Career's Fortnight - Confidence and Values

I found this webinar very useful in terms of refelcting on the way I view and think about professional and art-related worries of mine. Some of the key points that I've taken from this session are:

• There are 3 main zones you can be in: comfort, stretch and panic. Whilst comfort is the most natural and easiest, it's hard to improve and learn, therefore it's good to push out of this and into the stretch zone, where you are making yourself uncomfortable with the goal of bettering yourself. Be careful about pushing yourself too much however, as if you go too far you won't learn anything as you could be in a state of panic
• Everyone has unique view on things, people see things in different ways. 
• We've learned our fears (e.g. fear of job interviews) therefore we can unlearn them
• Focus on reframing bad situations. Not only will this help you accept the situation and be more positive, but by training your brain to think this way you'll start finding positives in more things. Our brain filters out and highlights things based on what we think, therefore it is important to think positively
• Comparison is the thief of joy - I need to get rid of my excessive competitiveness and focus on my journey and my own progress

I think this blog post is something I'll come back to, to remind me of the ways I should be thinking to have a healthier view on my practice.

503 - Final Film

Here's the final film:

We had a lot of issues with the production of this film, however despite that and the unfinished state of it I am very proud of it. With this film I wanted to focus on strong production quality and I feel I achieved that with the BG's and compositing. It was also very eductional in giving me hands on experience with working in a team for a short film, and I am hugely grateful for all the work KK and Ceylin did. 

I had a lot of trouble personally with finding the energy in the production stages, and I didn't do enough on the BG's, and that in combination with KK's insane workload meant we had to cut the film down considerably. I think it still makes sense and shows a narrative, but the pacing of the story is a bit off as the ending and the beginning are both longer than the actual main arc of the film.

One thing I definitely have learnt is that it's better to do a finished and well done short and sweet film than attempt a longer story where there isn't enough time to properly explore it.

From this project, I've found that I like suggesting ideas and inspiration for the story, but I'm bad at telling that story effectively. I think I'm too logical and stiff with my storytelling. It's something to work on, but I want to focus more on BG's than directing or story in the future anyway.

503 - Editing and Sound

The editing of the animation was very simple as I had already composited and colour graded everything. All I had to do was put it together and cut it at the right time. To help with the cuts I created a blink effect using a feathered mask, but other than that there was no real editing needed, other than timing things out.

The main bulk of my time was spent on the sound. Collating sound effects was time consuming as my internet has been really bad, and I find searching for sounds very difficult. I'm also very much a perfectionist, so I spent ages just tweaking the sound tiny amounts. The main aspect I found challenging with the actual sound editing was the volume. In previous animations I've always made the volume way too low, so for this one I turned my headphone volume down and focused more on the audio bar on the timeline. Also there are a lot of layered sounds, with the heavy breathing and BG city noises being continuous throughout, therefore it was difficult making sure everything could be heard and was at the right volume.

Sound is one of the things I find most difficult about the animation pipeline, and I'm aware that it's not the best and appears lackluster in some areas (specifically in the end and the bedroom scene), however I think the overall effect is good and it created the right feel for the film, so I'm happy with it.

503 - Final Scene Compositing

 This scene was a mammoth to do, and took me many hours. As I ran out of time, we decided to render the bedroom in 3D as KK already had the fully textured file. He really came through and produced an amazing image. In addition to this, he rendered the door opening on a separate layer which meant that I didn't have to rotoscope it. This essentially gave me a finished scene, however I needed to find a way to blend the FG with the BG, as well as find a way to do the lighting changes required of this scene. 

To start, I painted the FG to match the BG, as well as darkening the BG and painting a blood smear on the ground:

(Kahenya's 3D render)

(My paintover)

I was really happy with how well I could integrate the 2D painted style with the 3D BG, and even though the 3D is obviously different to the rest of the film I don't think it stands out enough to be jarring.

As there will be different lights happening in the room when the closet door is closed, I created 3 different version:

These three images represent the 3 different lighting setups in the room: no lights on, main light on and candle light. The candle light is the BG that will be the one showing when the door opens and for the rest of the scene, therefore I started the compositing of this by figuring out how exactly I can make it work and look integrated.

This took a long time, and I'm not going to go into how exactly I did it, but basically I used a lot of blending style layers and masks, as well as adjustment layers. I think the really hard aspect of this was figuring out what to do and what approach to take, and it started off quite messy as it was very much a trial and error method.

