124 stop mo A New Game animatics

Today we learned about the Zoom recording devices. We also asked my brother (a third year who knows about recording sound) about how to use the Zooms.
We learned that:
Voices should be between -10dB (-12 to -6dB) and all levels should be set to 0 if not used
To record dialogue, it is best to use a shotgun mic.
Wherever the mic is plugged in, make sure that channel is selected for recording
The phantom settings switch the power used between the Zoom and mic batteries (accessible in the menu by selecting the microphone icon and the phantom option)
SD cards need to be formatted before returning the Zooms (accessible in the menu by selecting the SD card icon and the format option). Formatting removes all recordings from the SD card.


We're planning on hiring one out for the weekend and recording dialogue, foley etc. for the animatic.

Speaking of animatics, today we did the roughs for the animatic. As with the treatment and screenplay; I did act 1, Chloe did act 2 and Marilyn did act 3.

Here's a poor quality render of what I did. Some shots are held for a long time because the characters are talking

127 classwork

After sacrificing my weekend, I managed to finish my storyboards.
I exported them from ToonBoom and collated them using the Photoshop template provided in class

Here's page 3 of my storyboards, where the cat is caught leaving footprints over the manuscript, which the monk erases. Then begins a new scene where the monk is transcribing and the cat appears.

I may clean these storyboards up in Photoshop (make the backgrounds distinguishable from the characters, add minor shading to the characters etc.)

Class work in Stop-mo

Today, we saw the rooms where we'll work on and film our stop motion project, it turns out SIT used to be a bank and is a bit of a maze.

For the cameras, we learned how to change a lens. The old lens is removed by pressing the black button on the front of the camera and the new lens can be inserted by lining up the white ticks on the side of the camera and the lens and turning.

Dragonframe is a stop-motion software, where the camera and the dragonframe keyboard are hooked up to the same computer. When the software is open, the camera settings can be changed and photos can be taken and compared using the dragonframe software.
The camera settings can be changed in the cinematography workspace on Dragonframe.

We used Dragonframe and Plasticine to make a short stop motion video:

We called it Snakers and it is amazing.

For the video, we put the camera too close to to scene and the aperture could not be small enough to put everything into focus, hence why some things were fuzzy.

127 classwork Monday

Today in class I finished the treatment, wrote up some character bios and sorted out my pitch bible appearance.

For the background of the pitch bible, I used the image of vellum (a type of parchment made from calf skin) shown above.

I quickly made these images in Photoshop to add to the character bios

This image was added to the treatment page. I'm going to really work on the colour palettes, because some elements of the scene do not work

World animation 1950-1965

Yugoslavia

Duga Film studio created the first Yugoslavian cartoon The Big Meeting (1951), which was made to celebrate the Yugoslavian identity

UK

 Halas & Batchelor created the first British animated feature to get a general release, Animal Farm (1954). Animal Farm was based on the novel of the same name by George Orwell, was aimed at adult audiences and retold the story of the emergence and development of Soviet communism in the form of an animal fable and allegorises the rise to power of the dictator Joseph Stalin.

Bob Godfrey made Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit (1961), which featured cutout animation with eccentric, surrealist humour in a style that influenced Monty Python's Flying Circus in the 1970's. The animation Godfrey used could be referred to as lo-fi animation, a subversion of the animation tradition that refuses to take itself seriously.

Hungary/USA

 George Pal worked in Hollywood and produced and directed the film Tom Thumb (1958). The film used a mix of giant sets, superimposition and stop-frame animation. The film won the Oscar for best special effects in 1959.

Czech Republic

Karel Zeman made The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958), which combined stop frame creatures and live action.

Japan

Taiji Yabushita made the first Japanese full-length animated feature in colour, Legend of the White Snake (1958), which was produced faster than Western features and were based more on spectacle and special effects than character animation. The style used in this film was considered to be the roots of anime

Osamu Tezuka created the manga Astro Boy (inspired by the story of Pinnochio) which was developed into a TV series in 1963. Astro Boy demonstrated to the world a particular style of cartoon that would later become anime

China

Wan Laiming made Havoc in Heaven, which was based on the traditional Buddhist tale about the Monkey King. The film was released in two parts, the first in 1961, the second in 1964. Both parts were edited together and screened in 1965

Canada

 Norman McLaren created Neighbours (1952) which used many different types of effects, including live action stop motion. An edited version of the film won an Oscar in the documentary category.

Croatia

Zagreb Film created Samac [alone] (1958), which initiated a wave of existential films questioning and commenting the human condition, which won a prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Dusan Vukotic and Zagreb Film also made Surogat (1961), which was the first animated film to win an Oscar that was not made in the USA. Surogat was a modernist short that takes a simplified design aesthetic to extremes.

Russia

Fyodor Khitruk made Story of One Crime (1962), which was a modernist styled animation about a character driven to his wit's end by human noise pollution. The film caused concern among the Communist Party officials, who saw it as an attack on government housing policies. The film inspired a new generation of Russian animators to make modern, adult films that contained irony, social satire and original ideas.

BSA 106 French new wave

French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague)

As a film movement, French New Wave started in the late 1950's. Many new wave film directors had been film critics and believed that the director should express a personal vision of the world, and often showed realistic Parisian street life and had themes of distrust of both authority and romantic commitment. The genre was influenced by Italian Neorealism.

French New Wave arose as a result of film making being expensive, but the film making equipment becoming cheaper and portable. Due to the accessible nature of filming equipment, lower budget films encouraged innovation and improvisation and gave directors more control. The first New Wave feature film is considered to be And God Created Woman (1956).

French New Wave is characterised by it's on-location shooting, little-known actors and small crews. The films were often shot silent and then dubbed in post, and their plots are often built around chance events and have open ended narratives. Many scenes were unrehearsed, had natural lighting and incorporated jump shots which jumped to and fro from different points in time.

Apparently the French New Wave spawned the Auteur Theory among film critics- where a director's body of work has a distinct style and recurring themes- in order to contrast the Studio-driven products of Hollywood. Auteur Theory has been criticised for minimising or ignoring the collaborative aspect of a film. For more details, see episode two of Lindsay Ellis' The Whole Plate Youtube series, where she discusses the Auteur Theory in terms of Michael Bay's Transformers series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srk-tPbQVcs)

Directors:

Francois Trauffaut

A film critic prior to his directorial debut, his early films have zoom shots, choppy editing and bursts of violence or humour
directed The 400 Blows (1959), which brought the world's attention to the New Wave movement. He also directed Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules and Jim (1962)

Jean-luc Godard

 

 Was also a film critic before becoming a director, Godard's films had a more abrasive style of editing. He often juxtaposed staged scenes with documentary material (ads, comic strips etc.), usually with little connection to the narrative.
Directed Breathless (1959), which broke traditional Hollywood storytelling conventions (used jumpcuts, handheld camera, disjointed narrative, improvised score etc.)

BSA 124 A New Game character concepts cont.'d

Today in class, we delivered our pitches. We also learned about writerduet.com, which can be used for writing and formatting screenplays.

For our animation, We continued working on character concepts and the aesthetic of the video game UI. Each member of our group has split up to do different aspects of the animation concept, with me on the older brother character and the younger sister design choices, Chloe on younger sister and older brother design choices, and Marilyn on the video game character base and the video game UI.

 This is an example of the kind of design choices the younger sister would make on top of the male character template provided by Marilyn.

When both siblings are arguing over the character's appearance, the end result is something like this. Base template is done by Marilyn, pink contributions are done by me (younger sister), dark red contributions are done by Clhoe (older brother). Red annotations are Chloe and I discussing what elements work together for the final character appearance.
Text reads (top to bottom):
Dress underneath jacket
girl hair [choice] with guy colours
unicorn horn
SPARKLES

I also sent the photoshop template to Chloe to add some of the older brother design choices onto the video game character. For the final character appearance at the end of the animation, a combination of design choices from both Chloe and I will be incorporated onto the same character.

