For this exercise I first worked out the keys for the mouth so I could get the lip sync down. I then thought about the acting. I tried to record a reference for myself and worked with one of the acting tutors to figure out the performance but I found it difficult to put movement into quite a subtle piece of dialogue. My interpretation of the audio was that it was somebody who had been through something painful and was sad when talking about it. I wanted to create movement without it being too much so I opted to have him look down and lean forwards/backwards as he was talking. I’m happy with how the performance turned out – just need to clean it up and add some colour now!
The mood change exercise has been the one I have struggled with the most and spent the most time on. As I was trying to create this animation I started to change my mind a lot and become unsure of what I wanted to do. Up until I began this assignment I had been drawing simplified standard human characters, so I wanted to push myself to make something more interesting. After seeing the work of my course mates I felt a little doubtful of my drawing skills and felt like I should be doing more complex characters so this is what I strived to do.
I decided to first map out the key frames very roughly:
https://vimeo.com/686073302
Then I traced over it with a rough design:
https://vimeo.com/686073893
When I came back to this animation after the break I wasn’t motivated to finish it at all. I had envisioned my character being a muscular gym guy wearing new trainers but I couldn’t translate it into my drawing. I decided that for these short exercises it is more important to focus on the animation technique, and then in future projects I can think about stylising my work more. I went back to the more simplistic design and finished recently with this:
https://vimeo.com/686073164
I’m really glad I went back to this simple design because I could make the movement so much more interesting. I had a lot of fun playing with the reactions and anticipation, especially the exaggerated transition into the run. I made the animation using both Steve’s walk cycles and a reference I found online which is in my research blog. I would really like to clean this up and make some fixes to the walk cycle so I can use it as a portfolio piece.
The development I have been through in this exercise has really shown me how much I have learned and improved in the few months I have been on this course. I feel like by practising all of these exercises I am starting to get a natural feel for animation and an understanding of the basic principles.
As part of Unit 1 we have been assigned a second year graduate film to work on. I was paired with Rosie, who is making a 2D animation about 2 mushrooms who ‘take’ humans and experience a psychedelic trip. I was nervous to be assigned a 2D project having become more comfortable with puppets as of late, but I was happy to see that Rosie’s style aligned with my abilities. The film will be drawn animation made in TV Paint.
When Rosie and I met to discuss my tasks she asked what I would like to do to which I said I was really keen to do some inbetweening since this is something I can see myself doing for a job. I realised this was ambitious as all of the graduate films are still in early stages of production, but I was fortunate enough to have Rosie prepare some key frames of the first scene for me. Because Rosie had to prepare this I had a late start to the work experience but I have every intention of finishing the work she has assigned to me.
I have done some inbetweening before in Photoshop so I have a little bit of experience in passing files back and forth. Rosie included everything I needed in the TV Paint document, such as movement notes, character turn arounds, colours and pen settings. Everything was very easy to find which meant I could quickly get started. Each character was colour coded with its own layer. I created new layers for my in-betweens.
The only thing I didn’t have which I was expecting was some timing charts, and there were some key frames which had large gaps between them. In these instances I used my initiative and animation knowledge that I have learned to draw frames where I felt they were right. I found that this took me a really long time. Looking back I think coming up with some of my own timing charts would have been very useful so I could avoid redoing frames. I haven’t yet finished working on this shot, and I have gotten about half way through tweening the guy on the right. Here is my assignment vs my work:
https://vimeo.com/686064760
Rosie’s Keys
https://vimeo.com/686064528
My in-betweens (WIP)
I think I have managed to get the movements right but there are definitely issues with timing. I tried to do a slow in for the jump but there are still too many frames and it looks a bit slow motion. I was trying to apply some follow through to the different body parts, which I think I achieved correctly with his head. I think I went a bit too overboard with his arms though and they need to come down much sooner on the landing. Rosie asked me to include an impact wobble when he lands which took me a while to work out but I am happy with what I did here. I got feedback from Rosie by sending her videos during different points in my work. The feedback I have so far is to speed everything up a bit.
I really enjoy inbetweening although it can be a bit frustrating at times! I have learnt a lot just by starting this project so I am really glad I got this opportunity. I am disappointed in how long the work is taking me after opening so much time on it, but hopefully the more I practice the easier it will get. I think the main thing that held me back was focussing so much on keeping my drawings consistent with Rosie’s. I have been taking a lot of time to make my lines neat and similar to the key frames when I should just roughly map out the movement first, otherwise I waste time neatening a frame I end up changing. I will try to do this when I pick this back up. I’m very thankful to Rosie for setting this shot up for me and she was really helpful along the way.
