The drawn animatic was looking good and helped me plan out my shots. But it was much more useful for me to physically build my shots on the animation rig to see if I could construct the space I wanted. So I decided to make my animatic with still images taken on the set rather than drawn on paper. Here it is:
This turned out pretty well and I learnt a lot from it.
1. I need to make my robots stronger.
I had problems getting my robots to do what I want them to do. The arms weren't strong enough to hold the pizza. So I need to re-enforce them and fix them to the body of the robot more effectively.
2. I need to make Postbot able to stand up.
Postbot, and the other two actually need rebalancing. Postbot was the only one I had trouble with getting to stand, but equally I haven't animated Ping's walk cycle yet so that could also cause a problem.
3. How will Ping jump?
Ping does not have knees, I think you need knees to jump. This is why in the shots where he should jump (his close up) he currently just sits there.
4. What am I going to do with the background?
It looks very flat and very bland. In a way I like this but I'd like to test some more realistic looking buildings .
5. Lots of time needs to be put into sound design.
For this I used found royalty free sounds from the internet and I think it really shows. I aim to record my own sounds. Hopefully this will give it a kind of audio-continuity and overall better quality and more appropriate sounds.
So, a useful exercise. My next move is to focus on the above areas as well as more testing.
Here are the three characters of my upcoming animated short film.
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From left to right, we have:
POSTBOT ROBIT PING
The post box The fridge The microwave
Follow Robit, Postbot and Ping as they go on a journey of friendship and self discovery.
I don't want to say too much more as a lot will come from this film on the first watch. I believe any story can be read in an infinite number of ways and I want each reading to come without preconceptions, hence I don't want to set this narrative in a set reality.
Here is some further design work on Robit, the main character for my upcoming animation.
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Working from these sketches I constructed a model from foam board and wire to see how he would look as a model.
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The next step will be to see how he looks when animated. I intend to test the capability of the arms to express emotion. For example having them drag behind him to show his sadness, or raised to show excitement. Him arms will be the main expresser of his emotion along with his eye.
I also need to see how it looks when he opens himself as shown in the above drawings, and see how I can make him dance for one of the possible scenes.
Here are the first sketches for the main character of my third year animation project. Here are some possible designs for Robit, a robot who wants to have an awesome party.
Robit with legs.
R2D2 inspired.
A more angular design.
An inverted angular look.
A box design with a single wheel. The handle allows the centre to be opened for storage.
A deeper cube with four wheels. More like a fridge.
I have several varied designs here each with their pros and cons. The last design is the one I am working from and have developed further. The stability of the four wheels is important as having a single wheel may lead to balance problems when animating. I like the fridge concept, whether the chilling function would be used is yet to be seen as I don't believe a robot has the need for anything to be chilled. But I can definitely see Robit storing things in himself much like Bender from Futurama.
I'm really proud of this work, I believe it to be a real worth while film that features an incredibly hard working young man. The juxtaposition between the expectation and reality of what a registered blind individual can do is an interesting contrast that I feel challenges peoples perceptions.
It gave me great experience of filming on location independently. I was responsible for everything on this production, not only with respect to the footage captured but also looking after the equipment. I had to carefully choose which equipment to take as I travelled alone over 150 miles on public transport to get to the location.
I would love to produce more work like this in the future. Documentary is a genre I value greatly, the ethical implications of what is produced and how it is approached are extremely important.
My first real Animation. The idea started off as a simple fight scene between a mouse and some toys, as if a child was imagining an epic fight where his pet is the hero. The only real similarity between the original pitch and the finished project is the mouse, albeit with as completely different character.
It is a very experimental project. The mouse needed to look realistic (for the original idea), the best way to achieve this was to use a real mouse but in my experience live mice don't do what they are told. Cue mouse taxidermy kit.
Picture courtesy of Firebox.com
It's safe to say my Biology A level has left me with a curiosity and interest is biology, I think this may have leaked into my work. Anyway, I dabbled in taxidermy for this project and I'm not sure I'll do it again. For one thing the mouse wasn't very moveable, once I'd treated it and put the armature in and everything it just went very stiff. Hence the exaggerated, jagged movement of the mouse in the film. This was one of the major factors in changing the story. I could have used it as a main character and had it's animation style as a feature, but this isn't what I wanted for my first animation project. I wanted to practise and learn good animation technique, which I couldn't do with something that wouldn't animate.
Fun Fact: I accidentally pulled off one of the mouse's feet when taxidermy-ing him.
I'd like to note the mouse was ethically sourced from a pet shop, already dead, sold frozen and intended to be snake food.
The new idea was a movie trailer rather than a complete narrative. I needed some new characters. I wanted to use Lego and see how I could animate it, seeing as it has been done before I thought it would be a good test of my skills. It was a lot more difficult than I though it would be, it took a day of testing just to get the walk cycle right. The orange dots in the image below mark out the distance of each complete cycle.
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The cave set is the only one I built myself as it was the only setting I could get the aesthetic I wanted out of the Lego I had available. All of the Lego, minus the figures, was donated by a good friend of mine. On a low budget production like this I would never have been able to fund it without borrowing and foraging.
