Tuesday 7 March 2017

10X10X17

Again the for the 10x10x17 project we were given the task of  creating 10 films in 10 days (1 film a day for 10 days). Here we go again!

Day-01-


ECA- Carrigan- Petronelli- Day 1 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

On the first day of 10x10x17 I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do this one, or really all of them for that matter. I didn't really have any small narratives that I wanted to tell and being honest I couldn't really think of any. This year I decided that I was going to play it fast and loose and not overwork myself too much, since I feel like I really burnt myself out last year. Besides this however I wanted to try and start off with something sad for a change, so I choose to make a film about a dying robot in his last moments, sitting next to a fire under the stars. To reflect the mood and tone I was going for in the film, I knew that I would need to have some very slow scenes and still moments. To do this I used slow camera pans and zoom ins to achieve this effect. Since everything would be shown as single shots and there would be limited animation I spent a bit more time on the visuals so I was able to make the film overall more polished. Something which I think really works well with the theme and tone that I was going for. Overall this film I have to say is one of my favorites, I quite enjoyed making it even though it did take quite a while to create backgrounds and what not, but I feel this added to the effect I was going for.



Day-02-


ECA- Carrigan- Day 2 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.
                                             
For day 2, again I didn't really have a clue what I wanted to do. After thinking for a while, I thought about doing something with a duck, and it being valentines day I figured I could do something along the lines of 2 ducks falling in love, or a duck trying to find love. I have always liked the idea of filming real locations and adding small animated characters into those locations. Something that I have done before briefly and had a lot of fun with (2015 Filler film "The Department" Film for the 4th Years Degree Show), and I wanted to do something like this again thinking that I could do something simple and quick. Hiring out the video camera from Mike I set about recording small boxes I have on my desk. I placed these boxes in the middle of the desk and shot them from lots of different angles so that I had plenty of options to choose from. During this process I had the idea of having a duck be wandering round the boxes, responding to a call of which he thinks is a female duck, however this would actually turn out to be another larger duck actually sitting in the box and tricking the small duck into following the calls round the box continuously (not a very smart duck). This idea did prevail once animating started however I began to run out of time since I had other commitments on that day, so in the end I had to cut the idea short. I was not sure how to do this at first however I ended up having the idea of having the duck look like it was caught on camera in a warehouse of some sort- due to it coming out from behind a box. So I added a camera recording effect onto the screen and some static and boof day 2 was done! 


Day-03-


ECA- Carrigan- Moutzouris- Day 3 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.


For day 3, I knew I wanted to make an animation to music created by one of the composers that were also part of the project. I ended up coming across Moutzouris'es piece which I really liked and It gave me the idea of animating a character walking to it, in a cool manner. This character ended up coming in the form of a sketch I did back in first year of the stud muffin, a hunky man with a muffin for a head- don't ask. I came up with the idea of slowly revealing this character to the music, finally showing off his head when the music reaches its climax, also reveling the visual joke. I originally had intended to animated this character in after effects using the puppet tool, actually going as far as to creating the full character with split up limbs for animating.


Original Stud Muffin For After Effects

However I ended up running into problems with Duik an animating plug-in in after effects which allows you to give bones to characters. This took most of the day and I began to run out of time so I decided to go ahead and animate the character frame by frame in a simple walk cycle, since for me I knew I could achieve this in the time I had left. Once this was done and he was all coloured, I then began to create a background that would allow me to reveal the character piece by piece until the end of the film. I did this by simply scribbling over the whole frame on a different layer 3 times so I could get a boil and then I cut out rectangles of the parts of the character that I wanted to slowly reveal. Overall I think this animation turned out ok, its not what I had imagined in the first place and I think that it could have been executed a little bit better, but I think in the end I managed to achieve the  effect I was going for.



Day-04-


ECA- Carrigan- Day 4 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

Day 4 was a chance for me to complete a film that I had been wanting to make for a while now. Amy and myself had recorded a silly little story that we had came up with on the cuff while I had the recording equipment hired out and I always have wanted to animate to it since I thought it would be a funny thing to animate to. So for me this was a chance to finally make this film, and I figured 10x10 is a perfect way to do it. Again I had another go at animating in after effects, however this time it was different since I wouldn't be using Duik and I chose to simply use after effect's puppet tool to animated the characters with. This turned out to be quite a bit of fun since I have only done animated tests with the puppet tool before so It was nice to be animating in after effects again with something a bit more substantial. A big part of this film I had to figure out was animating the lip sync on the characters, something I have never done before. For the head master character to get around having to do the lip sync for both characters I ended up just animating his mo-stash moving up and down, something I thought actually looked quite good and worked well. However this actually took quite a while to animate since I also had to sync the movements up with the parts where he was talking. However I think this turned out quite well. The I moved onto animating Amy's character the small blue one, and for him there was no way to get around the lip sync so I had to just soldier through it. Eventually I got it done however It was getting late and I knew I wouldn't have time to do all of the characters body animations, which is a shame since I think it would have made the film a bit better. However I had to use the time I had, and I ended up just making sure all of the lip sync was right and using close ups and cutting back and forth to convey movement within the scene. In the end I quite like this animation, its more of a personal one and I am glad that I finally have done it.

