This is my updated pitch bible. I fleshed it out from the previous version, replaced the Beram turnaround with a fixed feet version, and replaced the storyboards with a cleaner version that's more presentable.
I'm pretty pleased with this, as I think it shows off my idea and short very well. I particularly like the background slides, as well as the emotional graph slide as that illustrates the mood I'm trying to aim for. I also think it was a good idea to show the process behind the shots, to give an idea of workflow.
To improve:
I should finish the walk cycle and make it cleaner
I could add a lot more concept art to show the world off beyond just my short
I could have made that first slide a bit more interesting to look at
Now that everything is composited and finished, the final steps are to edit all the scenes into one film and then add sound.
The editing went very smoothly, and I used the animatic as a guide for timing, however overall the film ended up being longer than the animatic despite some scenes being taken out. I think this is due to mainly the travel scenes being longer than expected, however I prefer this pacing as it doesn't feel rushed while isn't too long and boring to watch.
I also changed the title to display after the flashback, as Beram's expression changes from sad to determined and after Daisy has been introduced. This fits much better, as you understand the title more and it also helps highlight what Beram is feeling.
When it came to the sound I really struggled. I didn't want to use the same music as the animatic as I thought it sounded too amateurish and didn't fit properly, so I tried looking for the right music on royalty free websites. This really stressed me out as finding music isn't something I'm good at, and it took me 3 days to come up with something that I was ok with. The music I chose isn't perfect but I think it's a lot better than the animatic. I then used the same sound effects from the animatic and combined them with some of my own foley (such as a kettle boiling for the fire at the end) to create the soundscape for my short. I think this went pretty well, however I don't like the sound of the carriage/cage too much as it's a bit grating, so I lowered its levels quite a bit. I think the sound turned out ok, but not amazing and dragged the animation down a little bit.
Here's the final animation:
Overall, I'm very proud of it as I've worked really hard and I was able to finish the film despite its longer length. I'm very happy with the production quality, especially the compositing side of things and the backgrounds. I think the lineweight on Beram should be thinner for the animation however. My favourite scene is that sunset reveal, as I think it's pacing is very effective and I really like the visuals.
This was my first attempt at a walk cycle using a wireframe armature. I found this really hard to do because the puppet kept falling off the rig, and it was generally very flimsy, however I think it turned out okay for my first attempt. The feedback was:
the left leg was better than the right, as it had a nice kick to it
the right leg needs one extra frame to make the kick for that leg more fluid
the knees need to be brought up more, and then the leg needs to snap straight for the contact pose
the foot needs to be consistantly rolling
the character needs to be leaning into the walk a bit more
I wanted to have another go at a 3D one, but my stop motion puppet was un-animateable. Instead, I used Ducky's half-finished one as this was bigger and had thinner limbs:
I used Richard William's Animator's Survival Kit and used a 16 frame walk cycle for this one. I had a lot of fun doing this and I think it turned out pretty good. Thinking about all the elements that need to move in straight ahead animation was a bit tricky, but I feel that the movement is pretty fluid. This puppet was a lot better to work with as it was more stable.
To improve:
The leg needs to snap out more and be straighter in the contact pose still
The foot needs to roll more
It's a little bit jerky so I need to be more careful when doing the inbetweens. Using the onion skin would help a lot
I then animated a 2D walk cycle of Beram. I ran out of time so wasn't able to finish the cleanup or add his crown and cape, however I got the main motion down. As I wanted it to be Beram's walk cycle rather than a generic one, I needed to tailor it towards his personality. This meant that it needed to be slower overall, and also be more sluggish. To achieve this, I added more inbetweens as Beram lifts his foot, and less for when he places it down to give the illusion that his legs feel heavy. I think this turned out well, however I think I should have added one more in between just before he places his foot down, to make the motion more fluid.
I think the arm movement is pretty good, as I only wanted a subtle movement, and the swing is very natural feeling.
The main areas I struggled with is the body and the head. I think they look too stiff and jerky, and I should have used a bit more squash for the body, and made the head bob more than it currently does.
Walk cycles are something I need to do a lot of practice on, and I'll probably try out a lot during summer.
The final thing left to do other than editing and sound, is the flashback sequence. To make it really stand out from the rest of the animation, I decided to make it very de-saturated and also have a black vignette overlay type thing. After drawing all the scenes using my storyboard reference, I took each one to after effects and composited them:
I started by keyframing any movement in the scene. For this one it was a zoom and pan, others had zooms, lights flashing and doors closing. Once the base movement was done, I added a wiggle expression to get a shaky kind of POV feel. I then added the animated overlay on top of the whole composition, and finally added a radial blur to it to get that sort of zoomed in dreamy effect.
