Background Concept Art - Stupid Question

As a generalist animator, I wanted to develop my backgrounds/concept art skills further. Following my somewhat successful background design for AfterLives in Level 5, I volunteered to help Cameron out with his backgrounds for his project, 'Stupid Question'. I knew my workload would become too stressful to manage if I took on the entire background design, so I decided to do just the concept art for the backgrounds (and give my input to Cameron on the final backgrounds if needed).

 I started my process with quick, rough thumbnails, focusing on atmosphere and composition. Cameron wanted the interior to be warm and relaxing, and also reminiscent of animated TV series from the 2000s. I looked at shows like 'Ed, Edd and Eddy', 'Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy', 'Ren and Stimpy' etc. Colour and shape were important things to consider - lots of round edges made it more welcoming and homely - and bright, saturated colours both matched the characters and conveyed a light-hearted mood (that contrasted with the 'talking nonsense' theme of the story). We finally settled on this unified warm palette, that would contrast with the rainy exterior but also not hide the characters:

 Cameron also created a (nostalgic) list of props to include, with photo reference too. I then decorated the set with props, and also outlined a few style "rules" to help guide him when he creates the final background.

Cameron then went on to create the actual background (which looks GREAT!).

What went well:

• Cameron's clear vision and requirements made it very easy to come up with designs, so there wasn't much experimenting
• Knowing my limitations and time restrictions meant I didn't take on too much work but still allowed me to flex my generalist/background and concept artist muscles,
• Collaborating with Cameron went without a hitch as we have worked together previously too.

What could be improved:

• I could've explored more furniture designs and interior decorating but researching and using reference,
• The concept art is quite rough, though not a problem for Cameron, I would like to try to achieve a more finished look to my concept art just so it is more presentable.

LoopdeLoop - Instrument

For LoopdeLoop this month, I submitted a loop of a forest spirit playing a waterfall like a harp. This loop helped me practice my water effects animation and composition:

Submitted it a few days before the deadline just in case

What went well:

• Using sin waves helped make the hair flow smoothly and loop seamlessly too. 
• Using spacing charts for the hands and noodle arms helped make the movement stylised but based in reality,
• The water and mist effects were informed by my Context of Practice module

What could be improved:

• I could've explored camera movements and possibly different shots to make it a less passive experience. 
• The hands could've synced up with the musical chords better (I have no musical talent, but I could've collaborated with a more musically-inclined person)

The Ladz: Days of Heinz Past

The final animation is finally complete!

AfterLives : Week 8 till Submission

This week we put everything together.
I learnt that the rules are more lenient for short films compared to feature films, but we still tried to stick to the rules as much as possible, to experience the whole film festival experience. We plan to submit the documentary to festivals, but we have yet to discus specifics. but I'm particularly keen on submitting to Cardiff Animation Festival (submissions open in September 2019 so we have plenty of time to polish things).

Here is the final documentary animation:

I also added subtitles but these may be reformatted for festival depending on their requirements:

AfterLives : Week 7

The Grand Finale

As the final critique neared, we realized we weren't going to be able to present a finished piece of animation, partly because we started the production phase quite late. However, I began compositing nonetheless, and instead of putting finished scenes, I put the incomplete scenes as placeholders so when the scene is commplete, I can simply swap them.

I also added a simple cel shading multiply layer, by making a silhouette and using offset tracking mattes. This however revealed that my alphas weren't completely clean. This was an easy fix, but in the future I'll make sure to clean up and inconsistencies.

This is what we presented in the final critique:

The feedback received was helpful; we needed to clean up the sound, I plan to do so using Adobe Audition instead of Audactiy like I've been doing. For the press pack, we plan to include English subtitles, which can be reformatted from the transcript we made earlier. 

What went well:

• We had a substancial amount of animation ready to present to convey the gist of the documentary,
• Planning ahead from before proved helpful now, both in the compositing and compiling the press pack. 

What could be improved:

• Time-management and speed could be improved so we don't have to 'animate till our hands bleed' for the last few days,
• Sound quality could've been improved at the source, by using a pop filter, or a boom mic. 

AfterLives : Week 6

Metamorph-uh-this?

I got a substancial amount of animation done this week, and this had to be done in tandem with my team. One scene required quite a lot of characters morphing from one to another due to the indecisiveness of the interviewees, and this is where I came in! Since I did a lot of animal morphs in the Context of Practice module, I volunteered to do all the morphs.

Some morphs I did in the 501 module

There were a lot of characters and therefore, a lot of morphs. And there are many ways of animating these morphs. I explored all sorts of smears, warps and transitions but in the end we settled with a bouncy, organic transition that wasn't too gross but was still slightly stretchy.

