Animating the Painter's Room

This was the final room that needed animating. The tears and cuts through the walls were created by running a screw driver through the paper-cache walls frame by frame. These look realistic however to improve them, we could have painted the back of the newspaper, which shows slightly when falling off the walls.

The shot where the painting fell of the wall and bled into the floorboards was a live-action shot, involving ink being poured into the back of the canvas, and allowed to leave through holes, where it then fell into a puddle on an invisible layer on cling film. We weren't sure how the ink would act however it turned out the way we hoped it would.

The ending scene with the candle drop was achieved by placing the candle on a piece of wire that was fed through the floorboards, to help keep it in mid-air. These had to be painted out in post-production however to remove the wire and create the illusion. 

The hands of the 'wall people' coming out of the chimney was the final long scene. We got the gist of them  from the practice scene we did a few weeks earlier so they were not as complicated to animate the second time around. We accidentally moved the first hand a bit too far to the right of the chimney however to recover it, we animated it settling back into a more central position, and the error now looks intentional as if he is feeling around. The fragile fingers towards the end also started snapping and were harder to keep in place, however this too is not noticeable in the final footage. 

What Went Well

• The distortion of the room was something I was worried that we weren't going to be able to achieve, however the scenes we have managed to create look very believable and I'm pleased with them
• The hands of the wall people have a lot of life and character to them
• The practice tests of some of the harder shots made animating the real thing a lot easier
• We completed the animation before the Christmas break so there won't be any issues completing it in time

Criticism

• The wall paper could have been painted on both sides, as some newspaper shows in some of the scenes
• We were uncertain how the ink would act for the live action shot as we couldn't plan for it or do a test shot
• We tried to get the picture frame to crack however it just ended up shattering everywhere so we didn't end up using that shot
• The 'wall people' hands would have been too fragile for any more than one scene of animating with without snapping

Animating the Hallway

We needed to animate a lot of shots in the corridor room. These were the hardest scenes to animate. The first scene involved the poet walking down the corridor towards camera, to his door. This was incredibly difficult to do as his body (in particular his legs, which were screwed to the ground) were unable to hold his weight in positions beyond standing, and without a rig we had to find ways around holding him in place. We resorted to tying a string around his head that was attached to the ceiling because this would need the least amount of painting out in post-production. The walls he was standing between were also very narrow and quite fragile. A couple of times, we accidentally knocked the set reaching over, and were unable to restore it so had to start again. Our main intentions with this was to keep the poet's head in line at all times as this made his walk cycle more steady. I was happy with the end product that we eventually managed to produce. In future I will consider the rigging of the puppets more thoroughly. 

The next scene involved the painter coming out of his room. This was surprisingly more advanced than I had anticipated as you could see him through parts of the door and so the painter had to be animated even behind the closed door. We then animated him bending under the door frame. Once again, without a proper rig, this was hard to achieve. We somewhat got the painter to prop himself up on the door with one of his hands, however was still very unstable and the final animation could have been slightly smoother, but with the materials we had, I was very pleased with what we achieved. Once or twice, the door frame was jogged and that meant we had to start again as we couldn't line it back up well enough.

The poet's and painter's speech was helped once again by the lip sync plans Harry made beforehand. It meant we didn't need to focus on the timing of the mouth but instead could concentrate on their body actions. These were the best animation sequences we had made yet as they flow very smoothly and they sync very well with the voices we recorded. There was some flickering of the light in one of the shots, however this can be removed in post-production. We also needed to switch around some of the walls where the new camera angles revealed beyond the set. Animating with the characters has become a lot more natural. 

The final shot with the poet walking into the painter's room is one of my favourite scenes. I was especially pleased with the animation here, which runs very smoothly and I really like the shadow cast across the floor and far wall. We had initially not planned for this shot to be included, however the door test that we made above persuaded us that it needed to be included.

What Went Well

• The characters have a lot of personality in their walking and movements
• The swinging of the door is very realistic and emphasises the painter's carelessness
• Details like the blue lighting on the floor adds to the atmosphere of the scene
• As a team, we are working efficiently and dynamically
• The lip sync plans are crucial 

Criticism

• We need better rigs for next time to properly stabilise and control the puppets. The screws were not enough
• The more complex scenes are slightly more jumpy than the scenes in the poet's room
• Some of the scenes were more advanced and took longer than first anticipated
• We had to be very mindful of the set as jogging it meant we would have to start again
• The hair and clothes of the puppets jitters but it's only noticeable in scenes with small movements and this is hard to avoid

Animating the Poet's Room

This room required both close-up and wide-angle shots. The shots I was involved in were where the poet get's up in bed, where the poet shouts for the painter to 'be quiet', and the loop where he roles over in bed.

