Production Diary - Week 10 - End of Production and Responses to Feedback

As it is the final week, production has stopped and now I am contemplating the feedback that I received in crit sessions. One bit of feedback that I received was that I had achieved the aesthetic that I was aiming for in the way that the animation looks (good by all accounts), but that some parts of the animation looks jumpy in the way that the characters head movements are a little jerky. Feedback was also given on the audio of the animation and the main issue for many of my peers was that the dialogue audio has a lot of noise in it and reverberation.  

Production Diary - Week 9 - Further Audio Consideration and tweeking

This week I have been trying to improve the audio of the animation by placing in non-diagetic sounds such as the wind blowing, bird song and the general outdoor 'hum', to give the animation more of an atmosphere and more emphasis on the setting.

I have also included music accompaniment of which I created myself and based it around the sounds that children's toys make. I have tried to mimic this in the tone of the instrument and in the melody in the way that melodies associated with childrens toys and television programs are usually care free and joyous in their delivery. The musical accompaniment features at the start of the animation, in the middle and at the end. The melodies are representative of: an introduction, a problem, and an outro.
I think the musical element really adds to the childlike aspects of the animation and I am pleased with this result.

Production Diary - Week 8 - Assembly, After Effects & animation

This week I was able to make up for the lack of progress in previous weeks by making a lot of progress on the animated elements in the scene.

First of all I made all my assets,
aside from those that make up the characters, into 3D layers in one composition. This allowed me to isolate the characters in another composition to precompose different parts of their bodies and animate those individually using the puppet pin tool and key framing position and rotation. I could have used tracking to track the movement of one part of the characters body and have another part of the mody follow the movement path of the given body part - this would have automated alot of the animation in the scenes. However I opted to animate each scene manually using key frames for the reason that I wanted the animation of the characters' bodies to somewhat match the expression present in the live action footage of the characters faces.
To save from having to produce more assets for the animation and have the project be more sustainable, I duplicated some of the assets that make up the character for example the flowerpots and the flower petals.
I think the result that you achieve with the puppet pin tool really works well with the aesthetic that I am trying to cultivate with the hand painted assets and live action combination. As the movement

that the puppet tool brings is unnatural looking it adds to the 'uncanny' value that makes the juxtaposition between the childlike playfulness of the medium and the adult approach to the dialogue.

I had the issue of syncing up the audio for the dialogue of the characters up to the footage, this was an issue because I wanted the audio to sometimes cut into the next shot as if one of the characters were talking over the other. The way i solved this was to first seperate the audio from the footage before compositing the footage in aftereffects to be grafted on to the characters' bodies and movements key framed accordingly.

As for the hiss on the audio of the dialogue i opened up the file in adobe audition and took a noise print of a section with no dialogue for the computer to grasp which frequencies needed to be dampened from the audio. With these frequencies removed it will be easier for me to smooth out any remaining noise issues using atmospheric sounds that are relative to the character's surroundings.
In reflection these issues may be avoided entirely in the future if I am to use live action video and audio by using a sound booth which should cancel out any residual noise/ reverberation.

Production Diary - Week 7- Clip selection and Beginning to Animate

This week due to being at the Manchester Animation Festival, I haven't had the opportunity to progress much on the production side of this project.
One thing that I have been able to focus on is the making decisions on which live action clips will be most appropriate for the animation and which clips would fit together more fluidly, taking into account resting facial expressions and reactions of the two characters when engaging in dialogue.
It is important that I pick out the most fitting sections of footage for each section of dialogue in relation to each other, when it comes to actually assembling the animation and applying the footage to each animated scene, I may have to change my selection of a given section of footage to make for a more fluid final edit - this could be due to certain sections of footage being too short or the facial expressions changing too quickly.
At the end of this week I created the first animated elements of my main scene in after effects, I also added some blur affects and drop shadows to give the scene more of a depth of field and elements of parallax.
The first element of motion that introduced into my scene was the sun and its rays rotating round the the main body of the sun. To do this I made a pre composition in aftereffects of the four sun rays and key framed the rotation of the rays around the sun by placing the position of the anchor point in the centre of the sun. I also key framed in different values of scale to make the rays look like they were growing and shrinking/ glimmering for want of a better word.
To give the sun a better sense of believability I duplicated it and the the rays' layers and used the blur effect to give them somewhat of an outer glow.

