10X10X16

For the 10x10x16 project we were given the task of  creating 10 films in 10 days (1 film a day for 10 days). Pretty simple really...

Day-01- 

ECA-Carrigan_01 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

And so it begins.... On the first day of 10x10x16, I set out with the intention of creating the Tiki Tiki film (actually created on day 06) spending half the day molding Tiki heads out of plasticine- with the intention of animating them under one of the rostrum cameras. However as the day progressed I began to realize that I wouldn't have time to make this film and push it back to another day. This was because I had the added problem of not being able to use main rosterum cameras in the dark room, due to there only being 3 of them and 30-ods of us. We had the take 5's to use instead, but the big problem there was that glare of the layered glass caused by the lights overhead made it impossible to animate on without seeing the camera above. So I chose not to bother. I think this was ultimately me trying to go for something too ambitious on the first day but I was glad to get the models made and out the way.

Having only half a day left and having practically nothing animated I began to feel the pressure a little bit. I had a load of pre-planned film ideas lined up for 10x10, however I knew I wouldn't be able to make these within the time frame I had. And so after a little think I ended up just animating a tortoise eating a bit of lettuce. It is a pretty simple idea, but it gave me something quick and simple to animate. I animated this in adobe flash and then cleaning it up in adobe a Photoshop.

Overall after a slightly stressful start to the project, I feel that this little film I had produced in very little time and the prior events of the day gave me a taster of what was to come and helped me- in a way- ease in to 10x10 and I  was looking forward to the days to come.

Day-02-

ECA-Carrigan_02 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

"Lumber" was originally a film inspired by both the "Powerpuff Girls" cartoon action sequences and the opening title sequence shot of batman standing on top of a building from "Batman the animated series" (as seen below). An odd combination I know, however I had an idea in mind that involved a superhero like lumberjack who would fight crime and wrong evil doers. It being 10x10 I thought it could be something quick, fun and interesting to do. I liked the fact that within powerpuff girls they would use various still imaged action sequences (like the one below) without having to animate anything. I thought this would be a really cool thing to try and do myself, and figured it would be pretty easy to do being still images.

When it came time to come up with a narrative for this superhero lumber jack, I began to think about the well known superhero story line of a cat being stuck up a tree. I thought about how maybe I could make it comical by having the lumber jack chop down the tree to get the cat down, but then this subsequently causes the tree to fall onto the old woman. Once I came up with this small narrative I began to really quickly scribble down a rough story board for me to follow when animating. 

Quick Story Boards 

                                                                    

Next I began to actually animate it! I decided that I would hand draw all of the animation, something which I would later regret as this literally took me all day to do. This included animating, clean up of the frames and lines and then inking. By this point it was pretty late on in the day and I was worried I wasn't going to get it finished. I then quickly edited the film together choosing to key out the white of the paper and only leaving the lines of the drawings visible. Adding to the lumber jack theme, I thought I would experiment and add in a wood texted background. Something which I think looks ok, but honestly I'm not very happy with the look of the film, nor some of the timings within it. I think the pacing is all over the place and the black lines against the textured background sometimes get lost. These things are things that can ultimately be fixed, but for what it is in its current state I think its an idea I can take and improve upon at a later time.

Day-03-

ECA-Carrigan_03 (Music by Hazel Turnbull) from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

   "Lamp Post Love" is a film that I am quite proud of and is one of my favorites from 10x10. It was an idea that my dad gave me when we were discussing ideas for 10x10. The basic premise of the film is all based around lamp post puns, in this case "you really turn me on". And the idea that two lamp posts talk to each other via shining light onto the road and essentially text each other- one trying to chat up the other.

Quick Story Boards

                                       























I really just wanted a nice, stylistically pleasing, funny little story that was easy to animate. And after doing a really short storyboard I set about animating in Photoshop. Using a really nice pastel brush, I had bought in a pack from Kyle Brushes online, giving me a really nice and simple aesthetic to work with. I choose to have the animation scaled down into the center of the screen again for stylistic reasons as I think it gives it a kind of windowed aspect. Like it has a border around it, keeping it clean and simple.

This film was surprisingly the easiest and quickest film I had made in the entirety of 10x10. It is one of the more polished looking ones too and I think this is why it is one of my favorites. I am just really happy with this film overall and especially with with the way it looks as it is very different to my usual style and I was really happy with that.

