Final Animatic - Version 2!

After the critique/initial feedback I received on the 16th January, I asked to speak to tutor, James, to go over my animatic, and there were a lot of areas that needed development in the story. We went through the points, and I understood all the points. I was not happy with the final animatic I handed in on the 16th and knew there were still a lot of story points I needed to change and develop, so the feedback was really useful.

Gemma Roberts helped me go through the new story, laying it out and thinking of composition and shots. Here are the scanned images which Gemma drew, which shows the new storyboard animatic layout. The images Gemma drew are the first two sections of box thumbnails, the thumbnails underneath are ones where I was working on frame layout and composition.

I also met with tutor, Matthew Gravelle, who went through my animatic too, and who also gave me some good points to think about and go through for the new story.

I worked all day Tuesday, so I was able to show Matthew the new animatic on Wednesday. Thankfully, this animatic then worked much more coherently and now there were only a few shots to change or take out. After this, I worked for the rest of the week to finish the new animatic, adding new sounds and finishing the animatic completely.

I am much happier with this story, it is much clearer and I feel much more strongly about the project as a whole.

So here is the Final Animatic - Version 2:

Babbit - Final Animatic - Version 2

I now will send this new animatic to my composer, who I will ask to complete a rough track for it.

As well as this, I will hopefully be able to get a presentation together to show to some prospective first and second year animators who I can ask to help on my film.



-jkl

Part 2 Submission - Feasibility Test, etc...

For the final part of our Pre-Production module hand-in we are required to submit 30 seconds of animations tests, from linetests to full post-production realisation.

I went to the studio every day last week to animated for this deadline, and was able to do three shots. I scanned them all and composed them into a video. Some are more "complete" than others, merely because of time constraints for this hand-in. (Monday 16th)

It was good to start actually animating after all this time on pre-production, and by diving straight into scenes from my final animatic, I was able to fully realise the time I needed on some shots more than others.

The main aspect that caused me difficulty was the hair on Mollie. I was animating her with the hair design I had previously used as the final design. But a few days into animating, I was growing increasingly frustrated with it, and I felt it was hindering each drawing, making it look too static and dead. I therefore changed the hair, made the line flow simply down, resting upon her head, but still in the same "bob" formation. It looked much more natural, and above all, felt much better to draw and animate with! The contriving feelings lifted instantaneously, and I went back and changed the longest scene I was working on to show this new hair design all the way through. This can be seen in the video (link below). As well as showing this hair scene with the new hair design, I have also showed the original hair design to show the comparison. Unfortunately, I did not get time to go back and change the other tests that still had the original hair design, but if these tests are received good enough for the final film, I will then go back and change the hair.

Hair Design Before:

Hair Design After:

Link to the Feasibility Animation Tests:

Feasibility Animation Tests (Vimeo)



---jkl

Final Animatic [Clean]

 Over the Christmas holidays, I was able to draw the shots from my animatic again in Photoshop, as 'Part 2' of our hand-in requires a "clean and more detailed" animatic. I decided to draw and colour the frames in a purple colour scheme in line with the final colour plan as described in earlier posts.

 There were a few aspects I needed to change from presenting the rough animatic to my tutors on the 12th December.

These were:
- In the teacher scene, the angle where the teacher's shadow appears on Babbit needs to be changed back to the first angle used in the first animatic.

- The background/overall colour visualisations need something more. The idea for having purple coloured characters on purple backgrounds might not work and you need to test this. Perhaps add more colours in the backgrounds?

-The montage scene (time-lapse) in the middle needs to be shown more clearly in the next animatic.


 Also, over the holidays I was able to visit my composer. I showed him the rough animatic (as I had not completed the clean animatic by then) and we discussed the sort of music I would like and what mood I wanted to get across. He said that he couldn't really come up with a track until the animation was all done and the film was timed out. So this has given me a deadline to work to in that I must finish and compile the animation by mid-late April to be able to give enough time for my composer to compose and record the final track. It won't matter at this point if it's not all coloured, he just wants the timing to be finalised so he can work with the emotional beats more effectively. So my time management is of the utmost importance to be able to achieve this.

