Halloween Film

This animation was created for the Animation Career Review websites $1000 Halloween short Animation contest, in which you had to have at least one scene where there is a pumpkin, ghost, witch, vampire, werewolf, or zombie and there needed to be at least 10 seconds of Kevin MacLeods "Dance of Deception" audio in  the film also.

Only having three weeks till the deadline by the time I found out about the competition, I knew I could only do a simple short animation and I wanted to do something funny based on a vampire. Conveniently and I already had a drawing of a Spaghetti vampire in my black and white sketchbook that I sketched back in the summer, so I decided to create an animation based on that.

I kind of had the idea from the get go that I wanted to have the movement of his arms go along to the music but I didn't have a narrative for what his arms would be doing. I came up with the idea that he would actually be eating spaghetti himself and he could be looking for a fork to eat it with, giving the film an unusual structure but one none the less.
I Began to plan out what actions the arms would be doing according to the music (the music being not the best to listen to made this a little tedious) so I spent a while visually going over the soundtrack in my head and doing rough timings of the movements in my sketchbook.

Once planning was done the next stage was beginning to animate. When originally thinking about how to animate this film I actually wanted to do it in stop motion, using the rostrum camera and plasticine and animating the vampire in a series of separate pieces just like the Moomins movie. But again I didn't have the time so I stuck with hand drawn. Firstly I wanted make a start on the wiggly arm sequences. I knew that on after effects there was something called a puppet tool that allows you to add points or pins to objects allowing you to move a static image easily. Once watching a few tutorials I eventually learned how to make my vampire arm wiggle and began to do some tests.

While I think the puppet tool is quite neat and is definitely something I will go back to. I was having difficulty matching up my separately animated hand to the end of the arm and trying to do this was taking up time that at this point I didn't have so I decided to drop it and begin to animate other scenes. While there was some frame by frame animation like the scene where the arm comes out of the trap door and into the kitchen(which was animated in Photoshop), most of the animating was done in Adobe Premier. The scenes were arms move from one side to the other or overlap are animated in Premier using key frames. This process was pretty simple and really cut down the amount of animation I had to do. Each single frame of the arm animations and even the still arm frames were all placed on green backgrounds so that I could easily key them out and place them on top of my background images. This meant that I could move them separately and use some of the same animations in different scenes and again just made the process a whole lot easier and save a lot more time.

Overall this process was very time consuming and with the deadline fast approaching I knew that I was going to be cutting it close. I ended up doing different segments of the animation in an order that was listed from most important and most complex to lest important and easy. This system, while being much more productive was something that I feel in retrospect was slowed down by myself animating in Photoshop. Photoshop is very effective at colouring, giving you access to a wide range of tools and different types of brushes however I find that animating in it is very slow. I see myself as being a bit of a creature of habit and I was used to using Photoshop to animate, so rather than using Adobe Flash which I heard was good for animating and at the time I had never used it before, I opted to stick with it. I did get the film done in the end however I feel the animating would have been much faster if I had just used Flash. 

Colouring in Photoshop

I quite like creating some of the backgrounds for the animation particularly the first one (below) which I think I got a bit carried away with as its the most detailed. The other backgrounds are somewhat very simple again due to my time limit. Especially the ones in the underground sequence they are just gradients from orange to black because I didn't have the time and this was another easy way to cut corners.

Editing the film together was fairly easy as I had the soundtrack which gave me a rhythm to cut the sequences to. There was indeed a lot of extending sequences and cutting them to make sure they matched up with the soundtrack as some of the bits of animation were either too shot or too long which did cause some problems but with a little editing magic were easily resolved.

Indeed while this was a very stressful little project, I know it is something that I had fun with and will go back to or even redo in stop motion. There are so many things I know I can improve on in this film and I really like the funny little concept I have going with it. However at the end of the day I'm glad I did go ahead and make this film. Even if I didn't win anything in the contest, It like every film I make has taught me a lot and I know I want to and will create more external little films in the future.

Edinburgh Sketch Book Project Year 2

            

       Edinburgh Sketch Book Project- 2nd Years Group 1 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

For this years Edinburgh project we were given a brief in which for the first week we had to go out and fully fill a sketch book with drawings from around Edinburgh and then subsequently choose one of them to animate, making sure it transitioned into the next sketchbook animation another person in your group has done.