For the shot with the poet getting up in bed, I was pleased with the motion, where there is anticipation of the action before it happens, as well as at the end, where the poet settles into his new position. The blink is also well timed. The only issue we kept facing was that the camera kept moving without us even having touched it. We took it off of the carpet, which helped a bit, however, whenever the battery of the camera had to be changed, this jogged it slightly. The software also kept crashing and meant we had to turn the camera off and on each time, also jogging it slightly. It couldn't be helped however and we tried our best to get it back into the same position. It is not noticeable in playback unless pointed out and otherwise runs very smoothly.

We had the same issue with the other shot, and being a longer shot, we had to replace the camera battery a few times. Despite this, I was pleased with the overall shot. The animation of the mouth was very accurate, due to Harry's plan, which mapped out each mouth movement for every syllable of the character's dialogue. This meant we had a good idea how long each mouth shape lasted for and we knew it would sync with the dialogue we recorded. The sliding back into bed is a nice touch as it conveys the poet's frustrated but tired emotions. To enable the character to slide into bed, I had to slice the end of the bed open in order to let his feet through. Another challenge was keeping the duvet still. While it did have a layer of tin foil to keep it under control, it was not enough to keep it steady but we tried our best to get it into the position we wanted it to be in. 

To achieve the loop, we only had to animate the poet turning over across the bed from one side to the other. The footage will then be reversed and seamlessly look as if he is constantly tossing and turning. This scene will be used as a half-transparent shot, overlaid on top of another scene of the bed, to convey the passing of time. This was the quickest scene to animate and there is not a lot I can critique about it.

What Went Well

• The movements are very smooth making the poet look realistic
• We found the most efficient way to make a loop cycle that worked for the poet tossing and turning in bed
• The mouth plan was crucial - we didn't have to worry about the timing of this on top of the timing of his general movements

Criticism

• The duvet was the biggest challenge to get right as it kept moving too much
• The camera battery and crashing software made it hard to keep the camera in the right position
• The bed had to be cut open midway through a shot to allow for the poet to slide back into bed

Green-screen and Painted Background Animating

Me, Daisy and Harry have started animating now that we are happy with the animation tests. We experimented with oil paints for creating swirl effects and morphing colour patterns. These will be faint overlays, which will help make the room look distorted when the poet character gets trapped in the painter's bedroom and the wall people start to come alive. 

The swirl effect using a pallet knife was incredibly difficult to do, as we had to keep the central point of the swirl in the same place each time. The rectangular nature of the A3 page also meant it was hard to achieve a circular swirl each time. This process was made yet harder when we slowly started to introduce new colours, as we did not want the colours to mix immediately. The loop however is fairly seamless as it plays forward and in reverse, and the swirl effect is fairly clear. 

The exploding colour effect was a much easier pattern to create. It involved colours from the white centre, exploding out to cover the whole screen, before being taken over by another colour. The only real issue was keeping the central point white as it tended to merge with the surrounding colour. The motion is smooth however and the colours are very strong. 

Next we animated the green-screen features of the film. The loop cycle of the hand holding the candle was particularly hard to do because the hand had no grip of the candle and the rig itself was unable to hold the weight of the hand. I got around this problem by tightening the rig's joints and using a wrench to clamp down the base of the rig to the table. This did mean the rig was very springy and hard to move between each scene but was at least able to take the weight of the puppet. Overall, the loop is fairly seamless and gives a good impression of the puppet walking from a first-person perspective. The candle wobbles slightly, however it is not too noticeable. 

Then we animated the poet's hand knocking on the door. The sleeve and arm of the puppet were able to move separate to each other, which was very useful, especially for the follow-through of the poet's sleeve when his fist impacts and abruptly stops at the door but the sleeve carries on moving forward. It meant the arm could be in the exact same position for each shot that the sleeve moved forward, giving more weight and impact to the action. This was my favourite green-screen element to animate and part I'm most pleased with so far. 

We then animated the day and night scenes with the front-on view of the window. We achieved this by positioning the light at different points along a semi-circle arc around the window. I like how the light slightly reflects in the window as it resembles the midday point. 

