#acm420

[midnightshowing-acm420-fall2019]

Week 16 - Alex - Dénouement

--- Opening Thoughts:

Here we reach the end of the story of this project; the final knot, which took so many threads to tie, yet seemed not long ago to be little more than a tangled mess.  This week, our group achieved more than what seemed achievable, given the time constrains and pressure. And although so much could have gone wrong, this was truly a very ‘right’ conclusion to an epic semester-long project. I’m so very, very thankful, and proud, of each and every member of our our group - without whom this film would never have been possible. And I’m honored to have been a part of what may very well be one of the finest films produced here in ACM Animation since its inception. I also would like to give a huge thanks to all the colorists who made the production pipeline go so much smoother and faster - sacrificing their own time and effort to be a part of something amazing! I also would like congratulate our terrific voice actor Justin Bendo, for his incredible work as the voice of Angel. And to our composer Joshua Namba, who breathed life and vigor into our film through his music.

--- Weekly Deliverables

For my work this past week, a lot has happened, as most of our group can probably agree to. It’s difficult to bring to memory every individual thing, but the core tasks were these: Coloring Sq13s6, a shot I originally roughed for. Although the final version would go on to have some major alterations to Angel, I’m happy to see it least one rough of Phantom I did pretty much stuck all the way to final:

Colored Sq13s16; took a heck of a long time even using pre-programmed inputs for the coloring process. But it turned out good, and due to me needing to use base layers for the characters, Gavin came up with an interesting blending mode for the Old Man which we can see in the final film:

For the next two shots I finished line from last week, plus color and shading for this week. They turned out pretty good I’d say:

We ran into some technical issues when it came to rendering out certain files, and one in particular that comes to mind is Sq9s16, as imaged below.

I don’t know how it was possible to even work on a file this large on Photoshop, with the hardware we have. It was so big that most of our group’s computers couldn’t even open it. Mine struggled big time to load it, let alone render it as an uncompressed .mov. I had to clear almost all my ram, and even then it crashed before finally managing to render it, which only took around 10 minutes (for one shot mind you,) and then uploading it which took a solid three and a half hours. 

This one file almost stopped our whole production. It was amazing, kind of hilarious, and a bit scary, but we managed to pull through. I added a clipping mask to the fire’s lineart to make it orange.

The next thing which ate up a lot of time and energy this week was sound. Basically, I expected have sound done in maybe 5 or 6 hours over the weekend. Turned out it required almost two full days to finalize. Me and Gavin met up to discuss corrections and adjustments, and after some last minute feedback, all the retiming work was done, and we got an incredible audio track. Even though it was a heavy tax on my very tight finals week schedule, I think having those two days to work on it really raised the fluidity and creativity to provide something almost of a remaster to the animatic audio track we’ve been using up to this point. The premiere file itself is kind of a convoluted mess:

Nevertheless, it gets the job done, and taught me a whole lot about sound editing and design over the course of the semester (except organizational skills.)

--- Last Reflections

This semester has been such a momentous one for so many reasons. If 320 taught me “how to work on animation,” then 420 taught me how to work on animation for real. The jump is so tangible, not necessarily in a “workload” sense (although that may be part of it) but more so as an appreciation for the art of animation itself as a collaborative medium, and a visually exploratory one.  I am much more aware now of every element that goes into a piece of work, and I think I can see the great value in attempting to discerning the purpose behind everything we see in Animation, as with any art piece. While it was easy to get away with seemingly arbitrary choices of shape, color, motion and such in the past, it has become especially necessary now to be deliberate in making choice, since the workload falls on someone else’s shoulders.

