24/02/2016 - Animation 04 - Rotoscoping Line Work

Week 07

Rotoscoping Line Work

Here are my different tests for my line work, the top one here is my chosen style and the rest are my other tests I did to give me more of a choice to choose from.

The idea now is for me to rotoscope my existing frames again but with my chosen line work, then I will do inbetweens of these frames to build up my animation.

24/02/2016 - Animation 04 - Rotoscoping

Week 07

Rotoscoping

This weeks animation revolves around the technique of claymation. The beginning of this post will be focused around a few rotoscoped animation analyses to give me a bases of what people have done with it in the past.

These two below both deploy a basic concept of rotoscoping, while I definitely appreciate the thought and hard work gone into such an animation, there is something lacking in terms of creativity for me. The hard work of rotoscoping can be easily seen in "A Scanner Darkly" where according to the director, Richard Linklater, filming took just 23 days whereas the rotoscoping took 18 months to complete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63o3ENsF2kE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYYQNLWa2A

Below is a screenshot from a rotoscope animation, the rest of the animation is actually in the traditional rotoscope animation style but this part at the beginning is more interesting. Here they have used a more abstract style for rotoscoping the man on a skateboard which only uses the video footage as a template of which to express themselves rather than a template of which to mimic the footage in drawing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IimLnyOeCtY

This rotoscope is a bit more creative, here the creator has used the original video footage as a foundation of which to draw over and that's exactly what they have done by adding several new elements which I can only speculate were not in the original footage. My intention for my rotoscope is a bit different though as I wont be drawing over my character but simply drawing over him with a different style of line work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E3uP1KOp_Y

Animatic 01

https://youtu.be/cJL_JvQpPgc

Over the weekend I took pictures of my brother in a fight sequence, the idea here is to rotoscope in a low frame rate but then add inbetweens that are free hand and more abstract. So far I have done the basic rotoscoping. The intention also is to have a fight scene in the middle where the protagonist leaps into the air, turning into a smoke like character, and beating away foes before landing back on the ground in his human form. The whole middle part will be free hand. I am also going to experiment with how I do the inbetweens, it would be nice to add some colour and I feel this would be the most impactful way of doing it.

Above is my original rotoscope but I was not enthused by it at all. I appreciate the time required for rotoscoping and I acknowledge it as a storytelling method but visually, it just doesn't appeal to me that often. That is where the image below comes in, I tried using horizontal lines which I think gives a more interesting appeal and makes it look a bit less like a traditional rotoscope. I will experiment today with a couple more variations of how I can trace over the character.

Feedback

After a talk with the lecturer today, There has been a focus on the experimental side of things with the rotoscoping transitioning into hand drawn animation and back again. I am also going to need to get pictures of my "actor" jumping up so I can use it as reference for my protagonist jumping up and turning into a smoke character while fighting in the air.

Plan

My plan for the rest of this project is to leave myself around 3 weeks before submission to tidy up all my animations and compile them together into a mini showreel. This means I will be doing a couple more new animations after this one.

Claymation

The lecturer mentioned I could do claymation as my next animation, this almost immediately gave me a general narrative idea which I want to get down on this blog post so its here for next week. The idea is that there are these oddly shaped monsters and the end consists of one of the monsters melting, thus, revealing an apple inside, this is when the other monsters begin to replicate what happened to the first so they can reveal their inner fruit, "I believe that inside every one of us is a fruit waiting to come out" will then come up on screen....then the last monster reveals a vegetable inside of him...which the fruits are not too happy about so they murder him. "he's not good enough for the food waste bin, dump him with the other trash". So that is my general narrative for next weeks animation. I'm thinking also that they throw him in a blender and we see the vegetable afterwards dragging its mangled body across the kitchen top.

24/02/2016 - Animation 03 - Animatics

Week 07

Animation 03

Animatic

Today I have finally completed my animatics for my third animation, It was started on Monday, so not that bad in terms of time. The title of the animation is "Catsnake". The idea here is to combine 2D animation in Photoshop with newspaper cutouts. I'll explain this below the animatics when it has some context.