Day-04-

ECA-Carrigan_04 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

"Astronaut Soup" is a film about an astronaut floating in what we think is either space or some sort of ocean, however it tunes out that hes actually in a bowl of soup. What I wanted to do with this film was try a trick the audience into believing that the astronaut was in space, and coming to the realization that hes actually in the bowl of soup. When coming up with the idea and drawing up a quick story board. I originally wanted the large astronaut to react to the small one he finds in his soup in a way that would resemble someone finding a fly in theirs.

Quick Story Boards

   

However I found that with this film I was again being quite ambitious and began to run out of time, having to cut the ending short because of the time it was taking to animate and colour all of the backgrounds. Again for the backgrounds I was using the pastel brush in Photoshop, drawing and colouring the same backgrounds 3 times and looping them to create the effect of light streaming through the soup as the astronaut floats to the surface (one of them can be seen below).

Equally some of the animating was done in Photoshop, particularly the end sequence with the astronaut reaching the surface and being spooned out. I also animated the astronauts limbs in the opening shot making it seem as though he was floating. Taking this into premier and keying him from left to right to make it seem as though he was floating up. I also did this with the "rocks" that were floating around him, subtly making them float up and down.

Overall I think if I had more time I could have made this one a little better, but I think personally it does what I set out to do with it and in this one I especially liked creating the animated backgrounds.

Day-05-

ECA-Carrigan_05 (Music by Hazel Turnbull) from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

"Awww Snap!" Is just a little silly film I wanted to make in which a water buffalo is drinking at a lake and that suddenly an crocodile appears from the water with snazzy sunglasses on and says "awww snap!", simple really. On this day we were to create a film that was suitable for kids and I figured that this idea was one that was. 

Quick Story Boards

 

I animated this entirely in Photoshop, keeping it very simple and clean, only using smooth black lines and I white background, I had a lot of fun animating this and again this did not take long to animate and edit together. I quite enjoyed this one.

Day-06-

ECA-Carrigan_06 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

"Tiki Tiki" is a film in which 2 Tiki heads are sleeping and one gets woken up by a coconut hitting him in the head, thinking that this was the doing of the other Tiki head tries to wake him up by shouting at him. With the platicine models of the Tiki heads already been made prior,  I was able just to go right into animating which was really nice. However again I tried to animate on one of the take 5s, this time with the lights off, but again I was still seeing the camera above on the glass. I also tried just taking photos of them with the take 5's but for some reason the quality was not very good. Meaning that I would have had to cut each part out individually, something that would take to much time to do.

Concept for the Tiki Film

What I ended up deciding to do instead was actually scanning the individual parts of the models on a green background into the computer so that I could key them out and just animate them in Adobe After Effects. This surprisingly worked out well and It would be easy to do but before I began animating I wanted to actually add a voice recording of the Tiki shouting at the other one. And so using an Ederol sound recorder, I went out into the corridor and recorded myself shouting Tiki getting louder and louder each time I said it to replicate the character trying to wake up the other. Once I had this done I was able to animate the mouth movements to the actual recorded sound of my voice, making the whole process much easier.

Overall animating in after effects was surprisingly fun, and I enjoyed the process of it once I figured out which layers where which. I did a couple of tests with each character (as seen below). Just to make sure everything rendered out correctly and their movements looked convincing.

Once this was done, I quickly drew up a background and some waves that I could animate in Photoshop and then began to composite all of the elements in Premier. Overall I liked the process of this one, however where I think it could be greatly improved is in editing of the sound. I think it could be a lot cleaner and a lot louder. The same being with the wave sound effects behind, that could do with being a bit louder. But finally I made this Tiki film I guess!

Day-07- 

ECA-Carrigan_07 (Music by Rupert Uzzell) from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

"Spaghetti Western" Is another one of my favorites. It is based upon the idea of taking the title spaghetti western and applying it literally to the usual western shoot out. With having the ending being one of the cowboys getting shot with actual spaghetti. Firstly I began to work out the shots I  wanted to have in the film, making them really dynamic and trying to set tension within the scene. Slowly building up a little sequence of shots via a quick story board that would build up to the final scene. 

Quick Story Boards

Once I had all of my shots figured out I began to design the first background for the film, originally doing it in colour (as scene below) but i felt like this was a little too colourful and would not fit with the "serious" tone that I wanted to get across. I ended up re-drawing a new one, using black white and grey tones just to see if that would work and I ended up really quite liking it.  

Again all of the animating was done in Adobe Photoshop and I edited everything in Premier. The style of the characters was again influenced by cartoon networks style of characters being very cartoony in appearance.

