Final animation
Raw version of the animation
In next couple weeks, we will present our cut-out animation which we are going to develop in groups of three people. There is also a time limit so the actual outcome can't go over a minute. In this minute the narrative should be crystal clear and understandable for the audience. We cannot have more than one copy of each character, so any scaling, shape changing and any other manipulations with the puppet are prohibited.
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| After a long discussion with the Tutor we decided to change some little aspects of the story |
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| Very first draft of the storyboard which involves 4 characters. After we found out that there could be only 3 characters we have changed the story completely. |
I have jumped ahead of the task and just couple days before actual brief I met a couple of my classmates to develop the story. The idea was to involve our characters characteristics into the animation to evince their behavior. We created a storyboard where all of our characters could show their purpose in that imaginary world. We had 4 characters and a quite nice story to start with. We also come to believe that our characters need to have a generic visual style and basically our Idea was working well on the paper.
After we presented our idea to our tutor, we have been forced to reduce our team member count to 3. After a long discussion with the tutor, we came to the conclusion that 3 people are completely enough for our animation so the story was changed straight ahead.
We had a discussion about the details, style and a narrative of the animation. We created couple storyboards to have a clear vision of what we intend to do. The Idea is strongly intertwined with our characters nature and behaviors. As a reference, we are going to use Lotte's animations but instead of using the lightbox stage we are going to perform our work on the horizontal surface. We had a dispute about the detail of our characters as I wanted to cut out every single detail using the knife instead of drawing with white marker on the black surface to represent the detail and cuts. We still need to come to the consensus, albeit our idea has a positive feedback and we know the direction of our work.
PREPARING|
As our idea has been developed and everybody was happy with it. We started to create our silhouettes and assets for the animation.
In the very begging, we created the a4 sheet in the Photoshop to figure out what sizes our characters are going to be. The character who represents the monster fish needs to be bigger than others, so this method of comparison helped us to manage right proportions. To make our actual scene more interesting and to add secondary movement to our background we have been looking trough the internet for some bird silhouettes to find suitable movement sequence. It was very hard to find birds
poses that would clearly represent flying action. After our Photoshop files have been finished we printed them out to start another phase of our work.
CUTTING|
I would definitely say that this part of the preparation was the hardest one. Our black cardboard was thick enough to keep our characters away from the possibility to be ripped, but the also increased the difficulty of the cutting process.
We attached our printed sheets to the black cardboard and started to cut out details. This was a time-consuming process as it required attention to the details and possibility to damage the silhouette shape was very high. It was especially hard to cut out a bird shape as it was very tiny over against the
silhouettes of our characters. To avoid any damages we decided to cut out bird's flying sequence straight from the paper sheet as we haven't had any moving parts in it. Assets like trees and flowers were created in the same way to reduce the difficulty of the work.
After cutting was ended we jumped into the next phase - The Сonnection.
Every moving part of our characters has been cut separately to connect all of them together afterward. We had many options how to do so, but we stick to one option - sewing up. This decision served to many reasons, to hide the actual joint, to make part movement easier and to reduce the possibility of the damage. Magic hands of Fontane helped us a lot in reaching this goal and after a while, our characters were ready for the animation.
BACKGROUND|
After we presented our idea to our tutor, we have been forced to reduce our team member count to 3. After a long discussion with the tutor, we came to the conclusion that 3 people are completely enough for our animation so the story was changed straight ahead.
We had a discussion about the details, style and a narrative of the animation. We created couple storyboards to have a clear vision of what we intend to do. The Idea is strongly intertwined with our characters nature and behaviors. As a reference, we are going to use Lotte's animations but instead of using the lightbox stage we are going to perform our work on the horizontal surface. We had a dispute about the detail of our characters as I wanted to cut out every single detail using the knife instead of drawing with white marker on the black surface to represent the detail and cuts. We still need to come to the consensus, albeit our idea has a positive feedback and we know the direction of our work.
PREPARING|
As our idea has been developed and everybody was happy with it. We started to create our silhouettes and assets for the animation.
In the very begging, we created the a4 sheet in the Photoshop to figure out what sizes our characters are going to be. The character who represents the monster fish needs to be bigger than others, so this method of comparison helped us to manage right proportions. To make our actual scene more interesting and to add secondary movement to our background we have been looking trough the internet for some bird silhouettes to find suitable movement sequence. It was very hard to find birds
poses that would clearly represent flying action. After our Photoshop files have been finished we printed them out to start another phase of our work.
CUTTING|
I would definitely say that this part of the preparation was the hardest one. Our black cardboard was thick enough to keep our characters away from the possibility to be ripped, but the also increased the difficulty of the cutting process.
We attached our printed sheets to the black cardboard and started to cut out details. This was a time-consuming process as it required attention to the details and possibility to damage the silhouette shape was very high. It was especially hard to cut out a bird shape as it was very tiny over against the
silhouettes of our characters. To avoid any damages we decided to cut out bird's flying sequence straight from the paper sheet as we haven't had any moving parts in it. Assets like trees and flowers were created in the same way to reduce the difficulty of the work.
After cutting was ended we jumped into the next phase - The Сonnection.
Every moving part of our characters has been cut separately to connect all of them together afterward. We had many options how to do so, but we stick to one option - sewing up. This decision served to many reasons, to hide the actual joint, to make part movement easier and to reduce the possibility of the damage. Magic hands of Fontane helped us a lot in reaching this goal and after a while, our characters were ready for the animation.