Here is the final Clean Animatic:

Babbit Animatic [Clean]

I didn't change much else in the final animatic, though there may be a few things that need altering throughout the process, but I will wait until the next feedback session before I decide on anything, as I now need to focus on the rest of the work needed for the 'Part 2' hand-in (due the 16th January), which in itself requires:

- 30 seconds of Animation/Feasibility tests.
- 1000 word Working Life-Industry Report
- 500 word Self-Reflexive Report
- Professional Practise work - Business Card designs, full and up-to-date CV, website links to portfolio, etc
- Final Clean Animatic

Here are the pages of drawings done for the clean animatic:

I tried to embellish some actions where I could. I wanted to show more actions in places, but it just wasn't possible in the time period we have been given to complete this. Therefore, some scenes are not as clear as they should or could be. Also, the last few frames were done on a separate document and were not saved in PNG form, these will be uploaded as soon as possible.

---jkl

More Preparatory Work...

Another Background Visualisation

For my production bible, I decided to draw another background visualisation such as the one in a previous post showing Mollie in a classroom. In this one, I would purely focus on the background and instead of drawing everything in Photoshop, I would draw it in pencil first and then apply colour in Photoshop after scanning.

I set about drawing the background. I decided to work on watercolour paper as a precaution if I wasn't able to achieve the desired effect using Photoshop.

I scanned the piece in and made sure the image was lighter by adjusting the "Levels" control on Photoshop. Unfortunately, the left-hand side of the illustration did not scan well, and left a shadow impression. I tried to fix it using the clone brush tool as well as the eraser, though it did not help greatly. I know that for my final backgrounds I will have to adopt a better way of scanning, or to use a larger university scanner to make sure the image comes out at a higher quality.

However, I pursued with the test, and spent about 30 minutes colouring the frame in shades of purple. It did not quite achieve the level of "shadowing" I was hoping, (for this scene in the film will be mostly in shadow with only the light from the door on the floor really prevalent in the shot) but for now, I liked the dry brush setting and the impression of shadows particularly on the bags. I much prefer the pencil quality to that of the entirely Photoshopped visualisation shown in previous posts.

I will therefore be using this method to create all my backgrounds for my final film.


Extra Characters

My film requires a number of background characters, being set in a primary school. Classmates will be shown in the background in a few of the first scenes to show Mollie's isolation. The idea to draw the characters as my own friends came to me a few weeks ago, as posted before. So here are a few more pictures of more background characters who are influenced off more friends in real life!

 (The last one is me!)



As well as this, I quickly designed some ideas for the teacher and final child designs for the girl with the skipping rope who makes friends with Mollie, as well as the small girl who is seen in the end scene, alone and upset. For the latter, I will be going with the top right design, as the small bunches give her a younger and more innocent look which I hope will let the audience empathise with her.

Final Designs

Here are the final designs for Mollie and Babbit.

...and some quick new drawings of Babbit's new style...(mainly to get used to drawing his limbs in a simpler style):

...and some new sketches of Mollie too...

Birds Eye View of Mollie's Classroom

 I thought it was necessary to draw Mollie's classroom in this view to make sure staging for some scenes set in and outside of the classroom are accurate and won't suffer any continuity errors.



---jkl

Second Animatic w/ Feedback - and Third Animatic!

The Second Animatic
After Matthew's feedback on my first animatic, I went back and changed a lot of my story to try and fit in the relationship build-up of Mollie and Babbit, which Matthew had said, "was not present" in the film. I understood completely where he was coming from, as in this first animatic, the amount of screen time with Mollie and Babbit together is very small, which, for a film about a friendship, seemed a massive flaw.

Babbit - Second Animatic [Rough] Vimeo Link

So I decided to change certain aspects. To begin with, I cut out the first shot of Mollie and Babbit together, as Matthew said he liked the meeting scene with Mollie and Babbit in the coatroom, and thought that would work well as the first introduction to Babbit for the audience as well. So I began instead with the shots of Mollie looking sad and isolated in school amongst her classmates.
 The biggest change I made, however, was to have another character who appeared in the first animatic, have a bigger part. The little girl with the skipping rope who wants to play with Mollie in the first animatic is seen earlier on in this second animatic when Mollie is playing with Babbit.
 The reason behind having the girl introduced earlier is to show the audience that when Mollie is seen wanting to go play with someone else who is not Babbit, then Babbit grows smaller. It happens earlier, just before we are introduced to the girl too, when Mollie and Babbit are in a scene in the playground. Mollie is drawing on the ground (with chalk) with Babbit - and the other children are doing the same but across the playground from where they are. When Mollie looks up and sees the other children, we see her looking like she wants to go and play with them. With a few angle changes, we then see Babbit suddenly a bit smaller, as Babbit is beginning to realise that Mollie is starting to grow up and become more independent and doesn't need him. Babbit growing smaller every time when Mollie is seen wanting to grow up was an idea that Matthew really wanted to see in my film, and this was how I went about producing that.

