Before I started animating I drafted up a quick shot list and made a basic Gantt Chart in Notion. I consistently updated this as I added more shots, or if plans changed and I had to move around a few of my shots. Notion also allowed me to click on each 'Shot' I had made and opened up its own page to allow me to take notes, brainstorm, keep feedback and make check lists.
Below you can see the final Gantt chart that I had made in Notion near the end which featured all of my shots split up evenly over my final two weeks, most of these we're just dedicating days to cleaning up animations I had previously done throughout November and the early weeks in December while others were doing some animations from scratch.
Research
I went through the library at the University and picked out a few textbooks to read on animation. The book that stuck out to me the most was 'Animated Performance' By Nancy Beiman. I did want to pick up 'Timing For Animation' by Harold Whitaker however it was already taken out by someone else and wasn't returned. Reading this textbook gave me a new perspective on animating that I took with me throughout my assignment.
Animated Performance taught me to break down my shots into primary and secondary actions. In the text book the author tells you to describe the action which allows you to identify the primary and secondary action. I'm not 100% sure if I was doing this right but I did go through each shot and break them down into sentences to try and work my head through it.
Primary and Secondary Sentences (Expand)
N/A Scenery Shot
She walks forward and looks around with curiosity.
N/A Scenery Shot
She walks forward and looks around with fear.
Flash light flickers then turns off.
She gasps and moves back. She leans forward in anger and pulls her ears back.
She twists her head and shakes the torch. She leans back and throws the torch.
She hears a noise, looks around in fear while her pupils look around frantically.
Creeps towards the noise, her arms shaking. The face appears in the bush.
Jumps in the air and wiggles her arms. Bounces off the floor chattering her teeth. Torch flickers on.
Friend laughs while shaking her head. Leans down and clenches her sides.
She blinks in disbelief before lowering her head in anger and folds her ears. She then folds her arms while leaning in further.
This textbook also helped me learn to breakdown my animations with different colours if I was struggling to see different parts moving. I didnt do this for all my shots as I slowly started getting the hang of separating movement, but for my early shots like the walk cycles I used different colours to see between the head movement, body movement and tail sway.
Another point the textbook made was to view my characters actions like a pantomime. Her actions should display her inner feelings, Why does she move the way she moves? How does her feelings make her move?
With these points in mind I proceeded with animating. I should also note that composition wise I walked into this animation trying to focus on camera angles that would allow me to show off body mechanics and acting rather than creating a 'mood', however I made sure to never break the 180 degree rule, this was the number one composition rule I never forgot during this.
Shots 1,2,3,4 - Walking In The Forest
Shot 2
I didnt really want to animate out of order so I just worked my way forwards in rough order of shots. My first shot I worked on was shot 2 (I hadn't decided to do shot 1,3,4 yet). I went back to the walk cycle I did for my first assignment and used it as the basic framework for the walk cycles in my short. I worked with pose-to-pose animation by marking out my contact poses first, then passing poses before filling them in with the inbetweens. Originally I only had her walking forward with a blink but I added the secondary action of her looking around. I also tried to add a slight bob up and down with arcs and a little bit of squash and stretch but I dont think its as noticeable as I wanted it to be, I struggled a lot with conveying the arcs on a 3/4 angle compared to a side view. I could have exaggerated the squash and stretch more to give her walk more personality.
I broke down some of the overlapping/secondary animation separately before pasting it into the animation. This is because I was getting very confused trying to do it on top of the walk. Like 'Animated Performance' said, separate it into different colours. So I did just that. I broke it down into head, ears and tail. The head and ears were just simple secondary actions of looking around and adding a blink. The tail was secondary behind the body, I used my arcs and referred back to the pendulum to get a nice sway with some ease-ins and ease-outs at the edges of the pendulum.
After feedback with Mike and Sarah we opted to add another walk cycle after this one to show her getting scared as this initial walk was more of an idle/curious walk instead of the fearful walk I was originally intending. I also fixed a few things
Shot 4
After my feedback I went ahead with the next walk. I just re-used the same walk cycle since it kept the pacing I still wanted. I went through Mikes feedback and pushed her posing further to look more exaggerated. I hunched her back lower and used smear frames on 1's instead of 2's to create quick moving head turns.
During class time I got some feedback and extra references from Mike and Sarah, we looked at Looney Tunes Jumpin Juniper and Scardey Cat. These were perfect references that gave me some great ideas for current and future shots. Looking at these references I realized I could push her tail to be more fuzzy and exaggerate the fear more. I also added a boiled line effect to the tail to make it look like it was shaking in fear as a secondary action behind her. Mike told me to hold some of the expressions more which would add to the appeal.
