mi6015harrystubbs

[mi6015harrystubbs]

This is the most recent update to my animation.

[mi6015harrystubbs]

I needed to make a scene of the Rabbit running and I have been struggling to figure out how this should look so I went back to the basics and looked at one of the design inspirations for the characters shape being Pikachu, who is very Rabbit like in shape. This GIF I found online is from a Pokemon game but it quite simple and smooth and I am going to try to make my Rabbit move like this.

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Clips I uploaded to Youtube of my Rabbit. These are used for refrence footage in some ways but mostly for the sound. I tried to get him to run around, eat and play as Rabbits make a unique grunting sound when happy. It is quite so I might have to cut it out and make it louder but some of the eating sound effects will definitly work.

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This is a mock up of the scenes done so far. 

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I broke down the sequences in a simple but quick way to help me understand where this is going. 

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I made screen shots for each second to improve the timing more.

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To get the timing right on the eating scene I reinacted how I wanted it to look with a toy. 

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WARNING! Turn audio down to about 50% before watching. Sorry.

This is the two scenes put together with some audio. I didn’t add much but this is a quick demo of the kind of sounds I am going to add to the item scene. These sound effects are far from final and I intend to record my own and improve them.

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This is the animatic for the follow up scene. I will tweak it more when it comes to polishing it up because the timing is a bit off at points but I think a lot of it works well for an early draft.

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This is the scene I recorded as a refrence for the item throw scene. I lean out of shot but I got what I needed from it.

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I created an animatic for the “item throw” scene. I recorded my self throwing items out of a laundry basket in a manar I wanted the Rabbit to do. While I worked on this scene I had the refrence footage up on my phone to get the body language accurate.

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I initially wanted to use TV Paint to create this animation but I also wanted the ability to work from home as well as the ability to work over weekends so I looked for alternative solutions. I decided to test out Krita, a free software that isn’t exclusively designed for animation but has an easy to understand and use animation layout and within a a day of learning I produced this short 2 second animation of a personal character of mine smiling. This was to prove I could create a smooth animation with this software and in my opinion, I have succeded. 

I wanted to try out Open Toonz as well and compare which I thought worked best for me. Open Toonz seemed promising as I knew it was the software Studio Ghibli uses but opon loading it up in seemed more complicated to learn. I could have pushed through and figured it out I am sure but time was moving on and I thought since Krita used well I would just stick with it.

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Clip of one of the scenes from Wallace and Gromit that helps show what I am going for.

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I made a story board which extends an idea I had to make it longer but more importantly more intersting. I had the idea of the Rabbit searching through the top hat for his want but included finding a bunch of unusual objects that you wouldn’t expect a Rabbit to have for comedic effect and then throwing them away. I thought the sound design could be put to good use here with the vase smashing off screen and the bowling ball having the sound of pins being knocked over. I really got excited coming up with this scene and think it is funny and could be a highlight. 

The other was the Rabbit attempting to do a trick by flipping the hat onto his head but instead of it landing, it just spins in mid air forever, the Rabbit observes it with curiosity. The way I imagined him observing this is similar to reactions by Shaun the Sheep where he would observe things with very animated expressions and body language due to him being a silent character.

That same joke would be again shown when he successfully flips the hat onto his head but this time he taps it with his wand and accidently sends it blasting off into the sky, leaving him covered in soot. This, and the previous scene were inspired by Roman Signer “sketches, one folwing one he done closely but also just the reactions of staring off and observing the strange thing that just happened. But like the last clip I was also thinking about Wallace and Gromit, noteably the scene in A Grand Day Out when Wallace kicks a football up on the moon and waits for it to fall but it doesn’t. These reactions and fit well and I think I want to encorporate these ideas into my project.

I did a rough sequence of events. I discussed maybe not having it all flow into each other but I do like them transitioning into the next one quite a bit. I tried to come up with 10 ideas again to in theroy last about 10 seconds each but didn’t manage to come up with two more. I am not going to worry about it too much right now, I think they will come to me and I am not even 100% sure I will need them as some of these ideas maybe longer than 10 seconds.

