I took the lead for the final editing and sound design of our animation. Here is a small insight into that process:
And here is the final film:
Production Principles: Out of Your Head, the final film
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Category Archives: Out of Your Head
Production Principles: Out of Your Head, explosion and second shot of horses’ eyes
I had fun with this shot of the horses’ eyes moving. The blue horse needed to have rapidly moving eyes because he was a human a second ago and now he’s a horse, so he’s pretty freaked out. The make that the focus of the shot, I decided the red horse’s eyes could move more calmly. So my first instinct was to have the blue eye go directly from one side to the other without any frames in between, while the red eye takes several frames to move the same distance. The result was that the blue was moving waaaaay to fast and looked bizarre. So, since I was shooting on twos, I decided that each frame of the blue eye would be held for four frames, while each frame of the red eye was held for two. So I moved the red eye every two frames and moved the blue eye every four frames. However, this still looked a bit mechanical, and I wanted to make them more out of sync with each other. Partly for the project, partly because it was getting too easy and I fancied a challenge. So to do that, I held the starting position of both eyes for three frames, then moved the red eye on the fourth frame. This meant, on the fifth frame, the red eye was being held a frame while the blue eye was making its first movement. And on it went, until I had about 1.5 seconds of footage altogether, having to keep count of the frames for each eye separately. I suppose that kind of stuff is just baby steps for a stop motion animator, but I find is strangely satisfying to figure out.
One thing I didn’t give enough attention to with the last few stop motion clips I made was the lighting. That was partly due to feeling rushed with the deadline coming up, but is also a habit of mine where I get a kind of tunnel vision on the thing I’m most interested in (generally the actual animating) and I ignore the other details. The plus side of this is that I get into a zone where I work for ages and don’t notice the time passing and I make interesting things BUT there is an obvious downside which is that I make mistakes or forget things and the work doesn’t come out as good as I’d hoped. Going forward, I think I just need to slow down, maybe make a list of all the things to think about before I go into something while my head’s clear, and then maybe those little mistakes will happen less.
Production Principles: Out of Your Head, stop motion clips
I wasn’t sure how making the boy walk when we can’t see his legs was going to go, but I’m really pleased with the outcome. With the limited experience I have of animating walk cycles, I would usually start with the legs and work up from there, but this time I had to focus on the up-and-down movement of his body, the head and the swing of his arm. For the head, instead of trying to guess how it would move up and down, I focused on keeping his eye line on the horse, which made the movement happened by itself. Altogether I think it was quite successful, and both the tutors I showed it to said he had weight to him which is just what you want, and not always easy to achieve. I also had fun playing around with holding the frames to get the timing of the blinks right, so there is slightly different lengths of tiny pauses between him stopping in front of the horse and the first blink, between the first and second blink, and between the second blink and his arm starting to move towards the horse.
I’m annoyed that everything else moved a little bit during the blinking though, particularly the head. I didn’t stick it down because it had just been moving, and the process of sticking it down would have almost definitely changed its position from the previous frame. I feel like this is I am going to keep on facing!
The second shot with the hand was made with a separate puppet of just the boy’s arm. It was important that it looked like a continuation of the previous shot, as if I had just zoomed in while moving his arm, and I think I achieved that pretty well. I think it helps that you don’t see his hand in the previous shot.
Production Principles: Out of Your Head, main character puppet
Production Principles: Out of Your Head, designing the character
Production Principles: Out of Your Head, animating the carousel
We animated several seconds even though we know we won’t need that much. This means for the two shots that include the carousel moving – when he looks through the camera and when he arrives in the colourful world, we can choice of which seconds of footage to use.
Production Principles: Out of Your Head, setting up for animating
Production Principles: Out of Your Head, the carousel and first test
Some initial designs by others in the team:
This week is all about preparing assets for the stop motion section and doing our first test. On Monday, we collectively designed the carousel, which is the first thing the character sees when he sees into the colourful world. We all brought in lots of materials such as coloured card, tissue paper, buttons, pipe cleaners, string etc, so that we could see lots of colour and texture options while designing assets. Deciding the colour scheme for the carousel was the hardest part, but it helped to look at lots of references on Pinterest. It needs to be colourful and inviting, and also familiar as a traditional carousel.
This is our first test animation of the carousel, with a simple background and another funfair ride in the midground just as a draft. The main issue is that the carousel is too big to for the shot we want. Other than that, the animation is pretty successful. We added little paper bands to the backs of the horses so that they could slide up and down the golden poles (coffee stirrers from the cafe). Animating it quite fiddly but looks quite effective I think. Going forward, as well as the smaller carousel, it’ll also be important to make sure that isn’t moving is secure.
Production Principles: Out of Your Head, animating on a multiplane
Production Principles: Out of Your Head, first animatic
We decided the next step was to create an animatic, which just needed to be the most important few keyframes for each shot, held for the length of that shot. To do this we needed to make the shot list even shorter, but we managed to condense it even further into fourteen key moments and make a storyboard together:
We shared the keyframes among us to turn into full-sized drawings, and then I put them together into an animatic:
An interesting development that came from making this animatic was actually a stylistic decision. We all really liked Evelyn’s drawing for her keyframes, which we done digitally but looked like they’d been made pastel or charcoal:
It reminded me of William Kentridge’s animation, which I shared with the group:
If we adopt this sort of style for the 2D section at the start, the animation as a whole will maintain a handmade feel throughout. That would help to unify the two different animation mediums, while still keeping the important contrast between the black and white 2D section and the colourful stop motion section.