Production draft.

~~~~~~~~~~~~ Draft ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is the production draft, there are many things that need to be fixed and changed but gives an idea of what is to be expected for the final.

Much finalizing and coloring to do.

2D animation

For my hand drawn animation I am using the program photoshop. I find animating in Photoshop really useful and easy.

In a few scenes of my hand drawn animation there are objects being created. For example as my beginning scene is opened up the city is being created. Now at first I tried to animate this way by drawing a little bit, then drawing a little bit more and so on, it works but it looks bad as you can clearly see the lines that where just drawn.

So I fixed this problem by working backwards. I draw the final image then slowly erased it bit by bit. Then I rearrange the image sequence and 'walla', when played through the city is created making it look as though it is being hand drawn right in front of you.

Another program I will be using is adobe after effects. This is another great program but I am still learning about it so I am seeking as much help and advice from my lectures as I can.  I will be using this program when putting my final piece all together as well as adding in little details here and there.

 I imagine I will have a few issues here and there but nothing that can't be figured out or done another way.

2D hand drawn animation

Another part of my final film is 2D hand drawn frame by frame animation. These scenes are in the beginning of the short film and at the very end with the paper animation and claymation in-between. As you can imagine I have been drawing a lot. And loving it, I have been drawing ever since I could hold a pencil and am really enjoying animating this way.

Animating this way is bringing a drawing to life, its spectacular when you can start drawing and draw bit by bit then play it and your character has come to life! It’s an amazing feeling, especially when it looks good.

For me I sometimes get frustrated when it doesn’t look the way I hoped it would but at that point I usually need to take a break and come back to it to either fix or change it. So far I have many scene that I really love and feel like I have animated to be best of my ability for this style.  And of course there are others which I think I will change later.  

My character Emily is simple in a way that she is very cartoony, for example she has a simple round face with a hair style that is easy to manipulate through drawing. I made her hands like mittens so that I don’t have to worry about fingers. Besides that though she is built like a regular human except that she is a bit short in the legs (I felt she looked better that way.)

Motka is a fun character to this film, he is a bit of comic relief and just that little background character you can’t help but love. I am really enjoying animating him, and every time he is in a scene he is doing his own thing in a very cute way. Motka is a very stylized character as well, it was fun making him a fluffy short cat and the way he is stylized has made it easier to animate. For example the way he sits I have made it that you can’t see all the things you usually see when a cat sits such as his back legs though it’s obvious that he is sitting.

The fairy-god-mother is mysterious and beautiful; I really enjoyed animating her as I have been able to make her more flexible when it comes to animating as she is a fairy. For example when she appears she comes out of a star and has magic swirly dust at the bottom of her robe. The fairy is also realistic and far more realistic than Emily.

I am just about to animate the other characters such as the old lady and the other homeless people. They are a similar style to Emily and they don’t move all that much in the scene so there isn’t anything to tricky happening there.  

The hardest scenes have been animated and turned out not being as difficult to animate as I had assumed. I plan on having all the rough draft animating done by the 24^th of August, which is when the production draft is due. That way all I need to do is finalize the animating add in the colour and all the details. Also this way my sound guy, Josh, will have all the information he needs to start putting sounds and music together. 

Helping out.

There are two of us working on our final this trimester, my good friend Janet and myself. 

Janet is doing her animation in 3D so in Maya. Her scene is looking fantastic, but because it is a forest scene she has a few trees and leaves, this is giving Maya some trouble and if Janet where to put many more in her scene it may not work properly or maybe not even load properly.

I suggested she should just put an image plan up and stick a forest image on it in the background so that it looks as though there is more forest whereas its just an image, I then offered to make the image scene for her as it is hard and almost impossible to find an image precisely how you want it. 

I grabbed samples of her scene and asked what she was after, Janet pretty much left it with me to do which makes me happy. I made the background image in Photoshop and it is now as a background scene for her animation. 

This is an image of Janets Maya scene at the moment. (not rendered)

And this is the background I came up with in Photoshop. The colors don't match but the image is meant to look further away, and with it all together it works.

I also made an image of just tree trunks that are the same color as her trees. This is so if she needed she could place it in an image plan in-between the background image and her scene. With the gapes in-between the tree trunks transparent, as the camera moved it would help the scene to look more 3D and as if there is no image but 3D trees. 

