timpac-capstone

[timpac-capstone]

Final Spring Update: Motus Mentis

Well, this is it, the end of my Stevens Institute of Technology undergrad art journey. Motus Mentis was a huge success! Not only were there a lot of people from Stevens but the alumni from last year came too, as well as my Mom and my friends from high school. It was definitely surreal seeing all these points of my life collide together in this one room and it made it a bit overwhelming to try and socialize because of how many people I wanted to talk to.

I'll be real, I finished the animation 30 minutes before the doors opened. I had something presentable beforehand but I felt like there were still a few things that needed to be tweaked or were missing. The morning of Motus Mentis I woke up super early to do the credits and an entire cut from scratch, that means I sketched it, timed it, outlined it, colored it, and drew in the background all the while also trying to dress and prepare myself for the exhibition. It was the cut where Dillon turned in his bed, at first I thought I didn't need it but as I kept playing that scene back over and over while working on the sound it felt like we switched between the brain room and the bedroom a bit to fast, it worked but I felt like the timing could be better. When I got to Monira I was just working on a few more timing things such as the 3 zoom-ins on the TV towards the end of the animation. I didn't like how I timed it initially and exporting those was annoying because of them being 3 separate layers that had their own image sequences. I also was able to find some elementary school background noise for the presentation memory which was bothering me constantly that this scene sounded too quiet. Anyway, I was able to make all the adjustments I wanted before the doors opened and a lot of people liked it. They said they found it funny and relatable which is a good thing since that was what I was going for. The most common question I got was how long it took me to make the animation, which you can find out from reading this blog but all of March was the actual animation part while half of January and most of February was the animatic.

What was a major shocker for me was the VHS tapes. I had almost zero confidence that this aspect of my project would be a success because of how much pushback I would get during the critiques. At most, I thought that I would have maybe 5 participants but I ended up having 27, probably even more cause some told me they only did one memory. They were also really glad that I set this up because it made the project feel a lot more personal to them, a lot of people told me that as they were watching they couldn't help but to think about what their most embarrassing and happy memories would be so it was a great way to express themself in the moment. Some of them would even come up to me and tell me exactly what they wrote, mostly they told me the embarrassing memories rather than the happy ones so I'm glad I was able to help people be less nervous about talking about this topic. And for any future Stevens students reading this, this is a great example of if you have an idea that you genuinely think will do great and believe it will tie everything together then you should fight for it despite what others may say.

My mom recorded a few videos of the opening day.

If you haven't already you should definitely check out Bedtime on my YouTube channel. The only difference in this version is that after the Special Thanks the card doesn't read "FEEL FREE TO STEP OVER TO THE TABLE ON THE RIGHT AND REMINISCE ON SOME OF YOUR OWN MEMORIES" and then it would loop back to the beginning.

Great way to wrap everything up.

[timpac-capstone]

Spring Update 5: Gallery Setup

A week ahead of the setup we visited Monira to take a look at the space and plan out where everybody was going to set up. There was a bit of confusion between the staff and us because they wanted to initially give us the space from last year's Capstone which was in the basement. Personally, I was a bit nervous about that space since I know some of the residents there were not very kind to the alumni last year so I really wanted as minimal drama as possible. They then showed us this second room which was super tiny and white, perfect for people doing projections but terrible for everybody else. There were like 4 people that wanted to do projections but then only one person ended up doing it so it worked out. The third space was the one we chose, it was very spacious allowing ample amount of room for everybody's project and for visitors to move around the space. I also interned at Monira as a videographer during this time and this space was super close to my boss's office so if we ever needed help with anything we only had to walk a minute or 2 to get to her office.

This is a general video of what the capstone setup day was like. I'm an intern at Monira so my boss asked me to record my class setting up their artwork. Unfortunately, nobody recorded me while I was setting up so you just have to settle for a few pictures. It wasn't that complicated anyway, just mounting the TV to the wall and stapling the bags to the table. I was a bit scared that I might mess up the wall or install the TV at an angle when setting up but I had help from both my professor and classmates. From what I remember you want the midpoint of the TV to be 60" off the ground since that is the general eye level for most people. To play the video I tried using one of the Lupa Players but it ended up not working, for some reason every time the video went from one frame to another it would glitch out whatever was moving. Also, the audio from the Lupa sounded very static-like but the audio from the TV was fine. Thankfully the TV has a USB port and headphone jack so I just plugged it inside there and then had to download a video player app from the Google Play Store that had good picture quality and would let it loop, I don't remember which one it was cause I had to go through a couple but maybe it was MX player.

My boss at Monira was nice enough to let me borrow the table from their office. Originally I was gonna use one of those foldable tables cause I didn't want to spend all my capstone budget on a heavy wooden table I would immediately have to throw out the next day so thankfully this one was here. I put 7 VHS tapes to see how the stacks would space themselves out. The bags were probably the most challenging to make for this setup. I had to walk to a drugstore at the PATH Station to buy some safety pins because using a stapler wasn't working. The main issue was I needed the bottom to be rounder and for the opening to be smaller. This took a lot of trial and error with how everything was pinned together and some cardboard to get the exact look that I was going for. The bags had to be stapled to the table with a staple gun before I could do any of this so I know how much length of material I am able to work with, I only had to readjust them once but it does take a while to remove all the staples. Finally, the instructions were printed on cardstock from the Fablab and then taped down with double-sided tape.

Final look before the day of the exhibition.

The Uber ride home

[timpac-capstone]

Spring Update 4: Setup and VHS tapes

Every spring update from now on will be about the setup leading up to the capstone rather than tips on putting an animation together. My idea for the setup hasn't changed since the fall semester. I wanted people to write down one happy memory and one embarrassing memory on VHS tapes and then put those tapes into their respective bags. This is an aspect of my project I had to constantly fight my professors over because they kept on trying to overcomplicate it no matter how confidently I answered their questions about my setup. In my mind everything was simple, you had a table with two burlap sacks and stacks of VHS tapes. After audience members watched my animation they would come over to the table and read the instructions. They would do as instructed and they would walk away having a more personal connection to my project. It was very frustrating to constantly explain the same thing over and over to my professors and then them respond with "You should think more about this". There is literally nothing to think more about, if the audience member doesn't get it they don't get it or they will have a friend who understands it who can explain it to them and quite honestly I had a million other things I had to "think more about" for my animation so I wasn't going to split hairs over this thing unless they had an actual suggestion like table placement or where I could find VHS tapes. Anyway, before I bought anything I made a very cheap mockup of my setup with household items that were lying around. I then asked my roommate if he could do a little test run for me and tell me if there was anything that confused him. He said that the last sentence of the instructions was a bit unnecessary and it threw him a bit off but besides that, he understood what he had to do.

I had 71 tapes in total, 61 of those came from a Facebook market post in Toms River, NJ which cost $25 while 10 of them were brand new VHS tapes that came from Amazon which cost $80. Honestly, this was a decision I constantly was mulling over because based on my professors' reactions I had no idea if this would be a complete flop or not. So I had to decide if it was worth shoveling the extra $25 of my own money so that I have a more appealing-looking setup or if I should just buy whatever the capstone budget can get me. Thankfully I bought the extra VHS tapes because it ended up being a great success and a lot of audience members were coming up to me to give me praise for having this extra thing in my project! Thank god too, for the amount of time it took to peel off all the stickers with my fingernails and some rubbing alcohol could have been used to complete my animation a week early. I did get a few comments where some people thought that this was a separate piece from the animation but oh well, I had like 16 VHS tapes that were not used so I would consider it a success. The only problem is that the sticker paper I got from Amazon is a bit too good so trying to peel off the memories has been a very difficult challenge.