Shots 1 + 3
Shots 1 and 3 were just some quick extra shots made to set the scene of the short. The first shot features a light night sky with some stars and a moon thats radiating light slightly. The second shot uses foreground trees that push away as the camera pans in. As the camera is doing this mist begins to form around the background trees to create that eerie atmosphere.
Shots 5,6,7,8 - Frustration to Fear
Shot 5
I didn't want to make shot 5 a huge priority as it didnt involve much movement at all compared to the other shots, so I just quickly set up the opacity for the flashlight to flicker. Mike advised me to make sure it actually flickered quite fast to make it look like she's not the one turning it off and on, that its actually a fault with the flashlight. So I just animated the opacity to quickly flicker on and off and left it at that. If I had extra time to work on this shot I would have. I would've animated a background that moves to look like shes walking and I would've bobbed her arm + flashlight up and down slightly to show the slight impact of her body moving with each step.
Shot 7
The next shot I wanted to get finished was one of the harder shots with the most interesting movement. Shot 7 involved interacting with the prop and getting across clear movement and believability. There was a lot to think about with this shot but like my walk cycles I broke it down with pose-to-pose animation and separating different parts of the body and focusing on them one at a time.
One of the main principals I was trying to nail for this was anticipation. The first bit of anticipation was her pulling the flashlight towards her and narrowing her eyes, building up the tension between her and the flashlight. The second bit of anticipation was her raising her arm in the air before throwing it. To add to the anticipation I utilised easing in and easing out for this part, easing in the anticipated arm raise and easing out her push towards the ground showing the weight of the throw.
For the flashlight, I needed to film some reference as I couldn't get it nailed down by just following some arcs. I stepped outside into the garden to have a softer surface similar to my shorts setting and I filmed myself throwing the torch, trying to get a bounce. I found the torch would flip itself on impact so I tried to nail that down in my animation.
Feedback wise I was advised to push the pose a bit more when shes listening for the batteries during the shake, and the shake was also too slow so I shortened some of the frames down to 1's and eliminated some of them.
Shot 6
Shot 6 was a quick shot showing how the main character was switching between emotions. She has to move from shock to anger. I tried to push and exaggerate her facial expressions in this shot to make sure her emotions were clear. I also slowed out her head as she pushed it inwards towards the camera when she got angry. I also included the secondary action of her ears folding backwards. A simple shot so I wasn't too concerned with this one as it was just to convey her emotions clearly.
Shot 8
For Shot 8 it was similar to shot 6, a short and simple animation just to convey a change of emotions. I utilised the same techniques like exaggerating the expression, adding secondary actions like arching her shoulders up with her slight jump, making her pupils dart around in fear, animating smears on 1's to make her head turns quicker. I also added a comical exclamation point to allow the audience to know there was a noise that alerted her, since there's no sound. If I were to go back and add anything to this shot, I would try to get some more clear overlapping animation rather than moving the arms together at the same time, it would make her appear less robotic.
Shots 9 (+extra),10,11,12 - BOO!
Shot 10
This shot was another one of the shots that involved a bit more interesting and dynamic movements so I opted to get it out of the way first before I did the rest. For this shot I referenced back to the Sylvester and Porky animations, Jumpin Juniper and Scaredy Cat. I wanted to exaggerate her scared jump more so I went with the comical 'stop in mid air' style of jump. I tried to emphasise her fear by animating her arms waving up and down and then using procreate dreams record tool to record her body shaking up and down slightly from the fear.
The difficult part was getting the fall nailed down I tried searching for references of backwards falls but I couldn't find anything solid when I searched for it. I couldn't exactly film myself safely falling back so I had to just rely on whatever I could find. I did take a look at this video to the right just to get an idea of how the body reacts to impacting the floor but I mainly relied on my principals. I thought of my jump and fall like an arc and then I imagined the body of my character like a heavy ball that can squash and stretch when it impacts, giving a very small bounce. This would also impact the torch sitting beside her, as she hits the ground the torch would also move or bounce slightly.
Im not totally satisfied with this shot, I think I messed up the arc of the fall slightly and I could of added some follow through action with her tail or ears, even going as far as to make the arms move slightly off from each other during their wave in the air. Follow through I think is the principal I struggle with the most as it requires more thought on how other actions impact parts of the body with gravity and such. I did go back in the end and try to fix the arc in the final shot but im still unsure if it worked.