I have left it with Janet and if she needs any changes on the scene I am able to wipe it into Photoshop and fix it up. But hopefully it works well.

Claymation: Fix ups.

After I made the scene and the clay characters I had to bring them all into uni as they have all the animation equipment such as lights, camera and StopMotion on the computers that I need.

Lab was booked out to me and thankfully no one came in and bothered me as the other lab was available.

I arrived after being dropped off at uni on Saturday at around 9:00am and I finished at 7:30pm, yeah, big day. But that’s the life of an animator.

I had many technical difficulties, which is one of the reasons why it took me so long to animate. When animating in StopMotion you plug the camera directly into the computer and use the computer as the camera. It is really handy as you can change the way the image looks as well as many other things by working this way. But for some reason StopMotion was having difficulties and was taking forever to process an image and wouldn’t allow me to take another image until it was finished. After a long time I called my lecturer, Kelvin, (yes on a Saturday) and we figured out that the image size on the camera and the image size on the computer where completely different. That’s why it was taking so long to process.  I fixed this problem by simply changing the cameras image size to the same size as the computer, 1920 by 1080.

This brought out another problem as every time I fixed the settings in the camera as soon as I hocked it up to StopMotion the camera settings would flick back to the original image size which was massive, I can’t remember how big but somewhere along the lines of 5000. Crazy, and no matter what I did the problem would not go away.

In the end I ended up doing it the old fashioned way, I simple animated directly through the camera, this worked fine and I actually found it more useful.

Now the animating is done and my back was killing me, what’s next?

The first shot I had done was through StopMotion so the images where the right size, however the images I had taken from the camera where a different size then the images taken in StopMotion, so from shot two, three and four I had to go through and resize every single image. Time consuming yes, but I did it through Photoshop and was able to make a setting that would copy everything I did and I was able to reply that setting over and over to each image.

After this I had to do the fix ups, in my film I had wire on the back of Emily’s skirt to keep her from falling over, I had to go through and Photoshop this out completely image by image. I did this with the stamp tool.

Another thing I had to fix with the stamp tool was the eye blinks on my red and purple character, as when they blinked there was still white from their eyes visible.

My Clay scene is done and to finish it off I will be taking it into Adobe After Effects and in the end it will be lightly snowing over the top of the scene, which is going to be beautiful!

Claymation: Making the scene.

I really enjoyed making the scene for my Claymation. My original idea for this world was always that it was a colourful fun world where anything can happen. It later became a colourful fun snowy wonder land. I love snow, well more the thought of snow as I have never seen snow, but snow is magical and I feel that’s what the snow has given to the scene.

First off I made the cardboard sky and ground scene, (this helped me with the measurement for the rest of the scene.)

The houses:

I made the houses with Styrofoam and cardboard. I measured out the size and shapes of the houses cut the shapes up and then stuck cardboard over the Styrofoam. I made a big mess as well, but it was fun!

After this I made the roofs and then painted them. For the roof I layered tape over the top to give them a tiled look.

With a hot glue gun everything was glued together. I used paper for the doors and windows but I glued a layer of cardboard in-between the paper and the house to give it a 3D effect.

Lights:

I thought it would look nice having old fashioned street lamps in the scene.

I made these with little bits of wood, cardboard and of course glue and paint. I really enjoyed this.

I had to create the top of the lamp which was a little tricky, after a few tries I came up with a map to use so that each lamp looked the same and was easy to put together. This took me back to school in math and making cube boxes, never thought I would say this but math class actually did teach me something useful. ;)

After this I painted them and drew in details with a marker.

I cut out swirls for the sides and stuck two back to back and then attached them to the wood and the top of the lamp.

For the bottom of the lamp I cut out circles, cut a slit and hole in the middle, and stapled them together creating a hole big enough to push the wood through. Then glued a flat piece of cardboard underneath to steady it and hold the wood in place.

With everything glued and painted the lamps where done.

Seat:

The wood I bought had a little picture of a seat you could make with them on the back so I thought why not.

I made this little seat with the wood and cardboard then watered down some paint to give it a rusty look.