The final morphs

I also used this 'morphing skill' to help Damo out with the character design of the chimera which was meant to be a strong animal + a mysterious one. It might as well be a halfway morph of an elephant and bat!

What went well:

• Animation was well on the way, using my experience with morphs meant we didn't lose momentum.
• Feedback on the morphs from my team kept me from animating morphs that didn't fit the narrative style,
• The anticipation, follow thorugh and overshooting of bits like hair, ears and feathers really sold the speed and direction of the morphs.

What could be improved:

• The sitting position of the morphing charcters shifts slightly but only because characters were designed to be flat and side-facing,
• The voices show no change while morphing, but this can be easily overlooked.

AfterLives : Week 5

In the background(s)

This week I got a lot of the backgrounds done. My process was drawing quick, sketchy thumbnails first, shading it roughly to figure out light and dark, then adding detail. I struggled with perspective, and creating perspective grids, but ultimately they came in very handy. Set designing is something I found surprisingly interesting even though it's not similar to my usual compositing and fx interests.

Since the audio of the pangolin had lots of wind that couldn't be removed, we decided to make the setting almost outdoors, in a conservatory. I did some concept sketches then added to it. 

Perspective errors in my sketch shown by the perspective grid

The props in the scenes reflected what the character was like and created a world around them.

To keep track of all the props in the setting, I made a 'prop panel'

Using a warping persepctive grid to simulate a camera tilt

We also kept in touch with each other over the Easter break using Google Hangouts and Facebook messenger. We used screensharing to update each other on our progress and receive feedback. 

What went well:

• The perspective grids worked well in creating a relaistic environment
• The props brought subtle life and character to world,
• Feedback from peers meant I could fix mistakes before I dedicated too much time on them.

What could be improved:

• Some scenes may be too complicated for the few seconds they appear in the documentary (the Chimera Detective background), this time could've been used elsewhere.

AfterLives : Week 4

Documentary in the Rough

Once the interviews were done, Cameron began storyboarding them. I then took these storyboards and compiled them together into a static slideshow to help with timing. Then I took some of Damo's character designs and animated the roughs into the animatic. Since this was a character-animation-intensive documentary, reference footage was essential. Cameron and I shot embarassing, yet useful reference footage to help with the roughs.

Since I like spreadsheets so much I began to do the work of a producer too, organising and listing things that needed to be done in Google sheets. I may have gone overboard and cause panic among my team because of how detailed they were, so I toned it down and reduced it to simple check boxes.


What went well:

• Animating the roughs meant I could figure out the limits of the character designs, i.e. head angles that'd be impossible or would run the risk of becoming a Simpsons/Peppa pig forward facing monstrocity. I gave and receieved feedback to Damo so the character design process was fluid and effective,
• The key and extreme poses really helped sell the performance, and helped with the timing too,
• The reference footage, as usual, proved invaluable to the perfomance.

What could be improved:

• The line between animatic and rough animation was quite blurry in this project, although I feel I could've kept it less detailed to allow for the animators to have more freedom.
• Keeping checklists and gantt charts simple is key to a perfectly organised project, I need to make sure my team is on the same page. 

AfterLives : Week 3

Interview Time

The team, exhausted from all the interviews

This week we conducted the interviews. It was quite an experience!
We booked an interview microphone from uni (which I handled during the interviews) and went around asking people three questions;

• "What do you think happens after we die?'
• "What would you like to happen after we die" (to ensure we got a wide variety of answers, instead of just "Nothing")
• "What animal do you feel best represents you?" (this helped us depict people as animals without the risk of offending them.)

After the interviews, I trimmed up the sounds so they were concise and manageable, which I then converted into a transcript. 

What went well:

• We interviewed quite a lot of people, and so we got very interesting, satisfying answers,
• The clever follow-up questions gave us rich descriptions to animate,
• The transcript will help us time the lipsync and animation and also can be converted to subtitles too.

What could be improved:

• I'm not very outgoing and confident, so anxiety and nervousness made it hard to interview people. We also had to be considerate of body language, to not intimidate people and had to word our questions carefully so as not to offend anyone.
• We could've interviewed a wider range of people to get more varied results.
• When writing the transcript I found it difficult to understand some words, especially when multiple people were talking at once. Thankfully, Cameron rushed in to save the day!

AfterLives : Week 2

Concept art and Contracts

Since I was doing the background design, I drew some concept art pieces to see what style we could go for. We wanted the interviews to be conducted by an authoritative, god-like interviewer and so the question arose of whether the interviewer should be visible or not.