What Went Well

• The painted overlays look very smooth and will definitely help to make the room look distorted
• The painted overlays compliment one another when reduced in transparency and played at the same time
• The separate sleeve and hand made for the knocking shot creates a very convincing illusion that the poet's hand actually hits against a door, as we could animate the follow through of the sleeve without touching the hand
• The window keeps its nice details in post-production for instance the outer strip of stained-glass, which was coloured with blue ink. This doesn't appear as opaque when green-screened, nor is it completely removed by the green screen

Criticism

• The green-screens weren't lit very well so Daisy had to edited them out along with the rig in post-production
• We'll have to make sure the lighting on the puppets matches up with the lighting of the environment they are in
• The rig we used was very unpredictable for the walking with the candle scene, however we still managed to make a successful loop cycle

Study Task 9 - Reflective Writing

My project aimed to investigate whether animating using stop-motion in its pure analogue form was enough to make aesthetically realistic water. I came to this investigative question crucially through the research I conducted to begin with. The abundance of information I found through my research allowed me to discover and focus on a very narrow area of interest, which my project could then develop on from. I previously thought I was going to go down the avenue of special effects in stop-motion, however the research was useful for fine-tuning my plans. Gathering all the research first and then deciding on the practical response and essay’s argument after, felt much more natural, rather than pre-formulating the practical response and essay structure before finding the right information to fit it. Overall the research was successful, and despite not being able find as much of my information from published books as I would have liked, the triangulation of the online sources I found, made the research more reliable and helped solidify my arguments. Overall the research stage taught me just how interconnected every animation project is – no film was ever completely unique but rather, there are always similarities and signs of inspiration taken from other animations. My animation particularly showed direct signs of where I’d been inspired by the films I was researching. 

 

The practical response’s design was inspired by the ocean in ‘Two Balloons’ (2017). The ‘wave table constructed for Two Balloons’ (TwoBalloons, 2017), which used ‘an intricate network of… pushrods to move dozens of shiny plastic layers to create the undulating waves of an ocean’ (TheAwesomer, 2017), inspired me to build a stage with a similar system of upright kebab skewers that could be moved vertically. I also based the stage on the ‘physical reference’ tests made by Laika for ‘Kubo and the Two Strings’ (2016), in particular the ‘water system’ made from ‘garbage bags’ and an ‘iron mesh that would undulate and roll like an ocean’ (Sarto, 2017), which inspired me to use a bin bag for the ocean surface. Although my ocean stage was smaller (only a fraction of the ‘20ft’ by ‘17ft’ (TwoBalloons, 2017) ocean made for ‘Two Balloons’), more fragile and rudimentary (the skewers couldn’t be glued strongly to the bin liner and the liner had creases in it that looked unrealistic for an ocean), I was still pleased with what I’d managed to create. The clouds were inspired by the fog and its opacity in ‘Hedgehog in the Fog’ (1975) and built similar to the ‘Two Balloons’ clouds, from cotton ‘wool’ that was stretched out incredibly thinly so as to be somewhat transparent (Smith, 2017). With more time, I could have improved the ocean by experimenting with painting the bin liner – attempting to get the analogue ocean scene to look more realistic, however, I thought that would reduce the flexible qualities of the bin liner once dry. I also could have made the background look more realistic by creating a sky scene with clouds, however I then wouldn't have been able to green-screen the ocean, so this would have set up many more complications. Overall, the building stage taught me that however thoroughly I planned, there were always going to be new problems that cropped up, which I hadn’t thought about until I’d started. 

 

Overall, the practical response was very successful in the investigation. It included all three sub-categories of water that I was focussing on (water expanses – the ocean, moving water – the waves and spray, gaseous water – the cloud backdrop). The two versions of the scene I created (one analogue version without post-production work and a version with digital post-production work applied) was particularly conclusive to the investigation, where I discovered that stop-motion in analogue form was not good for creating aesthetical realism, however was still useful as either a ‘physical reference’ (TheAwesomer, 2017) that obeyed the physics of the real world, or a ‘puzzle piece’ (Rolewicz, 2018) of an animation that looked realistic once further digital processing was applied. I also worked this way because from the research, I found out that apart from ‘Hedgehog in the Fog’, which avoided digital technology and created ‘doubts… about the omnipotence of the computer’ (Shenderovich, 2004), stop-motion is rarely used without digital assistance. Stop-motion is ‘almost never used for VFX creation’ (VFXGeek, 2019) on its own, with Laika director, Steve Emerson (2017) even revealing ‘water and stop-motion are not a good mix’. By creating both the analogue and digitally assisted scenes, I could witness the difference it made aesthetically, of which, there was a huge difference and this evidence was the most conclusive element of my whole essay. The fact the analogue ocean had faults with it and looked unrealistic could not be seen as a criticism of the test but rather evidence for the test disproving the question I was investigating. Overall the animating stage taught me the extent that stop-motion nowadays is used in conjunction with digital CGI and VFX. While on the surface, stop-motion films appear to be analogue, below the surface VFX and CGI have huge roles. An example being a scene from ‘The Boxtrolls’ (2014), digital assistance was needed for ‘rig removal, then adding the far background, far distant atmosphere, closer atmosphere, then we start to drop in the CGI city because they don’t interact with the city in this shot, then the atmosphere between the characters and the camera’ (TalksAtGoogle, 2015). All these digital steps were required despite this being a stop-motion film. 