- Adjustments to the Process in the Future:

Not all of this is necessarily in my control, nor should this be held against anyone or any part of the film making process here, since after all we’re learning and exploring how to work in teams with new techniques. That being said, one thing I would aim to sharpen in the future is the pre-production estimates of workload times/levels, as well as the overall film length. I think I speak for most of us when I say that the film’s scope grew a lot over the course of the semester. And I’m not saying having a large or ambitious idea is bad - that’s my favorite kind of project! But it can become a bit of an issue when it grows to such a scope that we are having to recruit outside helpers and dedicate most or all of the 24 hours we have in a day to be able to manage finishing on time. Basically, just have a more rigid plan from the start, and be very cautious towards anything that adds unnecessary levels of complexity. That’s something that can be addressed at the animatic stage. Beyond that, being more cautious with the estimates of time and energy requirements per shot would help. I noticed that some (or maybe most) of the shots required quite a bit more time than originally intended to be roughed, lined, colored, and shaded. That’s not taking into consideration all the revisions they may go through as they are reviewed, given feedback, and trade hands between group members. Production schedule-wise, it’s much better to undershoot I think, and have a lot of extra time to hammer out details, maybe refine shots, and properly apply feedback versus feeling the dread of being behind schedule and cutting years from your life due to the amount of sleep lost to try and catch up. A general rule of thumb is that specificity helps. Despite how meticulously we planned, we would still occasionally run into issues such as what color a prop might be, or how the shading might change between environments. Or another example might be how a character’s physical attributes such as stretchiness might change or remain consistent throughout the film. Although these were minor things that got addressed in the end, baring those details in mind in the future would be of great help I think.

- Words of Advice to Future 420 Students

You have three options: either become a cyborg, learn to hate sleep, or adapt to being powered by copious amounts of coffee every day. As for me, I took something from all three of those this semester. Joking aside, these are some general pointers I would give to incoming 420 students: -Choose your story and teammates carefully: This semester can be as fun (or unfun) as you make it to be. No matter what though, the people you have at your side are the people you’re stuck with. Hopefully by this point in the major you would be familiar with your teammates and their individual strengths and quirks, so if you’re having trouble picking a team in the beginning, go with the people you feel are the most self-determined, hard working, and whom you can adapt to their mold (not necessarily vice versa.) If you hate your team, you will hate your semester. But if you love your team, it doesn’t matter how tough the work gets, because you can still come to class with a smile (a very dead inside smile.)

-Come in with a strong concept: Even if your idea doesn’t get picked, being able to receive other people’s ideas and represent them faithfully is vital to the overall success of the production. The better you understand the idea you are working on, the better prepared you will be to make it a reality. Also, simple designs and ideas tend to get picked more often. Keep that in mind when developing your idea.

-Diversity is a strength: Having a broad skillset on your crew is incredibly important. Ideally, everyone can functionally perform any given task on the production. But having specialists assigned certain specific tasks is very helpful. It serves to balance the workload more or less equally among members based on their strengths, and the result is a product where you have good work reflected in all aspects of the film.

-Be prepared to change your schedule: Unless your group’s idea is ridiculously simple, chances are you will be losing sleep, possible questioning your choice of major, and being forced to change both when and how you are available to people and things you care about in the world outside the borders of your computer screen. It is not a joke to say that this course can affect your health, your diet, and maybe even the way you view other people - or even yourself! If done properly, this class should challenge you in the way you live and handle work. It should force you to adapt to an animator’s lifestyle. Not that you need to forsake life to be an animator necessarily, but to give you a taste of what the industry may demand of you through certain seasons of life.

-Be able to take a joke: By the end of the project, you’re going to be throwing shots at each other left and right. It is a crazy, whacky time - and you may find yourself forgetting this is all for a school project. Learn to enjoy acknowledging your own weaknesses, and have fun pointing out the flaws in others, when its appropriate. This makes the experience not only more enjoyable, but in a strange, ironic way it makes us become comfortable with our shortcomings, and enables/pushes each other to genuinely improve our skills, and ultimately create a better product.

-Communication is key: You need to keep up with your group. Period. If you are our of the loop for even a day, it can throw things off big time. Setup a chat group via text, setup a Discord server, or find some other means to talk to one another that is reliable. Even if you don’t always feel like chatting, just be ready when somebody needs you (which will happen quite a lot.) Also, having a system of file sharing such as Google Drive is indispensable. You may find yourself keeping certain tabs open and rarely closing them, just to check for updates and be able to send/receive files when you need them. 

