Aaaaaaah, it seems there is still lots to do

Back from a very busy but very enjoyable easter weekend break and decided I needed to make a new schedule to make sure everything gets done by the end.  It seems there are lots of little bits that need work, and there is a small problem with the quality of the scans, but I think it's fixable.

Can't believe all the remaining days fit on one sheet of 12 field paper!

A bit like "Oh, Shit" but less swearing please

Had a great day doing voice recording for the film today. Katy Bartholomew stormed it despite my haphazard direction and managed to pull off lots of mumbling and pretend chatting.  Also heard some of Neale's foley and its definitely coming together. Meanwhile I am working on putting the colour frames into the animation and its really starting to come together, so close and yet so far!

Katy rocking the mic

Neale on the decks

Are we nearly there yet?

The animation is done! Thanks to Tom and some late nights in the studio, all that's left now is the colouring, compositing, animate the text, the tree's eyes, the soundtrack... Nae bother!

Here is the intro section...

This happened to my animation...

Now I feel like this...

Eggs

Today I am researching things falling and smashing. 

I found this...

I found this scan of a tree drawing from an old sketchbook when clearing out my hard drive, it was originally from the 3rd year composers project but seeing it again was definitely a main inspiration for redesigning the whole aesthetic, stripping it back and making it all more 2D.

Edinburgh International Film Festival

I've spent the last 2 weeks creating a work in progress animatic to send to EIFF submissions for this years festival. The animatic has Dan's most recent sound track, on top of my final backgrounds and key frames that I drew and Kayla Stuhr coloured for me. Working with her has been fantastic and she is going to be an essential part of the process, if I can persuade her into ditching her own work for a few more weeks! It's been manic but really helpful in that I now have the look and timing down to a point where the sound people can do their thing and all I have to do is fill in the blanks with animation. Sounds easy hey! Although there are definitely scenes that still need layout work and some unresolved text problems, I am really pleased with how it came together, here are a few stills.

Now I need to start thinking about Degree Show plans and Dissertation writing!

Beautiful Apps

I have spent the last 4 days working on my dissertation, which is looking at the digitisation of picture books, and I found these most beautiful examples; Bold Creative's adaptation of Oliver Jeffers' Heart and the Bottle, and two original stories from Moonbot studios in Louisiana. 

I've been gone for some time!

Well Christmas came and went and all too soon I am back at college and the weeks are flying by. After the last post I left I started work on compositing the other backgrounds...

Then we started back at college and got the feedback from the pre production hand in.  Generally it was very positive but as usual Alan picked up on a few of the issues that I was trying to sweep under the carpet.  The main challenge for me, according to Alan, was pulling together the design of the piece to reflect the mood of the film.  The main problem for me was that I was beginning to make a film that I thought was ugly! After a bleak realisation that I would rather fail the course than complete this film as it was I decided I had to take a leap of faith, dump my last months work and re do the backgrounds.

I headed off to Waterstones to sneakily take some photos of their children's books...

The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers caught my eye, it is really inspiringly beautiful.

 And spent a day trawling through some really amazing work online...

The Art of Pho  is an interactive animated adaptation of a graphic novel, I love it! (click the link to go to the website an watch it.) Its so perfectly like what I want to do.

Some other animators I've had my eye on:

I realised that the missing element was the focus on 2D hand drawn illustrations.  It had all got too heavy and dark. I did a few new concept drawings and then launched into organising the layouts of the new backgrounds. Once I had started everything seemed to fall into place again and they poured out of me pretty fast.  There are still some that I don't love and some that need a bit of work but the are all done and scanned and just need layers of fog and moving text before I can get going on the animation...

This morning I had a meeting with Joe Atkinson who is helping me produce the film, he is a star and made us bacon pancakes for breakfast! I was beginning to panic about the sound coming together on time, but I have now had a new draft of the music from Dan and a new sound designer on the project who is very positive about what we can do with it.  Joe and I will also be trying out some voice actors for the part of Hannah which is very exciting!