Trees:

The style of this world is similar to Dr. Sues, colourful and fun. I had these little coloured Styrofoam balls from a previous project and had an Idea to make funky trees.

I painted a larger Styrofoam ball then glued the little Styrofoam balls to it, and also glued painted wood for the trunk.

These groovy little trees helped to bring the scene together.

Background:

For the main background I painted the ground white as there was to be snow over the top and painted long white bits of cardboard for the sky.

Then I cut out mountains and painted them and glued them to the sky with a layer of cardboard in-between for the 3D effect and it looked nicer.

There were far away mountains, the blue ones and also close up mountains that where a snowy white.

My inspiration was Finland.

Background characters:

I also had a few background characters in the scene that you have to look out for.

Near the seat and then at the door are two little blue birds made from clay.

Then in the background near the houses is a cute little guy watering his garden.

Final touches:

A friend of mine bought me this awesome ‘Make your own snow’ stuff. And that is what I placed in the scene on the ground and also sprinkled in other areas. This was the icing on the cake and made the scene perfect as well as fun!

Before I made the fake snow I separated cotton buds and glued them in areas such as the roof tops and around the lamps, this was to help give the snowy effect and it worked well.

Claymation: Try and try again.

Working on my clay creatures has been a very big challenge; I don’t have much experience with Claymation but I certainly learnt a lot.

Firstly the clay I used was not the best for animating as it was cheap, it worked but it wasn't very strong and wouldn't hold its position, for example if I placed the arms of a character above their head the clay would drop slowly, which for animating does not work.  So I had to make rigs for my main clay characters.  I researched many Claymation films such as Wallace and Grommit to understand and figure out how to make a rig with the equipment that was available to me. (I don’t exactly have the same equipment as a film studio.)

My first try I made wire frames for the body and filled them with foil (as this is what I have done previously with sculpting.) Then covered it with tape so the clay would stick. The bodies of my Red character, Purple character and Green character where not very flexible and keep their form in the animation so there was no need to make their body rig to flexible.  

Red Character:

But the Red character and the Green character both have arms that move. The first time I tried, I used wire, foil and tape for the arms. The shoulder would come out of the body a little bit to keep the size and form and had clay for the rest of the arm. This didn't work as the clay just melted to the ground. (As there was no support.)

I then tried to have wire, with foil in the upper arm and lower arm area covered in tape then clay over the top for the arms but this was not flexible enough. As the wire I was using was difficult to manipulate and every time the arm was moved the clay would get ruined and this is unusable for animating.

After speaking with my lecturers JMC provided me with amazing aluminium wire which is very soft and easy to move without using too much force.

I then cut chunks of Styrofoam out in the shapes of my characters, covered it with tape, pierced aluminium wire through the body and cover that in tape and then I was able to clay the creatures and this worked well. I was able to move the characters arms without smudging the clay. The characters where still not as flexible as I would have preferred but for my style of Claymation it worked.

Green Character:

My green character followed the same procedure with the body. But I wanted his arms to be able to stretch and get smaller. So for my green character I just used clay and nothing else for the arms. When I animated I would always have his arms in a position where they stuck to something such as his body so that they did not melt to the ground. I also placed wire through his legs to help him to stand.

Clay Emily:

Emily was a much bigger challenge then the other creatures as Emily had to keep a human form and still look like Emily. Also she needed to be much more flexible as not only did her arms move but also her back and head.

For Emily’s rig I used Styrofoam for the bulk and to keep her shape.

The main parts where her head, arms, upper body, lower body (skirt) and her legs.

At first I made the mistake on not separating the upper body to the lower body which meant I wouldn’t have been able to animate her bending forward.

This was an easy enough fix as I cut where her abdomen is which meant her upper and lower body where separate. Her head upper body and lower body where all connected through wire that represents her spine.

Her arms where again wire pocked through the upper body and taped. After making the skirt I made her legs and pocked wire through the legs that pocked through to the skirt for balance.

Though I did all this work Emily couldn’t stand on her own, so I had to glue her feet to cardboard then add wire to the cardboard behind her that went into her skirt which was what held her up.

The bags, scarfs, hats and jumper where all made with cut up bits of Eva Foam.