I also found out that I could actually move the photoshop compositions in 3D if i precompose them in after effects as well, therefore the process for this whole scene is to create the different lighting and the door opening in one main composition, and then in another make that composition a 3D layer and use a camera to create the camera movement. Once I keyframed all the movement within the scene, the last step is to apply the wiggle on the BG composition to create the camera sway. 

I much preferred using the camera to create camera movements rather than using the position keyframes, as it allowed me to have some natural parallazing with the coats in the FG. Also, I could keyframe the orientation as well as position, which meant that I could create the effect of looking around the scene. I used this a lot when the door opens as I could have the camera follow the blood trail, which made the door opening look much more natural. I also animated the creep's gaze following the girl's movements to show interaction and help sell the POV effect. 

For the girl, colour compositing her was the most challenging out of all the scenes. Getting her to be the right size was tricky due to the quite extreme perspective, and she really stood out from the 3D BG. To help this I colour graded her as usual, but also applied a feathered mask with a saturation layer to the bottom of her representing the glow of the candles. This helped embed her in the scene a bit more.

Overall I'm the most pleased with this scene out of all of them as the compositing of it was very challenging but I learned so much. I was also very proud how I managed to integrate the 3D and 2D BG elements, and how I problem solved to make the scene work.

To improve it I need to work on the reactions of the creep to what the girl was doing, as I don't feel he reacted strongly enough to what he saw.

503 - Compositing 4

This scene is my second biggest in terms of compositing:

I think the reason behind this is due to all the different elements moving. The car, bus and main BG must move for the main animation, and on top of that there should be a slow zoom in and wiggle. I had a lot of trouble with figuring out how to tackle this, but after a while managed to do it with several different compositions inside of compositions.

The car movement took a while to get convincing and to look natural, but after a lot of tweaking I got it to a timing I was happy with. The main problem with that was the parallax as I had to manually do it. In addition to that I was concerned about how I was going to do the camera sway, as if I just applied a sway to the composition containing the bus and car animation, all the elements would be moving together which would make the scene look flat. To avoid this, I precomposed the car animation and applied a wiggle to that in addition to the main wiggle. This results in some variation between the movements between each element in 3D space.

Similarly to the raining scene, I wanted to help sell the depth of the scene, therefore I added a blur to the car. To help make the movement of ducking behind the car more convincing, I made the car get in focus and blurred the BG as the creep ducked behind it. I really like this effect and it helps make the scene look a lot more polished.

503 - Compositing 3

 Due to our decision to edit the film down as we were running out of time, the only two scenes where the creep is in his room/balcony were the vertical slice and this one:

I had already done the vertical slice, so I used the same animation but put it on the new BG (that's just more zoomed out). In addition to that I also added a cast shadow for the girl to fit her into the scene better.

For the scene above, it involved a similar process to the vertical slice, the main difference being that the character is in the room, and thus needs to be affected by the various blending styles of the layers above, to give the effect that you're seeing her through a window. I had some trouble with my actual file, as clipping masks don't transfer from photoshop to after effects, therefore instead I had to manually mask the problem layers. I really liked this scene due to the clear separaction between FG, MG and BG provided by the balcony, the generated rain and the window effect. The finishing touch on this scene was to blur the FG balcony to really sell that depth.

I think this scene could have been improved with some hand drawn rain fx, as the after effects generated one looks a bit too much like snow.

503 - Compositing 2

The next scene I composited was this one:

This shows what the scene looked like before and after compositing.

What I had to do for this scene was to:

• place the character in the BG and colour grade her to fit into the environment
• animate the bathroom light turning off
• animate the pan across the scene, with parallax
• add camera sway
• overlay binoculars

This was quite a fun scene to composite, however I had a bit of trouble with the pan. Originally, I had planned on using 3D layers and having the room be further behind the main BG in 3D space, which when creating the camera would give a natrual parallax effect. However for some reason I couldn't move it in 3D, and I think that's because it is a photoshop composition containing different layers. I couldn't get it to work, so instead I manually animated the pan and parallax by keyframing the postion;s of each, making the room move slower. One problem with this was that I could no longer add the wiggle expression for the camera sway as that would get rid of the pan, so to overcome this I pre-composed the files and then applied a wiggle expression to that composition.

When it came to colour grading the character, I also wanted to maker it a little bit more interesting by making her more saturated when she walks into the light of the lamp, so to do that I just keyframed the saturation on an adjustment layer.

