Animated documentary - Evaluation

Evaluation

I really enjoyed this project because I finally got the opportunity to create a lengthy stop motion film, in the past I had created little bits but never had to plan for it as much as this, so I got to put my knowledge of sculpting and animating in stop motion to proper practice.

I really enjoyed the process and between us, me and Ciara used our skills to produce an animation we are proud of. We have learnt a lot during this module such as: setting up equipment in a way that wouldn’t be a healthy and safety risk when working in dark environments and easy to manoeuvre round, using the correct materials to create our models to be able to animating them efficiently and next time consider the scale so they are easier to work with and animating in general. For future I would also look at adding eye sockets into the character design, so avoid the eyeball moving around the head, with the newt the eyes had a place to sit and were easier to move I thought.  I feel we progressed in animating by the time we got to the end because of all this knowledge we had learnt. We got better at animating as we went along and found that using our gut feeling for action and when there should be a blink, really worked. Because sometimes if we planned for some movement, we did not make it last as long as it should or it was not as smooth, so I think sometimes gut feeling and going with the flow of it worked for us. I think we also work great as a team, we do have our differences in opinions, but we have different skills to the other, so can help where the other can't.

We had a few problems with equipment, sometimes we would come back the next day/week and equipment had been knocked, or removed, which set up back setting up again, we did have a few camera knock ourselves, but after setting up better, a camera knock from us rarely happened, but was easily fixed. In future we could maybe look at borrowing a heavier tripod, and discuss borrowing a camera for the whole length of our animation time, because other people needing to borrow it caused us positioning problems, hence the jumps in the animation, and did make us frustrated that we had to do this numerous times. We understood that other students need to also use the equipment, but if we were creating this for a level 6 animation, for a final year animation, we would b=need to look at borrowing a camera and having a secure set us so nothing would be touched.

I also learnt a lot more about after effects and dragon frame, now we had been left to explore it further ourselves though this animation, we were able to find out new things and ways of using the program that worked for us. We did had a few problems with stabilizing the film, but with help for tutors we managed to get this sorted, so now we know for the next time we need to use the program exactly what needs to be done to fix the problems we were faced with. 

I also enjoyed working with other people for the voices and think that they really fit with the characters to give them an appropriate personality. I think that just asking as if for an interview worked so much better than a script, the audio now is funnier, and has realistic pauses and breathing ect, so I’m so glad we decided to change it from reading a script

Time schedule wise we did fall behind a little coming up to Easter, this was because we had problems with out set, but we still managed to hit the deadline in good time, because we made the effort of coming into uni extra days as we knew we needed it to be finished in good time so we had lots of time to edit anything in post production, and because this process of post production was a little new to use, we made sure we had the time to be able to ask for help from tutors.

Despite all this I am really proud of what we have achieved to say this is both our first major stop motion film. And I can not wait to do another project working with this technique again. I have learnt so much about the whole process from ideas to editing, and I think that the next time I come to doing a stop motion with plasticine/fimo I will know exactly what I’m doing, and this will allow more time for animating and producing an even better, smoother animation, suitable for festivals or the like.

Animated Documentary - Animated Tails

This is our final animation all complete! Yes there are still some jumps and light flicker etc, but for a first major stop motion project, I'm so happy with our outcome. I feel that we've leart so much throughout this module and can apply out new knowledge into future projects.

Animated documentary - finalising animation

 The final bit to do on this project is to come up with a title and add it to the beginning of the animation, to introduce the film.

I created a mind map to help us come up with different options. At the moment we like something like 'Animated life' or 'animated tales/tails' 

Ciara is creating the dvd cover, and so I will either use this for the title credit or base it around the cover, depending on it's outcome.

There were some little bit we had forgotten about like background sound but this was easily fixed and we found a few sounds we could use for Ciara to put along with the video.

Animated Documentary - sheep fix

Clip before

Ciara managed to fix the flicker on the sheep video, which is great because that was something that really stood out in the video. However a new problem arose when there was a jump between the scene one and two, so I went back and fixed this by importing scene one and lowering the opasity so I could move the video back into place. 

There sill is a slight jump, but it's so quick it might not be that noticable. 

Clip after

Animated documentary - birds re stabilized

The stablisation of the bird scene really annoyed me, so I went back to try and fix it, Ciara suggested making the video larger so it wouln't jump around as much, I did this and then re stablised the video useing different tracking points, I also selected the rotation option to see if it would correct it further,I also put a mask round more of the set to try and get rid of some of the wobbly motion around the edges, and I think it does look a lot better, so maybe it just needed differnt points to track.






 I also then just had to get rid of a black jump that had been created after the stabiliation, but this was simple, I just deleted that frame and replaced it with the same as the next frame, which it should have been, so it works now. 

Animated documentary - rough edit

I've put together a rough edit, there are a few parts that will need to be fixed.

Sheep - there's flickering though out, but even with colour correction, brightness correction etc, it doesn't seem to be improving

Newt - theres a wobbly outline visible on a particulaer scene, but I'm not sure how else to fix this with the key lighting.

