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.