MAJOR PROJECT

 

Life Reference Photos

To begin designing and visualising our project, me and Neave wanted to focus on gathering as many real life references of nature and plants as possible. Neave took some from their retreat in Donegal and I got mine from my garden at home and the Botanic Gardens in Belfast. These were really helpful for visualising the tiny world of our animation and to try to understand what the perspective would be like, especially for backgrounds. It was difficult to get exactly perfect angled photos with only my smartphone but I found the references I got were close enough to what I wanted. We were able to get a very large gallery of photo references and so we were able to begin with the visual development and design process.

 

Colour Pallets

With these pictures, we were also able to draw from them some colour palette and colour script ideas. Whilst there are many shades of green that will be helpful, it was also fascinating to see the depth of colours and variety that occurred on plants other than the typical green. This has helped us keep our film from being overwhelmingly one colour and provided some ideas and colour combinations we might not have considered to use.

In class we assigned each other our main roles for what we wanted to complete and contribute to the project. Neave became the Design Lead carrying out Character, Asset, Colour and Background Design elements. I became the Storyboard and Animatic Lead, as well as becoming the editor of the project.

While Neave was the Lead concept and character artist, at the start of the project I helped brainstorm and think of possible designs and motifs for our main character. We wanted a lot of personality so I looked at characters such as Mei from My Neighbour Totoro, Ponyo, Mebh from Wolfwalkers, and Ellie from Pixar’s up. They all have a wild and adventurous personality that is translated in their design that I wanted to replicate in my concept designs.

 

I wanted to focus on wild, messy hair to reflect the characters wild and uncontrollable personality, with a tooth gap to show youth  and some plasters and scrapes to add to their rambunctious personality.

I explored a few styles and shapes and ideas to make sure I considered as many possibilities as possible. I wanted to look at insect design elements to give to our main character, such as large round glasses to give a bug eye look, and bits of hair sticking up like antenna.

In the end, both me and Neave agreed that we wanted to keep the big glasses and the tooth gap from my concepts for the character, however, we were both told that the character design looked a bit too old for the age range we were going for, so these were just early concepts.

Neave then began to start refining the design until it became something that was more fitting for our main character.

I decided to start to think about the environment of our world and the layout of our animation. I began thinking about floor plans and the travel route the characters would take. However, I think I started to begin designing the garden area too big for how small the characters would be. There were and overwhelming amount of potential compositional variables and I started to get overwhelmed and could not finish refining these floor plans.

 

I did like these concepts, but I ironically started thinking of the film as a giant stage with trees and landmarkings rather than the small bit of garden the story takes place in. If I could go back, I would start off much smaller and simpler, which might have helped designing the backgrounds to come much easier to me.

I then wanted to focus on house designs and potential first scene layouts but this proved to be quite difficult for me. I used house references but hate how every sketch looked.

I was sketching out potential layouts and compositional designs that might have inspired me for the beginning shots, and so I decided to stop trying to create storyboards beginning with environmental elements and start creating the composition of storyboards and shots around the characters themselves and what they are doing.

This was both a colour and a style concept I was testing for the look development. The tree-house was inspired by both mushrooms, tree bark and the Norse sod roofed buildings, however it gave the story and animation a bit too much of a fantasy world look. I decided to leave the main design elements to Neave, as their style would cohere together much better than mine, and they have a clearer mental visual of the initial story and idea than I did.

 

For the overall animation style, our biggest inspiration came from the independant animation Axolodyssey that is still in production, however the artist, Jon Densk, has been sharing their progress which was able to help me and Neave figure out how we could also create and develop our animation in a similar way:

The short film, Donal, by Giant Animation, also was very inspiring as it contains a lot of similar visual and story references we could use as reference.

Giant Animation’s short film Donal

This animation was very thematically similar to our animation, and the colours and art style were very inspiring for us.

 

Storyboards

When I first heard about Neave’s idea, I wanted to immediately start sketching out potential storyboards. In my sketchbook, I would quickly sketch out my storyboard ideas and potential compositions in order to see which ones would work best for our film. Most of these sketches were never used again, with old storylines and potential ideas that were gottenrid of. However, a couple of these initial sketches made it into the final lined composition.

