a short learning break before I work on lighting the 3D scenes and start compositing. And as for my own project, I just today stared making the animatic, so that should be done sometime this week, depending on when I find time.

Since I've no work to show with this post, here's a trippy video from the studio instead.

Revised Storyboards

Storyboard: Complete

Haven't been posting here much, but that's because there's been little work to show as of late, and I'm not much of a writer. Anyway, I've spent the past few weeks working on the other modules and trying to sort out my script while working up my new storyboard. The new script has yet to be converted from scribbles to type, but I shall update that on the blog soon, as well as adding the storyboard once I get it scanned.

Sketches from the Script

Muffins and Script Rewrites

The Secrets of Toontown

Some videos I found over the holidays that are proving interesting, inspiring and a little helpful for my own project when it comes to matching animation with live action technically, cinematically and thematically. One of the most interesting things that I think about the most is how to get my animated characters to interact with real objects, from merely moving them to actually picking them up and holding them. Some of the things they did here are really cool but a bit beyond what I can achieve right now.

Part 1 of 5 on YouTube of a surprisingly good behind the scenes featurette on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

A later documentary on the making of the film.

And some original footage of Bob Hoskins before the animation was added. He did a great job with so little around him to work with.