I found this short animation incredibly appealing due to the masterful pacing and rhythm it has. The scenes are ordered in a way that drips the information to the audience, gaining speed as it progresses - which makes the story very captivating. The use of narration in this film is also excellent; along with the brilliant voice acting, the actual script is incredibly well written and it really helps to push the films pacing.
I've found that I really enjoy animated shorts with successful narration, as another short I really enjoy features it:
Jacob Streilein also writes about how he got the idea for this film, saying that it was a school rumour from his own childhood. I think that shows how I could use seemingly insignificant and random experiences as inspiration for much bigger films by just developing them.
Zuzana Čupová is a freelance illustrator and animation student. I found her work in Issue 8 of the Character Design Quaterly magazine, and absolutely adored the variation and personality of each character she creates. The simplicity of each design is even more successful because of her strong shape language, and her strong gesture helps make them more expressive and thus more appealing. Her style really interests me, as although it commonly features a lot of long, skinny-limbed bodies, each character is still distinct due to the clothing, the head shapes, the faces and the body language. Skinny-limbed characters are a particular style that I've found I like quite a lot, with Laika being another huge inspiration for me.
This is one of my favourite pieces, as there are no clothes to provide distinction between the characters, yet each one is so personalised and unique. The story is also really effectively told, and is framed very well.
I particularly like her style of colouring - not worrying too much about shading, but instead using textures and gradients to provide interest.
Zuzana says she's been influenced by a lot of czech artists (Jiří Trnka, Adolf Born, Josef Lada, Cyril Bouda, Zdeněk Miler and Miroslav Šašek), so now I have more people to check out.
This stop-motion film by Siqi Song is an intimate and very personal look at the one-child policy in China. Song herself says that this film is not a political film; it wasn't intended to have an agenda, it was more an expression of her own childhood experience as a younger sister in China. She also says that she was very conscious of the story, as she had to balance it between the two different views of abortion from a westerners' and chinese persons' point of view, despite it not being about that.
This short appeals to me for many reasons, however the main ones are:
The slow pacing of the film - it's not afraid to slow things down and let the audience feel, which I admire and enjoy personally. It made it seem much more personal to me.
The use of a narrator - they weren't telling the story, they were supplementing it.
The felted style of the stop motion puppets.
The muted black and white lighting - it helps with the shorts emotional message, and using colours could be quite distracting from the story.
The surreal scenes - they both serve to sell the playfulness of a childhood sibling, as well as increasing the story's visual interest as the rest of it is shot in only one environment.
The repetition of the story as a tool to serve the "reveal" - something about retelling the story but with new information that shows it to have a different message, really appeals to me with short narratives.
EDIT - The full short film has since been privated, therefore I can only link the trailer to it.
After the roughs, I then did a second pass focusing on consistency and cleaning up the line art. I also added the faces in this stage, however I simplified them from my character design as they're quite far away, but also because their faces would detract from the acting of their bodies. I really like the cleaned up line art version, as it looks very fluid and complete despite the lack of colour.
I then added the colour, where I encountered several problems with how exactly I could colour the animation. I ended up creating a layer below the lineart, and changing the paintbucket settings to "above" so that it would draw its selection from the lineart layer. Doing the colouring made me regret the choice of a pencil brush for the lineart, as the lower opacity and texture of it interferes with the fill, as well as makes the animation look a bit more amateurish overrall. Despite this, I think the animation looks good, and the colours aren't competing against each other too much, nor looking off in the environment.
Finally, I took the animation to after effects where I added the rain effects. This was a bit trickier than my first test, as I had to animate several masks to follow the characters, as well as to illustrate the rain stopping and starting through the cracks in the roof. The result isn't completely perfect, and if I had more time I would go back and tidy the discrepancies up, however I'm very happy with the effect and the final animation.
This was the main chunk of the project, as I had to animate the objects as well as the characters. Because there was quite a lot going on in this animation, I feel that I should have had a shot list to help organise things, as the process was quite messy. This also affected the consistency of the animation, as I would do the keys for a shot later on in the sequence, and then when I would animate an earlier shot and then connect the two, they wouldn't match properly. Better planning would definitely help here. I also could have done with a better understanding of the bigger character, as I found that I was creating elements to his design as I went, which again caused inconsistencies and took longer to fix. Despite this, I found animating a really rough, loose pass helped me understand the movement immensely, and I'm quite proud of the animation. I think the subtle head turns of the bigger guy at the start, along with the smaller guy slowly sliding down the hole were the best parts, as they conveyed the emotion the most successfully.
I knew the bench animation was going to be tricky, therefore I created a simple test animaton first. I think this is overrall quite successful, however it could be neater, and the right side should raise a lot smoother, as well as causing the bench to bend with the strain. The movement is quite quick however, so it's not too noticeable. I can also play with how long the bench is held under strain before quickly flicking up, to give the animation different effects.
I realised that the lineart was going to be quite messy if I animated the bench frame by frame, therefore instead - and to save time - I edited the original bench to transfrom to the shape of the test animation. I did this for each frame and exported it into TvPaint. I think this saved me a lot of time, and the result was a cleaner animation, however the warping is quite obvious, and is only acceptable for this animation as it's very quick. Overrall I'm quite pleased with this clip though.