 

Me and Neave brainstormed our main character, Bluebell, to not have many friends and for her mum to be encouraging her to go make friends with other kids and not look at insects all day. Eventually this part of the story was removed, but it helped us develop and understand her character more.

I then wanted to understand the dynamic Blubell would have with Bug, our firefly character.

These were tidied up boards from my rough animatic. I found it easier to complete the storyboard by doing the animatic first. I then did not have the time to finish converting messy early storyboard frames to cleaned up ones. In the future I will keep this in mind, however I am upset at not having whole pages of completed storyboards to look back on.

I looked a lot at Studio Ghibli and Hilda storyboards for inspiration of layout and styles we could include in our short film. Hilda has a very simple round style, like Neave’s, so I really wanted to try to create story board frames that were similar.

I really liked how Tom Owens style in these storyboards really lends itself to the characters, their dynamic and the movements happening in this scene. I was inspire by his character focused storyboards and wanted to try to mimic than in mine and my animatic shots also.

I felt that I was struggling to conceptualise storyboards and found it easier to go straight into creating the animatics and editing the framing and layout around the characters actions. I took the lecturers advice about this and instead began taking the storyboard and animation guide out of the animatic. This helped speed up my productivity immensely.

I have been extremely influenced by Brobexx’s storyboard animatics that uses harsh black lines to emphasise the characters and their movements, I also really like their shot compositions and the way motion is very clearr.

I also found Qinni’s animated short film guide very helpful at this stage:

 

 

Animatics

 

With the first draft of our story script, I was able to create a rough animatic using Storyboarder and some of the traditional storyboards I had made. As the designated Storyboarder of our group, I wanted to try to try to use a program that professionals used and our lecturer recommended Storyboarder. I had never used this program before and so I was eager to try it. I found I really liked the sketch brush for making quick compositions, and gestures that were really effective to me for starting the animatic and visual development of our film. The program also allows for quick frames creating and effective playbacks without being too complicated. However I find looking back, the frames are a bit messy and hard to read, due to the pencil tool, to be used as proper storyboards.

 

Neave had sketched what they imagined the transformation would be like into rough storyboards and found them really inspiring so I used and refined them for the first animatic.

While Neave designed the characters and made the concept art for our film, I created the first pass of our final films animatic. It looks very messy and unimpressive, however I am happy with it as a first rough draft and think it gave a lot of energy, humour and character. Some shots were unnecessary or hard to read, and the timing is a bit quick in some shots also so I would have liked to have improved upon that. In the final film, we got rid of a lot of unnecessary scenes such as Bluebell and Bug playing fetch and the Bugs bounce for efficiency to save time, but I do still like those shots for initial ideas.

The animatic took a while to create as I was still adjusting to drawing in a similar style as Neave rather than my own. I feel like I did my best for the time being but I would have liked to practice and study the character shapes and forms much sooner, as well as making the shots better timed. I am happy with the composition of the first and last shots panning up and down, reflecting the transformations Bluebell has undergone.

 

Refined Animatic

 

In the second semester, I spent a lot of January taking on the tutors recommendations and trying to apply them as well as tidy up the final animatic, thinking about redesigning the backgrounds and composition, whilst also keeping the characters’ as the main focus. Neave was able to help me with certain shots I struggled with as they could visualise it better in their head than I could at the time. It also meant I didn’t have to redraw the whole animatic again by myself.

 

I am much happier with how the frames and shots turned out in this animatic. I feel like the story and character emotions and motivations are clearer. However, I was not satisfied with this music for our film and realised I had forgotten a shot for this animatic so I removed the music and re-edited the final version of our animatic here:

 

For my overall contribution to the Pre-Production stage of the short film I think I did well giving concept ideas, refining the story and creating the initial animatic. However, I would have liked to have drawn more refined concepts for characters, backgrounds layout designs and a colour script early on. I would have liked to have studied and practised more with storyboarding and framing layout as I feel like my final shot compositions are a bit lacking. Having storyboard frames laid out, clear on sheets would have been desirable too if time had permitted. I also am happy with my initial animatic, but I wish I had a clearer style of drawing so that others in my team, other than me could understand the characters motion and expression and be able to use them. Although, I do think me and Neave realy worked well as a team at getting our animation to a reasonable stage before production with our final animatic.