[timpac-capstone]

Spring Update 3: Sound and Voice Acting

Most sound effects that I used, or at least the good ones, came from splice.com. They are a paid subscription but they do have a 1 week free trial you can use. Just download a video & audio recording software like OBS and you can record the sounds from the website that way. I would use YouTube for the more popular and specific sounds that everybody has heard before, so a stock wipe transition or the Tickle Belt Theme from Sponge Bob. If you try to only download sounds from YouTube it may take a while to find something that is useful or to find a variety of the same sound that all sound good, such as the punch sound effects.

Sometimes it might be worth it to do some foley work yourself. I had the most trouble finding a good cloth sound effect for the blanket and the empty bags. At first, I tried using my actual blanket but it did not give the desired sound I wanted and my bedframe itself is really loud whenever I move. So I experimented with a few other cloth-based materials and finally, I grabbed my towel from the bathroom and it was perfect. It had the right amount of subtleness that I wanted and I could control the length of time I ruffled it. Other places I used foley work was sifting through the popcorn bucket by making my own bag of popcorn and then sifting through that, the crunching sounds of the popcorn were actually me eating Doritos cause crunches from chips are louder than crunches from popcorn, the VHS tapes moving around was me fidgeting with a VHS tape since I had 71 of those laying around and I asked my mom to bring our old VHS player up to Hoboken so I can record any subtle sounds it makes, and then Dillon washing his face was me washing my face with CeraVe Foaming Facial Cleanser.

The Zoom mics can pick up a lot of background noise, so did my HyperX Solocast, and many of the sounds from YouTube. This video shows a variety of methods you can get rid of background noise in Adobe Audition, highly recommend giving it a watch if this is what is bugging you.

It's also a good idea to record some white noise for your animation, this includes indoor scenes. Usually, when there is absolute silence between pauses when characters are talking it feels awkward or when there are only footsteps and clothes moving. It's also a great way to distinguish different settings from each other. Dillon's room uses the white noise from my own room while the white noise in the brain room is from the bunker. I tried using the same white noise throughout the animation but whenever we transitioned to a different setting it felt like the same place rather than two separate settings.

The one thing I severely regret not doing is not taking advantage of some of the Music Tech equipment Stevens has. They have an entire soundproof booth for voice recording in the back left of the studio on the third floor of Kiddie 350 and a bunch of professional microphones and headphones that sound 1000x better than the stuff I was using. I have a Music Tech friend who is also a monitor at the studio and I have known about this since the fall semester. The reason why I didn't do it earlier was because I was just shy about people looking at me trying to voice act. I also didn't know what was the policy about Vis Tech students using the Music Tech stuff but I'm sure if I just emailed some professor about it we could have worked something out, especially since the Music Tech people use equipment from the Fablab all the time. They can also help you out with sound effects as well, I had a tough time trying to find a music cue for the last scene when Dillon closes his eyes. I wanted it to be something like the Smiling Friends ding music cue when they get somebody to smile but I couldn't find it by itself on Youtube. That was until I showed it to my Music Tech friend and he plugged a bunch of things into the keyboard and I got exactly what I needed. However, I only used these good mics for stuff like grunts, snores, and screams. If I used my normal mic it would either peak past the point of it being fixable or it was too quiet and the background noise would always creep in. Also, since I was still unsure of bringing in other actors at this point it's going to be much harder to coordinate a time when all 3 of us, me, my Music Tech friend, and my actor, could be in the studio together at the same time. To keep audio quality consistent I decided it would be best just to use my mic for actual dialogue and the good mic for stuff my mic physically can't perform, also just to make my life easier cause it took a while to get some of these takes. For any future Stevens students that are reading this you 100% know at least one Music Tech major since a lot of them will take the art classes as humanities so it doesn't hurt to reach out to them and ask if they can bring you to the studio, the worst they can say is no.

Instead of the booth, I used the Fablab equipment room for recording the female Vis Tech/Theater Club student voice actor. It's pretty soundproof in there except for a vent that makes a tiny rattle noise but that can easily be taken out if you watch the YouTube video I linked, just record some dead noise as a sample and you'll be fine. However, I had access to this place because I am a Fablab monitor so I can't guarantee that the faculty will let you do what I did. Also, even though I did say this place is soundproof, what I mean by that is that it doesn't echo when you talk into the mic and doesn't pick up a lot of white noise. But the walls are thin so if it's an active day you can hear people from the teacher's offices or the laser cutter room. Also, Fablab people are constantly gonna walk in to get equipment and you'll just be in their way so it's best to go in there outside of their active hours which I highly doubt they would let you do. But again it doesn't hurt to ask.

For the actual voice acting part I'd say, just have fun with it. You obviously don't have the budget to hire one professional voice actor let alone several professional voice actors so the only way to get a good performance is just by experimenting. I have never done any voice performative work or any stage acting. The only actual acting I've done is in my videos and a lot of that acting is pretty much the same character so to play like 6 different characters and trying to make them each distinctive was a big challenge. And if it wasn't obvious from this post I do get very self-conscious whenever I do show my performative pieces. But somewhere in February I just said "Fuck it, I'm never gonna see these people ever again after this is over, I don't care if this is the most cringy shit anybody has ever seen, I need these voice clips for the critique". Once I stopped caring about people judging me the voice-acting part became a lot easier, obviously the first take you get from yourself or from others is not going to be what you want because your job as the director is trying to find that voice. Sometimes that means randomly moaning into the mic from exhaustion because you can't figure out how to sound like a fourth grader and then playing as an anime character cause you thought it was funny but eventually, you'll find it. Also if you get your friends involved try to make it fun for them too cause they are in an unfamiliar situation as well and they are pretty much doing you a favor even if you're paying for their time. This girl that I hired I was under the impression that she didn't like me so even asking her to be a part of my project was a bit nerve-wracking but as I keep saying it won't kill you to just ask and surprisingly she agreed. And then on the day of the recording, I just asked her simple questions like "How has your day been so far?" and then tried to have a mini conversation about that or show some of the funny bloopers from when I was voice acting. I believe it helped loosen us up a bit to each other and the further we got into the session the less awkward I felt. Also, doing all the voices on your own first, even if it's a really shitty voice, can make it significantly easier for your actors to understand what type of performance you want them to go for.

Finally, we move on to the actual sound mixing. Once you clean up all the audio in Adobe Audition you should then port all of those into Premier Pro, including all the takes you don't want. When you splice clips together you never know what take from one actor might work the best with another take from a different actor. With the female actor, I think we did like 5 or 6 takes to get the ending part of the teacher exactly the way I thought would work, and then I ended up using the 2nd or 3rd take because it flowed better when I cut it up a bit and played it back with my performance in context with hers. Other times I would speed up/slow down/reverse or pitch correct certain sound effects I thought were bad at first but then became what I wanted them to be when I did those manipulations. Something I would not recommend doing is leaving all of this stuff last minute, most of the sound mixing I did the day before the Capstone exhibition which drove me insane. I had to constantly replay the same clips and listen to the same sounds and jokes over and over again throughout the day to see if everything was playing well together and then obviously I would have to play everything from the beginning once it was rendered to make sure the sound was consistent throughout the whole animation. You don't want to force your audience to manually turn up and down their headphones as they watch your piece otherwise they won't watch it all the way through. Definitely give yourself a week because the sound in an animated short is just as important as the visuals themselves.

[timpac-capstone]

Spring Update 2: Revised Animatic and Animation has Started.

After showing the initial animatic at a critique and to a couple of friends and professors, the common consensus was that it dragged on too long. This is the third version of the animatic, the second version had the montage scene replaced with a 3-hours-later card, and the golden tape scene was removed. From the critique a lot of people didn't get the golden tape scene, what I intended with it was that people would project their own worst memory into it instead of me trying to make it my worst memory, which is the marco polo game in the script. They also thought I should get rid of the montage scene which I personally liked but I tried it out just to see how things worked out. It still seemed a bit choppy and dragged on until I emailed the first draft to last semester's capstone professor and she had a lot of critiques about the basketball scene. That's when a lightbulb went off in my mind, "What if instead of trying to fix it I just remove it". And oh my god the animatic worked so much better and thank god because that scene had a lot of moving parts and complicated backgrounds that I didn't even know if it would be possible to animate at my skill level. Don't get me wrong it did hurt a little to delete a week's worth of work but that's how it is when producing an animation.