Birds - hasn't really been stabilized so I'm going to re do the stabilization and try to fix this. 

My main concerns are with the sheep and the birds, I think these are the most noticable and should be fixed, so I'm going to go back and correct these.

Animated Documentary - adding backgrounds

After stabilizing, I added the background. We'd tested with backgrounds before and a main isuse was the glow around the set and characters, I used the pend tool to go round the foreground further, but in some scenes (scene 2 of the newt especially) the key light effected parts of the body, which I'm not sure how else to make this better, I'de put a mask round, adusedted the glow, smoothness etc. To watch is as a one off you don't pick up on it that much, but because I've worked with it for so long, it really bugs me. But I can't cut anymore into the glow around the model or character because it effected the characters

Animated Documentary - stabilizing the clips

To get my head around stablising, I firstly tried to following Martin had given us and some the steps I found online, by using the warp stabilizer. This didn't go too great as it kept failing on me, and I could find what Martin told us about having two tracking point, so I thought it would be best to ask again at uni.

Annabeth helped us with stabilizing today,she said that After effects may be getting confused with the black spaces between each scene, and advised us to do each scene seperate. I expoted out the scene in each part and when showed how to have two tracking points this worked out better. I took the sheep and the bird part, so we had equal amount to stablize, but I found the sheep didn't really need stablising with shows how much we've progressed with our animating.

I selected two point so that it would line them up to stablise and crete as little motion of the set as possible.

   

Animated Documentary - credit draft

Bird audio

Sheep audio

For a start on some end credits, I tried to include the things I liked about the credits I had researched. I added main things like: who it's by, who voiced, logos and copyright. 

I then picked out some audio from the bird and the sheep we didn't use, I picked these because the newt had 3 parts where as these only had one or two, so thought we could include some extra audio from them. 

I went for a serious piece of audio and a humorous piece. At this point i think the bird audio sounds good, joking about been in bikini on the beach in winter (in the Caribbean) but not sure if it takes away from the interview topic of weather/climate change the UK? I'd have to discuss this with Ciara and we can make adjustments together, see what goes.  

Animated documentary - titles and credits research

I stumbled across this video when looking for good ways to add tiles and credits to our animation. 

What I like about this it that it has the interviewer speack, off camera while the name of the film is on the screen, it tells the audience before anything starts that this is an inverview, instead of diving straight into the animation, where people may not really understand what it is. I think a little something like this will help the audience establish what kind of video they are watching. 

I also like at the end where the character is laughing when the creators website come up, to me it's adding more humor off screen like a blooper of some kind, which could be a fun way of ending our animation. 




And with this video, they had an animated intro for the tile, we could experiments in creating something with plasticine or just have like here wobbly letters. for the end they added blooper audio also, and I like that they include a special thanks to the people they interviewed which I think would be nice to include in ours.

Or like with Shaun the Sheep simply have a still background which music to end the animation.




Also for titles, most of these films have a still images and text, or only slight animation as the title is on the screen, I could just put the same image as the end credit, or film a little bit so it's building up to the animation setting, I can try out a few things see what works.

Animated Documentary - Sheep Day 1 (set up)

When setting up, we added the third light to illuminate the green foliage,  because when doing background tests, this is what we thought needed lighting up  to made the two layers blend better together. 

We leveled the camera to the same height as the sheep so it looks like a realistic interview, looking head on to the character. 

We tend to listen to the audio and when we feel there need to be a blink, add one in, or when we get to certain words that sound exaggerated, talk to eachother and act out how a person would move when saying this bit.

A section today we added movement for was 'down the end of the road' when going through the lip sync we noticed we would gester to one side as if tilting our head to ' down the road' so we worked out how we would move the character. I did struggle a tiny bit moving the head, as the character had no neck, as i didn't want to squash or damage the model, but i think one this plasticine warmed up from my warm hands, it was a slight bit easy to animate.   

Animated Documentary - Sheep mouths

Because we had some slight squash issues with the birds, and because it's easier to handle baked mouths, I went out and go some more fimo so me and Ciara could quickly create some mouths we could bake. We also created a small 'e' (top left) shape, because when listening to the audio of the sheep, we found that sometimes when pronouncing words the e/s sounds wasn't a big facial expression.    

Animated Documentary - Sheep set tests

Before we started animating with the sheep, we decided to first decide on how we wanted the background to look. We have some model foliage that I used on the newt set, which we thought we could use with this set also. We gradually built up the amount of foliage, taking photos of each stage, so that we can see what looks best with an photographed background. 

I put together the different amounts of foliage images along with different images I took. I think that the image with the foliage bushes works the best because with the others the floor and the grass in the image clash and it doesn't look nice. but with the bushes there it breaks that up so that it just looks like the field behind is a bit different from this with the sheep in.


I feathered round the edge of the bush so that there wasn't a harsh line between background and foliage, which made it slightly better.






I also blurred the background to continue that depth of field. And adjusted the colour balance so it matched the sheep layer more.