I researched about compostion for filming interviews and rule of thirds (for example). We wanted a sophisticated environment too.

Damo then came up with a few draft characters to test in these backgrounds so i could create some concept art.

This piece later inspired a gag in the documentary

One of the main ideas was that there'd be a 'dream' sequence visualising the interviewee's interpretations. I also created some concept art peices for that, experimenting with a contrasting art style.

Cameron came up with a base contract outlining the agreement, and I (with lots of tutor help from Dotty), refined it to make sure we covered all our bases. However, only a few of the interviewees actually bothered to read through it and validate our hard work

What went well:

• The collaboration between character design and background design worked well to create concept art that informed further decisions,
• The contract was official, polished and clear to read and understand,
• Exploring multiple styles meant we knew what worked and what didn't early on.

What could be improved:

• Since our animation depended solely on the interviews we should've conducted interviews earlier so we could have more production time. 
• Creating characters and backgrounds for 'test scenes' might've been redundant since we could've done the same testing stage with the final characters and backgrounds. 

AfterLives : Introduction and Week 1

Before AfterLives

When we got into teams we mostly had an idea of what our roles would be but we generated a few ideas first so we could choose a role that best suited the documentary. Some ideas that came up were diabetes, phobias and penguins, but we decided that the topic that worked best was Afterlife; a documnetary on people's beliefs of what happens after death. The idea was we would interview a random people and animate their interpretations of the afterlife in a style similar to Aardman's Creature Comforts.

The roles assigned were:

• me - Animatic, Background design and Sound mixing
• Damian - Character design and main interviewer
• Cameron- Director and Storyboard artist

The Initial Idea pitch

After pitching our idea we got feedback to look at both religious and cultural representations of the afterlife, and also near death experiences as the closest possible experience of the afterlife, since we can only speculate about the afterlife.

The Ladz: Deadline

Days of Heinz Past

We hadn't completed the projected completely at this point but the concept was there, and so it was eligible for submission to D&AD. This is what we submitted:

What went well:

• The atmospheric music in this worked really well with this, it was my first time using bespoke background music in an animation and it just feels a lot more 'crispier',
• Although it wasn't finished, the basic structure and idea is all there, so it shouldn't be a problem for the brief.

What could be improved:

• We could've achieved a better time management-ambition balance to get this finished on time. 
• A few foley sound effects might be too prominent, I should've played it really loud once so I can hear all the subtler sounds.

The Ladz: Week 8

Dead(Line) Ahead

As the deadline neared, we realised our allocation of jobs wasn't perfectly balanced. There were still quite a few backgrounds Halli had to do, and a lot of the scenes still required shading. I had finished my scenes and offered to shade in the leftover scenes (the first frames of these scenes were usually already shaded so I could simply replicate that).

I also began the brute work of compositing it all together. Camera pans, camera shakes and implementing the 2D and stopmotion assets took quite a lot of time and storage space!

I had been experimenting with augmented reality in Context of Practice, and the idea arised on how we could implement Days of Heinz Past in AR. We considered making a 3D model, rigging it to pop out of portal on the side of a bottle, but due to time constraints we stuck to using pre-existing animations, reformatted to fit the AR version. I had to redo the lip sync too and set the 'anchor' of the AR on the Heinz Ketchup bottle. Halli and I shot a little live action reenactment of the AR in a local supermarket:

What went well:

• Working together to help reallocate workload was done in time as there wasn't much last minute scrambling,
• I asked my team to animate and export assets keeping in mind that they were going to be composited in After Effects, so the assets didn't need much reworking,
• The AR aspect really sealed the deal and covered a lot of the criteria D&AD were looking for, as it was an innovative way to present and advertise the brand, plus my COP research really came in handy.

What could be improved:

• We underestimated the work needed to make a backgorund so we assigned Halli too many backgrounds (he was caught off guard with the workload too),
• The AR concept might've been rushes, but only the concept needed to be outlined for the brief.

The Ladz: Week 7

Safe and Sound

We began recording sounds for foley and voices this week. After having an informal audition we decided the voice that suited Tom/Tomatinator was the voice of Ben, our tutor.

We recorded foley using props that we had lying around, using this extensive spreadsheet as a guide:

The non-diegetic sounds will be made by a music student Morgan contacted. 

What went well:

• The audio we recorded fit quite well for our animation since we could tailor it to suit our needs,
• Being 'hyper-organised' really benefitted us since we managed to record everything we needed.

What could be improved:

• We could've exapnded our range and used casting websites like Mandy.com to find voice actors,
• A script/description of the Tomatinator/Tom Ato for the voice-actor (Ben), would've helped him understand the character better,
• I need to learn to mute both the microphone and speakers before switching between them to avoid that ear-piercing feedback...

