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.