-Practice makes perfect: I don’t care how good or bad you think you are at animating up till this point; if you do your best in this class, you will grow. You may find yourself drawing in a different art style than you’re used to, and implementing work methods and software that you’ve never used before. And that’s wonderful! Be open to experimenting and exploring new styles of work. I’ve found that is a big part of what makes animation enjoyable and inexhaustible. Just when you feel like you’re set in your ways, the moment you step into something new, it’s a whole other world, and you just might find something you like about it.That opens the door to not only other ways of being creative, but on a practical level, makes you a much more viable component to a team when being considered for hiring. Don’t let the early hardships bog you down; with time and practice, there’s nothing you can’t do. -- Well that pretty much wraps up this last blog post and the semester for 420. The experience has been life altering, no joke. I have no regrets, and I’m so thankful to have had the chance to work so closely with everyone. In my experience, this class has been the difference between being an animation student and becoming a professional animator. Even though it was as a real challenge emotionally and physically, I would take the class again if I could, and I very much look forward to working with you all - my fellow animators - in our continuing classes, as well as our careers beyond. You all have been my family here while I’ve been without one since moving all the way out here for school.

Thanks to Brittany for teaching our wonderful class! And to everyone who has fought through this semester together and made it something special, right up until the very end. Until next time my friends, this is the Undercover Animator signing out.

[acm420group2fall2018]

Week 15 - Allison Jean Comlat

WE DID IT!! At least.... 90% of it. The entire film isn’t colored, I did not get to put all the sounds I wanted, and the timing gets a little off here. Literally pulled an all nightery with all of my classmates. It was a bad and good experience. I had fun.  Can’t wait to sleep.  My next goal for my group: I want us to finesse the film for the ACM awards and HIFF. 

[allicomlat-blog]

Week 01

In my first week of the semester, I have worked on a pitch idea for my teammates and created a slideshow in Google Docs

My pitch idea is called Crush Hour which is about a young man, who is stuck in traffic, meets a pretty girl that drives the lane directly next to him

Link to my Pitch Idea slide: 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EuCXLMTIHUKCSTxfsYMna-ZVuB_qs0PggLkjLbXx0sA

My idea was inspired on my experiences of driving home during heavy traffic. I live 40 minutes away from campus and I imagined a weird romance story: what if a guy meets this special someone while he was driving home from work? I have not done any intense research for this project. The only research I have done as of now was to find reference pictures of what kind of art style I should go for. 

Also, in the previous class, I worked with my team members to figure out our roles for our short film. I will be taking position as the editor, character designer, animator, and research and development.

[acm320jewelracasablog]

Week 2: Scripts Are a Reminder That I Struggle With My Words

Post Pitch Struggles

After pitching last week, I struggled a lot to determine which short film idea I wanted to work on for the rest of this semester. While I spent a lot of time and effort last semester working on Batik-batik, I’m still struggling with that story a lot and I have lost a lot of passion I had for it at the moment. On the other hand, Araw at Gabi, is a story I’m more passionate about since it’s based on one of the first stories that got me into Filipino folklore and I had a better vision for it. Problem is, I don’t have as much stuff done production wise in comparison to my first film idea. This week was mostly spent making a choice between preparedness and passion. After discussing the issue with my fellow ACM friends and classmates outside of class, at this point, I am leaning more towards my second film idea. (Might use my first idea either for ACM420 or a capstone class eventually).

Scripts, Animatics, & Research (but mostly scripts)

In order to help me make a decision, I started working on the scripts for both films. I thought maybe writing the scripts could help me maybe clear up some of the holes in the story of my first film idea. Writing the script for this film wasn’t too hard in comparison to the other film (which I will talk about later). Having the animatic done already before the script made it a lot easier for me to describe the scenes a lot better. Film 1 Script: *Batik-batik

