Deeper Focus - Oil Pastel Character Animation

After much difficulty figuring out the logistics of animating with my oil pastels I finally had an opportunity to go ahead and animate a character. I decided to print out the frames of animation that I had previously completed on TVPaint so I could adhere them to the underside of the glass. I ensured the registration was correct by hole punching them and taping a peg bar to the underside of the glass as well.

Shooting setup with elevated glass pane to adhere work to

After lining up the camera and putting a layer of acetate down on top of the glass I was ready to animate my character! Except I spent the next hour trying to figure out why this error message was appearing when I tried to use Dragonframe... After checking every wire and looking at every internet manual and resource I could get my hands on I finally figured out that my issue had to do with the settings on the camera itself. Sometimes it's the little things that hold you back.

Error message on Dragonframe

Test shots before beginning animation.

The animation actually went quite poorly for this shoot. I'd printed out my reference animation fairly small compared to a full sheet of A4 paper and it made the pastels really difficult to work with for details such as the eyes and nose. The technique of scratching pastel away and then shifting the shapes worked really well to create a nice boil but it was messy and tedious work.

The idea would be to key out the edges of the character so the background doesn't flash.

Unfortunately I learned a valuable lesson while doing this animation. Don't leave your animation overnight at the shooting station during finals week - desperate animators will move your work mid-shoot and you'll have to begin again.

See the next post for the finished animation!

Deeper Focus - Rough Character Animation

During the messy series I experimented with character animation using oil pastels and I found it really rewarding. I decided to take a character design and animate a walk cycle to test how the boil of the oil pastels will loop. The pastels tend to get faded out as work progresses so I wanted to come up with a system that would keep the boil from jumping or clicking as the cycle refreshed and began anew.

The first step was to establish a very simple design to work with. My previous grandmother and grandfather designs were much too complicated and involved a lot of line work for each character. I decided to design basic shapes that fit together, and animate a fairly basic cycle.

I completed the linework for the animation in TV Paint this time. It was a much better experience than using Flash in my opinion. The timeline has definitely been developed considering the needs of animators and the brushes can produce a really lovely hand-drawn aesthetic.

Deeper Focus - Rough Environment Animation

I decided to continue preparations to animate an entire environmental scene using the oil pastels. I used flash to do a first pass on the animation. I split the scene into 2 components that needed to be animated. The first component was the grass for the prairie field. I animated a row of grass that I could then duplicate in Adobe After Effects, and offset the timing to create a rolling effect.

Rough Grass and Sky from Thalia McWatt on Vimeo.

This was a horrible experience. The Adobe Flash program I was working on was glitchy the entire time I worked on this animation. I was working on a cintiq and I found that the pen was not responding well at all. Every time I tried to make a line on my screen a menu would open or a severe lag would diminish my ability to make curved lines. I decided to do my rough animation in Flash in order to decrease production time, but I think ultimately it would have been faster and smoother to simply animate the sequences on paper.



Grass Animation from Youtube

Sky Animation from Youtube



The animation process for the sky was similarly frustrating but I am pleasantly surprised with the quality of the loop I managed to achieve. It moves far too quickly compared to my original vision for the movement in the sky, but I know that with a proper amount of inbetweening I can slow the movement down while simultaneously making it smoother.

The colour scheme is also not what I envision for the final project. The scene will hopefully be dirty pink and orange pastel colors with a slightly surreal sense of movement. I wish to make this look like a landscape in a dream and this was a good first step towards that goal.


Deeper Focus - Quick Test

I started my animation process by exploring the concept image that I found the most striking. When I think about the imagery in my Grad Film I'm really attracted to the scene of prairie grasses slowly swaying in the wind. I started by studying the way that prairie grasses move when they get caught in the wind.

Example screenshot of youtube videos that were referenced.

I tried quickly animating a clump of grass in Adobe Photoshop, hoping to begin the process of compositing the grass together using Adobe After Effects. Photoshop doesn't really have the greatest timeline for animating so I would definitely look to eliminate my reliance on that program for any future animation tests. I also found that offsetting the timing of one clump of grass and overlapping/distorting the angle of the layers made for the most convincing grass animation.