I'm quite happy with how these turned out, as I think its quite clear that these are flashback scenes. I also think the wiggle movement and the overlay makes them a lot more interesting to look at than the animatic versions, and they feel more like part of the animation now, rather than just exposition.
My most challenging compositing scene was the final sunset one, as this scene was so vital to the story I needed to make it both clear and visually good. The background was where most of the work went into, as I needed to make a version for both the sun being up and the sun being set/the castle being on fire. To do this, I focused on first how the bg would look with the sun being up, and then added layers after to change the colour quality as well as the castle and sky. I then cleaned this up and took it to after effects to composite, along with the image sequence of the animation. The final scene looks like this:
Overall it took me 3 hours to composite due to how many layers there were as well as getting the timing right, and finally genereating the smoke for the fire.
I started again with the sky, animating the clouds moving across over a 20 second duration. I then keyframed the sun setting, getting the timing right with easing. I used this as a reference to keyframe the second versions of the background's transparency, so that it would fade from sunset to night time. I also did this with the castle fire layers, to reveal that as the sun sets.
Once the background was mostly done, I placed the image sequence in, colour corrected it, added the shadow and adjusted the timings to fit with the background animation.
The final step was to create the smoke to make it clear that the castle was on fire. Originally I was going to do this in tvpaint, however I decided to try creating the effect with after effects. I used CC particle world to generate the smoke, and used a blur to make it softer. After playing with the settings to get it to look right and be in the right postion, I moved it in the background so it'd be behind the sky's many overlay layers, thus making it fit in with the composition. The final step was to keyframe the transparency to make it reveal itself along with the castle fire.
I'm very pleased with this scene, and it's probably my favourite from my animation as I love watching the transition. I also think the smoke - although subtle - really sells the scene, and Beram's reactions are very fitting.
To improve I think I could make the smoke more obvious, by maybe duplicating the smoke and putting it on top of the sky layers but at a lower opacity. It's something to experiment with.
Once all the assets were completed, I moved onto compositing. I composited each scene separately to edit all together at the end. The process for compositing was this:
I started by exporting the animation from tvpaint as a png image sequence to preserve transparency and get a better quality. I then cleaned up the photoshop document for the background and grouped the layers into folders to make it easier for me. Once that was done, I imported the raw photoshop file, and the image sequence into a 1920x1080 24fps ae document.
For the compositing, I always started with the sky and the clouds. In this particular scene, it was the sun as well, and in others there were things like fog as well as the clouds. I used the position keyframe to animate these.
I then placed the image sequence in the document and moved it into position. From there, I used curves and the hue/saturation effects to colour correct it so that it matches the environment.
The next steps were dependent on what the scene needed. This one needed an outer glow on Beram as he was silhouetted by the sun, as well as a slight zoom and pan as this was a scene from the travel sequence, and thus needed a bit of movement in it. Other scenes needed things like shadows, changing blurs, inner glows and largers pans with parrallax.
Compositing was really fun but also really stressful, as it was where I could see the look of the final thing, however there was a lot to do to get it to that presentable stage and a lot of files and layers to work with. It was also great at helping me learn after effects, and I love how versatile the software is.
One thing I learned was that proper planning goes a long way, and that I really should have spent more time on layout so I could get the exact movements down rather than having to problem solve in this stage.
I did a lot of thinking and planning about how exactly I can do this scene in after effects. The main problem I was coming up with was how to merge the crown with the grass and make it look like it was interacting with it rather than just pasted ontop of it. In the end I just decided to have an animated black line at the bottom of the crown to show a little bit of interaction, as well as have a layer from the background be revealed as the crown goes over it, to suggest Beram underneath disrupting the grass. Once I had all the assets drawn and painted, I moved over to after effects and first animated the crown's bob loop:
I keyframed the rotation and position to get this bobbing effect, and used a loop function so that it'd continuously repeat. I'd have to mask off the bottom in the main composition otherwise the mask would rotate with the crown, however I had to place the black line in this composiion otherwise it wouldn't allign. That meant that the black line would also get masked off, so it took me a lot of trial and error to place it in the right position. I'm quite pleased with this though, as I think it gives off the illusion of walking quite well.
Next, I went back to the main composition and masked the crown. I then drew a path with the pen tool and linked it with the crown's position, so that the crown would follow the path. I had to move the keyframes on the timeline around to get the right timing however, and also move the path so that it alligned with the background's dark path. I finished it by keyframing the scale, to make it smaller as it progresses.
Once that was done, I animated a mask for the background dark path, so that it'd be revealed as the crown moves through the grass.
