This is the final version of the watercolour sequence. I think it works well with the sound. The painted sea came out more jittery than I hoped, which is somewhat down to my lack experience with painting, so I couldn’t make the frames very uniform. I’d prefer if it was longer, which I can achieve by holding the boils for longer, but the sound quickly goes into the talking. I’m still not sure how exactly the talking part is going to incorporated into it all, but I think it would work to separate the “Yeah yeah” from the “Just here, turn left”, as in, have a cut between them, from this sequence to the stop motion sequence for example.
These are my tests so far for the stop motion island sequence so far:
For the first one, I immediately knew that plasticine was the wrong material for the island, because it’s just too soft-looking and cartoon-ish. That’s what led me to the idea of making the little island out of cardboard, using the contours from the map to make it the right height etc:
The plan was to use this just as a skeleton, and cover it with something green so that the image of the island moves from being a map to looking closer to an actual piece of land. But I really like it as it is. I think keeping the white will extend the ghostly feeling of the haunted island.
Tests 2 – 4 involved me keeping on trying to make the tin foil pieces look like the ocean, but I still wasn’t happy. It does look like water to me, but more like bubbling water than waves. However, in 3 and 4, I used the technique of holding a piece of coloured card at an angle out of shot, so that it was reflected in the foil. You can see it more easily in Test 4, because the pieces are bigger and less scruched up, and that time I got more of the effect I looking for, with these peaks of blue spread across the foil ocean.
IThe final test was done in the stop motion studio at uni, and I was experimenting with making waves by kind of rippling a single sheet of tin foil. I had a piece of green tissue paper held up with a clamp, but overall it wasn’t working. I couldn’t get the lighting right, and I think there’s too much reflection in some areas while others are too dark, so I need to think what to do next. The ocean under/around the island doesn’t have to look exactly like water, I just want it to at least create the shape of waves as seen from above.
In the lino cut workshop with Lizzie Hobbs, I decided to make a brickwork pattern that could be used as part of – or to represent – the monastery on Eynhallow. I tried out a few ways of drawing it, experimenting with printing on both the positive and the negative parts of the lino cut, as well as different colours:
For me, the most effective is the red one, in terms of linework. Making the texture on the bricks and the mortar between both negative makes the most visual sense, I think. The thin lines for the texture on the bricks gives it an old, weather-worn feel, which feels right for an ancient crumbling monastery.
I used a different shape of tool for the door, to make it look like wood. It looks messier than I hoped so I think that will need to be refined.
I’m not yet sure how this design will fit into my film, but I know that the monastery – or a reference to it – is going to be one of the last things on screen. At the end of the audio track, there’s a sound of a door lock and then a door slamming closed. At the moment I’m imagining the the people on this journey are travelling to this ancient monastery. The real thing doesn’t have a door, but my one does, so it’s like they’ve travelled back in time as well as across the land and sea.
For the final film, I decided to go back to solid colours for the characters. The boiling of the towel texture didn’t make sense across the whole piece, it just made the characters looks jittery and not settled in the composition.
I also added a sign on the back wall in the last shot to make it clearer that this is set in a swimming pool, since you can’t see the actual pool, which should help to make it more clear that these are towels, since they don’t have the texture anymore. I went for one that is a photograph of a real sign, not a drawing or something like that. This makes sense for the mixed media in the piece, since the background is made of scans of real bits of paper while the characters are digital drawings.
Finally I added lights to the alcoves at the back in the final shot. These were drawn in Toon Boom, again to enhance the mixed media effect against the collage background. The light itself is a cycle of three frames on fours, so that they have a gentle flicker instead of a fast boil like the lines of the characters. I didn’t want it to be a distraction from the characters.
For colouring the characters, I wanted from the start to use a photo of a real towel, or somehow recreate that texture, and I eventually found out how to import a texture into the colour panel on Toon Boom. So I imported this photo, having changed the original hue of it in Photoshop:
I found that it worked for the paint bucket in the areas that the paint bucket was willing to work, but when I tried to apply it with the brush in the areas that the paint bucket refused to do, it came out all pixilated, like the image was too big and I couldn’t make it smaller. So I gave up and did this:
BUT THEN, I decided to try and again and found that while the paint bucket sometimes couldn’t fill in empty areas, it could fill in areas that I had hand-coloured with the a plain colour. Which ended up like this:
The main issue hear is that the texture is inconsistent. If I’ve coloured an area by hand with the brush, the paint bucket applies the texture to each brush stroke separately:
However, I decided to keep this. It means the characters will have a boil in their colour/texture as well as for their lines, so shouldn’t look too strange. It also creates more of a surrealness to it – that the towel texture is jittering and changing as it moves, while the the paper background is still. Even the places where the paint bucket did fill in the whole area are still inconsistent, because of the the way it repeats the image. The weirdness of it makes sense for this piece, since it is literally two towels talking to each other.
Adding another photographic element adds to the collage effect created by the background. I like that this “real” imagery contrasts with the obviously drawn outlines and faces of the characters. But the digital drawn and the photographic are still tied together by the roughness of the charcoal pencil tool I used, like a bridge between the the two styles.
I now have all my backgrounds. Here is the wide shot one, which I did first to help me plan out the space, along with the line template I made to help me construct it:
And here are the angles for the other shots, all made from the original image above:
Today I’ve been doing inbetweens for when the boy is untwisting and sliding onto the floor at the same time. It involved my most complicated increment arc yet. Here’s how it looked in progress:
Some of the different angles for the “tail” were really hard to figure out, but I almost squealed out loud when I saw the result. He actually looks like he’s doing the thing he’s supposed to do!
I’ve added the first full faces, to Dad for the first sequence of him talking. My solution for the eyes was to draw them like this:
That way I’ve got enough information from the line at the top and the pupil to create expressions, without having to worry as much about keeping the shape consistent, because I don’t have the bottom line to worry about as well.
I also decided to add eyebrows which was really helpful for the expressions as well. I animated these mostly straight ahead and through trial and error, just moving them up and down and at different angles until I felt like the expression was right. The only time I really changed the shape of the eyes was on the “worse” expression, where I’ve got him widening his eyes like this:
But I think I should do something similar for the earlier part where his eyebrows are the most raised, as the raised eyebrow goes quite quickly and could definitely be emphasised more.
I also added a couple of blinks, which you can’t really see when watching it, but as well as being realistic, it sort of provides a transition between different eye expressions. For example, he blinks right before the wide-eyed frame above, which emphasises that expression more. I imagine it would also be more obvious if they weren’t there, and his eyes were constantly open all the time.
I’ve been drawing these blue “increment arcs” (what I’ve been calling them) on a separate layer, where plan out the inbetweens pose-to-pose, starting from the midpoint, then halfway to the midpoint etc. You could also draw them for something moving in a straight line, or any shaped line, but so far I’ve only had animate arcs. It’s kind of like a timing chart in context. Then I draw the lines for the top of the head straight ahead by joining up those points on the arcs, which results in this:
The perspective for the top of the boy’s head changes through this movement, but I don’t have to figure that out because it happens naturally by following the lines on my increment arc. Then I draw the rest of the body by eye. With this method, I’m hoping the movement turns out smooth and consistent without looking too mechanical. Here’s the same thing for the dad:
