World In A Room

World In a Room 

So in this project you only have 2 characters in 2 rooms. One character must be animated in stop motion, the other in the 3D animating software Autodesk Maya. With these two character we have been given the challenge of creating a narrative within the setting of these two rooms with a door dividing them. The narrative can literally be anything we choose but there needs to be a knock at the door at some point during the film, and this is the only guide line. At this point in the project we have two initial weeks to come up with a narrative and learn a bit of Maya.

Week 1

I approached this project initially with a lot of different ideas. It was so difficult to choose a theme as the project is so broad but I ended up coming up with 2 ideas I could go with.  My first idea was having a horror theme for my film. I knew I wanted to see if I could create a tense atmosphere with the characters and really make use of the lighting and appearance of the characters. I wanted to use the skeletal like features of the stop motion metal armature to my advantage and make it the monster/creature in the other room, and having the 3D character Norman (that's his official name) act as our protagonist/victim.

Idea 1-  Thumbnail Horror Storyboard

Idea 2- Thumbnail Gravity Idea Storyboard

My second idea was to have the stop motion character be really annoyed at something and we later realize that its Norman not answering the door. The reason why is due to the fact that the gravity in the other room is different for Norman, so he is actually standing on the side of the wall opposite the door and is unable to reach it to answer. I really quite liked this idea as I planned to have it cut in a way that would build the suspense. Cutting back and fourth between the two until the stop motion character finally opens the door and falls through because of the gravity in Normans room.

After a bit of thinking and a small pitch to a couple of my fellow animators I began to realize that the horror idea was just really cliche and I opted for my second idea instead. I just like the fact that with the second one I can make it quite funny, focus on emotions and movements more and it allows me to give equal amount of time to both characters.

Week 2

Now that I had a rough narrative I went ahead and created an animatic. The animatic allows me to get the narratives timings right so I know how long each sequence needs to be. Something which in this case was important because I wanted the cutting back and forth between characters to get faster as we progress to the end of the film. And hopefully if effective making it funny.

Week 3

Once planning and the animatic was complete I began to make a start on the Maya section of the film. This week was spent having refresher Maya tutorial sessions with Mike, something which was really helpful and really needed as I couldn't for the life of me remember any of it- not having done it since the walk cycle project in 1st year. This time round using Maya and having prior experience of using it- things coming back to me as we went along- I had a much better time with it. It did not confuse me as much as it did prior and I was much more familiar and aware of where everything was. Maya seemed a lot more easier this time around.

Week 4

Continuing on with Maya I began to animate my first couple of sequences. The first scene I began to do was the slow reveal of Norman standing on the side of the wall. I did some test initially just to get my bearings with the reaching up movement I wanted him to do. A first of all tried to do it by myself first to see if I could get the movement right and it did look ok but not amazing. We were recommended and encouraged to actually act out the movements ourselves, and honestly I found myself doing this anyway but I thought I should do some full body movements and record them so I can translate them into the way Norman moves. I find that for an animator and particularly myself this is a really good way of figuring out how a character moves. You do indeed have an understanding of how it moves but if you act it out physically yourself I find it definitely gives you a greater understanding. I found myself doing this with all of my scenes and strangely I mostly only did this with Maya and less so with the stopmotion part of my film.

Week 5 

Animating the stop-motion section of the film was personally my favourite part. We were given the set of the room just like the one in Maya and a simple, bare armature to work with acting as the second character. My actual animating time for this section was short, due to us only having half a day each in the dark room because of time constraints and the fact that there are 16 of us in 2nd year. For most of the day I ended up helping my animating partner Francesca as she had a few shots where lighting was key for some of her scenes, so we spent a bit of time trying to figure that out. Again this ment less time to animate and I ended up starting at 7pm so time was really against me. 

Once I had my lighting sorted out ( just using the basic 3 point lighting set up) and my character in position, I decided to place my animatic over the live footage in Dragon Frame allowing me to follow the timings of my scenes while animating. This was quite handy as I knew how long I had for each scene and I ended up not wasting time guessing how long each scene had to be. The armature itself was easy enough to work with, all though I did have some problems with posing it because it had some loose joints, some tight joints and no foot pivot which hindered the walking scene a bit. However I still enjoyed it none the less and it was nice to animate something physical for a change. Working with a set was pretty cool too as it was really easy to animate in. All of the walls could be removed allowing the camera to (like the picture below) get behind or in front of the character allowing more space for the camera and easier access to the armature.

In the end animating went pretty smoothly and I manged to shoot all of the scenes I needed, so I was really happy with that. However if indeed I had more time I would re-shoot the beginning and end scenes. The beginning mainly because the armature does not move at all, he is just staring at the door. I would have rather had him pacing back and forth to show or give an initial indication that he is unhappy about something, helping to better introduce the character. For the end sequence I wanted to literally turn the room sideways in post as he falls through the door, however because I didn't have much time and had to rush, I just shot the scene close up so I ended up not being able to achieve this. 

Week 6 

This week I just got back into Maya and was still tweaking the first reaching up scene. I ended up doing many versions of it but by the end of the week realizing I had spent to long on this scene and I quickly moved onto the next. This ended up being the jumping scene which equally ended up taking just as long to do. I had to sit and think about how I wanted Norman to jump while at the same time be reaching up and how I could make it look convincing. I went through the same process as before, filming myself doing the actions and then translating that into Maya. It did take me a while but I think I got it to a point were I was satisfied with it. 

Week 7

This was an extra week that allowed me to get some of the Maya sequences finished and finally get my editing done. Once everything was together, editing was done pretty quickly. I again referenced my animatic for timings and such but in the final film inevitably some things ended up being different. For the sound I just used free sound effects from Free Sound. org, using them very sparingly. I ideally do definitely want to go and record my own sounds for the film at a later point as the ones I end up choosing are not exactly the best. The characters sounds for example are definitely things I would record myself as adding in pre-recorded voices just does not sound right and would not fit right in the film. However because it was all I had at my disposal, I just ended up having to go with it. Premier ended up giving me a few problems to, especially when I wanted it to render the film. I kept constantly trying to render it in HD and it kept failing for some unknown reason, I manged to get a render but it was not the final version so I'm just going to go with that for the time being.

Overall this project has certainly had its ups and downs. I have really disliked Maya at some points and enjoyed it at others. However I know that with more practice at it I will get better and much faster as I use it more and more. Lack of time has been a big issue for me, especially with the time we had allocated in the dark rooms and with the amount of time I take in Maya. I realize that now and in future projects that it is something that I need to keep on top of and this project again is definitely something I will be coming back to, to re-edit and add my own sound. But I think what I have produced is something I'm at least happy with but I know there is definitely more room for improvement.