I really like how this scene turned out, as it's one of the ones that came out the same as the way I originally pictured it. I think it's a great introductory scene to the creep, and definitely gives off a voyeuristic vibe. To improve it I could have added a shadow on the girl to cement her more in the environment, as well as maybe blurring the binocular overlay.

503 - Compositing 1

I started compositing with the creep's apartment scenes, as these were less complicated due to not needing a wiggle expression. For all of the scenes, I used after effects for compositing as this allowed me to work directly with the photoshop file, and thus not lose quality due to compression. 

I realised that I would have more control if I composited both the extreme perspective shot as well as the close up in the same file, as I could tweak things easier than if I were to do it separately and use premiere. 

I felt that the extreme perspective shot was a bit lifeless on its own, so in addition to the slow zoom in I animated a light flicker by keyframing an adjustment layer that changed the brightness of the room. This was pretty straightforward, and in combination with the slow zoom in it gives the BG a lot more life, and allows me to not need to animate the blinds closing.

For the close up scene, I started by animating the binoculars fading into view. I found this quite hard as I couldn't get the right timing to make it fell more natural. I ended up going back to the photoshop file to repaint the binoculars making them fit into the BG a bit more, as well as adding a silhouette of the creep to make it appear less like the binoculars are floating. This in combination with tweaking the timing allowed me to reveal the creep in a fairly natural way. I recognise that it is not as effective as the original blinds closing reveal, but I think it still works.

To finish this scene, I animated the BG's zoom and dutch tilt. This comprised of just a lot of tweaking till things looked right and flowed nicely. From there, I combined the two scenes and tweaked some more, as if the zoom in's of each scene were at different speeds it would look jarring.

503 - Title Card Animation

I had asked Ceylin to design and create the title card for me to animate. She showed us a few different designs, and I ended up choosing two: 

(Ceylin's work)

(Ceylin's work)

My favourite was the second one, with Ceylin and KK liking the 1st one more due to the eye. I decided to settle on the 2nd one however, as I felt this represented the short better. The skewed letters at different sizes gave it a really creepy feel, and I feel like the simple eye works much better and looks creepier than the more symbolic one. 

From the original designs, KK really liked one due to the blood splatter behind it, however I said that it wouldn't work when animated. I suggested instead that we animate blood coming down one of the letters, and Ceylin liked this, adding that we should have it drip as well. Here is the blood drip animation I did:

I then took it into after effects and added some extra bits, such as an eye blink to reveal it on the screen, as well as a vignette effect to make it a bit creepier, as if the words are coming out of the screen. I didn't want to make it overly inticate so I just left it as this, as I think it's simplicity will be a lot more effective than a lot of effects. Here is the final title card animation:

I'm really pleased with how this turned out, I think it fits our film really well. To improve it, I think I could've added some texture so it's not such a smooth airbrushed effect of black on white.

503 - Backgrounds 4 and Contingency Plans

I really struggled with this project, especially as it progressed into the production stages. Due to covid I found that I had no motivation or energy to work on this project and thus I haven't done nearly as much as I planned, and to a lower standard of quality as well. Kahenya was also having trouble with the character animation, so we got in a call to discuss what we could do to still give in a semi-final film. I ended up making a priority list:

This cuts our film to the barebones, allowing for us to focus on the key elements for it to make sense (even if the pacing is off). 

Due to my struggle with working on these backgrounds, I also made backup plans for the BG's I need to do. For the opening establishing shot I decided to just use the 3D layout and paint over it roughly so as to fit in with the rest of the film. It obviously isn't as polished, and the colours aren't right but it's close enough to not completely detract from the rest of the short:

I did something similar for the scene where the creep is on the girl's balcony:

I painted the exterior (pretty much just flat colours though), but left the interior as the 3D layout. This allowed me to do this BG very quickly, and have it still make sense and look ok, however you can tell that it's not finished and you can see the 3D lines and markings. Again, I'm satisfied with this as a result as it works well enough.

Finally, for the last background inside the girl's room, I asked kahenya to render it in 3D as he already has it fully textured from earlier in the project. The change in BG styles would be quite obvious and a bit jarring, but at least it leaves us with something to show. 