I really enjoyed this one and I am quite proud of how it turned out. Rupert Uzzel a sound designer created a soundtrack for it closely resembling the famous western sound track from "The Good the Bad and the Ugly". And I love it, I think it really makes the film. Many thanks to him.

Day-08-

ECA-Carrigan-08 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

For my Day 8 film I new I wanted to try and animate something in stopmotion. For our 2 character project at the start of the year we had a character designing workshop In which the black white and yellow character was made out of Plasticine and I kind of fell in love with it. I knew I wanted to animate him from the get go and I figured now was a good time to do it. I came up with a really simple narrative sequence (scene below) which would involve him being chased by another character. This was simply just to allow me to animate the characters doing something funny and emotive and most importantly fun.

Quick Story Boards 

I ended up creating the red character from scratch, purely to act as the character who would be chasing the black and white one. I gave him 3 sets of chomping teeth so that I could swap them out, making it seem as though he is chasing the other character with the intention of eating him. At first I wasn't sure how I was gonna animate the characters moving from A to B, since they didn't actually have feet. However I ended up having the idea of actually making them hop, propping them up of green Plasticine with the hope of keying it out in post. While it did the job of propping them up when it finally came time to try to edit it out I couldn't find any easy way to do it after the keying didn't work. So I ended up just leaving it due to there not being enough time left.

Overall this was the easiest and surprisingly quickest film I had animated out of all of my 10x10 films. And it was really nice just to animate in stopmotion for a change. Since I have not done a lot of it and it was really nice to just have some fun and play around a little with these two simplistic characters I had created. I really enjoyed this one. 

Day-09-

ECA-Carrigan_09(Music by Laren Polic Zdravic) from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

"Long Day at Work" was a film inspired by the soundtrack of Laren Polic Zdravic. Her soundtrack gave me the idea to have a man standing in an elevator which is going down and as the music escalates. Strange things begin to appear when the light flickers in the elevator, with each time getting weirder and weirder until finally the doors open at the end. On this day I was originally going to do a different piece of music and have a giant robot and a giant lizard fighting each other in a city to it. However that idea was taking too long to do and so I decided to go and choose another piece of music being this one. 

With not much time left in the day, I figured I could just draw still characters in the elevator with the still man, only making them blink or look around. Just keeping it very limited. I did all of this again in adobe Photoshop using layers, allowing me when editing in Adobe Premier to simply just switch the characters in and out and make the light flicker to the soundtrack.  

Overall i think this film was successful and I think the visuals fit the tone of the soundtrack and overall I had fun with this one even if it was last minute.

Day-10-

ECA - Bruning/Carrigan - 10 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

"Elly & Birb" was a film that I collaborated on with my fellow animator Amy Bruning and really enjoyed making. We also only really had half a day to make this film due to Amy and myself  running workshops in the afternoon and so collaborating seemed like a good plan. This being the last day of the project we had to include an elephant into our films, in remembrance of one of the 10x10 coordinators sadly passing away last year. And so we came up with the idea of a little bird flying on screen or so you think as its actually being held up by an elephant running with it. Just a nice simple easy animation to do. I quickly drew up a little story board and concepts of what the elephant could look like (as seen below).

Quick Story Boards

Character Concept

We both decided that we would each take on of the characters and animate them ourselves, so I took the elephant and Amy took the bird and we went off and animated them. I had to figure out how an elephant runs (or in this case walks). After watch a couple of reference videos on youtobe of various elephants walking. I began to draw up a rough sketch elephant. 

Once the animation was complete I began to colour all of the elephants frames in. While I was doing this Amy began to draw up the background and animate her little bird flapping its wings. After this had to draw a separate trunk for the close up scene however this took two seconds and this was done while Amy edited everything together in After Effects and then Premier. 

I really like the style of this little animation and I think we were successful in producing a nice little film. I really enjoyed collaborating with Amy and am looking forward to doing it more. 

Final Thoughts

Really did enjoy this project. I loved being able to try some different stuff and I wanted to use 10x10 to really get some of the small ideas I had in my head out and actually create them in physical form. There were indeed some days in which I had trouble create films, like the first day where I planned to actually make the Tiki Tiki film however I resorted to making the small short tortoise one instead due the lack of time I had left, but I guess this was all in the means of getting into the format of the project. Overall the films I produced throughout the project were ones I felt proud of. Indeed some days I felt I didn't achieve what I wanted to achieve. But I think that's what the project is about. I always strove to push myself with every film, seeing how and what I could come out with in a day. And again sometimes it was good, other times not so but I enjoyed it none the less.