It looks okay, but I still don't think the colours match up properly or maybe it's the image. 
It might be a case of lighting the bushed to help it blend better or looking back at an image I took, it might be that the image needs bring down slightly so the horizon is lower down and behind the bushes. 















I went back to the images and tried to make it look as thought we had lit up the bushes, I upped the brightness, and already I think it's looking better and blends well with the background.


I also adjusted the levels of the background image so it was slightly darker, and brought the image down so the horizon is behind the bushes, it looks a lot more realistic now, and not as odd as it did before. So I think if we illuminate the bushes, this will help it look a lot better when adding the green screen.  

Animated Documentary - Bird Day 1-3

We had prepared our selves by going though the audio and noting down the mouth shapes, so that we could just com into uni and get on animating.

We watched some videos of birds and some creature comforts to help us with adding some movement to the characters. we decided to have the bird ruffle it's wings a few times, especially at the bit where she says drizzle, as we thought it would look like she things it's not a nice thing, considering she's a more tropical styled bird.

I sketched out a rough animation of how we could create this, and applied it to the animation when we were happy. We adjusted this patter slightly depending on how fast/slow we wanted the wing movement to be. And we thought it worked really well, it looks like she's shivering at the thought of cold drizzly English rain.

Animated documentary - Bird set up (Day 1)

Before starting with the birds, we had a sort out with the set up, moved the extra tables out of our way, and now are in out own little booth, giving us more space to animate in a safer way and hopefully out the way of it being knocked.

We also made sure the set was secured down with tape so it would not wobble and we also put wire from the birds into the set so that they would stay upright, and so they would move out of place too much.  

When had had finished animating for thew day, we decided to quickly see how it would look with green screen background. if you look closely the green screen picks up some on the model, and isn't a smooth outline round. we may have to either use the pen tool around the model, so that nothing we've animated get effected. But this is something we can do in post.   

Animated Documentary - Newt Day 8 (animation done)

Today we finished filming all of the newt. We decided that we would go back to the angle cut towards the begining of newt scene 1, because we thought that because the animation is so short we don't really need any cuts as it would looks busy, but the only reason we did is because the tripod was knocked and thought the easiest thing to do would be to cut angle, but it didn't look good as it was only a small part before the next scene, we we went back and tried our best to get it to the angle and position is was in the section before. However, I'm still not sure it looks perfect, we talked about having a zoom cut, but still it's only fast until the next section where it goes back to the previous angle.

I think we'll work more on this in post, because we really need to continue animating the other character.

We also decided to cut out a bit of the last section of speech, this was because when we had finished for the day, we didn't think it needed that extra bit on the end. that it sounded fine to end there.

Here is where we are up to, I added the background to see how it would look, and it works. We'll need to stabilise the videos ad there is camera shake, but I'm sure we can fix that in post also.




We also had a sort out with the set up, moved the extra tables out of our way, and now are in out own little booth, giving us more space and hopefully out the way of it being knocked.

Animated documentary - Newt Day 6

Returning to college after Easter hols I was met by some problems. The background had falledn onto the model, causing his head to have been squished. The tripod had also been knocked, which cased camera ofset. 

I did my best with some help from tutor Annabeth to try and get it back to the right set up.

We discussed that if this failed to either redo that scene or change the angle at an appropriate cut.

We managed to get it pretty much in the same position and set the lighting and camera back correctly, and after re moulding the character, I was okay to start animating again. We'll probably need to adjust positioning and light a bit in post, but hopefully that should be a problem.

This issue really set me back, because that time setting everything back to how it was, could have been spend animating. So again we're behind in our schedule.  

Responsive - Project report

Animated documentary - Newt Day 5

I thought it would be really good to do a time lapse our the process we go through each day when animating.

We sit and discuss the mouth shapes and eye/body movement while listening to the audio to see what shapes we need and for how many frames.

we then take it in tuns to animate bits, while the other guides us in what looks good on the screen.

It's so much better working with Ciara, as we take on eachothers thoughts and have ideas bouncung around on how the character can move.

Fedrigoni Submission

Responsive - Onform artboards and evaluation

Evaluation

Onform was a fun brief to do as the shapes given every other week were different and some really got me thinking. With this brief I did try not to think too much about what the shape could be and what was the first thing that came to my head, sometimes it did take a while for me to see something.

I think this is why I in the crit I received the comment ‘onforms not very original’ which I disagree with because half of the time the image I had draw was nothing like any other artist’s drawing. The boat and the bird may have been the unoriginal designs, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t make them original to me. Plus the task I set myself was not think too much about what I could draw, it was mainly an exercise for myself to improve my drawing skills and to look at shapes differently.

I should have done more drawings, because I don’t think 4 is enough to submit, considering my aim was to not think to much about the shape and just draw. But I would like continue this exercise to help me stimulate ideas and getting into drawing straight off, not repeatedly going back and erasing part and re-doing it.

And I think this exercise, although I only did a few really helped me to get into the mind set of, it doesn’t have to be perfect, just draw what I see.