 After the first "encounter" with the girl, it is more obvious that Babbit is smaller, and this is when the teacher comes in and takes Babbit away, as this was a scene I wanted to keep in. Thereafter, the film is pretty similar to the first, with a few extra scenes adjusted; i.e.: the time lapse scene in the middle, and the ending in a silhouette form.

Here are some rough thumbnails I worked on whilst developing these new scenarios. 

Feedback from James
 James did not like the second animatic as he felt that I had now made the film "too literal" in the sense that everything was explained too much and there was nothing left for the audience to uncover for themselves. He said that it lacked the subtlety of the first animatic, and that it would be best to go back and refine the first again, with a few ideas from this animatic, but mainly to keep the subtleties and explain the friendship between Mollie and Babbit in a few still illustration scenes with hardly any movement, instead of these drawn out and literal scenes shown in this second animatic.

I totally understood James' comments, as I didn't have a 'gut feeling' about this animatic, even as I was making it. I made it, trying to live up to Matthew's feedback, but obviously, I didn't want to completely lose the subtleties of the first, though unfortunately, I had. James' critique helped me re-look at my first animatic and spot points that could be improved on and altered. This critique session helped me really envision my film much more clearly, and I believe the changes I made to the animatic in the third version are definitely better executed and still retain the friendship of the characters and the heart of the story.


The Third Animatic
  So the main problem Matthew had to start with was the lack of screen time of Mollie and Babbit together. In the discussion with James, we both came up with the idea that the relationship moments with Babbit could appear between the first shots of Mollie on her own in the classroom. I would show Mollie alone at a table, sad and upset, and then the next shot, Mollie could be sat in the library cuddled up to Babbit reading a book. And as I had three scenarios of Mollie alone, I could easily intersperse three more scenarios of Mollie and Babbit together to show their relationship clearly in a montage.
  So I quickly went back with this feedback and drew up some new frames to put into the first animatic again. Thankfully, this did not take too long.
 I also chose a different piece of music to the one I used in the second version. The new animatic did not fit well with this previous piece, so I went back to a piece I had chosen a few weeks back which I had noted down as a possibility. Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie #1". I love the first phrase of the piece, the simple repeating chords really worked well with the first scenes, and thankfully, pretty much the entire piece of music fitted well, with some minor alterations at the end. I love how soft and emotional the track is, and I feel that it really helps the audience watching connect more with Mollie as a character to empathise with. I will be showing this piece to my composer to discuss ideas inspired by this music choice.

Here are some pages of drawings, thumbnails for shot development and new final shots for the third animatic:

Third Storyboard
Here is the storyboard for the third animatic:

 

I definitely feel this animatic has more weight and works better story-wise than the first and second. I will be showing this to my peer group on the 12th December after the Hand-In and hope to get some feedback on it. After this feedback, my next task will be to re-draw the entire animatic, adding more effects (with the aid of After Effects) to make a clearer and more detailed FINAL animatic for the second part of our Hand-In on the 16th January.

Here is the third animatic that I will be submitting as my final Rough animatic for my Hand-In deadline on 12th December:

Babbit - Third Animatic [Rough] Vimeo Link


Next Post: More Pre-Production Work.


---jkl

Another Colour Scene Test - Production Schedule

Colour Scene Test

After the feedback discussed in the previous post, I decided I would simplify the colour scheme for the entire film. In the time we have, it just won't be achievable to fully colour all the backgrounds and character fully. I much prefer simple colour washes anyway, so shown above is another visualisation for a final shot for the film. I very much prefer this version to the coloured one (shown below). It has a more graphic impact, and gives the piece a nostalgic and child-like illustrative quality which I wanted to show.

 

The multiple-coloured version in comparison, I think, kills the detail and seems disjointed with the pastel colours for the background and the bold colours for the uniforms. I did like the blending to white effect present on the left-hand side of the image to give the impression of light. I used this in the purple version.

The purple version also took a lot less time to colour. Obviously, it is still a rough visualisation, and more time will be spent on the final image. I will continue to test different brushes, drawing methods and textures that can be used until I am satisfied with the result. Overall, the purple version looks better and is less time-consuming. I will show this to my tutors later this week to discuss it further. 

Second Animatic

This week I have also produced my second official animatic. After some feedback with Matthew, I re-storyboarded the film to include more scenes with Mollie and Babbit together to show their friendship more clearly. 

Again, with this storyboard, the drawings were roughly done, so the quality of some of the images in the animatic are very bad. As this deadline required a rough animatic with sound, I decided to keep it very rough for now, and will clean it up considerably for the detailed animatic deadline in January.

