Amber Walk Cycle and Spirit Tail Tests

This afternoon I animated a new walk cycle for Amber, as I haven't animated her since her redesign a few weeks ago, so I figured she needed a new walk cycle test. She is now about 5-6 years younger and has different outfits for each season.

I drew her with some new blue Prismacolour pencils I got from Chromacolour recently. I really enjoy the loose feel of these pencils and although blue is usually for key animators to then be drawn afresh on new paper by clean-up artists using lead pencils, I will be colouring my lines an orange/brown colour, so the colour I use to animate will not effect the final look. So I may just draw everything in blue!

I decided to give her baggier and more oversized sleeves from what I drew in my model sheet, I think I prefer it this way and it gives some interesting options for character performance, so I may amend her 'Autumn' design later!

After this, I did some rough key frames of how the Spirit's tail might move (from side-to-side) to give a watery, lava-lamp style. I used a lava-lamp as reference to see how it could break apart and join up again. The first result is not working as well as I hoped, it appears like bubbles as opposed to watery droplets. The second is an improvement, so if I get good feedback on it then I will most likely take it further. Otherwise it's back to the drawing board!

Rough Animatic VI

This is the animatic I showed for my Production Bible presentation. This is the last rough version I'm doing, the next will be a digital rendering that is much clearer and will have shaded backgrounds and colour-coded seasons. Some story points will change and the character designs will be more finalised, and possibly with different music, but otherwise this is the main intent of my film.

Also, the working title is now "Acorns".

This will possibly be my last post until after this weekend, if so, Merry Christmas everyone! :)

Rough Animatic V5

Managed to edit my animatic down to 3:52 of full animation and a run time of 4:08 including the end credits by taking out some of the middle, a couple of the end shots and switching things around. I'm much happier with this version, I think perhaps I could cut it down further, but I'm worried about destroying the character, story and pace if I do. I will consult this new version with my tutors tomorrow.

Rough Animatic V4

I've edited my animatic down some more by removing drawings and replacing some others. I managed to take off 45 seconds, not bad but I still need to work on it!

I did some calculations for the amount of drawing work I would need to do for 4 minutes of animation.

4 minutes = 240 seconds @ 12fps = 2,880 frames

Over the course of four months (Jan-April)
720 frames per month
180 frames per week
36 frames per day (Mon-Fri) or 3 seconds per day

I find this reasonable as I was animating 40-60 frames per day for my last project which was just over  1,200 frames altogether, and I only had a month to do that in, so I'm fairly confident that I can do it, especially as some of my shots are long but without movement but I will still do my best to cut down the running time.

My friends gave me some feedback on how to cut it down quickly by having some actions happen in the same shot and taking some unnecessary ones out too, so I'm working on that now to get it as short as possible. I feel it's getting there though!

Another Rough Animatic

The past week and a half has all gone into redrawing my storyboard from scratch working from my new synopsis and shot list, which has been roughly edited into my third animatic, see below. It's much longer than what I had before (199 drawings instead of 174 and 5:10mins instead of 3:44mins), which will be a problem if I don't cut it down!

I showed it to James Manning yesterday for feedback and we agreed it was an improvement from the previous animatic. The structure makes a lot more sense with the acorns as a device. His main comments was to give the right moments more space, specifically drawing out the ending so that there is enough time for the emotions to play out. The middle montage segment also requires sharper editing so that we don't spend too much time on what's not as important.

James also noticed that the Spirit is not acting "Spirit-like" at the moment and performs so much like a squirrel that it might as well be a squirrel as a metaphor for the spirit instead of a spirit acting as nature. I will consider this as an option, but I did want to express a magical/mystical side to the story and Amber's imagination, so I will also see about making it more spirit-like in movement and design. This is not the final design for the Spirit anyway, but was a temporary solution for my storyboard.

We also spoke about introducing the Spirit into the story first instead of the girl like in my previous animatic as it was a more interesting perspective. I changed it this time around because I thought it would be better to show the ordinary and then the extra-ordinary, but then it might be seen as odd.

I will also need to look at films such as The Sword in the Stone (1963) for their squirrel scenes and begin pre-vis tests in soft, pastel colour like in my animatic.

After seeing James, myself and Jessica Leslau went to Leonie Sharrock's lecture for the MA animation students to show them our animatics. We caught the end of their lecture which was about composition in Cinderella and going from written scripts to visual storyboards. It was similar to a lecture I had in first year, but was more detailed and very interesting.

Jess showed her animatic first; Leonie wanted each of us to play them without preamble, so the MA's had no idea what our stories were about so they could judge them visually as outsiders. The students understood Jess' film about Babbit (http://arabbitcalledbabbit.blogspot.com/) pretty much immediately. There were some film language issues (crossing the line, continuity etc) but these were minor and can easily be addressed.

My film was not as instantly apparent as Babbit, the message (caring for nature, not abusing it) was confused, and I think this is largely because my Spirit reacts differently to Amber's selfishness... sometimes it is angry, other times forgiving and will switch between giving her acorns, having her take them away and reluctantly giving them to her. The Spirit is supposed to give them to her willingly to teach her and is exasperated with her abuse of nature. So that needs to be more obvious.

The characters came across well, the students agreed that Amber needs to be very selfish and greedy but still very young, so the audience sees her as a poor naive girl, rather than a mean one: "Aww bless her".