The film was quite post production heavy and allowed me to get to grips with some of the more complicated aspects of Adobe After Effects. The laser and the explosion were the most demanding sections. The explosion required a lot of masking done individually on each frame.
Click for larger image.
This animation has informed my ideas for my third year animation project, mainly on what I what to do differently:
- No Taxidermy
- No Lego (although it is something I would like to use again in the future)
This was a really exciting project for me looking back on it as it was my original idea for a show. Pitching an idea, having people like it and them working to make your vision a reality was gratifying.
This was also my first in depth experience of directing live show with more complex sections. There was a repo that was tricky to negotiate and cutting a demonstration where you don't know exactly what's coming up was something I hadn't done before. All in all I am proud of what I achieved.
The title sequence, credits and teaser are also something I am particularly proud of. Creating them saw a steep learning curve in the program Adobe After Effects which I hadn't used in depth before. The minimalist design reflects the ideology of the show, making life simpler. This work won 'Best Titles' in my university TV awards show.
This brief gave us more creative control in that we had to find our own talent and could choose the genre and target audience of the programme, but it still had to be music based and feature a live performance. It was also our first experience of making a VT that we had to pitch, research and plan ourselves.
Each member of the team had to pitch a VT idea that would fit to one of several themes we were given. I chose the theme 'Music in Society' and focused on the role of Buskers. This idea was selected by the group and we went on to make it (which I was secretly incredibly proud of). So we researched some local buskers and got in contact with a couple and ended up interviewing some local musicians. This was a nerve wracking experience, but we had to maintain a professional air about ourselves. We faced challenges that we had to overcome when filming on location, including how to record a musical performance and not letting it be compromised by the general background noise of a busy high street. On another occasion we also had to deal with faulty equipment when one of our microphones wouldn't behave itself. However, the beauty of interviewing musicians is they know how to deal with sound equipment and the lovely Jamie helped sort it out.
Once all the filming was done I thought the editing would be easy. I had used editing software before but Avid is a whole other entity. Actually, I had even used Avid before and it still gave me problems. It's a tricky program to learn but not too hard when you get the hang of it, which I eventually did. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, the hours of editing and tweaking paid off.
The recording of the live show went well. I really enjoyed being the vision mixer and would love to pursue this further. I worked out some fancy fades and transitions that enabled us to mirror the music video of the original song.I find the desk very logical. Just think of it as any other computer system, it doesn't make mistakes, only the operator does. If it does something you didn't want it to do it's not the desks fault, it did exactly what you told it to. The buttons don't rewire themselves or do something different because they feel like it. You just have to learn what they do and press the right ones. It's like a science, or a computer game. I like science and computer games, I like logic. So, it makes sense that I like the vision mixing desk.
Also I designed the logo for Off Record, it went through several designs.
But in the end this was the winner:
The show turned out pretty well but there are definitely things I would change if we did it again. It didn't really fit the target audience, we were trying to go for an older viewer. This was part of the reason for the record, its an old technology so it would appeal to the people who used them, but also it's quite trendy. The target audience got lost when we were making the programme, which is a shame. I personally would change the set to something different, although I don't know what and also I would change the presenter for an older individual.
Acoustic 5 - TV Show
- First year TV Project
- March 2014
My role: Editor, Camera
This was a very set brief, a music TV show called Acoustic 5 and we were given the talent. Not that I'm complaining, Abbie Lammas was fantastic to work with and a really talented singer songwriter.
In the pre-recorded segment introducing the talent we had to make sure we followed certain rules. These including good framing of the shots and also getting interesting cutaways and enough of them, something I learned during editing is that cutaways get eaten up really quickly. You can never film enough cutaways.
For the live aspect we had to really study the song to make sure the shots suited what she was singing and so we effectively conveyed the emotion grounded within the performance. Equally we had to show the 'musicality' is I think it was how it was put, hence the guitar shots (which are a staple of any guitar based performance.)
This was a good introduction to the TV studio which none of the team had had prior experience with before this project. However, I'm glad we got more freedom with future briefs.
This was my first big group project at university and it was quite the experience. Producing is a tough job and my organisation skills were very important. Crew management was one of the harder aspects, several people fighting for creative control is hard to keep under wraps. Add this to a single room shoot under extremely hot lights and you've got yourself a stressful environment.
This was shot on a 16mm film camera which was great to work with in a sense as it makes you really think about what you're doing, we only had so much film so we couldn't re-shoot or do too many extra takes. This is in complete contrast to digital filming where you can just delete the data and go again.
I learnt a lot from this production. One thing being film isn't my favourite medium, hence i chose the specialise in TV as my main module for my second year, along with animation.
My name is Sam and I'm a media student. I study Film, Radio and Television at Canterbury Christ Church university, but my study has moved more towards animation of late. I'm now in my third year here and have built up a little bit of work that I'd like to show you. Further to that I've got some projects coming up that are pretty interesting, so I'll be putting that up on here as well.