 

 

Production

 

To produce our 2D traditionally animated short film, myself and Neave decided to go for the industry standard animation program, Toon Boom Harmony. Both of us had never used Toon Boom before, so it was very new and exciting to use. We looked up a lot of tutorials so we could understand the controls and interface better and decided to jump right in.

I found these tutorials helpful for breaking down how Toon Boom uses drawings, exposures and keyframes as well as helping me try creating animation tests.

I also learned how to set up and animate the camera in Toon Boom for the first time using this tutorial, which I was then able to utilise for the first and final panning up and down shots.

Me and Neave started a Notion board in order to help us make a comprehensive shot list and keep track of what work we have completed and what is the highest priority to finish. I was able to list out each shot from the final animatic and give a rough estimate of time, actions, and emotions conveyed in the shot. This ended up being extremely helpful for making sure nothing was forgotten in the final edit.

 

TOONBOOM TEST ANIMATIONS

I decided to break in the new program by creating the basic bouncing ball animation. This allowed me to understand how Toon Boom creates exposures rather than keyframes and drawings rather than layers. This was the first step of what I would have to know for animating the characters.

We were considering using a rigged 2D puppet for some of the insect characters in the film, and so I decide to try to test out Toon Boom Harmony’s rigging animation functions. While this would be effective given time and patience learning how to use Toon Booms node features, this however proved to be too complicated for us at such a late stage in our animation and the semester so decided not to go with this method.

 

I then made an attempt at creating a rough animated pass at one of our shots. I was still new to learning how to use Toon Boom and was pretty rusty from animating. The movement stutters a lot, however I had improved at keeping the character on model and adapting to Neave’s art style.

 

Rough Animation

To make my animations movements more smooth, accurately timed and anatomically correct, I began filming references of myself for my animations.

Already, with this, my rough animation from before had been improved on and I was much happier with the timing, motion and overall smoothness. (See next YouTube link for Rough Animation Video)

Here are some other references I had filmed to help animate other shots with more complicated and slow motions.

Catching Firefly Reference Video

 

For certain shots that had animated references and more difficult angled to film at, I used animated reference such as the wave scene at the end of spirited away. The characters were a bit slower and less energetic with their waves, but it helped my animation rough all the same.

For other shots however, I had no point of reference except for my animation, so I had to take creative liberties in animating them, however, I think they but turned out really well and very dynamic and eye catching. I am especially proud of my fall, in which there is a change in the angle of the shot midway. I tried to think of the beetle moviving like a quadruped like a dog or a cat, but also found it fun to have creative liberty and make it hop like a rabbit.

 

The rough animations took quite a bit more time than me and Neave had anticipated to get done, and we were both feeling a bit slow at working at this point in the semester. However, we both managed to finish the entire rough animated shots in a decent amount of time, with two weeks before the deadline. I am extremely proud of how our roughs turned out, and can finally see our film looking more like the final product.

 

The final rough animation pass for the film was made equally by myself and Neave as we decided to take on feedback from our last presentation and cut out a couple of scenes that would just be too much for us to animate such as the butterfly shot and the bug getting his light back and jumping. In the end up I think this has helped us so we will not fall behind for the deadline, and the film still keeps its charm.

 

 

Final Animation Lining

For the final two weeks of the project, myself and Neave split the Shot list in half and each lined an average of 20 animated shots for our final lined animation.

I had complications trying to make characters’ awkward body parts, like the elbow, move more accurately backwards in certain shots such as after the headpat, and I am still unhappy with how it moves in the final film. I may try to fix it more over the coming week so I am satisfied, but I ran out of time for this submission. The same is true for some of my other lined shots where the motion stutters or jumps a bit however, it is the best it could be in a such a short time frame, without leaning too much into perfectionism.