Just a quick note to say that I decided to collect my inspirations, references and research using Pinterest as I find it more user friendly and useful for this purpose – it can be found here and also in the header menu.
I will be treating this as a sort of digital sketchbook so I can find my references in one place and refer back to them. I will be using this blog for documenting my own processes and reflecting on my work.
I used my plasticine puppet for the chosen lip sync task. This will be part of a collaborative film with some of my course mates which is a prison lineup. I put my best voice acting to work for my patriarchy dismantling drag queen!
https://vimeo.com/685181038
Green screen footage
Again with this being my first experience of claymation I made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot from them. One thing I learned soon was that a the time I spent perfecting the details of this puppet was a waste! I had imagined the arms looking a certain way when I had my final sculpture but the shapes didn’t really translate when I was manipulating them and they look a bit deformed in places. I think it would have been better to keep them as more of a tube shape. The blinks also ended up being a bit messy because of the way I sculpted them.
I am very happy with the lip sync, the mouth shapes worked well and even though the words in the audio are quite complex the lip sync is convincing. I didn’t end up using all of the mouth shapes that I made but at least I have them for the future! I think I managed to animate some nice movement which fit into the rhythm of the audio without having too much go on. I would have liked the beginning to have more of a pause when the character touches their head so it looked like they were contemplating more.
https://vimeo.com/685182149
I made this rough comp for the purpose of the assignment but it definitely needs some improvement! I enjoyed creating this lip sync but didn’t particularly get on with the plasticine puppet because it wasn’t as sturdy as my other ones.
A new puppet means a new character design so I decided to make an older character with some strong facial features. I find designing side profiles a little tricky as it takes me a while to understand the skull structure.
The idea of this puppet is to have facial features that move and can be easily animated. We started off by creating armature from wire set with Milliput for the base, I decided to create wires for the eyebrows, mouth and ears. We then built up a head in plasticine.
This sculpture was such an improvement from my first attempt at Sasha which shows how much I learned from just one puppet. I used the method of using a lot of clay and then sculpting into it which was much easier.
We then created a mould for the latex puppet using our sculptures. We did this by placing the back of the head into soft clay, making sure that the seam was always at the widest point of the head, before pouring plaster over the face. This gave us our first half of the mould. We then coated this half of the mould with natural soap (so the two halves wouldn’t stick together) before placing the head inside again and covering the back of the head in plaster. Once this had set we had a reusable mould.
I forgot to take pictures but the next step was to coat both sides of the mould with latex to create a skin and make sure the details would come out in the final puppet. After a few coats, we taped the mould together and poured in more latex and swirled it around to get the skin coated. Finally we poured in some expandable foam and birthed our puppets!
I think my puppet came out looking really good but unfortunately the armature inside doesn’t work because it hasn’t clung onto the latex, and the foam didn’t seem to set properly inside. I will soon be attempting this again using the same mould but a slightly different technique for the mechanics, and hopefully it will work out!
I was so happy with this puppet I couldn’t wait to animate it. The first exercise I tried with it was for the body acting assignment – having a character react to something using body language. For this one I wanted to just focus on getting to grips with the process of stop motion animation and not worry about facial expression or set details. Because Snotty is quite a melancholy guy the first thing that came to mind was to have him be scared of something.
https://vimeo.com/685140474
I animated this with the help of Steph – who suggested to record a reference of ourselves acting the scene out and then importing it into Dragonframe so we had a guide to follow for the timing and movement. I found this really helpful and got this one done in a short amount of time. I would like to try this again because although I am happy with the overall performance, I think I could make it a lot more fluid and interesting now that I have more understanding of the process.
Facial Animation
I decided to also use Snotty for the facial acting exercise. I was anxious to go straight into animation so I thought it would be a good idea to experiment with creating some different expressions and take pictures to use as a reference. I had initially painted on the mouth and eyebrows which allowed for no movement in these areas, so I painted over them and replaced them with plasticine that I was able to manipulate.
Curious
Angry
Determined
Happy
Scared
Tired/Pain
Weary
Bored
Shocked
Content
I had planned on making separate eyebrows and mouths for different expressions but once I had tried out the expressions I thought it would be easier to mould them as I went (I was wrong).