The Ladz: Week 6

Cracking on

This week I began animating roughs for the more difficult scenes. I animated this scene using a 3d animated reference of Moom falling. We also decided on the type of animation we were going for; slight rubberhose, with smears only when motion is really fast. We also decided we'd be using TVPaint as it is an industry standard animation software.

What went well:

• Using 3D reference that I animated in Maya helped me visualise tumbling through the ketchup void,
• There was quite a learning curve on TVPaint, but we helped each other learn techniques and keyboard shortcuts.

What could be improved:

• The type of animation should've been decided a bit earlier so some scenes wouldn't have to be redone.

The Ladz: Week 5

Beam there, Done that

This week I start assembling the stopmotion ketchup, and made a bunch of tests, while doing some 2d animation on the side. 

I also tweaked the colours to make the ketchup look more appealing and less like blood.
Halli also started rendering 3D backgrounds which I used for the tests.

I also added sounds to the animatic and wasn't surprised to see the animation become longer...

What went well:

• The ketchup tests can be used later onto the animaiton so having them as pre-made assets saves time,
• The placeholder sounds were recorded in a spreadsheet, making it easy to record them in foley later.

What could be improved:

• It might be a little early to be doing post, I could've focused the spare time on the animation.

The Ladz: Week 4

Gotta Ketch em' All

I quickly compiled the storyboard panels into an animatic (without sound) to see how long the animation would take so we can divide up the scenes.

We also began the ketchup stop-motion scenes;

I created a sort of blueprint for the ketchup stopmotion

What went well:

• The blueprint had precise frame lengths of the scenes which made it easy to animate,
• We divided up the stopmotion scenes between us to get it done faster, and within that, we assigned roles, like ketchup painter, ketchup cleaner and dragonframe navigator (switching roles periodically).

What could be improved:

• The animatic needs sound to help inform how long the animation will be,
• Movements in the animatic might be too fast, the final animation will probably be longer

The Ladz: Week 3

Life's a Pitch

The Pitch

What went well:

• Pitch was short, clear and precise (thanks to Director Morgan who emphasised this repeatedly),
• We worked well as a team and each contributed something essential,

What could be improved:

• Someone pointed out typo - don't put script in pitch,
• Converting the Google Slides presentation to Powerpoint meant some fonts looked off, we should've tested it before presenting,
• Don't give the 'client' design choices, only show what is going to happen.

The Ladz: Week 2

It has to be Heinz

This week we further developed the story and came up with a script.

Once the script was ready, we all had a go at storyboards, and I compiled them together in a very cinematic fashion.

Halli and I also did a ketchup beam test to inform our story, to see whether it was plausible.

A quick test beam

I then composited it onto Halli's concept art:

What went well:

• Since we all storyboarded our vision of the story, we had different perspectives and shots to choose from,
• I learnt from the previous test that using a white background makes it harder to key; the green really helped,

What could be improved:

• The script was a bit too simple, which left a lot of details unaddressed

The Ladz: Week 1

A Brief Encounter

This week we got into teams, digested the brief and explored roles, possible briefs and potential art styles.

My team consists of;
Morgan - Director and Character designer
Halli - Background artist and colour stylist
Me - Animatic and Compositor

We narrowed the briefs we'd like to partake in to LADBible, Heinz, and John Lewis. Eventually we decided to go with Heinz because of its creative freedom and interesting message (celebrating 150 years of Heinz and 150 years to come and a conversation between past and present). So ofcourse, we went with time-travel.

Uisng this idea we thought we'd try to do something with mixed media; stopmotion and 2D animation. I made a few tests at home with stopmotion ketchup (it has to be Heinz!).

Test to see how well the ketchup stopmotion meshes with a 2d digital assets.
Background from Halli's previous work.

Telling Tales - Tea for Three

It is done!

Telling Tales - Christmas Break

When we split for Christmas break we still had a lot to do:

• Some scenes hadn't been animated yet,
• Special effects, like lighting and 'whoosh' lines needed to be added,
• The 'Art of' book hadn't been assembled.

During the break however, R'Shaun was unable to animate 7 out 10 of his scenes, which I had to take over since Ava was responsible for the 'Art of' book. This was unfortunate since the animation had been divided equally in the beginning ended up being uneven. 

What went well:

• Critical reflection upon the team meant we could understand where we were going wrong and how to fix it,
• Scheduling and outlining what needed to be done was efficient.

What could be improved: 

• Deadlines should've been enforced much more sternly...
• Distribution of workload (although initially fairly balanced) ended up skewed and uneven.