First Animatic

https://youtu.be/azFMQlXiQ10

This is my first animatic, The premise here is of a cat watching a snake miraculously jump up and sprout wings before flying off into the distance...the camera then pans out and its revealed that the cat is a catsnake. The second animatic below is with colour.

Second Animatic

https://youtu.be/nXIr42hVAN8

Here I have added colour but also some extra frames from the snake to make it a bit smoother. My idea with the newspaper cutouts is to use eyes from news papers as the eyes of the catsnake and to possibly create a collage of images to create a background for this animation. I'm hoping that by adding the newspaper eyes I will be creating a disorientating effect for the viewer.

16/02/2016 - Refined Project Outcome

Week 06

Refined Project Outcome

Before yesterday (when I talked to the lecturer) my project was aiming more towards experimenting with animation before finally making a proper animation with a narrative, but now it has changed. Instead, I am going to get an animation done each week with a different style/technique and all of these compiled will be my final piece.

My next idea for this weeks animation is combining stop motion with Photoshop, the example I have in my head is a cat...whose eyes are cut-out pieces of paper that I have photographed and put into Photoshop. I could even try using eyes cut-out of magazines. It would also have a mouth and maybe a nose all from the same style of cut-outs....this idea doesn't seem overly taxing though so if I prepare properly then I can get a couple of these done this week to really push my idea.

11/02/2016 - Animation Test 02

Week 05

Animation Test 02

Today I created a couple of animations based on the idea of a digital crayon etching. Shown below by my lovely crayon skills.

The process here was to colour a piece of paper entirely in crayons (lots of different colours) and then go over the whole thing with black,after that you scratch away a design to reveal all the colours underneath. This principle is what I have decided to further with digital software.

Creating these animations was a little different than most animations, instead of drawing with a brush to create my line work, I had to erase from the black layer to produce the line work. The evolution i my process can be clearly seen between my first and second rabbit tests but this will be easier to understand with the context of the animations themselves.

First Test - Animation Test

https://youtu.be/3hcsdUA1H98

This first test was me experimenting with the technique to get the process right. On one layer I went crazy with different colours and on the layer above I made a simple layer of black. I copied the layer then made a small line, copied that new layer and drew the next part of the line, that's why the line quality is a bit sub-standard, but, this is something I address in my second rabbit test. this technique meant that I was using the eraser to rub away the black to create my actual line. so eraser = brush.

Rabbit Test 01

https://youtu.be/tuJqPKnLI_Q

Here I wanted to give some sort of narrative to my animation at least...with a rabbit. I used the same original two layers from the above animation and just used the same technique of copying the last layer and just adding the next part of the line. I of course drew my rabbit properly first to have a outline to follow as a guide. AS you can see though, the line work is of a poor quality but that is all sorted out in the next one thanks to my problem solving.

Rabbit Test 02

https://youtu.be/Qak8Vtw791E

This is the more refined version. Instead of doing my original technique of drawing a little bit of the line each time, I had the idea of originally drawing the rabbit with good line work and then I would use the brush tool (which acts as my eraser in a way) to then make a new frame and rub out a bit of the line each time. This sorted out my poor line work. So I was working backwards to create my animation.

Rabbit Test 03

https://youtu.be/mgkW99MEZZU

This one is even more refined!...the only different though is the ball in the bottom right corner is moving for the whole animation. My intention for this piece is that the ball creates the shapes, so it is clear that the rabbit has emerged from the ball and in my next iteration I am going to animate the rabbit twitching his nose and ears a little bit before transforming into a wave or something similar.