Highly recommend reading this book for your observational research during the fall semester. I was an idiot and started reading it in the spring so I barely got halfway through it before I had to start the actual animation process but what I did read was very useful. The main reason why I didn't read it beforehand was because I hate reading books, I feel that video tutorials are way more efficient and easy to understand than reading 400 pages but this book has a lot of pictures and the author's personality really shines through which makes it fun to read. However, you should be highlighting and writing notes on the side of the pages rather than just reading the pages. The more active you are in your research the more you will retain.

Also as the page from the book suggests you should record/time actions you want to animate by performing them yourself. I was really struggling with the last scene where Dillon goes back to bed. By recording myself I was able to see so many small details of my arm and leg placement as I changed positions. I tried this a couple of times with my first attempt being very slow and in this version, I did it a lot faster.

Similar to how my first animation test for the animatic was the walk cycle for Brain Cell 2, so was my Toon Boom Harmony test. I thought this would be the perfect thing to work on first cause this walk cycle requires a lot of different aspects of digital and traditional animation to make it happen and then once I know where everything is I can try and master it by working on the simpler cuts.

First, and probably simplest, is how do I even draw on this thing. I was having a lot of problems with Toon Boom in the beginning because it didn't like the size of my laptop's monitor so I checked out one of the monitors from the Fablab. I then set up my own animation station in the back of the bunker. This was a bit of an annoying aspect working with Toon Boom because if I had some downtime throughout the day, especially at the Fablab, I couldn't work on it because my screen wasn't acceptable and I needed space for the tablet. At the very least what this setup did for me, psychologically, I had a place where I could associate my stress with instead of keeping everything in my room. Until my other roommate let me borrow a monitor he wasn't using, then most of the animating I did at home cause I like having a place with sunlight.

From animating this one walk cycle I learned how to draw, color, make new frames for a layer, create symbols for the eyes and mouth which is useful for when characters are talking, how to insert spines/rigs into certain body parts or drawn pieces such as the legs so that I don't have to draw them frame by frame, how to rotate, resize, and move a drawing using pegs, and how to parent objects. Sometimes I would also get happy accidents such as the legs moving a bit before the body, this goes to a classic principle in animation which is anticipation. I was also really happy with how I was closely able to match the timing of the animation to the animatic, the bag still feels like it has a heavy weight to it.

I would also keep a notebook next to me and write down anything new I would learn so that I was more actively researching when clicking through Toon Boom tutorials on YouTube.

Once the walk cycle was finished and I was happy with how it looked I split up the animatic into 9 different scenes and then tried fully animating Scene 2 since that and Scene 6 is where that specific walk appears. However, that proved to be quite difficult because of how many different camera angles are in Scene 2, such as close-up shots of Bran Cell 1 on the couch, wide shots of Bran Cell 1 & 2, and then that one still with the door. There were simply too many moving parts to animate this on one file so then I thought "What if I split them even further to the cuts that make up each scene".

Now it's difficult to constitute what is considered the ending of a scene but I personally considered a scene done whenever there was a huge change in setting/background or if it felt like there was a new topic being discussed. So scene 1 is Dillon going to bed so we are in and rotating about his bedroom but once we enter inside his brain I call that scene 2 because the backgrounds are completely different for a good length of time. Then when Brain Cell 2 inserts the tape into the VHS player I called that scene 3 since they are not trying to figure out what the VHS tapes might be or how they work anymore but instead the focus is shifted toward the presentation memory even though they are still in the brain room and 2 cuts are in Dillon's bedroom. Some scenes like scene 5 flip back and forth between the brain room and the bedroom and quite honestly scene 6, which is the one where they drag in the new bag and ends when Cell 2 reaches in for another tape, could be argued to be a part of scene 5, especially since scene 3 has both the Brain room and Dillon's bedroom, but you really have to go off your personal feelings as to what will help you best in breaking down your animatic to simple parts.

Unlike scenes, cuts are very easy to define. A cut is whenever the camera angle of the scene is moved. If you think of it in a live-action sense if I wanted to get a different camera angle of my actors I would yell "CUT" and they would take a break while I set up my camera in a new position. Some scenes, like scenes 1 and 6, had only 2 cuts while scene 2 had 20 cuts, in total Bedtime had 80 cuts which includes stills and repeat shots. This made it a lot easier to work out the math as to how much time I had left to make the animation and which scenes and cuts required more priority if I wanted to make a good finished product. Scene 4, which is the montage scene, could be cut out completely if I really was stressed for time while scene 2, the dragging of the first VHS tapes bag, was not easily avoidable since that created the whole setup of the plot.

This can take up a lot of space on your hard drive and it can get annoying to transfer the assets/layers from one Toon Boom file to another so I would combine the cuts that had the exact same camera angles to make life a bit easier for me. I'm not 100% sure this is how people in the industry organize their files but to some degree, they definitely have to do it this way. Remember that you have several teams of people working on an animated project and the way people get paid, at least in Japan, is by the amount of cuts you do per episode.

Now that everything was nicely organized and I knew that my goal was to reach 80 cuts before the beginning of April I had a feasible plan of action. From February 28th to April 8th, I had to do at the very least 2 cuts a day in order to have the animation part done before the day of the exhibition. Obviously, I wasn't just going to do 2 cuts a day because I would be working up to the wire and that's not factoring in the time it takes to make the backgrounds and sounds for the animation so I definitely hoped that during spring break I could do at least 4 a day or get the harder cuts out of the way. If I wasn't able to complete 2 cuts then at the very least I had to start working on 2 cuts and then hopefully the next day I could do 3 or 4 to make up for lost time. Also, it's best to break this up into smaller pieces as well, so instead of "I need to finish 80 cuts as fast as possible" I would say to myself "I need to finish 14 cuts this week as fast as possible" which is why there is a number on the side with how many cuts I still had left to do. This way I can give myself some leisure time or work on other aspects of the capstone or school work and not stress myself out because I still have 43 cuts left. And if I got ahead of schedule by finishing my 14 cuts I felt more motivated to keep working at a steady pace.

Originally I was going to hire somebody to do the backgrounds for me but I ended up doing them myself in Toon Boom because I couldn't really find anybody cheap and even if I did I wouldn't know how to describe what type of backgrounds I wanted cause I needed to do some on my own regardless. I needed 27 backgrounds maximum, some were reusable so it was probably close to 20 but even then that would be way too expensive to make somebody else do for me so might as well do them all myself. That way they are all the same quality and I can save some money that can be allocated somewhere else such as voice actors. If you know some people who are good at digital painting and you have a good idea of what you want I would definitely suggest hiring someone to do the backgrounds. In the industry, everybody is a specialist in only one field, so one person does all the backgrounds while a different person makes the character designs and then a third person is the actual animator. But because Stevens' budget is so limiting for a project like this you have to really pick your battles.

Also highly recommend exporting your cuts as TIF Image Sequences and compositing them in After Effects, the one on the left is a TIF Sequence. When I export into a video format through Toon Boom the colors get a little bit whitewashed. This will however eat up a lot of your hard drive space especially since some cuts will need every layer to be its own separate image sequence. If it's just a still or a single stationary layer then just export it as one image and then extend it. If you're gonna go crazy with compositing in After Effects then you should definitely invest in an external hard drive to make life easier for yourself and it's just a good way to keep your capstone stuff out of harm's way, you never know what may happen to your laptop.

