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Week 18 (+ Extension Week)

Sadly, my difficulties with my wrists are only worsening. I’ve been focusing mostly on my lip sync during these weeks, which are taking far longer than I would have anticipated, mostly due to the amount of breaks I’m having to take in order to relieve my pain. Despite this, I’m pretty pleased with how the lineart has turned out so far. I’m unsure whether I’m going to be able to get it entirely done within the time for the deadline, which has me very worried though.

I hope to begin work on my second bestiary scene soon, but once again with my wrist difficulties its making it very hard to work.

I didn’t manage to get much work done on my narrative strategies project sadly, due to the stress I’ve been under with my wrists and ensuring my animations are done. I realise perhaps I should have tried to do more, but by the time I got home after working from 9 til 6-7 every night at uni, my wrist was causing me intense pain and I couldn’t really do much, even just writing on my laptop. I’m really upset about this, but  I’m hoping during the time remaining I might be able to get more work done on this.

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Week 17

During this week, I got the first of my bestiary scenes completely finished! Working from one of the more refined animatics, I fixed the timing up, and went ahead to fix the lineart and ensure that I was acting on model at all times. Overall, I’m pleased with the outcome of this scene, as I think it manages to portray the clumsy-inquisitive personality of the character well. However, during this week, my wrists had started to play up. I’ve had difficulties with them before, and its been getting slowly worse, however this week hit my left one badly. I think due to the fact that I worked for long days on my bestiary scenes, it didn’t do it much good. Hopefully, with rest over the weekend, I will be able to get back up to speed.

I began writing up the screenplay during this week too. My plot outline was still reasonably loose, but I was hoping to fix that with the tutorial at the end of the week. It did end up helping. It turns out that my plot was far more suited to a feature length film than a short film, with too many complex plotlines to portray within a short amount of time. I think that cutting out some of the nonessential characters will shorten the story enough to portray effectively without too many complexities. 

Also, during this week, I managed to get a refined animatic of my lip sync done. I focused mostly on the movements, as I had a mouth chart set out ready for the lip syncing, so it didn’t take long to complete that section. I’m very pleased with the movements overall, and I think it portrays an interesting dynamic and set of movements.

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Weeks 15 & 16

These weeks when I really decided to get down to work on my bestiary work. Managing to get out two more animatics during this time, I was pleased with the way my work was headed. I think These animatics are effective, and despite needing obvious working and fixing for the timings and posing, I think it will work well in order to portray my character well. Looking forward, I think these will be relatively easy to complete during the time I have left. Hopefully! Toward the end of week 16, I started working on the final scene. So far, so good. 

I looked further into the general noir aesthetics during these weeks, creating a Pinterest board of inspiration to help me get more into the groove for writing in this era. I really appreciate the visuals of this era, especially in the films, and I even created a design for how I would like him to look with some spare time I found. I think I’m having trouble fleshing out the story as a whole, but its coming together. 

I didn’t do much work on the lip sync project during these weeks, in order to try to get ahead with my bestiary first, considering there were more scenes I needed to complete for that one.

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Weeks 13 & 14

Progression during these weeks were slow but steady. I was able to get a first, very rough animatic for my bestiary complete, as well as continued work on my character bible. Working on a refined pose sheet and refined turn around before I finished my animatic, I was really pleased with the outcome. Referencing these a lot during my animatics was helpful in order to make sure I kept the form intact and on model. 

I didn’t do too much work on my narrative strategies project during this week, but I did look further into screenwriting, and how to go about adapting this into my own writing. It proved as a bit of a challenge, attempting to memorise the technicalities of the medium, however, I think I’ve managed to get it down pretty well. 

For my lip sync, I decided on working on the ‘time’ clip. I think this one could be quite fun to experiment with. While other clips have the potential of building more of an exaggerated reaction, I think this one could be quite interesting to experiment with more subtle reactions, alongside the exaggerated ones. It’s quite a long clip though, and despite completing an animatic for the entire thing, I think in order to get effective animations in within this time frame, and also thinking forward to the workload I will have, I think it’d be best for me to cut this down.