I created the background for the animation, separating the bench and the overlay onto different layers. I'm really happy with this environment, as the colour and lighting both aid in conveying the nighttime scene as well as keeping it sufficiently lit as to be visible. I also really like the colour of the surrounding trees/bushes, as it keeps the image interesting. To improve I would have made the line work of the bus shelter a lot cleaner.
I then took the background into after effects to add the rain effect. This was really useful as it showed me first of all how to do it, as well as the process for masking off areas where the rain won't affect it. I initially had trouble with what layer to put the rain effect on, however solved this by adding it to an adjustment layer. I also had quite a bit of trouble with adding the subtle splashes around the scene, and ended up creating a short frame by frame animation and looping that to give the right effect. I think this works really well and sells the image, however if I had more time I would polish the rain splashes and make the masking of the rain a lot neater.
I knew I wanted to have a contrasting dynamic between the two characters, and therefore I wanted to reflect this visually too. I wanted the older angry guy to be quite small and hunched over, and the younger guy to be much bigger (also needed to sell the bench gag).
One of my favourite studios is Laika, their concept art and 2D work being particularly inspiring to me, so I created a mood board for my character designs, using it as inspiration. This definitely helped me, as I could draw elements from different characters. I wanted to focus on Boxtrolls, and their design choice of voluminous bodies with thin limbs.
I like my final design for the smaller guy, however I do think I rushed the character design for both of the characters, but especially the bigger guy. I should have explored more shapes rather than focusing on the same one and just tweaking it. I should have also drawn different poses to get a feel for the character's personality, which would give it more appeal. I do like both the designs, as they still have quite a bit of character and are also simplified.
One area I struggled on was the side view for the smaller guy, and how the head joins with the body. Looking at Mr Gristle really helped with this.
Finally I created the character turnarounds. These became more of a rough visual guide rather than a chart I followed exactly, due to the lack of detail. I feel I should have spent more time on this, as well as drawing a fuller turnaround for the bigger guy to help with animation.
After being briefed, I did some research on Buster Keaton and found an analysis saying that he finds the right angle and then holds it, using the camera frame to create comedy rather than cutting. I liked this concept, so knew I would only have one scene for my clip. I also liked how he has gags where the audience is aware of whats happening but the character is unaware, and I wanted to incorporate this somehow.
I also love the duo dynamic from Laurel and Hardy, and therefore want to have some sort of contrasting dynamic between two characters. I had a rough idea of my idea, however to help explore it and polish it, I jotted down varying sequential steps, and made quick sketches. This helped me get my ideas out, however I think I could have explored the initial idea further with more extreme routes.
I was unsure of the start of the short, and so I thumb nailed an alternative version, again writing notes to help me. I found this quick idea documentation very fitting with my workflow.
I storyboarded my idea to get a clearer visual of the sequence of events. Doing this digitally really sped up my storyboarding, as I could keep the background layer and only edit what would change. It also allowed me to lower the opacity of the background to draw focus on the characters. I'm quite happy with this storyboard, and it communicates the actions clearly. It also read well to other people too.
I decided to storyboard the alternative start as well, to see which one would work better visually. I found that the first one had a better composition as it set the scene up for the viewer, however the alternate would definitely be quicker to animate, therefore that can be an option if I run short of time.
I found that my strongest work from the 12 principal tasks were the pre-production drawings, such as the solid drawing exercises, appeal character design and staging splash page. I liked the solid drawing because the dynamic poses gave the character a weight that made him more believable. The character design was successful in my opinion because he had quite a bit of appeal - his appearance alone gave an indication to his personality, and the set of poses and facial expressions enhanced his shyness and agitation. The splash poster was my favourite final outcome, due to its cleanness as a final image, as well as how successfully I believe I achieved the staging task. I found that it clearly demonstrates unease, and I focused quite a bit on how I wanted to achieve that with composition.
For the animations, my favourite was the rocket for the anticipation as I managed to include several different principles (such as the squash before take off), resulting in a more complete feeling animation. Furthermore I thought the arc of the flight was satisfying and spaced well.
Whilst I thought my pose to pose animation was successful, I found the stop motion straight ahead animation unsuccessful as there was no goal for the animation and thus it seemed unmotivated. Furthermore I could have been much more ambitious and experimental with the freedom straight ahead animation allows. I also found that the plasticine was very hard to work with, and I didn't enjoy animating using stop motion. Likewise with the stop motion arc of the hand flick-kicking the fly, I found it tricky to work with and couldn't achieve fluid arcs.
Timing was a principle that I understood quite well, and the activity of deliberately fudging the timing worked really well for me, however I had more trouble with spacing. I understood the concepts of it, however when applying them I wasn't very accurate, and found my animations to be too linear. The easy ease was successful however, except for the fact that I had one frame in the middle which reduces the effect slightly.
I understood squash and stretch quite well, however the exercieses I did for the principle didn't show it effectively and therefore I didn't include them in the reel. The rocket was a better example of squash and stretch than the bouncing balls, due to the shadows making the distortion less obvious. The flipbook was quite hard to capture, as the main squash happened towards the end so there weren't enough pages for a smooth playback.
Finally, follow through and overlap was probably my least favourite task, as I didn't enjoy working straight ahead, and working with very thin lines meant that accuracy was very important. I did multiple passes of the follow through, however it still didn't look smooth.