What I want you to take away from this specific post is that ORGANIZATION IS KEY TO A FINISHED ANIMATION. You cannot work on it every day for every second of the spring semester cause you'll get burned out like I did in April. If you can mathematically prove to yourself that you're in a good spot and can afford to give yourself breaks once in a while then your project will come out amazing. If you constantly keep yourself under stress then you'll start taking shortcuts where they don't need to be taken and your animation will suffer because of it.

[timpac-capstone]

Spring Update 1: Completed Animatic

It took about a month but the animatic for my animated short "Bedtime" is finally complete. All the frames were made in Krita with then all of those frames being put together in Premier Pro. Voice Acting was done in my closet with Adobe Audition and a HyperX SoloCast USB Condenser Microphone, and yes all those amazing voices are me. Starting to play with Toon Boom Harmony Premium and Procreate to get the final product done and if you have any critiques or praise please let me know, I genuinely need to know what is working and what isn't.

I rewrote the ending because people were getting the wrong message from my animation. I didn't want it to be an animation about suicide awareness I wanted it to be an animation about showing that everybody has these embarrassing moments that their brain loves to bring up but it's okay because we have an equal amount of good memories we can think about as well. While suicide was something that did trouble me at one point it's no longer a problem and I chose to more laugh at it than try to make it this thing I survived. Personally, some of these memories play in my head so often that I figuratively want to blow my brains out which is why the original ending was that way but I didn't really intend Dillon to be suicidal, more shock humor at best. But I do like this new ending a lot more because I also occasionally talk to myself in the mirror when these memories play in my mind when I'm getting ready for bed or going to the bathroom. Maybe I wouldn't punch out the mirror but I've definitely thought about it. Also, a lot of the punch lines for my videos or stories is that somebody pulls out a gun out of nowhere so this was a good writing challenge for me. These are the sketches from my sketchbook and version 3 of the script.

All the voice recordings for the animatic were done in my closet. I remember watching a Game Theory video years ago about how MatPat would record his voiceovers for his videos. He would just go into his closet and the clothes did a good enough job of reducing the echoes or background noise. However, my laptop fan is even louder which is annoying because I can't leave it outside the closet without having to constantly open and close the door. Also initially I wasn't going to voice any of the characters and did this so that there was something to chew on when watching the animatic but because of how many times it took to get the exact delivery I wanted from myself and because there will be reworks to the script in the future I could not even imagine trying to direct other people so I think I'm going to leave it the way it is.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 12

This took a lot longer than I expected, Krita is a bit annoying when it comes to transforming singular objects in a layer compared to how it works in Photoshop. If I make a circle in a layer that already has stuff in it it will transform that entire layer rather than just that circle which gets annoying especially when you want to duplicate a leg or an eye cause it will duplicate all the keyframes you don't want as well. But anyway this is how my animation came out, all the voice acting and sound mixing was done at 1am so don't focus too much on it especially since I couldn't find a sound effect of a person falling out of bed. I'm glad I was able to find a way to transfer my frames from my initial test animation and put it into a scene because I think it fits perfectly. Also, the way everything looks in this animation is way better than my initial storyboards, and that is because I scanned all the pages and traced over the ones that I liked as well as traced over the couch and CRT TV from Family Guy. As I was working on this I was thinking about switching to Adobe Animate since that is a paid program that some animation studios use so if I am to struggle with a program I might as well struggle with one that would look good on my resume. Overall I think this animation came out great, I realize that the best way to approach animation is to just not care how rough and off-model everything looks cause all that matters at the beginning stages is the motion and feel of the scene.

REFLECTION:

After these two weeks of animating in Krita I'm finally over my fear of digital art. All I'm constantly thinking about is fixing the script so that I can just get started animating and coloring as soon as possible. I'm going to email a Visual Arts alumni to ask if I should switch to Adobe Animate since he also did an animation for his Capstone and from his social media posts I see he does a lot of animation and 3D modeling in his free time.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 11

Timestamp: 6:18 to 7:05: A friend of mine recommended this video of Billie Eilish watching and cringing at her old Vanity Fair interviews. For the most part, she isn't too hard on herself because she takes into consideration her age and feels more forgiving for what she says because of that factor, it could also be because this is her sixth time doing this in a row. However, in the timestamp that I gave, she reacts the same way that I react when I watch my old YouTube videos which is comforting to see that I'm not the only one that wants to choke myself because of the dumb things I said and did in the past.

This was another recommended video, I can't remember if it was from a classmate or my teacher but this was a lot more useful to watch. For starters, I finally understand why there are no camera positions indicated in screenplays thanks to 13:47 to 14:04 and that is because the screenwriter's job is to make the story and the director's job is to present that story. This is also helpful because Emily is writing a SciFi story which has its own issues of having ideas too ambitious for the audience to understand. It was also insightful to see how the writing process progressed as Emily got more studio notes, an example being how loose she was in writing the first draft, and then in the second draft she made many quick decisions to get rid of scenes or dialogue she didn't like and flesh out the stuff she did like, and in the third draft was further fleshing out extra details and adding more background info about the characters and the world.

I FINALLY DID IT, I FINALLY ANIMATED A CHARACTER IN KRITA. After months and months of telling myself that I couldn't do it, I finally got around to making this walk cycle of the brain cell carrying a heavy bag. I think what definitely helped me was using the drawing tablets that the Fablab provides rather than the cheap one that I have, it actually does make a huge difference and it's not cause the Fablab one has more buttons. For one I have more surface area to work with that is closer to the sketchbook size that I'm used to and the pen feels like it has some resistance when I'm drawing and I can feel how hard I am pressing into the tablet. Once I got used to it I just started drawing the first pose of the character and then when I finished that I said "Fuck it let's just try animating this bitch" and looked up a tutorial and loosely followed along. I won't lie to you this was a very long learning process and I did get frustrated at times to the point where I had to leave my laptop, this animation that you're seeing right now took me a whole day. Something that was very frustrating was definitely the size of my laptop since there are a lot of panels that I needed open but Krita doesn't like it when you try to shrink those panels past a certain point so I had to constantly close and open panels. Another frustrating thing was the legs didn't seem to be coming out right no matter how many times I redrew them so I recorded a video of myself trying to act out carrying a heavy bag of laundry as a reference and I was finally able to fix it. I also had to figure out how to space out these 6 frames to make the bag look like it's heavy to pull. Before I had the frames evenly spaced out and the physics just didn't seem right and was about to draw some more frames but thankfully I figured out the timing before I did all that work. I'm really proud of myself for this even though this is just a rough test animation but I'm not as reluctant on digital drawing anymore.

REFLECTION:

Honestly, I have nothing to reflect upon, I finally did an animation and that is a victory in itself. Next week for my Capstone presentation I'm going to try and put together a scene from my storyboards. It won't play out exactly how I want it to because I'm still just doing early test animations to see what works and what doesn't work as well as just figuring out Krita. Not sure if I'm gonna put dialogue in or just let the animation speak for itself but if I have time I'll try to do some voice acting.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 10

I finally did another digital drawing, this time using Adobe Fresco on an iPad Air 2. This piece was actually way more relaxing to draw than the last time I tried drawing digitally on Krita using my roommate's touchscreen laptop because nothing was glitching out. Everything worked perfectly this time and the Apple pencil felt very intuitive in my hand. I still struggled to get my line work to look nice and I'm not sure if the process in which I colored and shaded my drawing was the way most people do it but after finishing this piece I walked away wanting to do more digital art which is a victory in itself.

When I walked out of Manga in New York I finally understood the importance of how the presentation of an art piece can add to the overall experience of the audience member. This was a quick sketch I did in Adobe Fresco of how I was planning to display my animation. I'm thinking of getting one of those old TV carts that I would often see in elementary school where it had a big CRT TV that was hooked up to a VCR. The VCR is just for display because I'm not sure how to put my animation onto a VHS tape and even if I did it doesn't really add anything but I was planning on displaying my animation on the CRT TV. The reason the setup is like this is because this is the same setup that the two brain cells have when they are watching Dillon's embarrassing memories. I will also have two bags that will be labeled Embarasing Memories and Good Memories, after the audience member is done watching my animation they will write one happy memory and one embarrassing memory on an index card/cassette tape and throw them into their respective bag. I'm not 100% sold on this idea but it is a good start.

