Animatic for '13 truths + 1lie', showing the rough keyframes for movement

Hidden Stories

Throughout the course of the project my idea had changed several times. Originally, I planned on making my film with paper cut outs, as described in my earlier posts, however when it came to animate with them I realised it wasn't going to work due to the complexity of the model and the way it made the horse's movement look stiff and wooden. My next reaction was to make the film hand drawn in Flash, which I experimented with making movement cycles

However I really didnt like the hard lines and colouring flash offered, so I decided to start the whole thing again hand drawn on paper.

At this point I had also decided to change my story almost completely.. my original storyboard was this - 

I eventually came to really hate it though and i started the storyboard over

The story is supposed to be that the 'spirit' of the carousel horse wakes up and goes to join the 'white horses' in the sea waves

This was somewhat inspired by various folk tales about the white foam of broken waves to be herds of white horses leaping out of the sea. This idea has been used in a few films and books

Clip from 1982 animated film "The Last Unicorn", where the unicorns are imprisoned in the sea.

White Horse of Zennor by War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, about a magical white horse that comes from the sea foam

I made this decision pretty late on in the project though and as a result didnt have as much time to animate and edit as I should have. The outcome I feel is poor quality and i am not happy with it...

resources + inspiration

 

Hidden Stories project

for this project we have to select an object from one of the Edinburgh Museums and Galleries, to base a short film upon. Feeling uninspired after visiting the museum of edinburgh, peoples story and the writers museum, eventually i came to the museum of childhood and found this gorgeous carousel horse, who i believe if his ribbon is anything to go by, is named Alf. 

Here are some sketches I did of him in the museum: 

I have yet to develop a proper story, but it will be centred around this horse as the primary character. I was thinking about how I could animate this - with such an intricate design it would be far too time consuming to do the entire thing hand-drawn, so in order to actually get it done I will have to adopt a different approach. I was thinking about stop motion, but I think it would be far too much work to figure out how to make a working 3d model for what I had in mind, in addition to the fact that i would have no idea what i was doing... 

Rachel suggested I look at paper cut out stop motion, like the type used in Jiri Trnka's Merry Circus. 

I started to design an articulated paper doll I could use to animate with. This is the first one I made to test how it works.

After some refining I have created a template for a model which I think should work:

I'm thinking about either decorating it by drawing the design digitally, or using fabrics, inks, and beads etc (or a combination of both). I will need to find a way to connect the joints so they move effectively.

other images:

  

the finished product !

i set it to some music by massive attack (intro to 'inertia creeps'). youtube distorted the sound a little at the end  though. I put all my clips together using imovie, its maybe not the most professional tool but it did the job ok. i would have liked to play around with the editing more than imovie allows but this will have to do for now!

a little something i did for another project (an element of risk/gold project). I used this guide by Richard Williams to help me.

The background is a painting i made and manipulated with photoshop.

some sketches to help me plan out my frames

Shark swimming test

water splash test

this is a summary of what I've done so far, youtube makes the clip longer i think its actually like 12 seconds and i need to cut down some of the looped sequences so really ive done more like 9 or 10 seconds

the editing is pretty bad in the final version i will probably re-capture some of the scenes on take 5 so the brightness/contrast is consistant and also make sure the frames actually line up cause it goes pretty squint in the second clip.

I plan to work up the quality of the second clip as it doesn't really match the others and also i need to recapture the last sequence in one go so it doesnt look so stupid.

On the last clip I continued to use the layering feature in take 5 and used a single paper cut out 'meteorite' and moved it manually out of the crater. it needs a little more work to make it look convincing though

i've realised with almost 10 out of 20 seconds already done and only a third through the storyboard i probably wont get to complete it and i might have to round it off at the point where it falls into the lake or something .....

testing out the smoke sequence after the meteorite crash. For this I experimented with Take 5's layering options and had the crater, the boulder and the smoke on 3 different layers. I threw the camera's focus off a little on the smoke layer to blur it and give it a better smokey effect.

Here is the clip of the meteorite crashing into the mountain that I plan to use in my film. I drew the frames in Paint Tool SAI and imported them into Pencil to animate them.

It took me a few attempts to get the meteorite to look convincing. Here are some of my first tries:

The first attempt I used too many frames and didn't take enough care to align them properly. The second was better but still too many frames to make it look real. The final version I only used 5 frames of the meteor in the sky as opposed to the 20ish i used in the first version.

If I have time I would like to do something with the lighting in this scene to make it a little less static, maybe i can try animating the clouds/mist too.

Here are some of the clips I used as references:

Scene background

completed storyboard

Test sequence for the first scene of my animation

(meteorite falling from space)

5 frames at 12fps looped for 5 seconds

shaniqua the shark

storyboard for 'when balls go bad' animation

so this is the start of my ideas for this assignment - my 'ball' starts out as a meteorite that falls to earth into the side of a mountain. It rolls out of its crater and snowballs down the mountain, getting bigger as it picks up the snow. Eventually it reaches a lake/sea and falls in, the snow melting off. it gets eaten by a fish, which is subsequently eaten by a larger fish and  in turn is eaten by a shark. i'm not sure how many seconds this sequence will take so i may have to end it at this point, however depending on how it goes i would like to have some way to get the ball back out of the fish and have it come to a final resting place.

character sheet

Bouncing Ball Animation Exercise

We were given a task to complete 3 animation sequences depicting balls of different materials bouncing.

The materials which I chose to animate were:

Rubber ball x2

Water balloon 

Iron ball

Ping pong ball

The first sequence I created I did entirely from my imagination of what I percieved the movement of a bouncing ball to look like. I did no research prior to starting and as a result the sequence was not very convincing. There was no sence of gravity as the balls in each frame were all placed an equal distance apart. 

I decided to start from scratch with the rubber ball sequence and used an arc to trace the placement of the balls.

This helped me align the balls better however I was still not getting a very realistic feel of movement and gravity. The squash and stretch of the ball was over-exaggerated and the overall effect needed to be improved upon.

The next sequence I made was a water balloon. 

I realised I could make things a lot easier for myself if I drew out each frame on a singe sheet of paper and later trace them individually. 

I used YouTube videos as references for the distortion of the water balloon.