Screenshot showing the camera in conjunction with 3D layers

To give the scene a sense of parallax, I converted all the layers into 3D layers and added a camera to work in conjunction with those 3D layers that could be zoomed in or out on the Z axis, up or down on the Y axis and left to right on the X axis. The point of interest may also be moved around to give the scene even more of a sense of cut-out-handmade-ness that seems to be the direction of my work so far. The benefits of using the camera were that I was able to keep the same scene and frame each shot by moving the camera around the scene and zooming in and out accordingly, rather than having to make a new composition for each close up shot.

production diary - week 6 - reflection

 - this week production has had to be put on hold due to illness -

As i was ill this week i was unable to focus properly on further production of the animated short, however this time did offer me chance to reflect on the progress that i have made so far and what the next steps should be.
I am pleased with the way that the world that the characters will play a role in has come together, I had preconceptions of the scene looking very jarring and not really having much about it in terms of believability, however by developing the drawings digitally I have been able to bring more warmth into the colours and bring out the brushstrokes in the thick acrylic paint that give the scene that element of homemade-ness and child like sensibility and playfulness that I was aiming for.
The footage of mine and my course mate's faces and dialogue has turned out well, the adult nature of the conversation/approach to the dialogue carries with it a dry sense of humour that i think will juxtapose well with the whole childlike aesthetic that I am trying to carry across in the physical/drawn elements of the world that i have created for these two rival characters.

One change that I will make to the original idea of having two different looking flower characters is that i am going to have the two characters looking relatively similar. The reason for this is that i believe the more adult sensibilities in the dialogue between the two characters should distinguish that they are in fact two very different characters in they're personal traits, yet because they are so similar there is this element of jealousy and competitiveness that arrises and results in the two becoming rivals.

Production Diary - week 5 - filming and acting

This week I did not make a lot of physical progress on the production of the animation, however I did produce numerous video edits following the script, I decided to produce numerous edits so that Me and my course mate Tom, gradually became more comfortable with the lines so that they seemed more natural in their delivery.

There were some practical aspects of filming the live action parts of the animation that I did not at first fully consider. The lighting and sound were major factors that I had to find ways of controlling, the first consideration about the lighting was how the subject's faces should be lit up - I thought to include as much detail in the face as possible the lighting should be flat and equal across the subjects' faces. The reason why the lighting has to be flat across the face is to bring out the facial expressions more which help to put more emphasis on the dialogue that is taking place and the attitudes of the characters on screen. Another reason that the faces needed to be lit up in such a way is so that the values of light around the face were equal so that they would be easier to mask and blend into the character's body.

The audio on the first few cuts of video was very poor, I then decided to opt for a Rode microphone to be attached to the camera for a better quality of sound. The audio that was retrieved was marginally better, it had a fuller sound to the dialogue being recorded - however the microphone also picked up background noise and slight reverberation of the room that I was filming in. What I shall do to rectify and improve the audio quality for the final cut is to use the graphic equalizer in audition to remove as much background hiss as possible. In addition to this I will mix in with the dialogue atmospheric noise relative to the world that my narrative takes place in (e.g. the wind blowing, birds tweeting etc), I have some footage archived of the countryside that may prove useful for this area of the project.

Production Diary - Week Four - Scripting/Screen Play, Storyboards and More..

(There are more assets, here are just a few for example and documentation purposes)

I have scanned in my acrylic paintings of objects to be placed in the garden scene of my animation, these are to be used as assets, I chose to paint my the scenery/environment of my animation by hand in thick acrylic for some interesting textures that would have been difficult to produce using digital means. Once scanned I opened the images up in Photoshop, removed the white/paper background so that the object was on a transparent background by using the magic wand tool. I then adjusted the levels in the image-adjust toolbar, this helped to bring out the texture of the brush strokes and added warmth to the colours - this is important if I am to keep a seemingly child friendly aesthetic (needs to be inviting).

Mood board -

above is a mood board featuring some animated shorts and feature films which I feel have the same aesthetic qualities of children's TV programs yet, subvert this/ make juxtapositions by having adult themes within the delivery, dialogue and action.
Pib And Pog is a good example of this juxtaposition, as on the surface of the animation the characters are very inviting and friendly looking with the narrator using a child friendly tone asking each character questions and reacting with a light hearted response to quite graphic violence between the two characters.
I also decided to include luxury comedy on the mood board for something to take reference for image tracking on after affects where certain assets follow the features of a face superimposed into an animation, this would help to further combine animation with live action film.

Progression of script - The script is finished however it is only short, it may need alterations depending on the cut of the live video,

Storyboard - This is the first draft of a storyboard for my animated short, from this I will be able to plan out better how long each shot will last and what audio will be played at each point e.g. dialogue, birds tweeting etc. The typographic choice on the first still of the storyboard is not necessarily the choice that will be final as I may choose to create my own text using acrylic paint as this may be more in keeping with the aesthetic of the whole animation.
In some of the shots on the storyboard - noteably the close ups of the flowers I have added a blur effect to the green hills in the background of the scene and aswell to the shed, this helps to pull focus into the two character's faces and gives the scene more of a sense of depth. These creative choices for the storyboard will help inform the work my post-production phase.