Day- 05-


ECA- Carriagn- Day 5 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

On day 5 we were given the theme of  "21st century social etiquette" with which we were given the task of conveying something we find annoying or rude about what people do in the 21st century. I had the idea of basing it on people who place there bags on the seats next to them on the bus. I find this quite rude and even more so when I'm on a packed bus and I see people doing it- so it was something I thought I would animate for this topic. On this day I didn't have a lot of time to work with since I had workshops that I do on this day and I was busy in the evening so my time was very limited. To get around this I figured I could make a film in after effects again, using simple static characters and limited animation. I ended up drawing alien looking characters since they would be simple to draw and I could convey my idea easily and clearly. I figured that I could create something that would appear like an infomercial for aliens that live among us on earth, a bit like a tutorial on how to be a human. Once all of the animation was complete and put together in adobe premier I decided that I would do a voice over to add to the effect of this being a infomercial/ tutorial on how to behave in public situations. I recorded my voice using a edoral sound recorder that I had hired out and recorded my voice as the animation was playing in front of me. This was actually quite difficult and it took a few tries and cutting certain parts together, but overall it turned out ok when it was finally finished. This isn't my favorite film due to my embarrassingly horrible English accent being played over the whole thing, however I do like the animation as a whole and I was proud I was able to animate it in the really limited amount of time I had.

Day- 06-



ECA- Carrigan- Peng- Day 6 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.


Day 7 was another day I knew I wanted to make an animation to music created by one of the composers that were also part of the project. I came across Terry Peng's really nice music and so I knew I wanted to animate to this. I also knew that on this day I would animate with Plasticine, since I had thought about animating with it over the weekend. Once I listened to Terry's music over a couple of times, I came up with the idea of animating a cup filling up with water droplets and then overflowing to the beat of the music (a droplet would fall when every beat would play). To animate this with the Plasticine I ended up using one of the rostrums, placing down black paper for the background and animating the Plasticine on top of a pain of glass, as not to get the background dirty. This process was fun but took forever, since I had to cut out the Plasticine over and over. By the time I got 3 quarters of the way through the animation it was very late and I soon had to leave to the last bus home so I ended up deciding that I would make the whole animation reverse back to the beginning quickly to the last part of the music. This ended up working quite well in the end and I was happy with the overall result.

Day-07-



ECA- Carrigan- Summerhill- Lui- Day 7 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.


Recovering from Day 6 I found myself being quite tired and really wanting to do something easy and quick for Day 7. Again I looked to music for my inspiration and discovered a track by Lui from Summerhill's piece that really matched my mood that day. With the intent of animating in Photoshop I decided to animate a tortoise relaxing in a field of grass and trees, watching the clouds go by. I actually really enjoyed doing this one since it was really simple and I really liked the style I came up with for it. Overall I think it really compliments the music and I am really happy with the way this turned out.


Day-08-



ECA- Carrigan- Garcia- Day 8 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

For Day 8 I wanted to do something a bit action packed and decided to base the theme of this animation on a monster attacking a city and a superhero flying in to save the day. I wanted to make reference to my Spaghetti Western film I did in last years 10x10 and decided to go with a monochrome colour scheme which I think worked well in terms of the films aesthetic, since I like how it kind of references the old monster movies of the past. I animated everything in Photoshop using layers in the timeline panel which was very useful, particularly for the part where the superhero enters and fly's down to face the monster that is approaching the city. And again as with all the films I had done in 10x10 I edited it all together in Adobe Premier. For the scenes with the monster and the face off between it and the superhero, I animated those in after effects since I find it much easier to pan, zoom, and add in assets within it rather that Premier. Overall I quite enjoyed animating this one and I think it turned out quite well. I think the music that Garcia kindly made for it really makes the film and helps to add that little extra something to finish it off.

Day-09-



ECA- Carrigan- Summerhill- Kim- Day 9 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

Day 9 was another lazy day for me, and another day that I wanted to add an animated character into a real background. I decided to use this frog man that I quickly designed and originally I was going to add him into different places throughout my house, creating the impression that he was stuck inside on a rainy day. For most of the morning I spent my time filming different locations within my house that I could place him in. Having him either sitting or standing not doing much- since I wanted to keep the amount of animating I would have to do to a minimum. Once I had all of my footage I took the first scene into Photoshop of him standing looking out of the window. What I realized while doing this however was that I could just use the scene of him looking out the window to sad music and that would get the point of the film across in a much simpler and easier way. I ended up going with this idea in the end and I think it overall turned out quite well and I actually really quite like this one.

Day-10-



ECA- Carriagn- Day 10 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

The last day! For Day 10 we were given another theme to base our animations on and this time it was "Seeing through the eyes of another". For this what we had to do was basically create a film with the perspective of  someone else's view point. What I decided to do for this one (again because I had so little time due to my workshops that day), was to do a pigeon sneaking up on an unsuspecting chip and then have a shot of the chip being pecked by what is revealed to be the pigeon. Again I ended up using Photoshop to animate the film and it turned out to be relatively easy to animate. For the opening scene where we see the chip being sneaked up on I used after effects to create the up and down motion of someone walking towards him. This was a little bit fiddly to do but in the end I ended up working out. Overall for what it is I think this films ok. I think it could really use some music and maybe some more time could have been spent building up to the chip tuning around and looking horrified, but in hindsight I enjoyed making this one and again I think it turned out ok.

Thoughts on Project Overall: 

What did I think of 10x10x17? I think I quite enjoyed this one. I don't think overall that I had made as many good films as last years project but again my main aim for this year was not to burn myself out, and I know for a fact that I definitely achieved this. This one too was a very different experience to last in that I found myself not really knowing what I wanted to do most days, not like before where I had some kind of plan each day. And I think that in some cases this may have been to my detriment, however I think I do have created some films that I am quite proud of and I think that's quite an achievement considering that we only have a day to make them. But I guess that's what 10x10 is about, you are not going to make a perfect or even a full film everyday. Most of the time you need to compromise and go with what works or what you have time for, thinking on your feet. And I think that's why I love and sometimes hate 10X10, but overall I just really love this project.