Finally, the tree needs to definitely be destroyed: completely burned and in pieces, rather than still standing and with leaves still on. I also need to redo my character designs still, playing with style and proportions of Amber to make her more interesting/likeable and the Spirit more spirit-like.

I've been compiling an image of character art and film stills that inspire me for Amber, particularly with younger girl characters that are more like Amber now that she will be 5-6 years old. I found it very difficult to find 5 year old female characters in the leading role of a film or series in Britain. There's Mei in My Neighbour Totoro, Ponyo, Aisling in The Secret of Kells, Boo in Monsters Inc., Bonnie in Toy Story 3 and Lilo in Lilo & Stitch, but these are all American, Japanese or Irish so it will be tricky to find a point of reference to make Amber feel more British. Here's the compilation, I'll be using it this week to redesign my style and characters. I'll make another one for my Spirit and for style/colour shortly.

Amber Walk Cycle II

Another walk cycle of Amber in more traditional British clothes inspired from some of my family photos in the 90's. She's still about 9-11 years old here, and I want to make her younger for my film, so perhaps this will be more relevant at the end of the film, but even then she may be younger than this!

I had some difficulty with the back of the dress, I wanted it to drag and float behind her but haven't achieved this at all... I'll need to shoot some reference for that next time.

More tests to come soon!

Walk Cycle Test

This is a walk-cycle animation test I did of Amber for my Pecha Kucha Presentation last Monday. It's a 12-frame cycle (12fps) with very rough keys/in-betweens. I think the side-to-side sway needs more exaggeration and her arm 'pops' a bit on one of the frames, so it will need re-addressing. For now I think it expresses her character, but I will be changing her design in my next drawings. Speaking with other animation students, we agreed that her dungarees give too much of a 90's American film impression, even though I wore dungarees as a child also, I want to make her more British and traditional.



For December's Production Bible deadline, I'll be doing a final revised walk cycle for Amber and an animation test for how she moves within a scene of the film.

Rough Animatic I

I've put the storyboards from the previous post into an animatic using Premiere Pro CS4 with music from Pixar's "UP" (2009) by Michael Giacchino, which can be viewed below...




I'm happy that the running time is not quite as long as I thought it might be. Still, I have a lot of changes to make as I outlined in the previous post and hopefully I can get the length down to just over 3 minutes as well. I think it's reading fairly clearly, but I will be working on making it even better for my next rough cut animatic.

Storyboards [Rough]

Last week we were set the task of drawing a finished storyboard for our individual films for presentation today. I presented my traditional storyboards on sheets of A1 card, comprised of 141 drawings. I started with some digital thumbnails on the computer however. Unsure of what format to use, I started digitally to get it down quickly, with the intention of returning to it to tighten up for my animatic.

After getting this far, I wasn't sure where to go in my story, so I returned to my script to plan what needed to happen in words first. This helped me to structure my thoughts. Then I began sketching ideas for interactions between Amber and the Spirit of the Oak (see previous post for sketches).

Once I had regained confidence with story direction, I sketched out the entire film on post-it notes and stuck them on paper. I kept each frame incredibly rough to save time (this version would not be presented) and some drawings were probably so abstract they could only be understood by myself anyway, but that's the purpose of doing it this way.

Working on post-it notes allowed me to freely rearrange scenes and swap drawings around. I didn't have to do this very much, but it did help when I needed to. There were 119 drawings in all.

Although it was a lot of work, it really helped me to think visually about my film and to tackle elements of my story that weren't quite clicking yet. A week didn't seem like a long time to do this, but the deadline helped me get my thoughts down quickly.

I showed my first thoughts to friends and made notes. At this point, the climx of the film wasn't quite right, here Amber takes an acorn from the tree to give to her friend, the Spirit, but it is misunderstood and the Spirit sees it as harming the tree and gets angry. Because of this, Amber falls from the tree and it is struck by lightning. It all got a little confused and the motives don't read well, so I changed it for my next boards; taking Amber nailing planks of wood to the tree in order to climb it as the part where she harms the tree instead.

The following version of the storyboard was drawn in coloured pencils and stuck on A1 card so that I didn't have to do further processes of printing and so I could show a physical version to the group for feedback. Backgrounds/characters/seasons are appropriately colour coded to aid clarity.

I received very useful feedback from these today from my lecturer, James Manning and fellow students. Some were confused when the Spirit changes size, so instead of trying to make that work, I'm going to remove that aspect entirely as it doesn't add anything and is not important later on. James told me that the climax of the film is still not the drama and conflict I need to make it work. He said there needs to be some sort of barrier between girl and Spirit to create the worst possible thing that could happen to them, so that the ending means something when hope is restored.

In addition, Amber will not plant a second acorn, but instead will see the acorn that the Spirit plants in the beginning, sprout into a tiny sapling. I also hint that the Spirit then becomes the squirrel, but I will take out that suggestion too so that the emphasis is on the acorn/rebirth of the Oak Tree.

Along with other tweaks to shot sizes/angles and simplifying/cutting down action, there is a lot to do for next week, when I aim to have a revised storyboard and possibly an animatic. We are doing a walk cycle exercise next week too, so I will need to prepare final concepts/model sheets for Amber.