I shot some reference footage of myself and I also thought it would be useful to draw out a reference so I could work out the timing of the action.
https://vimeo.com/685143922
Key frame reference
Set up of scene
I hadn’t really thought about the set before I went into animating so I had to improvise with this make-shift table which was impractically wobbly. I tried to stick it down with plasticine and tape but it didn’t really work – I think something magnetic would be much better in the future. It also wasn’t really long enough for the spider to crawl out of shot, so I had to manipulate it to create the illusion of it crawling off instead. Here is the animation:
https://vimeo.com/685143838
This scene took me a very long time because of the many different elements involved, but I really think it was worth my time because it turned out even better than I imagined! I think the timing could be better with the first reaction but overall I’m really happy with the acting and the way the scene loops. I began to animate by following my reference footage but my timing charts became redundant quite quickly as I realised it was better to just use my intuition.
The puppet armature itself was very nice to animate with – it was easy to manipulate and nothing felt like it would break. The hands were a little bit stiff and weren’t quite doing what I wanted which I found more difficult. I also wasn’t able to do the blocking that I wanted to with him ducking under the table – I tried but the body just wasn’t supple enough to have him bend down. I think my solution of just having him lean back was effective enough though.
The animation of the face was very time consuming. I was taking a lot of time in-between frames to sculpt the expressions where I hadn’t pre-made them. This allowed me to get nice transitions between the expressions but it was quite inconvenient when animating. I think next time I should do a few versions of the same features so I have some that I can manipulate and some to replace them.
Something that was very inconvenient was the way the hat would move every time I touched the puppets head – which I was doing a lot in order to animate it. I had to match the hat to the previous shot almost every time I touched it – which was another unnecessary consumption of time. Gluing the hat down would have made things a lot easier.
The other inconvenience I had was with the wobbly table and camera set up. You can see the table is moving around in the shot but I think I just about got away with it after taking time to match the table up with the previous frame a lot of times. I also learned the importance of having a stable camera and being very careful so as not to knock it (which I did quite a few times!) which results in having to match up the shot again.
It was also quite a challenge to have 2 animations going on at the same time with the spider and character. There were times when I would get too focussed on the character and forget about the spider so the timing is a little off – but I wasn’t being too fussy since this wasn’t the main point of the assignment.
I have a little bit of knowledge in VFX so I put something together in After Effects for the purpose of the assignment – I do want to try and get a better composite done for my portfolio.
https://vimeo.com/685153814
Final film!
I really loved this exercise, it felt like my first piece of proper animation and I am really proud of what I did. I’m especially glad I took the extra time to make the animation loop because it makes it feel very complete. This was a very useful exercise because I made lots of mistakes and learned so much from it – I will feel more confident going into my next stop motion animation.
Our next puppet project was to make a new model with plasticine. I decided to create a character based on one of my favourite drag artists, creating a punk look which would give them lots of personality. I had a bit of a rocky start with this one as I tried to understand the best method of sculpting. I intuitively created a base and then added details on top of this, but I now realise it is better to sculpt the details out of the clay.
My first attempt – I wasn’t happy with the messy face and the skinny body was impractical
I really felt I could do a lot better with this model, and as I was creating a character based on a real person I wanted to do them justice. I decided to restart the head and face to make it neater and more drag-like and was so much happier with the result. I also added details like jewellery, a braid and some elf ears (because why not?) and fixed the body so it would stand better.
‘Sasha’ revised!
Once I was happy with the design of the model I began to think about practicalities for animating. I wanted to use this puppet for a lip sync animation so I needed to create hands and various mouth shapes. When creating the mouth shapes I realised that the oversized lips I had created were difficult to mould into different shapes, so I adapted more of an Aardman style for the more extreme shapes.
Mouth shapes
For the hands and arms, I decided to make the puppet more butch to give it more substance. I really wanted to create more muscular arms but ended up being a bit pressed for time so this was my final result:
I made the hands using the same method as I did previously – wire, hot glue and then the plasticine on top. I attached them using Milliput placed so the arms would bend in the right places.
Final model!
I added some more colour into the hair to make it stand out more and I am now ready for animation! Even though I spent a long time creating this model there was still more I wanted to perfect – I have had to make myself come away from this one because I might have gone on forever! I think this is because I found the plasticine quite frustrating to work with because things can get messed up so easily and don’t stay put! But overall I still really enjoyed creating Sasha.