503 - Backgrounds 3

These are the pre-title sequence BG's: 

I used one of my development BG's as I felt it works in the film, as well as because of the fact that I was running out of time. I had to paint an interior to it as well as a cement balcony rather than the metal one previously. I wanted the interior to reflect the creep's personality a bit, therefore making it a much creepier room than the girls. I also wanted the lighting to be much more sickly, so used this cooler, harsh spotlight that creates these very dark shadows in the corners of the room. I dont think the balcony fits too well with the scene as it's too clean and hard edged, as well as the painting style being different, however I feel it works well enough.

The close up of that window was relatively simple. I avoided painting the edges of that scene too much (as well as leaving out the balcony completely) as the camera is in very close, focusing more on matching it with the previous scene. At this point the light would be off, so I just made the window dark instead of re-painting the interior. This isn't the most beautiful of paintings, but again it serves its purpose as a background.

Due to time constrictions, I decided to get rid of the blinds coming down altogether, and just have the binoculars fade into view once the lights are off. It won't be as effective as the blinds version, however it'll work.

Finally I painted the close up of the girl's apartment. I re-used the bedrooom from the other night time painting, adding overlay layers and changing things around to create this new light coming from the lamp rather than from above. With this scene, there is a pan and a light turning off, therefore I had to create the bathroom light on a separate layer, as well as make the bedroom layer behind the window and also slightly longer than it so that it can parallax properly

503 - Backgrounds 2

Here is the bus scene background, along with the car and bus foreground elements:

This scene is set is the morning, therefore the lightning needed to be quite dark and cool, however I wanted to create some interest by having the brighter, warm light of the sun shining across some elements, which helps give the BG some depth and sense of physicality in the world (as external, off-screeen elements are intereacting with it). I initially was very apprehensive about this scene as there was going to be a lot of details, however due to time and my own lack of skill I opted to go for a much more simplified version, focusing on making the colours, values, lighting and texture strong to create a polished and believable background. I think what really helped this BG was the road markings, which I created flat and then skewed them into perspective. This also helped the sense of perspective.

I definitely think the painting would be better off if it had more details, such as graffiti/posters on the bus shelter, something on the walls of the buildings and cracks/markings on the pavement, however I'm satisfied with this at is is for the purpose of this film.

In addition to the main BG, I had to paint the car and bus FG elements as these will be animated in post. I wanted the car to be very simple as to not distract from the character, and thus it is silhouetted and almost completely black. I will also blur it in post. I also wanted the bus to be simple but needed to give it some texture so that it fits within the BG. I am not happy with how it is placed in the scene as it's not realistic, however hopefully in compositing it will work and appear correct.

503 - Backgrounds 1

Here are my first set of backgrounds:

To help with the painting, I used references collated on a pinterest board (I used this same board for reference for all of my previous BG development work as well as future ones):

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/eaglefour444/voyeur-bg-inspo/ 

I had to paint a bit more of the vertical slice BG, but after that I used that as my base to create the other 3. Despite this, these still took me over a day to paint each. I think the main difficulty I had was finding the motivation to do it due to covid, so simple tasks were taking much more energy. The bsae was good as it allowed me to re-use the bedroom, as well as the previously made shape shape selections, however I still had to repaint everything. I'm pretty happy with the results however, as they still fit the film's style and look fairly polished. I think the colours also work very well together and show the right time of day.

The first BG (overcast day) is my least favourite and the weakest painting of these 4. I think it's due to the lack of details being made more obvious by the lack of strong lighting, and the overall lack of contrast within the image. I wanted the windows to reflect the cloudy sky, however I should have been more bold with my bruishstrokes as currently it looks too flat. I also should have made the lower windows reflect the building rather than the sky as they are below the creep.

I found it very challenging to paint the same scene but within different times of days, as not only do you have to match the colours of the building, but also each material's textures and the general brushstrokes of the other paintings to avoid it looking like a completely separate building. I think I did a pretty good job of this however.

Next time I do something like this, I should start with the overcast day as that is the most plain, and would allow me to build on that easier than the nighttime one.

503 - Colour Script

To help me with choosing the colours and making sure that the colours mesh well together, I decided to create a colour script:

WWW:

• I feel that the first 4 scenes' colours show that theyre part of the same time frame
• The darker colours feel creepy
• The glow of the 4th scene 

What didn't go well:

• I found that this was taking me too long and the rewards weren't worth it so I only ended up doing 5 scenes
• I think the 5th scene looks too bright and sunny. It's meant to be morning time but looks more like sunny mid-afternoon. 
• The 5th scene's colours also don't really fit with the other scenes, it feels like a different building

After doing this I've realised I need to practice painting colour scripts, as I was way too slow with these and found it very difficult focusing on just the colour aspect rather than how pretty the image was.