Babbit - Second Animatic [Rough]

I used a piece of music by Liszt. "Consolations, S 172 - Lento Placido". The track fitted the mood of my film relatively well. It is a tad "grand" for the final film, but for the animatic it works, with some emotional beats fitting well. I cut the last section of the song using Premiere Pro very roughly so the ending of the song ended with the animatic too. The animatic is pretty much 3 minutes long exactly, so full animation is about 2 minutes, 50 seconds. There still may be some pacing issues, as Matthew told me to cut some scenes down as they were too long. I tried to do this, but I will show this to him and other tutors this week to see what they think.

Feedback on the second animatic from James:

I showed the new animatic to James earlier today, and unfortunately he found the new animatic way too literal. In the previous animatic, the moments between Mollie and Babbit and Mollie feeling shy and anxious were way more subtle than the new version. I wanted to take on Matthew's points, but I can absolutely see where I went wrong. I think I was panicing about the relationship with Mollie and Babbit coming across well, instead of trying to think of clever shots. I had changed a great deal, bringing the 'other classmate' into the story more, and making the story more literal. James reminded me that in film, things don't have to be completely literal, and that there could be much more subtle shots that indicate Mollie and Babbit's relationship that could speak a great deal more than literally explaining everything in unnecessary scenes. 

So unfortunately, I will have to abandon a lot of the newer elements I included in the new animatic and go back to the first version to refine and make clearer. It was unfortunate, especially as I spent a long time on Premier Pro to help the animatic flow clearly, but overall, I want my story to be subtle and sweet. I lost sight doing the new animatic, as I overlooked lots of moments in an attempt to keep to the points Matthew gave me. I perhaps went a little too far in the wrong direction! I will now refine the first animatic, with some parts of the second(!) to make sure I have a clear idea ready for the Christmas holidays.

Production Schedule

I also produced a Gantt Chart to pre-visualise the time I have in production for the film.

The red squares represent the week of final deadline. I included my dissertation in the 'Task' column too, as this is something I definitely need to schedule in too!! 

The final deadline for the film hand-in is the 14TH MAY. 

I have made sure that compositing and editing of my film will happen at the same time as my animation. I could set a weekly task to scan and put together my work from the week and put it into my animatic for timing/layout and composition checks. By doing this straight away, it will ensure I won't have anything outsandingly wrong or difficult to fix at a later stage in production.

Overall I want to be spending the most time focusing on the quality of my animation. I have highlighted the time to finish animating around the last week of April. This would give me enough time to then finish colouring and compositing everything together. This is my aim, though it is likely to change as and when I start!

Planning for Production

I will hopefully ask some second and first year animators to help me with the colouring of some of the frames too. As the colour scheme will now be very simplified, it will hopefully mean the colouring process won't take as long. I will test some more colour ideas and possibly time it and then try to calculate more accurately how long colouring will take. From last year, when I worked on Eva Wagner's film, I was able to see her own production schedule for her fully hand-drawn animated film, "Sun and Moon". I noted how efficient she was in organising her time, with daily aims in number of frames. She had started animating before most of the class, and everyone remarked on her dedication. From seeing her working method work so well, I will be aiming to do the same. I will stick to the schedule as tightly as possible. I want to be proud of my final film, and above all, I want it to be finished. Strict dedication to the schedule is the only way to fully realise this!!

I will produce another schedule that fully realises everyday goals. Eva worked every day for several months producing 60 frames a day. I will work out the 'math!' and post this as soon as possible, though it will most likely be similar, if not exactly the same to Eva's! 

All pre-production work is due in on Monday 12th December, so exactly a week! I'm positive I'll be able to hand this all in in time. It'll be great to "finish" the pre-production and move on to the actual production stage. I will be updating at least one or two more posts with pre-production work. Some more colour tests, etc. 

Aim for the week: Finish all necessary preparatory work ready for Hand-In on the 12th December!

Rework the animatic!

---jkl

Scene Colour Test and more Animatic Feedback...

Scene Colour Test:
  I produced a frame from the beginning of the film in detail and attempted a colour test. This was prior to the comments from Jerry Hibbert (below), but it definitely supports his feedback. It took me a long time to choose the colours, and a long time to execute them to a standard I was (somewhat) happy with, but the time taken to do this needs to be taken into consideration for the time I would have on the final film and how many backgrounds of a similar look would be needed to be coloured this way.
   I added some background characters to show ideas of what the other children could look like in the same shot. I used a "dry media brush" in Photoshop for the background colours. I like the grainy/canvas look. I'll do some more tests with other brushes and other textures to find ones that work well for the final film.