This is the end result:
Overall I'm pretty happy with it. It achieved the right effect, and I managed to complete this scene a lot quicker than if I was to hand animate it. If I had more time, I'd definitely try and improve the way the crown interacts with the grass, and actually animate the grass moving for the crown, however this version is a good compromise.
Once I finished the handdrawn animation, I moved onto the backgrounds. I didn't do them chronologically, instead I started with the travel sequence, then I painted the post travel sequence scenes, then the pre-travel sequence forest scenes. I definitely got better the more backgrounds I painted, so the quality of them varies a bit.
Overall, I found this really hard but very rewarding. Digital background paintings is very new for me, but it's something I love looking at in other animations, so I wanted to get better at it. I'd done a lot of research on colour and lighting, but I found that time was what helped me the most. The longer I spent, the better the painting turned out. Most of these took 3/4 of a day, but for a couple of the harder ones (the downhill stormy one and the first forest scene), it took me 1 and a half to 2 days, however these are the ones that I think turned out best.
When painting these, I had to make sure everything was on a different layer to enable me to composite, and I had to think about what was going to happen in the scene so I could animate it (i.e. any zooms or parrallax, any clouds moving etc.)
I also wanted to get the overall colour right, as the short should progress from morning to night as evenly as possible, and I think I managed that pretty well. The film's colour moves from a dark greenish, to a bright greenish, and finally to a dark orange. This reflects the emotional journey of the story very well which I'm happy with.
Overall I'm very proud of these even though I know there's a lot for me to improve, and background painting is something I want to practice and get better at.
The final scenes left for me to animate were the pre-travel sequence scenes. As time was running out, I decided to cut the scenes after the flashback in favour of having Beram's expression change from sad to determined, as this would take a lot less time while still telling the story. I also cut the head falling down and added it to the back view instead, as this would be quicker to animate. I started by animating the heavy breathing scene:
This was quite a simple scene, and I basically just animated one breathe and then reversed it, then looped the whole thing. I changed the timings of the breathe out to make it much quicker than the breathe in, to show how exhausted Beram was. I also quite liked the messiness of the lines as it made the scene more dynamic, so I kept that in the cleanup.
Next I animated the head turn. As this was a close up shot, I wanted it to be very clean and well animated, so I spent quite a bit of time on this:
I made a timing chart and drew the keys, and then the exremes to get a slight dip to the head turn, as well as a slight pause on that dip. I'm very happy with how this turned out, and I think the animation remains the right shapes and feels solid, as well as has good timing and spacing. I think the mouth lingers a bit too much on that dip however, though it's only for a frame.
This was the last scene for the handrawn ones, and overall I'm very pleased with all the animations. I think I managed to convey the right mood with them, and managed to do them quite quickly for me.
I wasn't sure how the movement for this scene would work (Beram climbing onto the top of the hill and looking at the view), so I recorded some reference of me climbing onto something and used that to create the keyframes:
This helped me a lot with figuring out how Beram would scramble up, and I took a very methodical pose to pose process for this scene:
I think breaking it down into keyframes and then inbetweening those really helped me with this scene, and I think it turned out pretty good. I had a bit of trouble with deciding the timing in the keyframes stage, as there would be some holds and I'd have to take that into consideration for the timings, however it became a good guide for me, and ended up only being slightly quicker than the final thing.
I animated the cape and crown only after the character animation was done, to make it simpler for me. I also didn't animate the face till the very end, and just used a cross guide for a reference. Finally, before cleanup I realised that Beram was too small, and therefore had to enlarge him. This resulted in the lines being a little too thick in the end in my opinion, but overall I'm pretty pleased with this scene.
This week I finished the animation for scene 4 of the travel sequence:
I really enjoyed animating this scene because of the run cycle and the cape, but I found the roll quite hard to do. I think the fall is okay but the way it transforms into the roll is a bit stiff. In hindsight, I should have looked at cartoons to see how they show a roll with minimal detail, as I think this animation is a bit too literal.
I also think the roll gets fast too suddenly and there needs to be more of an ease out.
I also animated the final travel sequence scene this week:
I think this was very successful, and I managed to capture Beram's tiredness with his sluggish footsteps and the uneven timings between them. I could add more movement in his body though to improve it.
Finally, I animated the scene where Beram looks up at the hill and tree after the travel sequence, as well as the scene where he falls to his knees and raises his arms in joy (and then lowers them after a bit in sadness). For that scene, I left quite a lot of space between each of the moevements, which would allow me to tweak the pause timings in after effects depending on the background animation.
