VCD 302: A Post-Mortem

The Minotaur is a short ‘what if’ teaser for a potential animation project, it shows a world and creates interest in a short animation production that will evoke both wonder and fear. The animation is made of four major parts, the introduction speaks to the wonder side, and shows the colourful and beautiful world, the middle animation is a peek at a more minimalist type that would become a key branding mark of the final work, followed by a contrasting gloomy and bleak undergrowth, that sets up the key conflict and essence of a potential full animation, and a final cerebral outro, a reiteration of the key minimalist visual approach that can be used to convey non-physical story elements in a way traditional film techniques couldn’t.

The work uses traditional cel animation style, mixed with digital techniques in world building, and functions primarily on the strength of colour and lighting to construct the world and characters.

So maybe I am being a little dramatic, but it is a breakdown of the work I have done, which, for the majority of it I am quite happy with.

Technical achievement

On a technical level, I am incredibly happy with the final result, ultimately the final fidelity of each individual frame I feel could be a lot higher, and the final Minotaur at the end of the short animation could of been more bespoke in animation, instead of tweening the motion of a single drawing, but as an overall teaser and evidence of understanding of motion fundamentals I believe the work is really good. I utilised several major programs and imported and translated between them a lot, such as After Effects, Toon Boom, Premiere Pro.

Implementation of motion design fundamentals (primary, secondary, temporal)

The motion design elements used really created a good sense of the emotion I was trying to invoke, while I did use a fair bit of smearing and compression to convey motion, I also implemented a way to more closely create a sense of a horror movie, particularly in the second half of the animation. This was done by using a technique stolen from Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, where the character was actually animated on 2’s, this did make the workload a lot less, but it also conveyed a nervousness that I wanted present in the character. The initial relaxed shot, was actually animated at 24 Fps, but was dropped to 12 or even less when trying to convey that stiff nervous reaction.

Animating each frame with less smearing and compression on average, was actually done to make the movements feel more deliberate, a slow crawling progression, rather than a explosion of movement. Smearing and compression actually proved to be the easiest way to animate the scenes, than fully redrawing the entire body each frame, but would of taken away from the slow momentum I was trying to achieve, except in key spots of explosive energy.

Design / aesthetic outcomes

Overall design wise the shots are a little messy, and not as polished as I would like, but still maintain a basic idea of composition and rule of thirds framing, utilising similar perspectives and visual organisation all the way through, so as to maintain a smooth visual flow between cuts. Colour is separated into two major sections, the almost fever dream bright colours and visuals of the first sunset shot, to the gloomy blue and dark’s of the undergrowth.

Project goals – did you meet your own objectives for this project? Did you meet your own brief? How did it succeed? Where did it fall short?

I believe as a baseline skeleton for a full shot I achieved the critical areas that I was attempting to explore and succeed in, create a sense of narrative, and explore techniques that I had little experience in, and combine them into a multimedia production. The individual frames quality of drawing definitely fell short of what I would be happy to show off, but the guidelines for the motion and the ‘skeleton’ of this is solid enough to be built upon and I believe that makes this project a success.

Learning opportunities/analysis

So there were three major learning points and areas that I feel I definitely could learn to improve on. As touched upon earlier in this post, I definitely feel taking more time to draw each shot and pay more attention to the structure of each individual frame/drawing, would be a major thing to keep in mind. Working with a digital tablet is still relatively new to me, and the frames were very much quickly drawn out, which lead to inconsistent proportions and structure that I feel weakened the sense of reality in the characters in the physical space; and given a chance to redo the project, I would instead spend more time on using phsyical mediums to storyboard with a higher degree of detail, so that process of experimentation in form can be more fluidly approached instead of in a digital space.

I also learned that while inconsistencies of drawing in physical forms and structure, can become unnoticed in an animation consisting of 24 drawings a second, this is not true for the colour or lighting, and this requires consistency. With this in mind I definitely should of approached shading and lighting each frame in a more careful way.

The other thing I believe I noticed in hindsight, is I am infinitely more comfortable working with type, and it would of been exciting to incorporate this more throughout the entire project, as it definitely feels to be the strongest single aspect of this particular project, and it would be interesting to incorporate these into the work.

Future

In the future I believe that I would take a lot more care in the individual fidelity of my drawings, as I focused a lot on the other aspects of the work, and less on maintaining solid structure in the forms throughout the project, despite this being a strength I usually have. I will definitely be expanding my animation work, and have learned a lot from the animation piece.

VCD 302: In Progress

I recently found this teaser for film called Klaus, it uses a revolutionary technique for 2D Animation that involves lighting and shading as if it was 3D rendered. It creates a very stark and iconic visual style, that while I doubt I will be able to achieve, I at least hope to have some level of emulation to what they have done.

How is it Progressing?

This is an example frame from Toon Boom that I am using to show off some of the stretching and light smearing that will be present in the final product. The product stylistically, is a almost offbeat horror themed animation, and with this in mind, the animation won’t feature a lot of distortion of form, but will still have a lot of compression and smearing to show off the motion that is present.

Type has been integrated into the animation now as well, it has a combination of ‘wobbliness’ and a shifting type face, to convey a almost hand-drawn aesthetic to the piece.

And this is a particularly strong example both of the new background the final section is using, but also the most exaggerated smear and compression in the animation piece, it really gives a sense of the impact from hitting the ground.

Some effects I used to make the undergrowth scene, feel as if it was a part of a forest under a canopy, was a use of randomly generated geometric shapes as an overlay, as little specks of light entering through and lighting some sections of the scene up. I think this helps with the atmosphere of the project.

I did have some minor issues with the program being used to draw these animations, as it struggles to render out a video over a certain number of frames. This was solved by rendering out the animation as a series of images, which can then be imported into Premiere Pro, at a speed of 24 FPS, and this can then be rendered out as a final video.

I also have gone through the process of making my own musical score for the piece! I am far from a trained composer, and am not a naturally musical person, but I wanted a piece that matched the feeling and beats of my Animation.

Now one issue I am having with the animation is I created some lighting and shading on each frame, which looked fine while animating, but after rendering and watching back, has a heavy strobe like effect as each frame is different. Normally when doing motion these smaller differences don’t make a huge impact in the final animation, as the drawings I used as a base were very rough but once in motion, didn’t make a huge difference to the overall fidelity; this is not true for lighting and colour though, and so I am going to go through and remove as many individual frames as I can.