The final component of my piece was the sound design. I used audio files from Freesound.org to (hopefully) create a sense of time passing very slowly. I'm fairly happy with the end result and although I am doubtful that this project will become a major part of my Grad Film I enjoy it as a standalone piece of my work.
The final part of the experimental process was to get the landscape moving in the oil pastel medium.
In order to accomplish this I reserved a room for myself and set up a projector that connected to my laptop. I advanced my reference animation frame by frame and aimed the projector at a particular portion of the wall. I then set up a camera directly above the projector so that it was facing the same piece of wall. I set up lights on either side of the wall at (roughly) 45 degree angles. A layer or orange paper was taped down with a large acetate sheet taped over that.
The paper taped to the wall with oil pastel being applied.
The projection over the oil pastel layer.
I was originally using animation that was very light in colour but I found that I needed to re-render my reference animation so that all the blades of grass were high contast from each other. Leaving them yellow or green simply didn't work on the projector regardless of how much fiddling I did with the projector contrast levels.
Panorama of the workspace - 2 computers, 1 projector, 1 camera, etc.
The animation process itself was smooth but I will recommend that anyone trying a project-against-a-wall system should think carefully about how high they place their paper in relation to their height. I found that the paper was set up a bit too low for standing comfortably.
Unfortunately I only managed to get 10 frames finished due to time constraints. Each frame took between 20 and 30 minutes to colour so the work was fairly tedious. I wish I had more time so that I could have finished the loop but at least this gives me an impression of how well this concept can be executed.
So I decided that I wanted to take my work in a different direction for this piece. I've made a series of new boards and shot a new piece of animation to work with.
Storyboard Revisions from Youtube
The new boards aren't similar to what I had originally planned but I think the best thing about creative work is that your ideas can shift and change as you become inspired by particular parts of a project. I originally intended to represent both my grandfather and grandmother as characters but I limited my focus to just one character. There are also two strong themes emerging in my mind as being central to this piece - time and religion.
In the process of doing research for the Grad Film that I'm working on I've come across a few interesting cultural artifacts. One of the most interesting pieces was a gold icon/cross that my mother took with her when she left our religious extended family. I've been talking about animating with light for some time now so I thought that this would be a good opportunity.
Animating with the light was very difficult, and I think that's quickly evident by the way the light seems to 'pop' at the end of the cycle. I tried putting pieces of tape down on the floor to ensure the light was moving at an even pace around the object but I was unable to control for that factor on the far side of my setup. If I did this again I would either find a way to navigate around the object entirely, or composite two halves together after breaking up the initial shoot into 2 portions.
I finally had a chance to animate an entire walk cycle using my character. My setup was similar to the first time that I tried but with a few key differences:
1. I expanded the size of the reference animation so that it would be easier to animate the details on the face.
(helpful tip: don't print directly off of photoshop because it takes forever to load on the school printers)
2. Acquired a key for the shooting room. Locked doors means greater security for your work mid-shoot.
The animation process went well this time. The setup was mostly the same, with a glass pane separating the reference animation underneath and holding the acetate with the oil pastel layer on top. The most difficult part of the whole process was keeping the lighting consistent from frame to frame.
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.
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.
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.