Shot 11
I had a lot of fun with shot 11. I was getting closer to the deadline with this shot so it was a bit more rushed compared to the others at the start but I think I nailed a solid laugh with some room for improvements. I looked at a few different videos of laughs on youtube just to get a general idea of how the body can move differently with certain types of laughs. I noticed that usually a laugh will involve either squinting or closed eyes, the head will twist, turn and/or arch back, the shoulders will raise up and down as the one laughing takes deep breaths. Since this wasn't one of my originally planned shots in my storyboards, this was being planned here and now. I fluctuated between 1's and 2's to keep the speed up with the laughter. I also added some squash and stretching to her body as she rises and falls with her breaths.
I could've again added some overlapping or follow through animation to this shot with her ears or little tufts of fluff on her cheeks. I also forgot to animate her tail which I could've used my pendulum again and created a fast moving tail wiggling with her laughs.
Shot 12
Shot 12 was similar to shots 6 and 8. It was a close up of the main character showing her frustration. I was following the same steps of pose-to-pose, inbetweens, trying to exaggerate expressions, adding some secondary action (like moving the eyebrows in, slowing out the head pushing inwards, moving the mouth and the ears). Again I could've thought more about overlapping action and I could've added some more frames to have the movement more smooth. I also noticed the timing was a bit off but I decided to wait till I pieced it together before I made that call.
Shot 9
Shot 9 I changed the camera angle to try and add more to the cinematography. Mike helped a lot with his feedback and suggested we have her move towards the noise and keep the dark bushes in the view to keep it all in one shot. I decided to go a step further and break shot 9 up into 3 parts; moving towards the noise, a close up of her face showing the fear, her body shakes as the eyes appear in the bush. For the close-up shot I used composition to try and create a claustrophobic and fearful emotion by having her head take up most of the screen and really emphasize her emotions. I reused the same walk cycle from before but just angled it up to have her walk towards the bush and I utilised the same techniques of jerking her arms up and down to show fear and having the tail do a line-boil effect to heighten the fear.
The number one thing I would change about this shot is the pacing of the walk. It would be much more exaggerated and have better anticipation if she was doing a tip-toe towards the bush, trying to stay quiet as to not alert the creature that made the noise. I cut a corner and settled on just re-using the same pacing which was a blunder on my end, I was just getting low on time to animate. I could've utilised my arcs, ease-in and outs and squash/stretch if I went with the tip-toe which would have been much more appealing to look at.
Final Render + Timing Changes
Once I was happy with the way my shots were looking I quickly took them into iMovie on my iPad to piece them together. I wasn't too concerned with adding any fancy edits which is why I choose not to use Premiere Pro for the final render. iMovie allowed me to just add the basics of putting the shots together and adding any fades or transitions (which I opted not to use). Below you can see the first final render before changes,
When I finally looked at all my shots pieced together the biggest thing that was sticking out to me was my Timing. My shots were running a little quick, I didn't give time for the audience to take in the staging, anticipation or the appeal of my exaggerated poses. I showed it to a few of my peers and they also said the same thing. So I sat down and scrubbed through the movie a few times before going through each shot one by one and making a list on Notion of shots that needed better timing or staging. This was the first issue I was talking about in my pre-production blog post. If I had gone through my storyboards and decided the timing for all of my shots before hand I would have known how long to hold each shot before animating. I've really started to understand how timing can affect everything in an animation and its something I'll be looking out for in my later assignments.
As you can see I didn't get everything done on my list but I did use the extra time I had at the end of my assignment to add these quick changes to my shots. The main focus was giving the audience time to take in what was happening in each shot before it would quickly jump to the next one. If I also had the time I would of added the 'Why' shots to the start of the animation. To get a better flow of story I would've added her checking her phone after the first walk cycle to set-up to the audience why she's in the forest. Then I would have added a close up of her face from the front admiring the forest. It would then fade into the shot of the scary landscape following with having her check her phone nervously for the time, to show it has passed.
Below you can see the final full render of the film with the slightly extended shots.
Reflection
Overall im really happy with the outcome of my animation. I was very ambitious with this project but I think I made a solid attempt at making some smooth and well-thought out animations. I was missing quite a few principals when I looked over my work like overlapping, anticipation and my staging. But as im animating more I'm slowly starting to pick up on the things that im missing and I know what I could fix in the future to make my animations look much more solid!
I also completely forgot about composition during this assignment, I was mainly focused on trying to pick camera angles that would focus on showing the body mechanics. I did try and push myself by using close-ups to make sure expressions were shown clearly to the audience or to envoke particular emotions in the audience, but it wasn't the overall priority in my mind. If I were to have a go again, I would take more time in pre-production to solidify my idea and use my storyboards to create more interesting shot compositions.
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