On the down side I am now pretty behind on the schedule, Edinburgh Film Festival submission deadline is the 13th of Feb and I need to have a pretty clear line test of the film to give them if I have any hope of getting in.  My sound designer also needs that to get started before the studios fill up with final projects and and then there's the dissertation half way hand in due in 6 days that needs considering, leaving me about 10 days to get this loose animatic, pile of A5 backgrounds and stack of unread textbooks into a beautifully timed and presentable festival submission and half a dissertation!

Its got to be done, so it will be. Bring it on!

Climbing Out The Window

I've started with this scene to test the way I plan to do the whole thing. This little film shows the stages I plan to work in, building it up gradually rather than completing it scene by scene. Its been a bit of a shock realising just how long it will take but I have a much better idea of a schedule now and hopefully I can draft in some help!

Ents

I finally decided I should watch the trees come alive in Lord of the Rings.  Now I'm glad that mine doesn't walk!

Grandmother Willow

Can't believe I forgot to put this up earlier!

Practising Fog

Today I have been trying to get convincing fog in the style I want the film to be in. I am quite pleased with it at the moment but I have no idea how to animate it as this took me the whole afternoon.  There is gonna have to be some jazzy masking in after effects to pull this off!

Concrete Poetry

Concrete poetry is about laying out the words of a poem to symbolise the meaning. This piece is by Ian Hamilton Finlay, a concrete poet and sculptor who is interested in taking words out into the world and make them a part of the landscape.  His words gain context from the environment they are placed in at the same time the setting gains a clarity of from the words.  He is able to influence and alter the way which the audience perceives both elements by bringing them together.  This is really interesting as it is essentially the role that I want the text to work within my film; the pictures and the words come together to present the story that I am trying to tell.  

Beautiful Illustration

 Have a look at French illustrator, Rebecca Dautremer's, website, its so hard to choose just a couple of images to show. Her work is beautiful and so atmospheric!

Pilobolus

This is dance, but really fun and great illustration of how people misread character poses!

Weird!

Run Wrake's take on animation with text, dark is probably the best word for it!

Some nice things from the internet:

It's been a while since I posted any video's on here and I'm getting quite a backlog on my Vimeo account, so there's a selection here and click here for more videos! 

... Lovely motion graphics, colour and use of text.

... A great concept, directed by Tom Jenkins.

... Streamschool, Lovely textures together on Peter Vacz  graduation film from Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design.

...Amazing and intricate sand stop motion made on a beach, for rock band Eatliz, directed by Yuval and Merav Nathan.

...'Float' by Flogging Molly, music video by Karni &Saul. It's live action backgrounds with CG character animation that foxed some of our studio's best stop motion minds! 

Story Boarding - Check

I've had to draw a line under developing my storyboard for the moment as it's taking over the studio - and so I get a move on with actually creating this film.  There may still be some changes to things like layout and text that I can do as I go along but I have enough to make a pretty accurately timed animatic now.  Once that's done I can send it to Dan for some music and start planning how long its actually going to take to animate this thing! Scary.

Mood Boards

This weekend I put together some collages using paper and material off cuts,  each one represents a different part of the film; the tree in the day, the tree at night, the fog, the kitchen/hall way and Hannah's room.  The idea was to start me thinking about the textural backgrounds of the film and how I am going to create the atmospheric settings that the story needs. It was fun and made the story board look much brighter.

3D Landscapes

This afternoon Jared tried sneakily to convert me to 3D software. I have been working on layouts for my final animatic this week and he showed me how to model my landscape with some lights in 3D Max and run a camera through it to see some different angles.

It was useful to think about actually how the staging works, but I plan to cheat the position of the moon quite a lot and I don't have the skills to play around with the camera on my own.  It really made me think about the scales of the house and tree and gave me some good ideas for some pans. It actually looked quite nice with some example textures on it, but I think I will stick to sketches and paper models for now!