This is the concepts for the Background of the videogame user interface that Marilyn designed. We plan to use a layered approach so we can move different elements without them interfering with each other.

The aesthetic of the videogame UI may be similar to that of Little Big Planet:






In the future we have to sort out the treatment, logline, screenplay and script before we can start storyboarding and animatics as our story is very dialogue driven.

BAS 127 character concepts

In BSA 2127 this year, we are making a short (30s to 2 min) 2D animation. I decided to base my story in this picture of an image of an Italian 15th Century manuscript from Croatia, where a cat has walked across it.




Image source:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130326-animals-medieval-manuscript-books-cats-history/

The story logline is basically a monk is trying to finish a manuscript and finds his work interrupted by a monastery cat.

Since the story is based in 15th Century Mediterranean monastery, I had to do research on mediterranian cat breeds, 15th Century fashion, 15th Century monks, manuscript writing and illumination processes and what tools were used in manuscript writing.

Mediterranean Cat Breeds:

Since the Mediterranean region borders both Africa and Europe, it has an ancient and extensive history featuring lots of migrations in both people and the animals they take with them. Due to this there are no distinct cat breeds that are endemic to the Mediterranean region.

15th Century Fashion:

for the fashion, I used the information found in the Men's section on this website: http://world4.eu/italian-14th-century-clothing/, although the website was a useful resource for historical fashions, the human character was a monk, so I needed to look elsewhere.

For 15th Century monk references, I found some illustrations on getty images which were more in line with the monk character

I'll provide site links since blogger hates images
Image source:

http://www.gettyimages.co.nz/detail/photo/figure-of-monk-fresco-of-sacristy-of-upper-high-res-stock-photography/158647383

Image source:
http://www.gettyimages.co.nz/detail/news-photo/figure-of-monk-detail-from-the-miracle-of-poison-fresco-by-news-photo/154713625#figure-of-monk-detail-from-the-miracle-of-poison-fresco-by-the-second-picture-id154713625

 

The first 5 costume ideas were from the fashion website, and the last two (bottom right) were from the monk images

Manuscript writing and Illumination Process:

For what tools the monk is going to use, I researched the manuscript writing and illumination process. Since script writing and illumination were time-honoured traditions, and the only way to print books prior to the printing press, their processes would remain largely unchanged for centuries.
Getty museum once again proved useful with their Youtube tutorials on what the manuscript writers and illuminators did throughout history (see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_3325523639&feature=iv&src_vid=1aDHJu9J10o&v=nuNfdHNTv9o).

The process of making ink may be of some use in the story, so I also looked at tutorials on how to make iron gall ink from oak gall nuts:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-Iron-Gall-Ink/

 My annotations on the manuscript writing processes.

Text reads from top to bottom:

Manuscript writing tools

[quills were often made from] goose flight feathers

[manuscript] pages made from stretched leather

[quill] shaved down to make room for hand

[manuscript] lines would be ruled prior to writing

flat [quill] tip produces this kind of writing

mistakes can be scraped away

generates 'dust'

'Gall nuts' or carbon are used to make black ink

gall nut on oak

[gall nut] contains tannins for ink

manuscript would be written on an angle because of how gravity interacts with ink and quills

top half [of quill feather] thinner than bottom (flight feather)

Character expression sheets:

 

The expression sheet and rough sketches of the cat character 

text reads top to bottom:

[the cat is] just out of kittenhood

have the cat be skinny to contrast man[uscript] writer

large, expressive eyes +ears

maybe use whiskers to push expressions?

 

The expression sheet and rough sketches of the monk character 

text reads top to bottom:

 can simplify lines

repeat this shape

stain fingers w[ith] ink?

short fingers + wide palms

large sleeves

only show eyes when really necessary?

Character turnarounds:

I cleaned up the characters and did turnarounds using ToonBoom, at the tutor's suggestion.

 

The cat turnaround

 

The monk turnaround

The colour pallets of the characters may be subject to change, but I'm relatively happy with their overall appearance thus far.

Next I may have to sort out backgrounds and environments