My professor recommended that I watch more animated short films that weren't just from previous alumni to broaden my horizons in terms of storytelling in a short animation and the way animation is used as well as its quality. I saw 10 animated short films but I'll only talk about the ones that stood out to me starting with This Actually Happens A Lot by Tom Law. I remember my professor asked me to explain why I love animation so much and I showed her the transformation sequences from Ben 10 (2005) and I just said "I mean just look at that". But she didn't see the same thing I did and said I needed to look deeper for the reason and I feel this short gave me that answer. Animation makes the unnatural feel natural without needing to explain why it is the way it is. In this short, we see that the male character's social anxiety is causing him to stick from wall to wall and be suspended in thin air. Obviously, this doesn't happen in real life but I didn't question it, I accepted immediately that this is how this world works and because of that I'm more in tune with the author's message instead of fighting the way he presented it, creating a much more enjoyable watch. If this was live-action I would be more interested in how they did the effect rather than what the point of this character being suspended in mid-air is supposed to represent in the first place.

Resilience by Yunie Choi gave me a new perspective on the horrors of war and life after death. They used animation to do a timelapse of a decaying corpse over the course of several hundred years and it is quite beautiful to see how life moves on without you. The use of colors and interesting animal designs really add to the beauty of this animation.

This guy, Manu Mercurial, does a lot of YouTube tutorials for animation but I haven't seen his animated projects in full before. I thought it would be topical for me since we are both interested in the subject of memories. He very much took a very different approach from what I was thinking of doing but I still think it was a good watch to see how people visualize revisiting their old memories

I like Afternoon Class by Osro for the same reason I like This Actually Happens A Lot, I don't question why this kid's head turns into several heavy objects but I have an immediate connection to it because I understand the feeling of trying to stay awake in class. Also, the use of sound effects is excellent in this short.

I put Forget Me Not by The Lonely Star Studio on here because it shows that even with terrible voice acting and mic quality I can still appreciate the animation of this short which has also been a huge stressor.

Bounty by Arrowmi is on here because it has the opposite problem of Forget Me Not it has amazing voice acting but the art style and animation are pretty rough. It's not bad but it's not super pretty to look at either. However, it was still able to tell an intense story of an ex-bounty hunter and suck me into the world despite its noticeable drawbacks.

Going back through my old script ideas, I had this one part where at the climax of the story the main character would wake up in a car sitting next to his dad. He's in shock because his dad is supposed to be dead and yet here he is just driving nonchalantly, the main character knows this is a memory but he decides to ask his dad a bunch of questions to see if his dad would still be proud of him if he were to meet him as an adult. I feel that this entire scene I made was inspired by this Spiderman story I found 2 years ago on Instagram in which Peter gets 5 minutes to talk to Uncle Ben after years of being Spiderman, this story really connected with me when I first found it because what I want the most in life is to just ask my dad "am I doing good". There are a lot of things that I struggle with; not being masculine enough, I'm almost 23 and still haven't had a girlfriend, and I constantly wonder if I picked the right career choice. I don't know if my dad struggled with the same things but I assume that he didn't and I often feel that if he were to meet me as an adult he would be disappointed. I know that most likely he would say that he is proud of me despite all my shortcomings because that is what parents are supposed to do but the fact that I will never get that answer kills me. I decided to read all 3 parts of this story to get a better idea as to what led up to this Uncle Ben interaction and it was pretty good, if you watched Spider-Man 2 it hits the same story beats. Lately, I've been thinking of scrapping the two-brain cell idea and instead animating the car scene I described earlier on its own.

REFLECTION:

I'm really happy that I finally found a groove into digital art and I'm hoping this will finally jumpstart some animation this week. I'm also glad that I watched all those animated short films, they all had their unique quirks and drawbacks that you don't normally get to see in professionally animated TV shows. I also want to explore the idea of being able to talk to a dead relative for a brief period of time before you never see them again.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 9

I showed my wall to my capstone advisor, Jeff, and while he was happy that I now have a story and with the progress I made since the last time we spoke he is a bit worried that I am putting all my eggs into one basket. I can see where he is coming from since I STILL have not done any digital animation and it's becoming more and more of a stressor on me. He suggested I watch Rejected by Don Hertzfeldt since this is a compilation of multiple simple animations, Jeff suggested that rather than starting where my storyboard begins I should first animate the embarrassing moments themselves and that way if I'm not happy with the narrative later down the line I still have these and can make a plan around it.

I just can't do it man, I can't get into digital art. It feels so uncomfortable every time I try to draw in Krita, Fire Alpaca, or Photoshop, and every time I try to actually sit down and try to learn it I get so frustrated when the line work still comes out so goofy no matter how many times I try a new brush, setting, or simply redoing it. I used one of the bigger tablets from the Fablab this time which was a lot more comfortable to use than the small one I have but I don't know, if I had the option to make this traditionally I would be seriously considering it right now.

Lately, I've been thinking back to the topic of growing up without a dad so I looked at some videos on YouTube and a lot of them, like this one from Joe Rogan, are about people who had their dad leave them instead of passing away. Obviously, there is a difference between how I feel about my dad and how these people feel about their dad, Joe and Erik hold more anger and animosity towards their dads because they betrayed their trust while I held a lot of anger towards myself because I felt like I wasn't making anything out of my life or because I didn't understand the concept of death at age 7. However, one thing that did resonate with me was how they described their loneliness growing up with a single parent. I think by age 9 or 10 my mom would start training me on how to take care of myself at home alone. I don't hold any animosity towards my mom for this because it's like Erik said, my mom was working hard on her own trying to make sure that I had everything I needed and then some but that meant we had to cut some costs such as a babysitter. I believe this is where my love for cartoons stems from, when I would be home alone I would constantly have the TV on Cartoon Network even when I wasn't in the room and that is because I would get extremely anxious when the house would be dead silent. The worst punishment my mom could give me as a kid would be no TV for a week, not because I would be bored for that week but because I would be so anxious that I wouldn't be able to function. Eventually I got over it as I got older, the sound of silence and being alone most of the day is the norm.

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So I was scrolling through Instagram the day before this event happened and I saw this ad called Manga in New York by Ginza Sony Park Project. It was an event at Studio 525 that brought 6 different Japanese artists, not necessarily manga artists, together so that they could create and display their manga in unique ways using Sony's technology. When I presented my wall to the guest artists their main critique was that I hadn't considered how I was going to present my animation during the exhibition. At first, I didn't really know what that meant because James Ring, an alumni last year who did an animation, just set up a TV and put the storyboards and sketches next to the TV which is what I was going to do. But after going to Manga in New York I can see what they meant, each manga here was displayed so differently from each other and because of that added to their individual experiences. The first manga, Interlude by Miku Masuda had the talk bubbles animated like animated manga on YouTube except each page had its own display screen so people could walk along the story rather than standing in place watching a slideshow on one screen. A Pilgrims Guide to Videogame by Takakurakazuki was the exact opposite, it only had two displays for two people who flipped through the pages with a joystick but the area in which it was placed in also had the comic printed on paper and hung along the wall with large pieces of art to go with the exhibit. Ueda and Sasami by Hikaru Ichijo also had its story printed out and displayed along the wall but behind the reader would be a giant Ueda with an animated Hamster inside her stomach. Dream Pill by Millennium Parade was the one I found the most impressive, the floor had a projection of water on it and if I stepped in the right spot the floor would rumble and the projection would make a splash, as if I was actually walking on water as I read this manga. A Guide by Masanobu Hiraoka, who is an Animator/Director, made a manga that had huge prints on each page and only certain panels beautifully animated on a huge TV display that really brought the vastness the manga was trying to portray in its story. Finally, Walker by Katsuya Terada had massive displays of his manga accompanied by background sounds like bird noises and rain sounds that you can faintly hear as you walk through his work. I also got the chance to see him draw live, unfortunately I only stuck around halfway through his live drawing cause I had other plans that day but this was a very insightful trip.