Deeper Focus - Plan

My plan for Experimental Animation is to continue working on the oil pastel scenes for my Grad Film, Schism. I'm very attached to the texture of the oil pastels and I have created a series of sketches for possible scenes to experiment with:

The sketches were completed fairly quickly but they represent environments that I wish to explore in my film. Each pastel drawing holds the possibility for movement, and I'd like to experiment with boiling the textures inside of an entire frame. 

I've been exploring the possibility of animating my grandparents as characters in my film. Here are some character sketches and a GIF of a possible scene to complete this semester.

Messy Reflection

The Messy Series of animation experiments was an important undertaking while I started working on the development of my Senior Grad Project this year. I'm going to take this opportunity to reflect on the progress that was made and look forward to what the next round of experiments will bring.

I really felt that the Messy Series was successful. I developed the very specific goal to animate with oil pastels as I formulated the scope of the projects. I've always been drawn to the way that oil pastels can be used to capture light and form in static drawings and I wanted to bring that quality to my time-based work.

Throughout the Messy Series I tried my best to explore openly with the mediums while also making conscious decisions to eliminate variables in order to create a focus in the work. For instance, when I developed the method of back lighting the work, while using orange paper and beige felt to simultaneously warm the light and dull the piece, I knew that I had created a lighting style that was satisfactory. From that point forward I decided to leave that lighting process untouched and focus on the how the oil pastels responded to the acetate and glass.

Having difficulty applying the oil pastel to the glass was by far the biggest surprise in the process. I was so certain that by spending the time to prepare a glass surface for animation I would be furthering my progress with the oil pastels. I was dumbfounded when all my planning and preparation didn't work. Sometimes you learn the most about your work when you least expect to.

If I were to continue the Messy Series at this point I would definitely start to work with particular character styles and a different array of movements. My goals would be threefold: how to best represent the human figure with this technique, how the pastel reacts to different types of animation (fast movement versus slow movement), and a deeper focus on lighting and colour.

I know that I'm going to continue working with oil pastel as I develop my Senior Grad Project this semester but for the next series of experiments I'm going to step away from this work and try something new. My focus will be as follows:

To experiment with paper cutout animation.  I want to animate the physical pieces of paper with natural light but I also want to digitally composite the pieces in After Effects. Perhaps I can run a comparison of the two production methods and see what will work best for my future work.

To incorporate painted and photographed texture in the cutout animation.

To work on a title sequence for my Senior Grad Project, thus introducing narrative and sound to the experimentation process.

Messy 3

Grease Pencil

Experimental: Messy 3 Grease Pencil from Thalia McWatt on Vimeo.

Oil Pastel 

Experimental: Messy 3 Oil Pastel from Thalia McWatt on Vimeo.

This was my final week of oil pastel animation tests. I used the same materials and lighting setup as my previous tests so the experimentation was focused on how best to use the pastels to create the animation style I wanted.

In my work on Messy 2.5 I was having trouble getting the pastel to hold onto the hard, flexible plastic, so I thought, "well maybe it will stick better if I have something harder I can push into."

thus, glass!

This worked out terribly.

The oil pastel just wouldn't adhere to the glass at all.

After realising the initial test was doomed to failure I decided to just run a new animation test with a grease pencil to see how that looked. The movement wasn't very planned out so the animation doesn't have any gravity to it, but I can see how the grease pencil might come in handy for future work.

My next thought was to get some really soft plastic sheets to work with. If hard makes things worse then surely soft will make things better?

This was sound logic. 

I love how the final result looks and the oil pastel took to the plastic really easily. This whole time I've been looking for a way to achieve this aesthetic without the physical work being to much of a burden on my hands and this was the closest I've gotten to a quick, easy style. In this test I would scratch away at the edges of the pastel while working in a new layer of colour (mostly white) on top of the existing oil pastel. I'm very satisfied with the result, but I also recognise that I need to think about how I'm going to composit this type of work into larger scenes.

As for what comes next, I expect to start experimenting with paper puppets and compositing in After Effects this week.