shayesanimation-collab

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Final thoughts

I am actually fairly happy with the direction this project is heading in. The idea of using ‘stings’ to act as a full length animation is not an idea I would have come up with myself, but I think it is perfect for everyone to experiment and showcase their skills. It offers the freedom for us all to develop whatever we want, yet still have it tie in with everything that everyone else is doing in the group. It is a breath of fresh air to have so much freedom on a project to develop an idea that everyone likes, yet still work with other people to develop our ideas. I think everyone is working great within the group and we all bounce off each other wonderfully. I think it's going to make for a really well functioning workflow throughout the later stages of this project. Due to the amount of stress and trouble I had with the personal project, I feel like I did not have enough free time to truly develop this pre production as much as I would have liked to have done, however when the project starts I am excited to get stuck in and really challenge myself with new art styles and animation techniques.

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Finished group animatic

Above is the finished animatic for our film. We are all really happy with how it came out and are excited to see it progress.

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Collecting group animatics

Below is the order we decided to place our our animation. We wanted to start with Katherine's slightly darker themed animation and end with my darker one, in between we choose to add the rest of the groups more comical animations to provide more of a flow to the overall piece. We are all really happy with the running order so Penny is going to edit together the clips tonight.

Katherine

Esme

Katie

Jack

Penny

Me

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Transitions and intro screen

In order to help our individual animatics all connect together Katherine put together a quite into screen and in-between segment for our animations. We chose to add tv static in between each segment to give the impression of someone flipping through channels, and personally I think it looks great. All in all I am pretty excited to see how this project develops having seen all of the individual pieces.

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Personal Animatic 

This week I focused on getting my storyboard converted into an animatic. I stuck with a lot of the same theme and colours from my initial style frame as I genuinely like what I produced there, so didn’t see the need to fix what wasn’t broken. The overall pacing I am happy with in my animatic, I think it shows the decrease of childhood imagination very well. I added sounds to my child running and more dull and and muted sounds as he gets older, such as echoey footsteps and a creaky door. Next week we aim to get all of our animatics together in full length animatic for submission.

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Personal Animatic

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Updated Treatment

After having a discussion about our project, we were able to update our treatment to include a more detailed description of what we aim to achieve. 

We also included what we all individually hope to get out of this project. For myself, I stated that I hoped to ‘Expand and develop use of new art styles within limited confines. Become braver with stepping outside the box.’ I didn’t intend for that last line to be a pun of my film, but I’m going to own it.

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Concept and Style Influences

In terms of the overall theme of the film, I take reference from the contrast between Toy Story 1 and 3, showing woody growing older and outgrowing his childhood interests.

I take a lot of influence from the screen grabs above, the idea of showing a young and old Andy in the same place with a few key differences to represent his growing age and yet still remind the audience of the character he once was. This is a similar feel to eh idea I am trying to put across in my wardrobe shot. I want the audience to be able to clearly identify that the man in the shot is the boy from the first scene. 

In terms of style, I’d love to get a ‘Feast’ look to my film in terms of hard lighting in contrast to dark and our of focus background, I feel like this technique provides a lot of emotion and power within a scene so I would love to try and encapsulate some of this into my own theme. 

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Storyboard

For my storyboard, I decided to keep to the same story concept that I put forward for my style frame. I wanted to depict a small child who finds a sense of creative limitlessness within a basic box, though this wonder fades away as he grows older.

I began by opening with a scene of the boy running down a path dressed in the box and pretending to be an airplane. The camera would pan from a side angle of him to a front angle to show that this is simply a box and nothing more, it also helps the viewer to notice all the small details about the boy and the box so they can pick up on such cues later. Once the camera reaches the front of the boy it zooms in on his pilot goggles that rest on his head. before fading to black. When the scene re appears we see that we are looking at the same goggles many years later hanging out of the box in a darkened space. When the camera zooms out we notice that the box and goggles are tucked away much out of sight in a wardrobe, long forgotten.

After establishing the shot, footsteps can be heard off in the distance. The boy, now a man, appears in form of a silhouette looking fairly stressed over an unknown reason. He pauses by his desk and sighs before noticing the wardrobe door is ope. He approaches the wardrobe implying a false hope that maybe he is going to acknowledge the box once again, however once reaching the wardrobe he swiftly grasps the handle and closes the door, shrouding the scene in darkness.