When it came to the second film, creating the script came with challenges. While I did have a clearer vision for this film, putting it into words wasn’t the easiest. This is mostly because I tend to struggle to put things into words and sentences that are coherent or make sense to people that aren’t me. I did my best to describe the scenes the best as I could. The hardest part was describing the fight scene between Mayari and Apolaki. How does one create a fight scene between gods who are also children but also are fighting as blobs of light in space by just using words? I can see how it would go down in my head but how do I transform visual thoughts into words? In order to ease the the struggle I ended up working on an animatic for the opening (animatic will be in next week’s post). I also researched the visual elements that inspired the style of fight scene I imagined for this film aka fight scenes from the original *PowerPuff Girls. After watching the shot where Blossom and Princess Morebucks are reduced to abstract rapidly moving lights, it became a lot easier for me to put my fight scene into words. Film 2 Script: *Araw at Gabi

Another massive dilemma for these scripts was deciding whether the dialogue should be in English or Tagalog. As of right now, I have the script in English because (a) my first language is English and I’ve only taken 2 years of Filipino language classes and (b) pretty sure most of our class will not understand the script otherwise. 

Despite the struggles, I look forward to working on the animatic some more this upcoming week. Woo!

*The bolded words are links.

[undercoveranimator]

Week 16 - Judgement Day

Today begins the true endgame for this project... 7 days... 7 days of tribulation; Japanese tests, a presentation, a paper, packing and moving out, all in addition to completing this project, which has a minimum of 12 shots remaining, plus still requires audio editing. And on that last day, judgement will be passed as to whether I was in over my head with this project or not.  But it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, I don’t think I could be more proud of what I’ve accomplished so far. Despite being a busier than normal week, with assignments and tests sandwiched all throughout, I somehow managed to complete seven shots, and am well underway to completing the next one. Take a look at the progress I have so far: (WARNING - one shot is a little loud 8 seconds in. Sorry, I forgot to adjust the audio. I recommend turning the volume down a bit first):

Here is a preview of the next shot in progress:

I must say, this project has thoroughly kicked my butt. However, it has also pushed me to adapt, develop strategies, trust my colleagues and their critiques, build a workflow, and create an appealing aesthetic more efficiently than I ever thought possible. A year ago, this really would have been only possible in my dreams. Seeing how far I and everyone else have come this semester makes me so happy and excited for where we will go together in the future. At this point in time, I would say, do not expect the bonus scene to make it into the final in-class cut of the film. However, assuming I do run out of time, I will go back and try to add it as soon as possible. Likely within the first week of summer, to have a complete version to display for future film festivals, and I will post it here as well. My experience on this project has been a true roller-coaster of excitement and growing pains. Animation will probably never be pain-free, but even so, this project has dug deep into the core of my character, trying to uproot me, perhaps more than any other assignment I have ever faced in school. But I refuse to give up. Even if it takes days with no sleep, I swear I won’t let this project beat me. I’ll find a way to finish it, somehow. The major advantage I have now going into 420 and other future projects is hindsight; knowing the sting of this desperation to finish. I think every good animator experiences this at some point. For me, it is my stubbornness that prevents me from falling into despair, but it is also my stubbornness that caused my pain in the first place, since I lost weeks worth of progress due to my refusal to move off of paper and ink at first. Now that the switch has been made however, I think I have a much better comprehension of my workflow and how to be efficient, while still being effective. The delays and setbacks I faced with this project will be compensated for in future ones. 

As for ACM420, whatever capacity I serve my group, I know now that my stubbornness will not slow us down. Rather, I can adapt while still anchoring my group through the storm; make us unmovable, unshakable, and achieve something more than we ever thought we could. Not just for ourselves, but for the whole animation major as well. To the students going into ACM320, my advice is to have a clear vision of your project early on, AND combine it with a work method of bringing your project to completion that can stand up to scrutiny. Mine could not, so I had to change. If your workflow or method is too slow, you must adapt. This class is all about breaking your shell, and transforming you from a novice level animator into an adept one. After this class, you will understand others, and yourself, as animators. Now then, it’s back to work for me. I’ll try to be back next week with a final cut of the film, followed by one more the week after that. Until then, sit down in your chair, sip that coffee, and animate on! This is the Undercover Animator, signing out once again!