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| We have used a black еthread and a needle to attach moving parts to the body. |
The narrative of our story required some sort of the background, preferably containing a design of the forest. So we created assets like trees, flowers, and a bird to decorate our stage. Fontane brought in a ready background and we added our assets into the scene. We were lucky that the size of the background fit very well into to the stop-motion setting in the studios. The issue came when we tried top move our characters around to see hot the animation is going to work. As the background was created using many layers of the thick paper, our characters faced the edges of them. So it was impossible to use our scene for smooth movement of characters and our main idea -colourful dots.
We went to the shop and bought a transparent plastic sheet and mounted it on the top of our background. Sp we faced another problem - plastic reflected lights in the studios so we moved them aside to reduce the reflection. The main light in the studio didn't want to switch off completely so we mounted a jacket on the top of the camera to hide any reflections. After these easy manipulations, our scene was ready to start filming.
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| A test run of the motion before the plastic sheet was attached. |
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| The jacket on the top was mounted to block the light from the ceiling. |
COLOURFUL DOTS|
The key feature of our animation are dots which are going to represent the colour in our scene. As the main idea is that the fish eats all the colours in the world we decide to use dots of different colours to represent tree leafs and happiness. It is very easy to move them around the scene and to add or reduce their amount.
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| Process of dots creation |
TEST RUN|
After all of our efforts, the scene was ready to start actual filming. The light was set, all reflections removed, characters ready to perform, narrative discussed and approximate timing calculated we shoot our first frame.
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| Filming process |
In the very beginning it was very exciting, but let's be honest - each second of the animation requires at least 12 FPS and it is the minimum. As our animation is strictly set to one minute it is 12*60 = 720 frames. And it is the MINUMUM! To produce a high-quality movement with the smooth secondary movement we need to shoot at least 1.2k frames. It is not hard to achieve, it is time-consuming which is not an issue. Only when you are in the process of the stop-motion animation shooting you can realize how much effort animators are putting in their work and it is amazing.
Our storyboard was divided into separate groups where we could see how many seconds each action requires to fit into that one minute. We realized that the timing of the movement needs to be discussed in the detail as some of the movements were too fast in compare to others. This was only a test run and we already noticed issues which need to be solved before the actual shoot. Also, we need to put more effort into the animation itself to produce a high-quality work for the presentation.
FILMING|
After we collected and carefully analyzed the feedback of our tutor and other groups we re-planned our storyboard and changed some of the motion aspects of our animation. First of all, we decided to expand some of the narrative parts to show our narrative more clearly. Our idea was to fit the one minute story which would have a clear form from the beginning until the end of it. It was distinctively easier as we had some previous experience doing the test run.
I will divide this observation into small parts to give a more detailed explanation of our features and fails during the animation.
Features:
To create a feeling that the background is actually *alive* we had to use a movement of the particles which represented our tree leaves. Accurate moves promised a realistic look of leaves falling and being constantly relocated due to imagined wind activity. The bird movement also forced some of the leaves to detach from the branch. It was very interesting and exciting to replicate bird's fly to see how it actually works in stop-motion.
Colorful circles which we have used to replicate joy were very difficult to control as we had to understand what speed are they going to move and collect together. After many tests, we figured out the most appropriate pace time to give a realistic feeling of them moving around the scene. We received much positive feedback from our classmates and they were excited and surprised how well we managed to move them around to give a continuous sensitivity of the movement. The overall process of filming took us around 7 hours of two days filming. It was a wearying operation as we had to deal with many small details and give each of them an action. Some previous knowledge accompanied me throughout the process and gave me more accurate control over the particles to create this kind of functioning on the screen.
Fails:
While we were very concentrated on the secondary movement we unnoticed many details during the filming. Many of the particles were staying in the same place for several frames before we detected them. It was unreasonable to delete the bunch of frames just to move couple leaves a bit further so we moved further. It was really hard to follow each single particle so during our animation many of the fails appear if you take a careful look. Also, some of the character parts were bouncing from original position to very unexpected while we moved our particles around. It was very irritating as we had an issue with the technology of the part attachment. Besides, reflections caused by lamps migrated around the scene and caused inequality of the lighting. The secondary movement of the flowers acted independently as each single touch of the plastic surface caused a vibration and moved our props constantly without any visible reason. We noticed that movement only after full review of our finished animation.
SUMMARY|
In brief - I am very happy with our work and proud of my team as we were able to demonstrate a good teamwork and fast workflow. We created a beautiful story and we noticed that the audience enjoyed it as much as we did. I was a good essay of our capabilities to create something from the scratch. I would change a load of things in this animation to improve its look, but as we were restricted in our actions I think this work is pretty well made. I have received an affluent experience during this task and I am very sure that the next project will become even better.
SUMMARY after the show-reel|
As our group first started and finished the animation, we have been following certain restrictions. We thought we need to keep our animations as simple as possible to reach a primary goal - understanding of the animation principles. We have used our own ideas in the *alive background* and these Ideas were stolen and used in other animations. Many people from the audience were fascinated by the birds to fly and leaves and at least two of groups have used same principles. Next time I would like to keep in secret what are we doing and how are we becoming with ideas.
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