Now that the storyboard and script is finished I am able to start producing the cuts of live action video to be included in my animation, once one rough of live action video is produced I will then be able to use the audio from that footage to put it alongside the visuals of the storyboard to produce an animatic.

Production diary - Week Three - Character & narrative development

This week I focused on developing more depth to the characters in my animation by deciding what differences they should have. One character being a passive one with intentions to mediate a situation such as an argument, and the other being the opposite with an argumentative and challenging nature towards the other character.
I am posed with the problem of how to represent this visually in terms of the way the characters move and their overall look, I shall produce a series of sketches for each of the characters (perhaps 5 with some substantial detail and annotations detailing why I have made certain decisions.
The characters (Ben and Bill) are flowers, Bill is the character who challenges and seeks to evoke an emotional response from Bill, who brushes off his verbal attacks with ease. I would like the character of Ben to be one of someone who is composed and thinks about what they say before they say it, contrasting with the character of Bill who will be someone who acts in child like way - motivated by jealousy and this will be presented through the dialogue that the two characters engage in.

By developing the depth in my two characters' personalities, it has been easier to construct a narrative due to the fact that I am able to plan their actions in accordance with what is happening in their world - in this case a garden wall with a view out onto fields behind them. As the sun rises the plants/flowers awake and turn their attention toward the sun, the objective for Bill in this narrative is to try and outgrow Ben who, we can tell by his physical qualities, is a more well established plant with more foliage.
As the day turns to evening, Bill's confidence in his ability to outgrow Ben is diminished and due to his unfortunate placement on the garden wall, Bill is now in a shadow cast by the garden shed. We then see a change in Ben's character as he gloats and poses reasons as to why Bill is in the shadow, goading him into confrontation.

The plan for the week ahead will be to:

- Produce a finished script

- Have all assets/props completed, scanned and edited where needed

- Produce character's body designs

- Have a finished storyboard with added annotations for dialogue and any audio.





Here is an aproximation of how the first scene may look..

Production Diary - Week Two - Asset Production

 I have decided to start producing my individual assets to get more of an idea of how the story may progress - i find working on the practical side of things with only rough ideas at present helps to spark new ideas and new depth to the project.
I have opted for bright acrylic paint for the objects within my animation to give texture and the aesthetic of a production made for young audiences e.g bright colours etc.
This is because I want to juxtapose this with some adult themes within the narrative of the animation, perhaps in the way that the characters behave - with the discourse between them being something that you would not hear on a children's television program.
When I first canned in each asset the colours seemed very dull and so i had to adjust them in photoshop to bring out the textures a little more.
Overall I have realised I need to speed up my working practice in the next week, this will help me to formulate a clear narrative and outcome of the story.

Production Diary - Week one - idea generation

 For this project I want to bring more maturity into my finished product, so I began to take inspiration from television programs that have adult themes and humor, mainly sketch shows - due to the 30 second requirement of the brief.

However I did take inspiration from the channel 4 sitcom 'Peep show' for an idea on the theme 'rivals'. The idea revolved around having the main character going to work and having to put up with an annoying co worker in an office setting, one that he had to compete with to win the affection of his crush.

I felt that this was a good idea for the theme of 'rivals', but could not think of any real practical way of animating the story that would fit involve a mixed media approach which is how I would like to go about producing this animation.

 When I began thinking about ideas for the animation I realized that the kind of animation I want to produce would be a very dialogue heavy end product, so I had to think about the practicality of this and realised that i would have to produce lots of different shaped mouths - either digitally or by hand - and to me this did not seem necessary so i have decided early on to instead use live action video for the character's mouths.
This may result in a very comical looking end result which i am okay with - as long as it can be tied in with the overall aesthetic of the finished animation.

I decided to simplify my idea's - still focusing on the theme of rivals, I looked at the word 'rivals' and thought of other words that could be associated along with it, 'competition' was the first word that came to mind.
I had the idea of two flowers on a wall arguing over who can grow the fastest, or attract the most bees etc. I then realized that i had the opportunity to make something that could be quite playful in the sense that I could include a level of maturity in its delivery but at the same time have an aesthetic that would be similar to some children's television programs.

This is due to the bright colours and acrylic paint that i will be using to create each asset of my animation.




Here is a rough storyboard/thumbnails of what might occur in the animation.
It is still in the developmental stage and will need to develop organically as the project progresses, this is due to the fact that I will be using live action video for the character's faces and want to give the dialogue a slightly improvised feel to it.
I will however use a simple formula to tell a simple narrative of rivalry - the character's may even put aside they're differences to help one another.

Upon reflection I feel that the idea that i am going to stick with will have its challenges in the technical aspect of the project but with some experimentation I will be able to overcome those challenges.