REFLECTION:

I don't know how I'm going to be an animator if I can't digitally draw the simplest of things. I'm not trying to give up just yet but Jeff might be right where maybe I should look into doing a series of shorts rather than just one singular narrative. Up until this point, I haven't gone on a museum trip specifically for my capstone, mainly because everybody else in the class seems to be busy so I would have to go by myself and I don't think I'll find anything useful in the museum regarding what I want to do for my project but I was happily proven wrong. When I left the museum an idea that I had for my capstone would be to play my animation on a CRT TV with two bags placed next to each other, one labeled embarrassing memory and the other happy memory. Audience members would then write down an embarrassing memory or a happy memory or both and place it in one of the respective bags and by the end of it, I wanted to see which bag got more filled up. But I will worry about how this will be displayed at a later date.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 8

This week we got a wall to put up our capstone progress and had to present in front of the class, 2 different professors not in our capstone class, and 1 professional artist so that we got a fresh set of eyes on our work and feedback. As you can tell I put a lot on my wall, in fact too much on my wall that I didn't get a chance to properly present everything the way I wanted to present it which I feel made it really confusing for the guest criticers, I didn't even get a chance to go over the story of my project that much. The feedback I got was mostly related to how I present my animation, like whether it will be just a monitor mounted on a wall or will I have stuff around it to make it more interesting. The only thing that I have in mind is two bags where the audience members can write one good memory and place it in one bag and in the other bag they'll write an embarrassing memory and put it into that bag.

REFLECTION:

Having everything set up on the wall instead of inside computer files really helps visualize how much stuff I've been doing these past 2 months. I'll be honest I didn't really find the feedback helpful during my presentation but I can't really blame them cause I had to jump around a lot just so I was able to touch upon everything. Also because of the amount of progress from last week, I didn't really do much this week, my brain was just so tapped out from the week before of just trying to figure out what I wanted to do for this project, and once I figured it out my brain just wanted to take a breather. My goals are still in line with last week so my mission is to start some character animation, self-recording, or recording lines and see how everything is working.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 7

So I tried making a completely new story because my original idea was just way too ambitious for the amount of time I have and where my skills are currently. Writing my script like this is difficult, it's hard to keep up with the flow of ideas that pop into my head and write them out in this style. I've tried looking up some videos online on how to write a screenplay but they're so long, 10 to 15 minutes, when all I really want to know is how do I format my words when describing the setting, where the camera is, and characters actions; which does not take 15 minutes to explain, just say if it's bold or italicized and where I should align these things. I started getting somewhat of a writer's block, I know the story I want to tell but describing it to others is difficult.

Finally finished Keep Your Hands Off Eizoken, it was actually pretty useful regarding this project. I went more in-depth in my week 5 post regarding the plot, but I didn't really get a chance to talk about the characters themselves. I really related to Asakusa because often I will have this idea for a video that I really find enjoyable but once I start typing out ideas I start to think, "People will think this is cringe" and then I start to pivot away from what I originally wanted and I slowly start to lose passion for it. That's when the producer, Kanamori, steps in to stop Asakusa from pivoting and procrastinating not because she's a concerned friend but because they are trying to make a substantial business. Mizusaki also has the same struggles as Asakusa because she is very much a perfectionist, she doesn't care that average people won't see the cut corners of their projects because she cares about the anime enthusiasts that will and in return it creates a lot of stresses on her and the team. It is relieving to see that this is something that all artists share on a professional level and it's not an exclusive thing to me. But despite these personal challenges we are still able to make amazing works that can have everlasting impacts on people.

I went to a Redshift meeting Wednesday night that was about making zines. I've never made a zine before and loosely know what they look like so I thought it would be a good idea to go because I think I'm going to have to make a zine eventually for my Capstone or if not for some project in the future. It's a pretty easy process especially when you have the proper tools so it only took like 5 minutes to make the booklet itself. Afterwards, I didn't really know what to do, I saw people writing in their zines but I wasn't really sure what to do for mine so I just made a comic. This was an eye-opener for me because it showed that I can still tell a story without developing a script first or with super amazing drawings. I'm not a reader and certainly not a writer so why was I trying to create a story the way a writer would. So I'm going to work backwards from how I usually do things which is making the visuals first and then I'll write the script around those visuals.

This is a podcast episode that my capstone professor recommended to the class to help us get over our roadblocks in doing research and experiments for our capstone. I am definitely a perfectionist, usually whenever I do an edit in a video that I'm really proud of I will watch that one edit hundreds of times as I'm working on the video just to make sure it has absolutely zero mistakes which you can tell causes a lot of delay. I definitely feel that perfectionism is getting in the way of me trying to learn digital art or animation, it is a mixture of making sure I find the perfect program and trying to use my time more efficiently, which is ironic cause I never make time in my schedule to try and learn Krita. My OCD definitely plays a part in this but not everybody in my class is diagnosed with OCD so there is something more at play here which up until this podcast I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It's that feeling of failure that I'm desperately trying to avoid, there are two instances in my life that really stick out to me when it comes to trying to make creative projects. There was one video that I made with my friends called "Why I Haven't Uploaded in a While", I was really excited because up until that point I was only making videos by myself and it was going to be a parting gift for my friend Brett who was going to the military in a couple of weeks. However, I soon realized that explaining the ideas in my head to a group of people is a lot harder than expected and as they got frustrated I got even more frustrated, not to mention I wasn't prepared for the battery in my camera to run out or the SD card to get full. I was just such an asshole, it was supposed to be a fun thing me and my friends would do before we all went our separate ways after we graduate but the video never came out the way I wanted it to and it's just a bad memory for me even though I'm still friends with these guys to this day. Another video I made, called "I'm Innocent", took me several months to make and it's where I really pushed myself in terms of editing and why my skills are so good today. I still consider this video to be my magnum opus even though the subject matter and jokes would probably get me in trouble today but I'm still really proud of what I was able to make. But when I sat down to watch it with my friends they didn't laugh at a lot of the jokes that I thought they would find hilarious and it didn't get a lot of views on YouTube. For a while after that, I was just so discouraged from making another project because of that feeling of failure constantly lingering in me, just waiting to rise up again. It wasn't until I had a video project for my "Moving Image: On Screen" class that my passion for video-making resurfaced. The fact that I treated it more as a project that had to get done before a deadline rather than a masterpiece that would define me for the rest of my life really helped me get things in motion. There were a lot of rewrites and a lot of last-minute touches but I got several compliments despite it not being as perfect as I wanted it to be. So the point of this very long tangent is that you can't always focus on the optimal route and that doing something is better than doing nothing.

Finally, I have a story! It took me a while but I finally got something out of my head and onto paper. Here's the premise, everybody's brain likes to constantly remind them of the embarrassing things they did years ago but I feel that I tend to think about them way more than other people do and I certainly react a lot more violently. I will swear at the top of my lungs, I will smash my fist on my desk as hard as I can, I will punch my own head, and sometimes I just want to shoot myself. In this storyboard, we have a character who is trying to go to sleep but the brain cells in his brain find a huge bag of VHS tapes with all his embarrassing memories and they start watching them. As the brain cells watch these tapes the main character gets more and more uncomfortable and agitated. The brain cells find these tapes hilarious and continue to watch and rewind them at the expense of the main character's sanity. Eventually, the main character has enough and heads toward his closet, meanwhile, the brain cells run out of VHS tapes from the initial bag but don't worry they drag in another huge bag. When the closet door is opened we see a shotgun and some shells; the main character grabs the shotgun, starts loading it, and puts it in his mouth ready to pull the trigger. Meanwhile, the brain cells are loading up another tape as they sit back with their popcorn in hand readily anticipating what's about to play. However, they are shocked to see that it is a happy memory and as soon as that happy memory plays the main character takes the shotgun out of his mouth with confusion, as if he just snapped out of a trance. The Brain Cells realize that this bag is filled with only happy memories which to them is boring and walk away from the TV out of lack of interest. The main character finally has peace in his mind and as he stares at the clock he smashed earlier he sees that despite its cracks and discrepancies it still functions and with that, he happily goes to sleep.

