Studio Practice: Weekly Production Diary- Applied Animation Week 15

Compositing

After finishing the character animation for the park scene, I was tasked with compositing all of the shots (which the other members of my group had posted as PSDs on our shared Google Drive Folder) in After Effects in order to make them look more like a documentary. This mostly involved creating a 3D camera layer in After Effects and shaking it about to simulate a documentary style of shaky cam. I was conscious of not just shaking the camera randomly using some sort of plugin, as I feel each movement, every pan and every zoom, should be motivated and the audience should have some feel for what kind of character the cameraman is.

I looked to shows such as the Office for inspiration and noted that the cameraman in those shows is always reacting to a situation slightly after it happens, meaning an event or action happens and the camera lags behind as the cameraman adjusts to film it. This is where a great deal of the visual comedy from these shows comes from; classic moments such as Martin Freeman looking awkwardly at the camera in the office, which I hoped to emulate in my animation. By moving the focus of the camera, this did wonders for the staging in our animation. For example, in the park scene, when the entire scene plays out in master, it can be a little confusing as to what is supposed to be funny about it, however by panning and whip-zooming on certain visual cues such as eye movement, this diverts the audiences attention from one element of a scene to another and emphasizes the comedic element in a subtle way which would have been lost had it just played out in a static master shot.

In order to simulate this camera movement in After Effects I converted the composition into a 3D workspace and erected a sort of diorama, with the characters at the front against a backdrop which I could then zoom in and our and move around as if it were a 3D space. By limiting myself to certain axis and not pointing the POV beyond the boundaries of the composition, it maintains an illusion of camera movement in which I can zoom, pan, tilt, realistically as if it were a camera in 3D space. I can also apply a depth of field effect to the camera lens to simulate focus pulls

First Scene (Stage)

Camera starts off with its POV focused on the homeless person sitting in the doorway of the derelict shop.

As Keith emerges from the right of the frame, the camera adjust to focus on him. 

The camera zooms in, but not in synch with it lining up to focus on Keith. This is something I've noticed a lot in Fly on the Wall documentaries, the cameraman is always slow to focus on an event or action, so I tried to reflect this in the animation.

Focus pull, character in foreground is slowly brought out of focus...

... as the reflection is brought into focus; the bird poop on the window aligning to form a tear under Keith's eye.

Editing the Final Animation for Submission

After compositing each of the shots in After Effects I uploaded them to the shared Google Drive Folder for Tess to put together in Premier with the sound she had been collecting. I trusted Tess with the final edit, as I had seen she had proven herself in taking the lead with the voice direction and script writing; she knew what she wanted out of the animation more than anyone, so I let her take the lead and have the final say in the editing stage, something I usually like to have control over. The final edit I am incredibly happy with and feel works really well on a comedic as well as a storytelling level, despite the feedback we received from some of our peers regarding the clarity of the inciting incident which induces Keith's rant at the end. This is something we hope to address and clear up in the future after submission.

Press Kit

For module submission I created a Press Kit to promote 'Gentlemen Of The Road' at potential film festivals and events. I worked closely with Brogan who was developing the DVD cover and sleeve to ensure that both products followed similar stylistic conventions, using the same fonts (Germanika) and synopsis which appears on the back of the DVD cover. 

Studio Practice: Weekly Production Diary- Applied Animation Week 14

Animation: Final Scene

With the knowledge that there is no way we will be able to fully animate the final scene of our animation in time for the deadline in two weeks,  I created an animatic in Photoshop for the final scene of our animation where Keith lashes our at a crowd of onlookers, in frustration with how his efforts to address the homeless situation have gone unappreciated. In the rough animatic, this scene lasted around a minute and a half, while one of the shots, the shot in which Keith rants at the crowd in one uninterrupted take, lasts around 30-40 seconds and includes a lot of lip synching. Wanting to try and communicate the crux of this scene in a way that didn't require lots of time-consuming lip synching, in time for the deadline I opted to create an animatic consisting of 40+ individual and unique poses, in order to visualize Keith anger and frustration through body language, as well as to lay the groundwork for the animation which we will finish after submission to submit to festivals.

In the rough animatic I created, the scene in which Keith rants at the crowd of passers by consisted of around 6 poses, which really lacked the energy and momentum present in the dialogue, so I opted to create 40+ individual key poses in order to emphasize a certain level of physicality to Keith rant; to show his anger and frustration visually in order to compliment the audio side of things. The result I am fairly proud of. Key frames have never been a strength of mine, but with this scene I feel I definitely hit my stride, worrying less about staying on model and more about drawing lots of unique poses for Keith. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot about key framing in the process.

Colouring Tess' shots

This week Tess also finished some of the shots from the beginning of the animation before asking me to colour them for her before I am due to composite them for the final animation early next week. She gave me the PSD files on Google Drive and I coloured them on a separate video layer, using her previous pieces of concept art as reference for the colour palette. In keeping with our newfound scrappy aesthetic I wanted the colours to boil along with the lines. For this I used a watercolour brush from the Kyle T set which I had used for my character designs, with a large brush, not worrying too much about remaining within the lines in order to keep that scrappy look. However, Tess was not happy with my colouring, feeling it was a little too messy and redid parts of the coat which I had coloured, including a tartan pattern which she applied using a mask layer. I also coloured two other shots, one in which Keith picks up a Walnut whip wrapper to inspect it and one in which he is feeding birds in a wide shot.

Studio Practice: Weekly Production Diary- Applied Animation Week 13

Animation: Second Interview/Change of Course/Reflecting upon production so far

This week we showed our tutor some of the work we have done so far; mostly animatic and unfinished animation consisting of uncoloured keyframes. Steve really liked the scrappy look of our animatic, which he said was appealing enough on a purely aesthetic level on its own without having to colour. He suggested, as we only have a few weeks left, and are behind schedule with the project, to focus on polishing up our animatics;not to worry about getting everything finished in time for the submission as long as we communicate what we want to communicate with our rough animatics. While initially hesitant, as a group we did come around to this idea, as various illness and poor time management has left us in a position where none of us could see ourselves finishing the animation to the standard we expected; with the different textured brush strokes, colour and full lip synch, in time for the deadline.

We decided instead to embrace the roughness of the work we had produced up until this point. Working on top of our pre-existing storyboards and animatics, focusing on communicating the staging and key poses of our characters as simply and effectively as possible without the need to re-colour and re-animate large segments of the film. The newfound scrappiness of our animation also worked in favour of addressing some of the issues we had been having up until this point in keeping the shots we were individually working on to the same style/model. The three of us each have very different, unique styles of drawing; while I tend to have quite a strong emphasis on polish and tight line work, Tess and Brogan are a lot more loose with their lines and defined in their character's form. By embracing a scrappy aesthetic, the difference in our three styles seems a little less jarring. Coupled with the background designs Tess and Brogan have been working on the past few weeks, this seems like a more viable course of action to take the rest of the project; though we intend on polishing the animation up after submission so we can submit to festivals.