In the first week the idea of filling a full sketchbook with drawings was In all honestly pretty daunting but by the end the week I think most people actually manged to do it. I didn't due to having a toe operation mid way through the week so I couldn't get to Edinburgh to draw anything, but beside that I got a good way through it. Here are some of my favourite sketches:

When it came time to choose one of these drawings in our sketchbooks, as a groups we did it in a way where we each chose our favorite drawings in the others sketchbooks and the ones that had the most votes, ended up being the ones we choose from. I ended up choosing a sketch of a shark inside the National Museum of Scotland as the group seemed to like this one.

Coming up with ways to transition our sketchbook animations at first was quite difficult as we were unsure how to transition them and merge the different styles of drawings together. At first we had a range of different ideas, but ended up going with pixelation. This meant that we would be able to move from one location to the next (the location being where the sketches were drawn in) creating a 1st person perspective journey around the city. You can almost see it as  a reflection of our own selves traveling round the city -like we were doing in the first week- showing these places or things through our own perspective.

We also decided to keep the animation hand drawn with no colour. Again creating a sense of continuity without losing everyone's unique style. However we still were not sure how we were going to implement these into the film alongside the pixelation. At first we were going to physically track our drawings and place them on top of the pixelation on after effects. The problem with this however was that the pencil lines would be lost within the rapid jerky movement of the pixelation, so we had to go back to the drawing board. I thought about the possibility of actually holding sketchbooks in front of the objects that were being animated giving the effect that our sketches were almost coming to life in a way. This would allow the hand drawn animation to be fully visible on the white paper of the sketchbook, also meaning that we could pixelate the sketchbooks being held up in front of the camera tying the two animation forms together. The group seemed to like the idea and we ran with that.

When it came time to animate my shark sketch I knew I wanted to play around with the idea of the shark being attached to the ceiling on strings. I created a little storyboard in which the shark wakes up from being still and then tries to bite everything around him but is unable to, limited to hanging very sadly. With this premise in mind I wanted to make this funny and it knew it was going to be something that I was definitely going to have fun animating.

Before animating the shark I wanted to do some reference sketches to get to know the character I was animating

Once I had put together the animation on the line testers for the first time I realized that some of the sharks movement needed adjusting and more frames needed to be added. The real challenge when animating the shark was getting its swing right. This took a few attempts but I think the end result looked pretty good. I'm just really pleased with it overall and for me I personally love hand drawn animation which is what made the process really enjoyable for me.

      

During this time we all went out as a group and did the pixelation from location to location. We had planed out a set route of where each location was and the route we would take to get to each location. Some locations like the first one which was St Anthony's Chapel ruins we accidentally forgot to pixelate the sketch book going up and down, which meant that later we had to edit in one of the later pixelated sketchbooks. In the museum we ended up running into the same problem with my scene because the sketchbook ended up being very dark so we replaced it. In the end it actually looked convincing, as if they were pixelated at the locations. We also ran into the problem of some of the locations being too far apart. Wanting to avoid having the whole journey pixelated (as this would make the film too long and boring). We ended up creating transitions between locations by going into things or fading similar looking things together, like transitioning between the rocks at the ruins with the cobbles on the royal mile. Overall it didn't take us long to do the pixelation but we knew we at least had to put a day aside to do it. Luckily there was really good weather that day so we lucked out.

Finally once the pixelation footage was shot and my animation was complete, I handed it over to Grant who put my shark animation onto the pixelation footage of the sketchbook page. He needed to track it on the page to give the effect that the animation was pixelated making it match to the original footage due to the reason mentioned earlier.

Overall I enjoyed this project and it was a nice way to start of 2nd year. The task of filling the sketchbook by the end of the week was a surprisingly good exercise, really loosing me up and making me draw much faster afterwards. The process of working with new and less experienced animations was another valuable experience and was a great way to get to know the new second years.

Stuff I did in Summer 2015

My Black and White Sketch Book

This sketch book comprises mainly of random sketches I have drawn and inked. These are just some fun little drawings I like to do in my free time.

See Hear Project Part 2

   

See Hear Outdoors Part 2 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

For this second part of the project we were given a soundtrack to work with rather than one we made ourselves. The soundtrack itself turned out to be quite a sci-fi sounding one, a theme that we all decided we wanted to explore. Taking this, we knew rather than creating another abstract film we wanted to create a more narrative driven film. Listening to the soundtrack over and over as a group we began to brainstorm some ideas of what actions would take place within the narrative. We eventually came up with the idea of having the sounds represent different aliens on a planet, with the sounds at the beginning coming from an astronauts space ship. The space ship would then land and an astronaut would come out of it and begin to explore the planet, finding the different creatures that inhabit it.  Below is the storyboard that we came up with for the narrative:

 After our storyboard was complete we began to divide up the work load, choosing which parts and tasks we wanted to do. We all decided to play to our strengths, and with mine being Photoshop we decided to firstly create an animatic so that we would have a visual que for when each of the sounds came in. This also allowing us to plan how long we would need to animate each of the characters and actions for.