Writing a script for this became 1000 times easier with the rough storyboard by my side. I also found the Rick and Morty scripts from season 1 which gave me a reference as to how things are formatted in a screenplay for an animation. Every time I had a hard time trying to describe a scene I would just look at the storyboards and describe what I see there. This method allowed me to focus more on the dialogue for this animation since I purposefully left it out of the storyboard for that reason. I want to see if people can tell what the story is about just from my rough drawings and because I'm not 100% certain if I am going to use embarrassing moments from my life or use embarrassing moments that people can relate to but if I ever do decide to change it it will be easier to edit this way.

REFLECTION:

There was a lot of progress this week, I feel that this breakthrough of working backwards has lifted a lot of tension off my shoulders and I also feel like I'm halfway through this project. Obviously, I need to get some second opinions before I put things into motion but at the very least I have something I can use to practice character animation or start recording myself so that I can see if my scenes work.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 6

I spent this week fixing up my Tumblr, I've never used Tumblr before starting my Capstone so I just assumed that it functioned similarly to Twitter since the top articles when you search up Tumblr are how it's a Twitter alternative. So my first couple of posts were very short and sweet, not even specifying the week these assignments are for and don't contain any reflection. However, after my professor showed me an alumni from last year's class Tumblr I had a much better understanding as to how my weekly posts should look like. I also watched a video by STRANGE ÆONS to learn all of this site's features and capabilities. If you look at my blog now it's a lot more neat and tidy which makes me way happier, I also started using hashtags so that people outside of my classmates and professors can chime in with their support and or criticism of my work. Unfortunately, that does mean I lost all the likes and reposts my Larry 3000 post had but oh well.

So normally whenever I have an idea for a YouTube video I always start out like this, I create a Google Doc and let my mind run free as I create bullet points trying to capture whatever I can from inside my head onto the page. The first couple of lines usually describe what it's about, an example here would be "Focus on the physical cringe feeling I get when I think about a dumb thing I said or did in the past", everything after that is jokes or funny scenes that I think up on the spot, usually in the form of a dialogue rather than the acting out of a scene. Then the next day I read through what I wrote and I try to put this jumbled mess into a cohesive script, still in the form of bullet points rather than the traditional look of a screenplay, and as I'm writing the script I think of even more jokes or brainstorm how to make a specific idea I really like work in this project.

I've tried writing screenplays before but it has always felt so unnatural to me and I feel like I lose a lot of my ideas in the process of trying to make this script look nice in comparison to when I just write everything in bullet points. But I know other people have to see and understand what I want to do with this project so I have to just figure it out. I've tried looking at a couple of videos that explain how to write a screenplay but most of them are around 15 minutes long and all I really want to know is how I describe where the camera is and the actions of the camera and the actions of the characters, which does not take 15 minutes to tell me. In the end, I was only able to get a page and a half done because as I was writing this script I was struggling to organize my preexisting ideas while trying to get all my new ideas onto the page as well. Also while all the new ideas I was coming up with were great it was starting to make this project feel a bit more overwhelming. I was now thinking, "Oh my god am I going to have to hire professional voice actors because of how many characters I'm thinking up, am I going to have to hire a musician to make a score for this, how am I gonna find all these sound effects, how many backgrounds am I going to have to draw" and ultimately I had to stop because my brain was feeling burnt out.

Example of how I usually write scripts:

REFLECTION:

So not a lot was done compared to the other weeks but that was because reorganizing and learning how to use Tumblr took a lot longer than expected. But I would say it was worth it because now everything is a lot more cohesive and presentable to viewers. I was also able to start making some actual progress regarding my animation by finally having a story but I realized while making the script that I might be a bit too ambitious and might want to try reworking the story into something that I can do with my skills and time frame given.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 5

Started watching "Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!" this week, it's a 2020 anime about making anime. I'm only 1/3 through the series and when I started this series I thought this show would be about the process of making an anime from the ground up. While that is true it mainly focuses on the struggles of getting an anime made due to outside forces rather than the actual process itself. An example being that Eizouken are under a time constraint to get their animation finished before the school budget meeting and now they are forced to compromise with where they should cut corners such as some scenes not having color or a different scene made by a computer program. It brings to light the struggles of balancing time constraints, budget, hardware/personal constraints, and compromising between the story of the animators and the needs of the producers. I actually like this plot rather than what I formally thought it was, I definitely am able to connect more to the characters due to me having to meet deadlines for my capstone so I definitely want to watch it all the way through.

This Wednesday the RedShift art club had a presentation night about character design. This was a golden opportunity for me because it gave me a chance to get general information about what goes into designing a character and I got to see what the thought process is for people who are experienced and those not experienced in making characters. I was pleasantly surprised on how informative of a presentation my classmate Janelle made, I definitely went into this thinking it would be half assed and we would be more focused on having fun redesigning characters than trying to learn something useful. The four main principals in character design are Focus, Shape language/Exaggeration, Color Palette, and Silhouette. I also found out that Janelle uses Paint Tool Sight for digital art and Krita for animation.

Finally! I got around to drawing in Krita. So far it definitely feels no different to drawing digitally in Photoshop but that may be because I was only using one brush. Instead of using a tablet to draw in Krita, my roommate let me borrow his touchscreen pen laptop. It had its own set of complications, I had to restart the laptop 6 times because the cursor was bugging out, but I want to say it felt a bit easier to draw. I at least knew the exact direction my line would be going in but I was still having trouble making my drawing exactly how I wanted it to look. It came out fine but I definitely need some more help in terms of how to sketch and layer those sketches and colors.

REFLECTION:

It was nice being able to watch an anime for research purposes, it's like killing two birds with one stone, if I don't get anything out of it well then at least I got it out of my plan-to-watch list. It was also nice to do something that wasn't on my computer and interact with some Stevens students who aren't in my major. It was also a big eye-opener that if I'm really struggling with something I can ask my classmates for help cause they definitely know a lot more than I do. Next week I'm going to hammer out the script for my animation so most likely little to no research is required and I'll just let my brain put what it has been thinking for the past couple of weeks into writing.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 4

The one thing I'm most anxious about in my project is voice acting. I definitely want to have some dialogue in my story but the more I brainstorm the more characters seem to get involved and in that sense, I might have to look into hiring professionals. I am not a voice actor or an actor in general, I've done skit videos before but I'd hardly call that acting because I'm acting like myself with a layer of sarcasm rather than trying to put on a performance. Even when I watch professional voice actors do their performances I still feel a bit of secondhand embarrassment. I found this video by ProZD who is a professional voice actor/YouTuber on "How do you get into voice acting" and it's the answer that I expected which is you just do it and eventually you get better through trial and error. However, this is more so for people who are trying to get into the industry and not techniques to warm up your voice, how to find a voice for a character, or what microphone to use. But one thing that did stick out was that you have to get over that feeling of embarrassment of performing in front of others and once you learn how to do that you're pretty much halfway through the battle. Ideally, the only voice actor in this project will be me but I need to first get over my embarrassment of performing.

