Corfu Animation Festival

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AUSSIES REPRESENT!!!

Finishing off

Last day was spent fixing the colouring and masking out random noise. As I had left it to the last minute, the titles are very simple. I think it looks nice for the first few seconds coz you feel all moody and ominous, then it cuts to Jacque and music box and it completely throws me off. No time for anything more sophisticated however, so I guess it will have to serve to foreshadow his grim, grim end.


If I had to review my animation at this stage:

-aforementioned conflict with titles
-jarring and disorientating beginning
-laughs are a bit unconvincingly cut together, but otherwise alright flow for rest of scene 1-(oh and at the part where he jumps off the bed weird I added a blink in and it made such a difference)
-scene 2 feels good
-music good
-wut, random card
-not sure what to think of the solitary random card
-the director's idea of subliminal messaging?
-more like the director's miserable attempt to tie things together even when the absence of certain elements renders the effort absolutely meaningless
-anyway, still good up until they sit at the window
-there some animation needing redoing
-lighting is nice
-music not ideal, but not bad
-something happened now it looks like a climax
-music does not work to be honest
-no feel
-and yaaay it's over!


More evaluation:

I think the main problem with Slapjack as a whole is that it was built upon a retrospectively poor foundation. The story was weak to begin with, and would have worked better as a more stylised animation, but there was minimal work done for look and feel.

Some things to remember for future projects, KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID. Like, actually simple. And do a lot of concept art and style frames. Since that's what I'm into.

I probably reiterate, but I think the best place for this work is online. Aside from the potential for a huge audience, there's that psychological aspect for me; online all of your work can be viewed together, whilst at a festival or something it's that one work representing you. It is something you have done, versus something you have DONE. And it really is too weak for DONE.

^Excuses

Anyway, I will be submitting this to festivals (bullied), but as the main place for it is online/showreel, again, online hand in tomorrow.

DONE!

Glow abuse

Which level of glowiness?
Why, the level that most effectively masks the dodginess painfully apparent in a high resolution render.

low res, high res + small glow, high res + more glow

Background assimilation

Michelle's backgrounds:

I think I underestimated how difficult it would be to copy somebody else's style. Nevertheless, they were a massive help, and I managed to assimilate two of them with a quick blending & rendering job, plus some random texture/adjustment layers.

I am a bit irked by the bedpost colour on the first one, but I haven't had time to fix it, so hopefully I am the only one who notices.

Animation Festivals

Since After Effects is freezing up every five minutes (I should really learn to pre-render), I might as well take this time to update my log. I have been bullied into submitting my work to animation festivals, so here are some of them that I would be ok submitting to, I guess.

-2D or Not 2D Animation Festival
-Blue Mountains Film Festival
-Melbourne International Animation Festival
-miscellaneous free ones

Actually the only one I really personally wanted to submit to was the 2D or Not 2D one, because it was started by Tony White, whose books were an amazing resource for me trying to learn to animate traditionally. But I was searching for it a few weeks ago and found not much recent information about it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it hasn't died, but it is looking likely that it has. Grumble. I was also kind of interested in GRAPHIC, at the Opera House, but considering the due date is on Sunday, I wouldn't be able to polish it nearly enough by then, and anyway, looking at the calibre of previous animations done for GRAPHIC, it's kinda a lost cause.

The other two are because I prefer nearby locations I can get to, and they seem cool. Other than that, I am probably just going to go down the list of animation festivals with free submissions on that website I found, and just send it off randomly. I know I should prioritise the big/semi-big festivals, substandard quality or not, so I won't put it up publicly online too soon, on the off chance I catch myself in an optimistic mood. So for hand in, I think I will put it up on Vimeo, but on private, so it's sort of like, it will be public, but not yet... yeah.

Error 16

Today, Adobe CS6:

Please uninstall and reinstall the product.
If this problem still occurs, please contact Adobe technical support for help, and mention the error code shown at the bottom of this screen. 
Error: 16

And the hilarious thing is, After Effects CS6 files are not backwards compatible with After Effects CS5.5, which is the version installed on the beasts at COFA.

Yet another manifestation of Murphy's Law.

Shadows

For dodgy, inaccurate, but passable shadows in After Effects:

-duplicate colour layer
-skew
-rotate
-scale
-fill
-ramp
-gaussian blur

For when animated masks just doesn't cut it.

8 days to go

No time for anything, quick update, backgrounds done, colouring 99% done, cards 90% done, leaves done, music is passably alright, foley 20% done (!!!!), shadows, blankets animation, titles/credits NOT done, and I'm giving up on animating the falling cards, so there is a single transition type falling card randomly and THAT'S IT. I mean it's not necessary to the story but it woulda helped, I reckon. Sad, sad life.