                       
                                   See Hear Part 2 Alien Animatic from Tyler Carrigan on Vimeo.

Once this was complete, we knew that we wanted to animate all of the aliens in stopmotion, using actual model aliens, while the astronaut and spaceship would be hand drawn on the computer. Problem was we realized that all of the space in the stop-frame 3D studio was booked out, meaning that we had to animate on the rostrum cameras instead. We wanted to still do 3D looking models and took inspiration from a version of the animated cartoon called "Moomin" in which this is done.

I did some sketches of some alien concepts when we first began to listen to the soundtrack. I tried drawing aliens that would create the kinds of noises that we heard in the soundtrack, here is what I came up with:

I ended up choosing the squid looking alien as we thought that it would be good for one of the sections with bleeping sounds in it as the round parts on its sides we figured could light up in time with the sounds. All there was to do was actually create the model! Here is the finished version:

The model was made out of Fimo plasticine so that it could be put in the oven and baked. I added the tentacles to the bottom of the model using just normal plasticine, allowing them to be animated and articulated.

For the astronaught I went ahead and did some sketches aswell:

I knew when designing the astronaut I wanted the design to be pretty simple, I mostly veered toward the goldfish bowl helmet design and the 1950s jumpsuit/space suit look which I think suites the look of the film overall.  

Once this was done, myself and Amy began to film footage to rotoscope for the astronaut scenes. Using the animatic we could copy the actions that the astronaut would be doing and act them out ourselves, allowing for the astronauts movements to be more realistic. This also meant that I could in turn take the footage and rotoscope it, focusing on the scenes with higher importance first so that the astronaut would have the same drawn style all the way through.

Once we captured the footage I then went ahead and rotoscoped. I had not had any prior experience with rotoscoping before so it was something new for me to try. Overall I think I picked it up fairly quickly and I think it was quite fun to do as I basically had to trace around Amys figure and turn her into an astronaut (Not something you say every day). It was pretty hard going some of the time as there was a lot of drawing and redrawing, but as with any animation, seeing the final result made it all worth it and I think overall it looked pretty good. 

I did some tests with the first major scene I did when the astronaut first lands on the planet:

         

This first test was pretty jumpy in places and I knew I need to add more frames to make it smoother- not bad for a first attempt however!

         

In this second test I had cleaned up all of the frames and added the details, yet I still felt like it need more frames as the actions of the astronaut didn't look like she was reacting to the aliens in the scene enough. 

         

This final version I felt happy with as the pauses I added really make the astronaut seem like she's reacting to the aliens a lot more. Also I was happy with the overall movement, adding the extra frames helped this as well I think. 

The others in my group helped me out by colouring the frames and focusing on some of the miner scenes for me as the rotoscoping was very time consuming and it was a major part in the film. I added a blue background to the astronaut rotoscoping, as this allowed us to key out the background so that we could add the astronaut in as a separate layer of film to composite on top of the other backgrounds.

This was very much like the other things in the film as there were a lot of layers to composite and bring together. Things like the stop frame animating of the aliens, the one I designed Amy went ahead and animated for me as I was still doing the rotoscoping.

I also animated the spaceship stair scene which was done by taking the footage of Amy walking down the stairs and using the literal stairs she walks down and use them as a basis for the spaceships stairs. Trying to get the stairs to look like they were coming out of the spaceship was tricky as I had to get the angles right. I also ended up animating it backwards making it easier for me to animate it.

 Things that I would change:

Overall I quite like the project and really enjoyed creating a narrative out of a soundtrack, its something I have never done before. But I think the plot of our film could have been looked at a bit more as in the feedback from the crit. We were told that perhaps the aliens should not be revealed straight away helping creating more suspense and build up the tension a bit more, something which I agree with. Another thing would be taking more time on the keying as I feel that some of the keying was a bit off, but this was down to having our film done by the deadline. I feel were were focusing more on getting it done rather than making it look good which was one of the problems that we faced. Another small thing was there is a scene change were the background stays the same and makes the film look a bit strange, but again I think this was down to us trying to get the film finished for the deadline.