This week I started the animation. I quickly did the layout for all the backgrounds by just tracing over my storyboard panels, so that I could have a reference for the animation. I started with the travel sequence first, as this was the bulk of the animation for my project.
I think this went okay overall, and I managed to make good process, (animating scenes 1, 2 and 4 from the travel sequence). I mostly animated pose to pose, however for scene 2, as the character was so far away I decided to just go straight ahead and try and get the rough movement right. I also animated on 4's for this scene:
I think this turned out pretty sucessful and I was able to animate it quite quickly for me.
Scene 4 was also pretty hard to get the right cape movement down, so I first animated the character, and then on a different layer I animated the cape. The character movement was quite simple as it was just a run cycle looped.
I encountered another challenge with scene 3 - the crown bobbing through tall grass - as I wasn't entirely sure how to go about it. I first tried animating a line along a path on the keyframes:
I thought that this would eventually work but it'd be a lot of effort for basically the same movement, so instead I worked out that I could actually do it in after effects by animating the bobbing motion, and then making that animation follow along a predetermined path while also keyframing the size so it gets smaller as it goes. This would save me a lot of time, so I skipped this scene for now to continue with the rest of the handdrawn animation.
The sunset scene was the scene that inspired the rest of my story, and it's the climax of the short, so I wanted to get an exact idea of how it would work before I started any background painting for it. The idea is to have Beram reach the top of the hill and see his castle and be happy that he made it, however as the sun sets it reveals that the castle is actually on fire and that his home, along with his daughter is destroyed. The idea is to have the sun hide that the castle is on fire, and it going down would slowly reveal the fact.
If I couldn't get this to work, I could try a couple of different things that would have the same effect but be less impressive:
Have the castle on the left and the sun on the right, but the sun is so bright that it overexposes the castle so you barely see it. As the sun sets, the light becomes less strong and you see its on fire.
Use blurs to obsucre the castle's details so you wouldn't be able to see it properly
Have the castle silhouetted through a cloud, and the cloud would reveal the castle on fire
I decided to do the test for the original idea first:
I made a quick mockup of the assets (so it isn't meant to look great at the moment), and then used after effects to composite it. I'm pretty pleased with it, and I think I can use this idea, I just have to be very precise when making this scene's background. To make this scene, I basically had two different versions of the background - one for when the sun is up, one for the when its fully set. I then animated the opacity as to slowly reveal the second one over the top of the first. In addition to this, I animated a curves layer which would darken the overrall image to help sell it. The fire on the castle is done in the exact same way, however in the actual scene I'll change it up and make it look more convincing.
After showing this to some people, and reviewing it myself, here's the changes I need to make:
I need to make it more obvious that the castle is on fire rather than just glowing. I could do this by painting flames for the actual asset, as well as by adding smoke coming off the casttle
The clouds need to be changed and made much larger, as well as move slower. To get the lighting on them to change, they could be behind an overlay layer so that changing will affect the cloud's lighting as well
This task was quite good as it gave me practice with modelling in Maya, something I'm not very strong at. With the tutorial of modelling the truck, I found that edge loops are very useful, and overrall it wasn't too hard to model. The rendering side of things however, I was not so good at. I couldn't get the lighting right and the truck just loked very fake.
For my own object, I chose a simple stapler I had in my room. It was quite fun to model because it was basically a more complicated cuboid, and I had a lot of fun designing each part and rounding them off with edge loops. I didn't model the inside of the stapler very much, instead just trying to get a representation of it done. Overall I'm very happy with how this one turned out as I think it looks a lot like the reference photo. Again, the rendering was something I had trouble with, as it just looked a bit boring.
Background painting (especially digitally) is something I find very hard. Getting good brushwork and finding colours that don't look too digital is very hard for me, so I had a lot of trouble with this painting. Inititally I was going to just use flat colours and cell shade it (top left) however I didn't like the look, and instead made a thumbnail version to help me decide what colours to use (top right). I liked these colours better, however when I turned the lines off it looked awful - the brushwork was all over the place and it didn't feel like an environment, it felt more like a flat painting.
I then decided to do a greyscale painting and focus on brushwork and value without getting distracted by colour. I also moved away from the more cartoony trees to a more realistic style, and it helped me loads. From that, I then painted the colour over the greyscale version using different blending modes, resulting in the final thumbnail (bottom right). I was very pleased with how this turned out, and liked this workflow, so I used it to make the full background:
I think it turned out very well for my first proper background painting, however there's still a lot I could improve:
The painting full screen looks a bit too flat/messy, and I think that's due to both my brushwork and the brush itself, as at large sizes it looks a bit too fuzzy
The grass is quite flat looking
The trees seem pasted onto the land rather than like theyre growing out of it
The shape of the puddles aren' too attractive
I think for the rest of the backgrounds, I will try and paint directly with colour, however if I'm having particular trouble I'll go back to this workflow of using blending modes over a black and white painting.
