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.
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.
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.
When I chose my audio clip, it had a lot of background noise that I edited it with Adobe Audition, but that made the dialogue a bit echoey, so some of my initial ideas are inspired by that.
Peter Millard is an animation filmmaker who has a really fun, playful style. He uses simple shapes to form characters and his work is filled with silly humour and bizarre things happening. In my own work, I really want to use similar techniques to make things are funny and silly but still artistic
They thought it fitted the children’s cartoon style, in colours, movement and shape
Someone agreed that the square would look better if it fell faster before it hits the pentagon
Feedback from tutor:
She felt the final movement of the pentagon not quite right. It could be more exaggerated
Final changes:
To finish off my piece, I just changed the final movements of the pentagon when the circle stops. Instead of having it slowly fall and then drop quickly, before bouncing back up again, I made it stay mostly upright and just settle back and forth, increasing in speed by decreasing each movement.
This change is maybe less confusing, but also perhaps less interesting. I think in future work, I’d like to carry on with messing with gravity and how the viewer would expect something to move.
After using the workshop support session to finalise the movement of the circle and pentagon and map the movement of the star, my plan for today was to animate the star bouncing off the pentagon. However, I couldn’t figure out how to make it squash in the right way as the two shapes collide, so I switched to having it fall straight down behind the circle and pentagon, and then rock side to side when it hits the ground. The comedy element would be in the fact that the pentagon only narrowly missed being hit by the star. But I couldn’t get this to look right either. The rocking looked more intentional than as a result of the falling momentum.
So I have changed the star to a square, so at least any the squash and stretch part feels more doable, and now I’m taking a break until tomorrow because if I carry on in this frustrated mood, it’ll just feel impossible.
Tuesday 3rd October
Today I animated the square bouncing off the pentagon. There were a few things to consider when doing this, because it moves, squashes, stretches and changes direction in just a few frames. Because of that, I had to manipulate it at every frame when it meets the pentagon, otherwise it would overlap or leave gaps when the two shapes are supposed to be touching.
I wanted to make the square accelerate as it falls towards the pentagon, but every time I changed something at that part of the sequence, the other frames for the collision would go wrong again. If I had more time I would try to make it work, but I wanted to have a complete piece for the tomorrow, even if it’s imperfect.
I also added sound to the sequence, in the form of a comedic “boing” for the collision and a slide whistle for the falling and flying of the square. My plan was for the pitch of the whistle to match the square’s movement, but I found that the pitch going up for the down movement and down for the up movement worked well. It creates a bit of a sense of the square being fastest just before and just after hitting the pentagon, without me having to change the animation.