 

 

Bibliography

 

-       Emerson, S (2016) Kubo And The Two Strings Behind The Scenes “Animating Water”. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeWzM24HXWg (Accessed 19^th November 2020)

-       Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) Directed by Y. Norstein [Film]. Soyuzmultfilm 

-       Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) Directed by T. Knight [Film]. Laika

-       Rolewicz, E (2018) For the love of lemurs. Available at: https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/feature/2018-07-16-interview-with-mark-c-smith-about-two-balloons-feature-story-by-emilia-rolewicz (Accessed 19th November 2020)

-       Sarto, D (2017) Stop-motion and VFX Converge in the Vast Oceans of ‘Kubo and the Two Strings’. Available at: https://www.awn.com/vfxworld/stop-motion-and-vfx-converge-vast-oceans-kubo-and-two-strings (Accessed 19th November 2020)

-       Shenderovich, V (2004) “Everyone is free” – a conversation on free topics. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20041105150620/http://www.svoboda.org/programs/SHEN/2004/SHEN.070404.asp(Accessed 19th November 2020)

-       Smith, M (2017) ‘Featurette #6 | Shot 67’ Vimeo, 6^th October. Available at: https://vimeo.com/311130004(Accessed 19th November 2020)

-       Talks at Google (2015) The Making of the Boxtrolls |Anthony Stacchi + More | Talks at Google. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAK10UAAHIY (Accessed 19^th November 2020)

-       The Boxtrolls (2014) Directed by G. Annable [Film]. Laika

-       The Awesomer (2017) Stop Motion Ocean. Available at: https://theawesomer.com/stop-motion-ocean/456630/ (Accessed 19^th November 2020)

-       Two Balloons (2017) Directed by M. Smith [Film]. Four Winters Films

-       Two Balloons (2017) Featurettes. Available at: https://www.twoballoons.film/featurettes (Accessed 19th November 2020)

-       VFX Geek (2019) ‘Stop motion animation in VFX’ YouTube, 13^th July. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTfJx5D-8x8 (Accessed 19^th November 2020)

Sound Effects and Sounds Bibliography

This week, I've been searching for the right sound effects to fit our animation. Originally we were going to record all of the sound effects ourselves, however we agreed that a lot of the sounds were going to be hard to produce or not sound as good as the free sounds we could find online, such as the sound of rain. We are now using a mixture of free sounds and sounds we've recorded ourselves. 

The sounds we'll be recording ourselves will be the wall knocking, the poet banging on the door, the outside atmosphere, the synth drone and the voices of both characters. The rest will be free sound effects. Of course, with the sounds being recorded at home, it meant the room wasn't sound-proofed and so some background noise can be heard, however, I tried my best to remove these in Logic. 

Bibliography of Sounds

• 180118 (2018) Nails on Chalk Board. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/180118/sounds/442889/ (Downloaded 16th December 2020)
• Aiwha (2019) Paper Slow Tear. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/Aiwha/sounds/496136/ (Downloaded 16th December 2020)
• Blimp66 (2019) Fast Door Squeak. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=464019 (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• Clearwavesound (2020) Pot Smash. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=540339 (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• CUeckermann (2018) Shifting in bed. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=444815(Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• Darius Kedros (2015) rattle, shake, vibrate. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=276858(Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• Dheming (2015) Breaking_Ice_01. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=268023 (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• F-r-a-g-i-l-e (2018) Tiny Bell Ringing / Rolling. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=447143(Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• HowardV (2017) Door Long Creak. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=393801 (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• Idomusics (2020) Rain. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=518863 (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• InspectorJ (2016) Rain on Windows, Interior, A. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/346642/ (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• InspectorJ (2017) Door, Wooden, Close, A. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/411791/ (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• Joao_Janz (2019) Water Dripping 1_1. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=478690 (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• Legnalegna55 (2020) Water Droplets. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=543649(Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• Nox_Sound (2019) Footsteps_Walk. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/Nox_Sound/sounds/490951/ (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• Peridactyloptrix (2013) Candle flicker/ blown out. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/peridactyloptrix/sounds/204531/ (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• Spookymodem (2014) Crunching Bones. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=249811(Downloaded 1^st December 2020)
• Stondi (2014) Floorboards Creaking. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/stondi/sounds/248258/ (Downloaded 16th December 2020)
• TheMinkman (2013) Quake with crash. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?q=199802 (Downloaded 1^st December 2020)