I wanted to give an almost ‘Toy Story-esque’ feel to the film to show how childlike means of occupying time become long forgotten as we grow older and adult responsibility begin to dominate our lives. 

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Deciding on a group name

Following our group meeting we thought it would be best to try and decide on a possible name for our film, which proved difficult due to the diversity of the project as a whole, some names that were thrown around included..

The Weird Collective

Loops Collective

Ani-Weird

Weirdmations 

We’ve decided to bare these in mind and come back to this on a later date, possibly when we have all our animatics edited together?

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Group Meeting

We spent most of the meeting talking about ways we would be able to get our films linked together in a way that allowed us the freedom to animate what we wanted, yet still fit together within one film. After a while the idea of possibly having the film set up like somebody flicking through TV channels was put forward, and we all agreed this would be a fun a efficient way to get our films together. the old style of static appearing between channels would be a perfect purposefully jarring transition between all of our flips and would allow us to play around with comic timing etc. 

Following this development, we have decided to all go off and work on out storyboard an animatics ready to begin planning the film out as a whole.

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Feedback

The general feedback we got was fairly positive, people liked the idea of the ‘sting’ style film we were going for as it gave us the opportunity to all independently create something we were proud of. 

The main issue that arose was how we would go about tying all the pieces together so they all fit into one film and didn't just appear randomly stitched together. We received a lot of advice when it came to how we would go about doing this from having it as part of a rolling narrative, to making it all into one consistent theme. We have decided we will all meet up in the next couple of days to decide the best way for us to go about this. 

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Treatment

For our treatment, we put together a initial slide that detailed the basic roles we would all be filling, then moved onto a secondary slide that provided a brief synopsis of the concept for our film. We wanted to focus to be on the whole ‘independent segments’ of the film yet still managing to keep it consistent and quirky. 

I think the description does a good job of getting our idea across as we worried people might not understand what it was we were trying to achieve. On the following slides we included the style frames we each put together.

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Esme’s Title Example 2

At this stage, Esme decided that she would in fact like to animate a segment for the film, so put together what could be a possibly theme idea (Transformation) and the animated title that would appear before it. 

We are all pretty happy with how these frames look and could help tie our ideas together a lot more fluidly. 

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Esme’s Title Example 

Above is a title frame example put together by Esme to show the frames that could appear before everyone's segment, she chose Penny’s to provide an initial concept for the group. 

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Completed Style Frames

Below are everyone's selected style frames for the treatment. Esme has chosen to work on the transition animatics as she is working on a number of different projects so would like to focus more on being a producer as opposed to an animator on this specific project. Except for Katherine and I, everyone chose completely different colour pallets and themes, so it made for an interesting selection of style frames that all tell their own stories.

Penny - Drag Queens

Sián - Growing Up

Katie - Farmer Drama

Jack - Advertising

Katherine - Fears

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'Growing up’

After looking back over the list, I have decided on the idea of ‘Growing up’ as I feel like this is a theme we can all relate too. 

I put together the concept sketch seen above to show the possible beginning and end frames for my animation. The idea being a boy is seen playing within a cardboard box that he is using his imagination to turn into an airplane to show how children can make anything out of anything. The scene would then transition to show the boy in his elder years completely uninterested in the box, leaving it in a cupboard and using it for its actual purpose- storage. This represents how as we grow older we lose our childlike wonder in being able to see the potential in items past what they were designed to do.  

I chose the above colour pallet for my style frame as I felt the blues and darks allowed enough contrast to be seen as both a pure scene and a cold scene, representing the contrast in the two age gaps. 

Above is my finished style frame when combined with the colour pallet, I am quite happy with how the frame came out as I tries out a style of line-less art for a bit of stylistic quirk. This is not a style I normally draw in so I would be interested to experiment with this in terms of developing my own style.

When it came to the actual character of the boy, I chose to leave him both faceless and silhouetted to allow the option to self project onto him as a viewer to allow people to better connect with the theme of growing older as it is something that all of us experience throughout our lies.