09/02/2016 - Animation Tests 01

Week 05

Animation Test Tests 01

During the weekend, I created a couple of quick animations in Photoshop and managed to export it and compile it into Photoshop so I could position the two separate line animations in the same space and export it out as a video, the link for that is below.

https://youtu.be/rl1HdB18Bnk

I like this animation as a starting point for a possibly bigger animation. I could add more frames to make it smoother. I have just had a thought though, perhaps I could do a digital version of those drawings with crayons we all did as children, this is when you cover a piece of paper in loads of different colours of crayons and then you would cover the whole thing with black, so that you can then scratch lines across the black to reveal the multi coloured background. This is something I want to try using a combination of Photoshop and Premiere Pro and I would create an animation out of it.

My general idea for the animation I have created so far is to create a bunch of new layers where there are different shapes and sizes of lines dancing around the screen.

04/02/2016 - Visual Research

Week 04

Visual Research

For the last two weeks I have been watching a bunch of animations that use various techniques to achieve their style. That's why there was a lack of blog posts last week, I aim to do this one today and then try and do a test animation trying out a new technique, and I will aim to blog it as well. 

'Papillon d'amour' - Nicolas Provost (2003)

This experimental film is created from the film Roshomon, Akira Kurisawa. Nicolas Provost has used the mirroring technique to create this film. This involve mirroring one side of the screen to generate this 'trippy' experience. This is definitely a technique I could play with where I would probably need to combine Photoshop with premier pro to achieve this with better results.

'Coda' - Alan Holly (2013)

I like this scene from 'Coda' because of the way that these pieces of a flower seem to appear out of nowhere to form the flower. This is a technique I have seen quite a lot over the past two weeks (but just done through different methods). I quite like the idea of having moving shapes that dance around the screen and ultimately come together to form something. This technique is another one that I would like to do a test animation with in the coming weeks.

'Feral' - Daniel Sousa (2012)

This screenshot from 'Feral' is kind of similar to the ones above in the sense that these different parts of the buildings are growing out of nowhere to form the building themselves. This technique again, is something that I want to experiment with to create my own scenes.

'My Happy End' - Milen Vitanov (2007)

This animation is a combination of paper drawn, stop motion and 3D animation. This is an inspiring animation for my project in the sense of its technique, I like the way there is hand drawn paper cutout stop motion in use here. It is something I would like to also play about with in a test animation.

'The Land Eaters' - Brandon Ray & Lisa Ray (2009)

This animation is made using hand drawn cutouts and painted backgrounds. The cut outs where filmed on a green piece of card (a makeshift green screen) and the handle and green screen were removed later in After Effects and this is where the painted landscapes were put in. I don't think I would go through the work of doing a similar process but it has sparked an idea of having a somewhat cutout animation test where I could have a big piece of paper with a painting on it and I would put it on the top layer in Photoshop but erase shapes out of it so you can see behind it in certain areas. This is where there would be some sort of animation happening.

'Marcel, King of Tervuren' - Tom Schroeder (2012)

The screenshot above is just a few seconds before the screenshot below, There is a dance of lines around the screen and they come together to form the cockerel. This is the sort of animation I love and is something I want to experiment with myself in this project.

Here is another scene where there is a fight between to cockerels and a lot of it is made up of dancing marks fighting each other, I also like the way that the scene changes red when the fighting begins and this is something I want to remember for my own project, colour is emotion.

'Marilyn Myller' - Mike Please (2013)

Amazingly, this animation was created using Styrofoam models using stop motion. Of course I probably don't have the time, or patience, to do something like this myself but it does inspire me to maybe try doing a stop motion animation where I paint over in Photoshop that the stop-motion character maybe interacts with.


'Oedipus' - Paul Driessen (2011)

This animation is in here because I love the drawing style of it, You can see below how the characters are drawn when they are moving, Its quite a bizarre animation to watch as everything is moving constantly, I like the irregularities between each frame and again, this is a technique I would like to play around with.

You might think that most of the animations shown here are not experimental, well you might be correct but the term experimental means the combination of two kinds of art to make a new piece of art.

Summary

My summary for today is that I am aiming to create short animations in the next couple of weeks based on the interesting discoveries I have made in this blog post. I have also come to the conclusion that I will need to maybe do some animation in Premiere Pro, this would allow me to use the interpolation in Premiere Pro for some of my animations.