 I also did some little fun sketches of other background character designs. It was a "eureka!" moment when I realised instead of getting bogged down with creating other characters, I could draw my own friends as children! It was too cute of an idea not to draw them straight away! So here are a few - all from my animation course!

Further Animatic Feedback:
1. In the morning I saw Matthew Gravelle, for some feedback on my first animatic as shown in the previous post. He provided some interesting points:

-Cut the first scene where Mollie and Babbit are sitting on the wall.
   Matthew thought the scene where Mollie meets Babbit in the coatroom later on in the animatic would work better if the audience wasn't already familiar with Babbit. By cutting the first scene, thus starting the film with Mollie in the classroom on her own, would show her loneliness more clearly, and make the first meeting scene in the coatroom stronger.

-All scenes are a little too long by about 2 seconds or so. 
    I will go back to the animatic and cut some shots down. I was trying to show long shots for a slower, more moodier atmosphere, but some shots do need to be trimmed down, as they really are too long.

-Extend the meeting (in the coatroom) scene with Mollie and Babbit. Get a more emotional impact. Then do a montage scene of Mollie and Babbit together. In the montage, have some very simple shots, illustration-like, not much movement, with her classmates doing the same activities as Mollie and Babbit. Show Mollie wanting to join in every time, with Babbit growing a little smaller every time she does so. In this animatic, you don't get the importance of Mollie's relationship with Babbit. This should be the most important thing to show.
   This is a very good point that had somehow been overseen in the animatic, but something that I was becoming aware of. Mollie and Babbit weren't really shown together on-screen for very long at all. I'm really glad Matthew pointed this out. It means I have to go back and change a big chunk of work, but I do really need to show Mollie and Babbit together more, for clarity, and for the story to have meaning! I will also try and make sure the montage doesn't have much movement to save myself the trouble of difficult pieces of animation performance. It will require precise and clear story-telling through strong layout and composition.


2. As well as Matthew, I also emailed Jerry Hibbert and a a few of the guys at Hibbert Ralph, my animatic. I went to the Hibbert Ralph Animation studio in Soho, London, over the summer for a work experience placement. I started developing story ideas for my final film whilst I was there, and was able to show my ideas to a few of the people there, so I had some great influences right at the beginning. Jerry Hibbert gave me some feedback on my first animatic:

-I couldn't really understand the narrative of your animatic. But there some sweet images in there of the girl and her rabbit - both the giant one and the regular one.
   I will have to work on the clarity of my animatic, for the narrative didn't seem to come through here. I will be drawing a neater version for the next animatic, so hopefully the narrative will become clearer then.

-Make sure that when you cut, the figures change size so it cuts properly and for a reason and doesn't look like a weird arbitrary jump cut. And cutting from full face to profile can be odd too. Three quarters views are usually prettier anyway - try to avoid full profiles. Work it up more and make sure the story comes across.
   I'll make sure the cuts are clearer and the proportions are more accurately drawn in the next animatic. I also like the point about keeping 3/4 shots of Mollie's face instead of the frontal ones. I will definitely incorporate this into the next animatic. It will hopefully help me sort out problems with composition and layout etc.

- Don't worry too much about colouring it all up. A film with a title and an end looks like you followed the project through. what you want people to think is "She can animate well - and has the staying power to finish." Not necessarily "She's good at colouring her animation."
   I really appreciated this comment in particular. The colour in my final film is still not completely thought out and finalised, purely for the reason that I did not know which way to go. In prior tests with feedback, the "lilac shades" looked nice but seemed like a "lazy" option to some, whereas the full range of more realistic colours (skin colour, blonde hair colour, red school jumper, etc) looked better, but took far longer to achieve. It's a case of weighing up these pros and cons and judging which will be best to go forward with. I do think a simple colour palette, with just simple shades of a certain colour would work, and it's a style I really love anyway. Full colour would look great, but in the time I have to complete this film, I think it may be more realistic to use a limited colour palette. My intentions right at the beginning were to keep the colours simple anyway. I want people to focus on the animation performance and the story the most. The colour and backgrounds were not as important to me, overall. I will produce some more visual tests to see what method could work, more working with the limited colour palette.

So this week I will:
-Develop a second version of the storyboard/animatic, and I need to find and edit some music for it.
-Do further, more extensive colour tests of scenes that could be in the final film. Test colours, brushes etc.
-Start the Negotiated Proposal and Production Bible ready for Hand-In for the 12th December.


---jkl