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Week 12

During this week, I decided to knuckle down more into the narrative ideas, thinking about the possibilities of where my plot could go. I decided the possibility of having it occur in a film noir setting sounded fun. I put some research into other film noir, and animations in particular, and found there was a surprising lack of them. I really enjoyed the rendition of Spider-Man Noir from the Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse movie, and thought the style he was created in was really effective, and a waste of potential if there are no other film noir / gangster film animations around. I think it would work well with the medium, I just need to think of an effective, and not too overly stereotypical plot, while still managing to stick to the conventions of the genre. 

Thinking about the character performance, I first went about designing the characters. Since I heard that one character would be silent while the other spoke, I pondered what kind of characters this could be. Eventually, I thought: ‘What if the silent character were a mime?’ I generally tend to do better animations when I’m able to worldbuild around them, and set out a design and basic personality/occupation/similar things for them. 

For our bestiary, I continued to develop my character, through sketches and poses. I’m pleased with the way it turned out, and I hope to be able to express its full potential and character well in my final animations. I have plans for animatics going forward, and look forward to putting them into action.

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Weeks 10 & 11

Sadly, for a majority of these two weeks, I wasn’t able to attend due to illness and travel related issues. However, I did manage to catch up on what I could at home, and began planning for my bestiary scenes. Character design is something I find very interesting and fun to experiment with, so I was quick to attempt different iterations of my potential creature. I took inspiration from the character by looking at cats, especially my own cat. Observing her behaviour and individual quirks, and wondering how this could apply to a more mythological creature was a fun experiment.  I took pictures of my cat for reference images for posing and the like. Other areas of inspiration I found were lions - particularly the manes, other species of cats, and moths. Also, I wanted to have a slightly disconcerting quality to the character, so in order to achieve that, I took some aspects from humans too. I managed to settle on a design reasonably quickly, and went about developing and improving it from its start point, and going about building a world to surround the creature I had created.

Despite the illness and travel issues, I did manage to get in in order to attend the the first of the lectures during these first two weeks, and I read the second on the VLE when uploaded. The brief for our narrative structures topic was one I was interested in, as adapting a text into something entirely unique sounded like an interesting challenge. Jekyll and Hyde is an interesting tale in itself, and being able to take aspects I liked of it, in order to create my own unique idea was something that appealed to me.

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The supporting cast for my bestiary work is as follows:  An adventurous young girl, who is particularly fond of animals and all things creepy crawly. She finds the main character’s species particularly endearing, and tries to befriend them with not much luck.

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Film Noir Research

Despite the multitude of live action film noir, upon further research, I found there’s a surprising lack of animated film noir. Aside from the cameo of Spider-Man Noir in ‘Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse’ (2018), ‘Film Noir’ (2007) and perhaps films like ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ (1988), there’s quite a gap in the industry. Most films I could find were simply short films, more often than not student films.

I think there’s a lot of potential within the medium to be able to create an effective film noir animation, and I think ‘Into The Spider-Verse’ was able to portray that well. An incredibly stylised genre of film like that, especially the ones based more in the 30s with the black and white film, could create some very interesting styles, especially if adopting similar aesthetics to ‘Spider-Man’. 

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(originally posted by stream)

Spider-Man Noir (Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, 2018) is a brilliant example of how noir film could be adapted into animation. The style, though with a clear lack of colour, emphasises on shape and hue of the black and white in order to give clear silhouettes and an extremely interesting, unique style of animation. Even though the entire film is seen with a very interesting comic book-esque aesthetic, the Spider-Man Noir sequences lend themself to the animation technique extremely well, while still maintaining that iconic film noir feel.

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This was the first test of animation I did for the creature animation. I made it a simple, quick exercise, with enough movement to be able to portray the character reasonably well, as well as how it may react to a surrounding environment. To get a good grasp of how a character might move, I used reference materials from cats, including my own.

This was a video I found particularly helpful. Using the slowed down footage, and comparing it to the length of the limbs and other general parts of my own character, I was able to get a good feel for how a jump might look. Overall, I think it was a pretty successful attempt, however I’m interested in maybe switching the angle, to be able to show more of the character interacting with surrounding environments.