This is a snip bit from a much larger Behind The Scenes bonus video that mainly focused on the Ed, Edd, n Eddy: The Mis-Edventures video game. This clip specifically focuses on the show, such as what was the process of making the characters and how Danny Antonucci came up with the concept of the show and its characters. I watched this about 7 years ago and it was the first BTS video that I ever saw regarding how an animation was made. I had no clue about walk cycles, turnarounds, or model sheets up until that point so it was interesting revisiting to see what information I still retained after all these years and what Danny Antonucci's creative process is compared to other creators and showrunners.

I found this guy about 2 years ago, he's an animator from Canada who works for many big-name Japanese anime studios. A lot of what I know about animation production is from this guy, it has been really helpful in learning the differences in animation between the West and East and what is similar. It has also been very insightful as to how he got into the anime industry considering he is from Canada, the secret being having a really good and active Twitter account but that's probably not the case anymore. He mainly uses Clip Studio Paint since that's the standard in japan but that is a very expensive program and I'm sure Krita works just fine. Recently he's been doing a lot of tutorials on After Effects which will definitely be useful for me since I have some experience with that program.

I've only done a few digital drawings in my life and absolutely no digital animation so it is a big stressor on me because I keep saying I'm going to learn Krita but digital art is just so uncomfortable for me to do. I've only just recently gotten my drawing skills up to where I want them to be and that was because of a personal year long competition I did with my friend in which we had to make a drawing from scratch every single day for a year. However that was mostly all traditional, there is clearly I much different process for digital art but it's a bit difficult to figure out because to make a good digital piece requires your own personal preferences and knowing the limitations of your digital art program. It isn't as easy as just finding a single tutorial on Krita because every bodies work flow is different and when I see these 40 minute long tutorials I feel like I'm gambling away time I should be using drawing and making stuff in Krita. This is a channel I found this week that does ten minute long time-lapse videos on animating in Krita, I feel that these give me more exposure as to what the workflow in Krita is like and I don't have to spend much time watching his videos so that I can go on and do my own thing.

REFLECTION:

This was a much more research oriented week, I probably won't have time to put what I learned into action this week but still pretty useful information that I will definitely go back to eventually. I feel this process will become a lot more easier when I know what story I want to tell so that definitely will be my next goal to get done during this week.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 3

Started this week by looking at past capstone projects to get an idea as to what level of professionalism is expected of me. Also what topics have been tackled and how the use of animation was better able to get the artist's message across. It does relieve some stress seeing that there are some obvious corners cut from these projects but every idea I have had so far is so ambitious that I don't think I have the time or skill to make it come to fruition.

Artists: Khianna Byrne, Jadesola Colpa, Jasmine Hoagland, Katie Owens, James Ring, Christine Drobish.

One of the initial ideas I had for my capstone was about a rat that goes to a rat city that becomes more monstrous over time due to the toxicity of the city itself and its populace. This week I looked at the trailers and concept art for "The Tale of Despereaux" and "Flushed Away" since they both are set in a rat city. I was going to watch both of them but they look so bad, story-wise and design-wise, that I felt my energy was better spent somewhere else. I also looked at an animation by Steve Cutts called "Happiness" which is the concept that I want to go for which is rats that do human things and criticizing the rat race we are put in because of our desires. However, I don't think I'm gonna go with this idea because I have zero experience in making backgrounds and obviously the rat city is going to play a huge role in the story so it has to look interesting and polished.

This is a recent assignment I did for a Creative Programming class in which we had to create a drawing using a very specific set of rules that we chose for ourselves. I am someone who hates the feeling of cringe and I feel that I often think back at my most embarrassing moments more than most people do. So I thought why don't I try exploring that?

The rules were:

1). Watch an old video of yourself and every time you cringe draw a continuous line

2). When you stop cringing you stop drawing and make a dot where you stopped, If you start to cringe again continue from the dot you left off at.

3) The pencil must be on the paper at all times and you can't pause the video.

I have one specific YouTube video that I made when I was a sophomore in high school that my friends make fun of me to this day about. Every time I've tried rewatching it I couldn't even get past the first second and this gave me a good excuse to force myself to sit through the whole thing. I was surprised by the results, sure there were a few moments that were agonizing to sit through but overall it wasn't that bad. I think this might be something worth exploring further in my capstone.

REFLECTION:

This week I'm feeling that things are slowly coming together, ever since I've started this capstone I've been looking a lot into the production side of things, which I've always enjoyed doing in my free time but it's especially hard to find anything for animated shows. I have a better idea as to how ambitious my project should be but still no specific idea that I'm dead set on doing, maybe if I look through more old personal projects or assignments maybe I'll find something to latch onto.

[timpac-capstone]

Week 2

Day 1: I liked doing the turnaround drawing for Double D last week so for this week I did a multitude of character turnarounds varying in shapes and art styles. First I did Larry 3000 from Time Squad, since he's a robot he is made up of many geometric shapes unlike Double D. Geometric shapes can be difficult to keep consistent when you're changing perspective constantly but it came out very well in this test.

Day 2: Looked at a couple Japanese anime model sheets and I noticed a few differences. American characters tend to have 4 or 5 turning frames while the Japanese only have 3 or 4. But because they have fewer frames it isn't a smooth turnaround rather each frame tries to pack as much information about the character as possible. Now if I were an animator who didn't know anything about Misty I would notice that one frame has her bag, meaning that she is probably a traveler. Also, the way her legs and arms are positioned in each frame makes me feel like she is impatient but tries to act like she isn't based on her facial expression. I usually have a tough time drawing anime faces and the first frame didn't come out so well for me but the two others are pretty spot on. Also, they even gave more information on her bag in the model sheet showing that it's probably gonna be a big part of her character. Also her hand in frame two looks so goofy that I tried to fix it my version.

Day 3: Not a turnaround animation but still just as important! I was lucky enough to stumble upon the walk cycle for Pikachu while looking for his turnaround model sheet. I thought it would be interesting to see how I would fare in animating a quadrupedal animal running. This also let me experiment with timing a bit, normally my turnarounds are 0.2 seconds long for each frame but it felt too slow for this one so I used 0.1 seconds instead. If I put no delay it looked good but it looked like Pikachu was running for his life. I think this is one of my favorite studies that I did because of how smooth and consistent it is between each frame and I've seen Pikachu run so many times that I feel like I nailed it.

Day 4: After the Misty drawing, I was really interested in seeing what Jake the Dog from Adventures Time model sheet would look like since Jake can stretch into whatever he wants he should have a pretty crazy model sheet. It was pretty normal, I thought after I drew it out I would see something unique that I wouldn't see at first glance but it was pretty standard. The constant moving of the hands is a bit distracting.

Day 5: Wanted to go for something more creature-like, so I chose Patrick from SpongeBob. Patrick is pretty simple to draw but this still took me like an hour and a half to completely draw it out.

Day 6: Okay so this was a bit interesting, I wanted to see what a model sheet from an old Disney or Looney Tunes cartoon would look like and it was vastly different. It is similar to Misty in that it is not supposed to be a smooth turnaround but rather each pose is supposed to tell you something about to character while also showing you how he looks from all angles. I had to slow this one down, as well as the Misty one, to a 0.5-second delay just so that I had enough time to take in the information that I was seeing. But the model sheet for Bugs was a lot more descriptive as in it showed the simple shapes used to draw Bugs, how many heads each pose is, as well as all the facial expressions which are usually put on a different sheet.

Day 7: I really need help learning digital art.

REFLECTION:

I looked through so many model sheets this week from American cartoons, Japanese anime, animated films, and different time periods with characters that had varied in geometry and simplicity. It was hard to tell at times which model sheets were fan-made and which were officially used on the show but I think everything I used for this week was official. I tried digital art again and it really shows that I need to either find a way to use an iPad as a display or learn how to use a tablet. It's interesting how different every model sheet is structured between all these shows and what they want the animators to get right, their personality or their appearance. This was a huge learning experience for what goes into a character's design and I can't wait to use it in my own project.