[mi6015harrystubbs]

Changes

I watched through my animatic and made a note of what I want to keep and what I want to cut and why.

First of all as stated I want to abandon the domestic house setting so that includes the background of the cage, table, door and other furniture. In extension this includes all inclusion of the Human and as a result no sneaing around in the box. I don’t know if I want to discard every mention of the box as my initial idea of animating a Rabbit and having it do things that Rabbits do does extend to them playing inside boxes but I if I do use the box it will be different and I will not have him sneaking around inside it. Similarly, the context for certain things may change like the eating of hay. I always wanted to include this and I am keeping it but having it come from a bag of hay that has fallen to the floor may change but to be honest I don’t think it was entirely clear that is what had happened in my animatic as is. 

Pretty much everything else I want to keep as it was all the stuff in my research and planning and where my animatic is strongest but maybe I will tweak events, make bits longer or shorter if they need it but in general I want to keep the events fairly similar. I want to have this simplified so it isn’t too hard to follow along to and keep the idea in check throughout the project. One idea of simplifying events is that I liked how it begins where it ends with the Rabbit returning to his hat to start his day again so I could kill two birds with one stone and have the dream part take place after he returns to the hat to make it more apparent he has gone to sleep but also so it doesn’t feel as forced in the middle of the animatic.

This has got me excited and worried about where I am going with this as on one hand I can remove some stuff I wasn’t as pleased with but also those things where included to push it over two minutes so I don’t really know how I will reach that time but this all may come naturally as I work on my project more.

[mi6015harrystubbs]

Improvements

I got some very basic feedback that I can take into consideration and most of which I agree with. 

First of all the pros were the Rabbit character and the Hat idea. It was really apparent that my focus was on the character animation and that is where my animation should be focusing itself. 

The things to cut and change are not making it so much of a plot, the domestic setting and the backgrounds should be changed and the music and sound effects need work.

I feel I tried to fill 2 minutes with my animatic and it may have suffeed for it. Adding the “Human” didn’t feel like too big of an oversight as my intention was to provide context to what is happening in my animation but it began turning into a story where that wasn’t what I was going for. Part of it became about the Rabbt hiding from the Human when there was no real reason for this since this starts and ends with a Magic Rabbit. It was kind of telling that these were the later additions to my animatic. 

Also the music is repetitious and a little annoying which I failed to recognise when working extensively on it and it needs to be a lot better. I will focus more time on my sound effects and the background music.

Alot of the early ideas such as the Rabbit running around and eating and such are things I feel like I will want to keep but I need to fugure how much context I need to provide for these things withouth falling into the same trap as I did last time. Animating this character is what I want to do and him being a Rabbit is important to that as I focused a lot of research on that idea in my research to begin with. But some improvments, cuts and new ideas need to be mixed together to make it work as well as it can.

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The Top Hat is supposed to be where the Rabbit lives and what is evident through how he fits in and out of it and how he searches for his wand inside that it is “bigger on the inside, than it is on the out” which is reminisent of Mary Poppins Bag or Hermoinies back from Harry Potter but more so for me it is like the TARDIS in Doctor Who. 

I don’t fully know how much of this concept I will dive into and even what I will specificall aim for but thinking about optical illusions and a large interior space I think of two specific scenes from Doctor Who, the one shown in screenshots here is a sequence from the 2012 Christmas Special “The Snowmen” where for the first time in the series history the camera follows the characters into the TARDIS with no cuts which is imprssive since obviously the TARDIS is a concept that can’t exist in the real world so it looks spectaular. Through animation this may be possible to pull off to some extent to maybe show the idea of the Hat more.

The Doctor even acts like this is some sort of magic trick in the scene.

This isn’t something I am certain I will take forward and I will have to consider ideas and brain strom but this is what initially comes to mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHHTw-chJ64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af3MIt2EZNg