The shot of the hands reaching up for the firefly at the end gave me a lot of trouble as I was running out of time for submissions and it was 80 frames of very particular slow and careful movements. I think this shot taught me a lot of patience as I had to readjust certain components over and over again to make the motion look more smooth. Although it is not perfect, I am extremely happy with how it finally ended up.

I did end up being unable to finish lining one transitional shot, where the characters step towards the next part of their journey, however the effect on the film’s story is minimal and I am confident that I can finish lining it and adding it to the film’s final render for the EOYS.

 

I am extremely happy with how the lined animations came out, and though we did complete most of them in a rush, the quality of animation in each shot, for myself and Neave’s, are all consistently very high.

 

I also looked into effects and other functions on Toon Boom such as the particle effect. I did not have a time to watch a tutorial so I was just experimenting with possible quick ways to get the effect of fireflies flying into the air at the final pan up shot of the film. Here is a screen recording of my process as Toon Boom seems to hide particle effects when exported, which I will learn to fix over the week.

 

Colouring

For our final submission, we wanted to have a proof of concept shot that Neave coloured and I composited. Me and Neave aim to begin colouring all of the final lined animation this week and finish before the end of year show. Neave was having complications with creating colour art from the vector lineart, therefore we were unable to get the final proof of concept the completely coloured and composited shot that we wanted. However, I now aim to watch tutorials and figure out how to solve and fix this issue in the coming week.

I briefly began looking into how to colour on Toon Boom but only achieved static background objects, however, I did like the effect it had with the lines, and think once I start colouring, the animation will look really effective.

Due to our running out of time, Neave started helping me with drawing and composing backgrounds as they had a better vision of their world design than I did, and had a very specific style of drawing plants. I would have liked to have had more time to be able to refine and draw my own final backgrounds, however I will be doing so in the coming weeks before the EOYS.

 

 

Sound Design

Our main plan for sound design is to use royalty free music and sounds effects as well as potentially recording some of our own for the final film edit at the end of year show.

I found this website with a lot of different royalty free sound effect we can potentially look through!

Here is a sample of a royalty free song superimposed over our final lined animation edit because I thought suited our short film and wanted to test it to show Neave:

UPDATED LINK TO YOUTUBE – ANIMATION WITH MUSIC SAMPLE FILE

 

We will be discussing music and sound design in more depth over the coming week for our final animation edit.

 

Post-Production

I have been editing together the animatics and rough versions of our animation in DaVinci Resolve. I had never used the program before this year and had downloaded it from the advice of a lecturer. I immediately preferred its interface in comparison to Premire Pro and After Effects which are extremely convoluted and confusing to use. However I found DaVinvi Resolve to be much easier and faster.

We aim to use DaVinci Resolve to edit together our final animation render, have the colouring and backgrounds complete so we can make any colour correction adjustments in the program, and add VFX animations in the compositing stage. This will include the glow from the firefly and the flashes of light from the sun and the magnifying glass.

For the End of Year Show, we aim to finish colouring our lined animation shots and complete the compositing and rendering by then.

 

Final Lined Film

LINK: https://youtu.be/PgUXnAIR_xs

 

My progress gifs have also failed to load on the blog so most of my work is in Youtube videos, and the progression and development of my work progress is not as clear as I would have liked.

 

Conclusion and Reflection

Overall, I really enjoyed making this animated short film with Neave. Working in a group made me more motivated to work on my tasks and part of the project whilst also being excited to bring my work with Neave’s and see what we made together. I think the final lines turned outt really well despite a lack of time at the end, and Neave’s proof of concept make me very excited to finish the film. I think our final lined edit came out looking amazing to me for a 2 minute 2D animated film by 2 students. Even though we were unable to complete the coloured proof of concept to our standards and had to leave out a couple of shot due to running out of time by submission, I believe we did a really admirable job creating this. I think I have developed so much in this project and in this course  that it is unbelievable. I am really happy with the project we came out with despite many roadblocks and difficulties, and have been impressed with how my skills have improved. I hope our finished film lives up to the current standard and that I can use the skills I have learned and take them to my next project.

 

 

For my project teammate, Neave’s blog focusing on their parts in the design and development of our short film, go here!

 

Coloured Shots

 

 

Final Film