I found the formative feedback 1 to 1 very useful. The main feedback was for the animatic, as I was concerned if I'd be allowed to do the short as its so much longer than the 40 seconds, however Rob said it's manageable if I work hard. He gave me a lot of good feedback on things to change/do:
Cut some scenes out - mainly:
the breathing front view as that's redundant as it's shown from the back
The empty cage scene as theres's a more clearer version of that shot with beram in it, so this one is pointless
cut out one of the travel sequences (the 3rd one) as it doesn't serve a storytelling purpose and just adds time
Reduce the number of fades in the animation as much as possible - try and limit it to the flashback sequence otherwise they look overused
For the final shot of the sun setting revealing the castle on fire, do a few tests to see different options in how to achieve that, such as putting the sun on the right and having the camera look overexposed
On the final shot, try and light it so that you can see the glow of the flames on Beram
Have a transition between the 2nd and 3rd travel sequence scenes of Skulk walking in front of the camera. This helps tie the two scenes together as the cut would have looked a bit jarring otherwise, as well as shows how Skulk is always there and following behind Beram
The edited animatic
Other feedback included:
For the walk cycle, as the movement is very subtle I need to make sure the lines are very clean to avoid a boiling effect which would hide the movement
For the backgrounds:
keep them lineless
go for a more painterly approach as this will contrast with the character's flat colour style well
use blending modes to help with lighting
once everything is done and composited, make sure to colour grade the scenes to tie them together
For the workflow, I should make sure that I have all the layouts done, but I could animate before doing the background painting so that I have that done as quickly as possible
I used my cleaned up storyboards and put them on a timeline to create my animatic. The door swing I used after effects to animate, just to make it clearer in this stage.
The short ended up being over 40 seconds (1 min 24) however I believe I can animate it in the given time frame as a lot of scenes are stills, and the reason it's long is because it's a slower paced story. Also, I don't think I can take out any scenes without making the story unclear.
I also think that the travel sequence may need to be a little bit longer, as it was hard to judge their timings in the animatic as it was only a still image. I think I could have improved the animatic by including more frames in each travel sequence scene.
I think for the ending scene, I need to do some tests to see how it'd work, as at the moment it's not entirely clear what's happening.
Despite this, I think the rest of the animatic is pretty good and clear, and all the scenes work well together. Again, the flashback wasn't obviously a flashback in this, but I think that's mainly due to the fact that everything is a black and white still as its the animatic stage. When the rest of the animation is moving and has colour, the difference will be more evident.
The music in the animatic is probably going to be replaced as I think it sounds a bit amateurish and doesn't completely fit my animation, however I think the thunder and door closing sounds really suit it and will keep those for the final edit.
As I was a bit concerned about how long it was, I made a second shortened animatic which cut the beginning section and used scenes from the flashback between the travelling scenes:
Although shorter, I don't think it's that successful as it gets too confusing with the changing scenes, and the story is much less clear and harder to follow. I'm going to stick with the first animatic and just work hard so that I can get it finished in the timeframe.
This is the first draft of my pitch bible (and thus there are a lot of aspects missing). The presentation of this went quite well, as I managed to explain my world, story and characters in quite a lot of depth while speaking failry fluently. The feedback I got from the presentation:
I had strong character designs
I had a strong idea of the world and general setting
My storyboard was clear
In Beram's 3/4 turn, he has two right feet which I need to fix
The designs and silhouettes are very strong
The story feels like 1-2 minutes long, so during the animatic phase I may need to do some editing to make it shorter, possible cutting out some scenes
To help make the flashbacks clear, they could be colour gaded differently - maybe greyscale or sepia
The daisy crossfade transition was liked
Obviously I have a lot to do to complete this, and to flesh it out. I also need to present a cleaner version of the storyboards rather than the scan of my sketchbook thumbnails.
To prepare for the animatic, and to make them read better, I cleaned up the storyboards digitally and added the travel sequence to it. I took out some of the flashback scenes as they weren't entirely necessary and the story as already too long, and I made sure to take into consideration how some scenes would be transitioning between each other, such as the pan up daisy as well as the long pan across the first two background scenes in the travel sequence.
Overall I'm happy with this storyboard, as I feel it communicates the story very clearly and works as a whole. I think the flashback sequence is my main concern, as that is the main area where my story could become unclear. I really need to differetiate it from the rest, and try and communicate what's happening in each of the stills very clearly.
