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.