Colouring list:

Me:
-1.02
-1.08
-1.10
-1.11
-1.12
-1.13
-2.04
-3.06
-3.12
-3.18
-3.20
-3.21

Pauline:
-1.03
-1.05
-3.05
-3.08
-3.10
-3.11
-3.13
-3.14
-3.15
-3.16

Kimmy:
-1.06
-3.02
-3.03
-3.09
-1/2

Nancy:
-2.01
-2.03
-3.01
-3.19

Juliana:
-1.04

Andrew:
-2.02

So I win! ...yeah.


Backgrounds:

Michelle:
-2.02
-3.05
-3.06
-4.02

Except the backgrounds are still quite different to my style. I have assimilated 3.05 and 3.06 but I haven't time to do 2.02 before assessment.

What else... note about the cards I guess, thought I was gonna do them in AE but found it was neater and less computer intensive to warp them directly onto the frames in PS.

The leaves I did today, a bit of an issue with AE not being able to import my multiple video layers and smart objects but I put each leaf in a separate file and that worked out.

And man! The colouring in some areas is horrendous. Mostly my fault coz I told people quantity over quality, but I cringe.


Final (thereabouts) look:

Gonna add a glow thing to it on Susan's suggestion and coz it do look nice.

Finally got around to zooming in the cards sequence and it's good after all.

Shadows takes longer than expected. Gah.

No other progress shots today, too busy progressing.

And I'll post up a list of festivals and stuff soon, just after I finish this... ok that's not soon.





Photoshop tip of the day:
Hold down R for one second to temporarily activate rotate canvas tool.

Timing

The best way for timing out frames for me was in After Effects I found. Originally I was going to do it in Photoshop, but since most of my colouring people didn't use Timeline anyway, and also a host of other issues with After Effects not interpreting the layers right that I can't remember right now, After Effects was the way to go.

The files had to be really clean first however. I separated each shot into two separate files, colour and line. I got rid of any groups, and made sure each layer was on max opacity; it screws with you later otherwise.

Also important was to get rid of any Timeline information remaining on the Photoshop files. I couldn't figure out a nice way to just turn it off so I had to first switch it to Frames and then back to Timeline, so that all the layers would be active at once, then duplicate it to a new file. Frames puts everything on zero opacity though so had to remember to max that.

Or you could just duplicate twice. Whatever floats your boat.

So that way I get clean, consistent layers to work with in After Effects. You know, there is probably a way to clean up stuff in AE anyway, but I couldn't find any, so it was just neater to have everything there on import.

On working in AE, I gotta remember to do this:

• Set durations of pre-comps
• Set pre-comps to 25fps

Plus these amazing shortcuts:

• [ or ]  -->  Move In point or Out point of selected layers to current time
• Alt+[ or Alt+]  -->  Trim In point or Out point of selected layers to current time

Plus if you want to preserve the blending mode effects (like the transparency from Multiply) in a pre-comp, collapse transformations. I don't know why that works, but it do.

Character animation complete

I think this is 9 weeks behind my original schedule.

Nevertheless, it is something to be glad about.

Upcoming: scanning, colouring, backgrounds, shadows, cards & leaves & blanket animation, foley, in order of priority.
Yes, I am terrible.

Animating the laugh

As the only piece in my animation that I was syncing to audio, animating the laugh posed a couple of new challenges I guess. I had a rough idea in my mind of viewing the audio as a waveform and writing down the timings of bits, and then maybe roughly testing out the timing of some keyposes, but which software? Doing it directly in Photoshop was my first preference, but although you could bring in audio, there was no way to view the waveforms, so it lacked the precision I was after. Next I tried Premiere Pro and Flash. Premiere was irksome, and I never liked it anyway, so I gave up on that. Flash would have been ok, except the recording was a bit on the quiet side, and so the waveforms were invisible. There seemed to be a limited way of resizing the timeline, plus I couldn't get the audio to play, so I ditched that and went to Audition, which was the logical first choice, come to think of it. So I ended up using Audition to find the exact time I wanted, then timing it out in Photoshop.

I had only a faint idea of how laughs really went, taking them all for granted as it were, so Youtube came into handy there. Although most of the footage tagged with my search terms were of babies, I could see that, contrary to prior assumption, the mouth did not really change shape with each syllable, and head bobbing was minor. I chose to accentuate the head and shoulder movement (exaggeration, booyah), and moreover recalled the use of a figure 8 motion path for the animation of a laugh in one of them books I read; most likely  the Animator's Survival Kit. I haven't consciously done that figure 8 thing yet so I thought it'd be good to give it a try.

Now I just need to get all this information down on paper. Which will take ages. Which I might not even get done this week because I have another assignment due. Which sucks because I am SO CLOSE to finishing all the character animation for this thing. 

2 MORE SHOTS!

Laugh

The sound component is coming along, if not amazingly. Music is the most done, with Nick coming in to work on it every week, foley I am still putting off as much as possible. Good news however, is I have laughs! Susan kindly organised for me to record her son who is about the right age (and ridiculously adorable to boot). It took me a while to whittle down and mix and match the audio (which mostly consisted of us trying to make him laugh) to a reasonably believable continuous laugh sequence. It didn't help that he had this (ridiculously adorable) sarcastic laugh going most of the time which was short and I could only use the beginning of. Short laughs have a different quality to long laughs I found.