503 - Layout

I had asked KK previously to update the 3D file of the street, adding the room to the scene properly as well as having buildings at the end of the street to give it a closed end. When that was done, we got in a call and I directed KK in creating the layouts. To do this, he positioned the cameras and took screenshots for me to then use as reference. 

After creating all of the 3D layouts, I imported them into photoshop and made them the right size, opting for 4K resolution as there is a lot of camera movement. I then added 16:9 camera guides, making sure to have a border between the outermost camera and the edge of the background to allow for the camera sway in compositing. To finish, and to help me with the painting process I drew over them and added details/changed some areas. Here are the layouts (some I did not draw over and thus are Kahenya's 3D screenshot):

(Completely 2D layout)

(Completely 2D layout)

This process was a bit time consuming, but the most challenging part was figuring out what exactly moves and how in the scene. Doing this is incredibly helpful when it comes to compositing however, as hopefully there won't be any difficulties when it comes to the actual BG file. With each of the scenes, I tried to make sure the composition was interesting, and also if possible creepy. One thing we did was to decrease the focal length of the camera as the film went on, which gives the environment a more extreme perspective.

One area I'm worried about is the cut between the scene where the creep is in his room, to the one where he's on his balcony. I'm not sure if that change will be visually obvious. The next step for me is to do the backgrounds, whilst KK and Ceylin can now do the character animation.

503 - Vertical Slice

While KK and Ceylin are focusing on character for the vertical slice, I focused on the background. To start, KK and I got in a call to generate the 3D layout for the scene:

(Kahenya's work with my direction)

A problem when creating this was that KK had 2 separate 3D files, one for the room that was detailed, and the other for the street and buildings. This scene required both, therefore he had to quickly merge the two together, as you can see above. This meant that thing's don't match up 100%, but as it's a vertical slice I think it's ok. To remedy this mismatch, I drew over the 3D layout correcting some things and adding other elements:

Next, I created some colour thumbnails and a black and white one to get my values down, and to explore possible colour variations for the building:

This is a night time scene therefore it needed to be dark, however it is also the Girl's building therefore I didn't want to make it too creepy as her's is meant to be the cleaner side of the street. On the flipside, having it look a bit creepy is good as it reflects on the creep more than the girl. These are just thumbnails therefore the painting is not neat, serving more to give me an idea of what colours to use.

I really liked the greenish one however I felt that was too creepy. The pink one I feel doesn't suit the profile that much, as it would look very out of place on the street. The first orange/purple one is more suitable and still has a cleaner feel with a hint of creepiness, so I decided to use this as my main inspiration.

Here is the final painting I did:

Doing this served as a style guide as well as gave me an indication on how long these BG's would take. This one took me a day and a half, however the first one always takes the most time.

As you can see, I toned down the colours a lot compared to the thumbnail. I went for a more realistic colour setup instead, which fits the film's style better I think. To avoid making these backgrounds too creepy as well as distracting from the character, I opted for a cleaner painting style, using the lasso tool to get very sharp edges. This also compliments the urban setting of the film. Despite this, I wanted to avoid everything looking boring and flat so I spent a lot of time rendering the shapes within the sharp selections, and for the bigger areas (like the building itself) I allowed myself to be looser and show more brushstrokes.

Overall, I think this BG fits the film's style very well.

Things to improve on in this painting:

• The bathroom light - it appears too flat and lifeless
• The cast shadows, particularly of the top most balcony
• Include more details - I found I went for the bare minimum rather than enriching the scene with character and life

The final step for the vertical slice was to composite it. We were aiming to get this done for a feedback session with Mat, however KK was delayed and therefore I had to composite and colour the rough animation within an hour, so it's not perfect but I feel still fits the style of the film I had in my mind:

(My work except for character animation, done by Kahenya)

I think this was very successful overall. I really like the creepiness of the camera sway and slow zoom in, and the character fits well with the environment. I think I should have made her darker however as the light from her room will silhouette her more. I think to really embed her within the enviroment, I could add a cast shadow for the girl.

After showing it to Mat, he has no qualms about it, therefore the next step is to do the layouts and colourscript.