[acm420group2fall2018]

Week 10 - Allison Jean Comlat

Lost my voice and a lot of sleep time from the Bruno Mars concert, but damn. It was so worth every penny. I NEED an outlet. I did not have any fun outings much since the semester started and I hated having to hold so much pent up stress of the amount of overloaded animations I gotten do and it won’t stop! I had to miss this one day of class to study for a midterm I did not get to study for (and still didn’t unfortunately..) I can’t believe we’re in week 10. What happened? Things needs to slow down! But anyways, I’d just like to say that this weeks crunch time has been such a nightmare for me. The last time I worked on one of the scenes (I was nearly finished animating it), ToonBoom just completely crashed on me and it didn’t even save me a crash file nor save up from when I last saved it. It was SUPER IRRITATING.  I am highly impressed with everyone’s animations and although it is a challenge to keep the style exactly the same, I really do like seeing the subtle differences each person animates a character, it is amazing. What I would like to do is start figuring out what parts to take out or keep in, so that way it makes it more easier for me to edit all the pieces of the movie together for the final film! Great job everyone!

[acm420group2fall2018]

Week 05- Allison Jean Comlat

My group is still in the process of Pre-Production mode but we are slowly making our transition from pre-production to production. I have been working on the animatic and have a revision to the opening of Traffic Trip as well as adding additional sounds. I want to thank Londy for helping out with finding extra sounds and Shayne for contributing his temp voice for Stefan. Rina will be the possible temp voice for Nohea and I will be the temp voice for Lilikoi (in case we don’t find the right bark sfx needed lol and just for fun). 

As of now, Shayne is working on the backgrounds for the animation as well as the revised storyboards alongside with Sean. I also thank Rina for finishing a final screenplay draft for the film and for Sage for being a great director with the story direction for the film! 

The benefits of us finding the time to meet at the iLab to work on the film is to not only find time to have discussions to improve our film, but we are also bonding together as a group and with a great bonding team, we are able to work together to make a solid film! Keep up the great work guys :)

[acm420group2fall2018]

Week 14 - Allison Jean Comlat

All I did was a couple of edits for the 420 film. Just added a couple of new shots into the film but no sounds were edited in. We are headed towards the last week of the film and the pressure is on for sure. I don’t think we’ll be getting sleep any time soon. Coffee and crying sure sounds like what I am gonna be dealing with this week.  Ahhhhhh…. 

[acm420group2fall2018]

Week 09 - Allison Jean Comlat

This has got to be the worse contribution I could provide for this week: but I did not progress with anything for the 420 film. My screenplay class has been giving me the hardest time of this week that it has affected all of my progress for all of my classes (so stressful af..). I am very worried for this film and its completion tried to do by the end of the semester.  A 90% of our group members has been meeting at the Keller Lab when I am around and have been working on their assigned shots. This is a good progress. Progress is progress! I promise to start animating my shots starting next week and getting my free trial of ToonBoom so that I could work at home. November is gonna make us or break us. Meetings are gonna be very vital for us. 

[acm420group2fall2018]

Week 08 - Allison Jean Comlat

I have FINALLY updated the full length of the animatic (both first and second half) of the story reel and the length of it came out to 4 minutes and 41 seconds. The timing, sound effects, and the possibility of cutting off any extra scenes will have to be discussed.  Sean, Londy, Shayne and Rina have all stopped by the Keller Lab to work on their assigned scenes. Sean and Londy have also been working on the Nohea rig and will continue to work on the remaining rigs. They will also need to work on different facial and hand assets as well.  I am kinda afraid of how much of the film we can finish to the end. The end goal now is to have a good quality film while still sending a message that still makes sense to the audience. 

[acm420group2fall2018]

Week 07- Allison Jean Comlat

This week, we have started animating our short film. Shayne has created a Animation List of sequences for our film and that each of us are assigned a sequence for us to complete. There are six people in the group and that our goal is to at least have each of us complete two or more shots each in order to push our film to completion. If people have more time in their schedule, they are able to animate more shots for the film.  Also, this week is the official opening for Keller. The downside for the iLab is that there is no ToonBoom for us to animate in. This will benefit the group a lot since there are multiple cintiqs for us to use to draw our scenes.  If anyone is just as stressed as me, just remember, you are not alone ; ~;