Halfway

Week 7 is halfway right? Except for some reason I'm currently at the min point of my panic sine curve.

This is what halfway currently looks like:

Revised schedule

Ok, I kid.

But it's looking pretty bad nevertheless, and I think I'm gonna need that extra week 13. I'm going to try really hard to get all the animation finished up next week in the break, and with the backgrounds and other odds and end, that'll leave hopefully 2, 3 weeks for putting it together and chucking in as many production-quality-booster type stuff (shadows, gradients, blurs, moving holds etc.) as I have time for.

How much I animate

I might need a new pencil.

Sound design commence

I've been neglecting the audio element lately, so last week I re-learnt myself some Pro Tools and started processing the music fragments Nick has composed for me. I am only using midi, because I don't know anything about good sound recording, and anyway there's so many sounds to choose from it's awesome. I managed to get the beginning down alright, I think (besides it sounding like some horror film).

Original:

With stuff added:

Nick didn't have the luxury of being able to directly match up music to animation though, so the rest of it is going to be difficult to make cohesive.

Colour Script v2

So I figured when the sun sets there's this colour change happening, plus some dimming. The old one was more stylistically inclined, but I figured I had such vibrant oranges for the window I might as well stay consistent to that.

After Effects

This was a while back, but I thought I should write about it. You know how I said I thought After Effects was a waste of time (not really)? Well I still do (not really), except a little less now. This is probably obvious to most people, but me being a relative AE noob, I thought it was real nifty when Susan showed me how to use pre-comps!

I love pre-comps!

They're this thing where instead of having one composition where you just Shove Everything In, you have a composition referencing multiple compositions referencing multiple compositions etc. in a tree-like structure. Things start looking half organised even.

You go from something like this:

To something like this:

Notice the size of the scroll bar. Anyway, so what could happen is that I have a pre-comp for each shot, and pre-comps in that composition for each layer and pre-comps in that one for outlines and colours and time out all the frames for a single shot in single composition. As I said, a huge obvious major AE feature that I managed to miss, but still, I'm learning! :D

After Effects still not amazingly convenient for me though, because I my computer isn't tank enough for reasonably fast previews, and file management is annoying as always.

Fast leaves

Is it just me, or are these leaves WAY too fast...

On industry and employment

Edit: stress removed.

Apparently I'm meant to be giving some thought to my future in this course. Well, I'm not actually graduating yet, but I have been thinking about it a lot recently.

We were asked to define our industry. Like, specifically. Well I dunno. Is that a "what do I want to be when I grow up" question? If I had to go into specifics, well, the list includes character animator for film, 2D and/or 3D, game/film concept artist, book illustrator. Doing indie films and taking the funding and festival route is very appealing, but, you know, I need to buy my parents a house and everything, so something that pays a little better is a priority. I've also always wanted to make my own picture book and do comic strips in newspapers, but that's a different story.

And how is Professional Portfolio (this animation) going to help me? To be honest, I don't think it will, in itself. Besides the fact that it's a 2D hand drawn animation of the type that I don't think there's any jobs around Sydney for (correct me if I'm wrong), I also gave up on drawing concept art for it, so I have nothing to show in that area.

Overall though, the main issue is that the quality is nowhere near "professional". My animation doesn't work -mainly coz I'm a bad director. I would feel uncomfortable trying to promote it as a work. The only direct good that can come of it is that I have some traditional animation to buffer my animation showreel, which only consists of 18 seconds of 3D animation due to lack of practice/everything else being below standard.

I've been following this super long thread on DLF lately, mainly featuring a great deal of Aussie unemployment in the CG area. The way the debate has been leaning, the problem seems to be the high Aussie dollar, and thus outsourcing digital labour to cheaper Asian countries. There's veterans in the field saying they can't find a job.

Now that's really daunting for the student, naturally. But the way I see it, sure it is probably a lot harder to find work nowadays, however, I do believe there's always a market for quality. So in terms of Packaging vs. Content, quality content wins it for me. Speaking personally again though, I can't even do the whole selling your product business. They tell you not to undersell yourself, but I lack in the self esteem department (yes I am completely aware). I accept that, only it means that, for me, content is everything. It has to be outstanding. It's outstanding or nothing.

I'm not too concerned that my work is not going to be outstanding. I have an extra year after all, to build up a volume of work. I think I will focus on 3D and still image though, to better my job prospects. And then an honours year if I can't find work or if I manage to get a scholarship or something.

Also, a while back I attended a SIGGRAPH talk by Andrew Silke. Now he was really, really cool (he created the Generi rig!) and everything he said was super inspiring, but there was one thing that really stuck. He showed us this video, which basically sums up where I'm at:

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Thoughts.