Sculpting The Character - Developmental Process: Clay Final Layer

Final clay model of Edrik

With the armature done previously, it's time to mask Edrik in his flesh, made from clay, of course. Personally, I expected the last step to be rather tedious by using methods of covering him with silicone or hardening clay, but it was just good old colored plasticine - easily shaped and diverse in terms of combining colors. It was a good thing that I had already designed the color scheme of my character, so without any thought I knew which colors I was to use. Firstly, I covered Edrik in the cloth layers, which are his legs and shoulders, since those layers are in the background, preceding the spiky and exaggerated armor. However, the head armature was too big to execute the precise proportions of my character, hence his head is really small to contemplate his physique. Still, it resembled the facial features of my character, as I used a marker to point out his contours (eyebrows and lines above lips). I tried to maintain the key features, such as the emphasized cheek bones and long slender lips, something I believe to have "nailed", to be quite honest. As for the rest of the details, I did by scraping the top layer of the plasticine with a thin aluminium wire (such as his abs, or under-eye lines). This character really put my character into perspective, as I can see him in 3D and use him now as a better reference for dynamic shape. Aside from this, during our session we also learned how silicone molds are made - something that intrigued me ever since I saw the process of the molded characters being made for "Shaun the Sheep" at the Manchester Animation Festival. A real versatile material, all I now need to do is be a bit more curious so that I can do it on my own for my future stop-motion films to come!

Sculpting The Character - Developmental Process: Making the Skeleton Armature

Original Sketch

Edrik, The Flamboyant King of Vladya is about to be brought upon this world, with all his arrogance disseminating through the air. Today, in the Ceramics Shop, we started creating our individual characters by making their armatures. Since my character is a humanoid, the crafted armature went according to the guidance of our proctor. Firstly, I sketched out the basic shapes of my character in a T-Pose in relation to a linear graph with 9 points, all separated by 25mm. We did this in order to use the sketches as references to the size of our character, as we drew all joint points as well. Accordingly, by twisting aluminium wires (in order to get a stronger bind) we created the skeleton of the legs, spine, arms, and head, by bending the malleable wires with pliers, all in relation to the original sketch. By using milliput, a versatile industrial adhesive, I molded the muscles of the legs and arms of Edrik, leaving space in between the joints for flexibility. Finally, with styrofoam I crafted the torso and head of my character, which are soon to be covered in a plasticine mold. I had to be careful of the size, because with the plasticine at the end the shape of the character shall increase in bulkyness, considering Edrik is a slender king! Hopefully, by the next time the milliput will set and harden, so that I may awaken Edrik and bring him to this realm!

Sculpting The Character - Developmental Process: Base

As a part of our induction, we have been instructed to create our Visual Language character in 3D by sculpting him. I personally believe that this will be great practice to develop our perspective in terms to Solid Drawing of a character. Accordingly, with these inductions we will also learn the use of tools and techniques in the world of model-making, something essential for me especially, hence I wish to pursue stop-motion. Our first induction consisted of wood works, where we were to create the base for our armatured character, as well as to understand the wood work machines in case we need them in the future (safety procedures and all). Firstly, we used a giant saw machine with which we measured and cut our base from a huge vertical wooden plate, and then measured its diameter in relation to the bolts that should be fastened once we get working on our character. The distance in between both holes on the plate is 60 mm, and they are placed in the middle of the base, all accurately measured with a ruler. Other than this, we also fiddled with the sanding machine and the vertical saw machine just to understand their functionality.

Finished base plate

The Other Side - Final

The animation is done! Overall, I did achieve my desired goal in several ways. According to comments by peers and acquaintances who watched my animation, I was told that the tone of the animation was atmospherically eerie, and that it even presented a relevant level of symbolism, several people having a different interpretation of the succinct meaning. For example, one friend of mine pointed out that it portrays how my other side is the nostalgia towards my home country, how I am desperately striving to come home, inadvertantly getting crushed once I get there realizing that it's in ruin (in terms of political, cultural, and social structures). Nevertheless, the atmosphere got defined just as I intended it to be: ambiguous and other-worldly. My animation turned out quite flexible and smooth hence I did not do it in doubles (except for the idle character movement and the charge before jumping cloud from cloud).

The Other Side - Developmental Stages: Sound Effects and Atmosphere Music

With the scenes being piled together, now it's time to add sound. I took all of the ambient sounds and sound effects from freesound.org. Firstly, I set a background ambience soundtrack with echoed synthetic sounds that mimicked the "extraterrestrial" sounds used in sci-fi horror movies (cause I thought that this would go great with the selective lighting). Since the character talks during the first scene, I recorded my own voice with a condenser microphone (a good one, too) yelling out "where is my other side?" with a coarse alteration to my voice, along with grunts and screams that the character produces along as he travels through the unknown. In order to fuse the isolated realm with the sound, I altered my voice with an echo effect with a decay factor of 0,5 and a time factor of 0,1 (seconds, as in how soon the sound echoes). Aside from this, sounds of moving through space, of impact with miscellaneous items and objects (like the Ketchup Construct), and of the sounds the Construct makes I downloaded and then compiled and altered them. For example, the subtle steam that the Ketchup Construct releases is not in intervals - it's just a can of coke opening - I lowered and augmented the levels of the sound based on the frames to make it sound as if it's releasing steam one cluster at a time. Another such example is the screaming, which levels are also configured to simulate travel of the object (in this case, the character) producing those sounds.

Soundboard of the animation - the lines between the nods signify levels of sound

The Other Side - Developmental Stages: Compilation and Lighting

Arrangement of scenes in Flash

Once the animating is done, now it's time for post-production. To me personally, this step is the most enjoyable because I slowly get to see the assemblage of all that I've worked for, and experience its shimmering moment of being brought into existence. Primarily, the way I constructed and animated all of the scenes was by fragmentation. In other words, for every scene (be it only 1 second) I had a separate Adobe Flash file, done for two reasons:

 - With more than 300 frames on the clip-board (the animation in total being 600) the program has a bigger chance of crashing mid-work  and slowing down while I'm animating.
 - In this manner, the outcome of the animation in terms of length shall not matter, since it would be much easier to edit out fractions of scenes in Adobe Premiere if they are already divided.

Taking this into consideration, I can still import any movie clip from any of the scenes into any other. After all of the scenes were done in Flash, I exported each of them in QuickTime separately, then imported them into Adobe Premiere. All in all, I had 35 seconds of animation, including the repetitive movements (like when the character is flying through the air, or the idle seconds before the action occurs in a scene). I first cut parts of animation off, piled it together chronologically, and ended up with 25 seconds, as instructed. Since Flash has no elaborate mechanic of lighting effects or overlay filters, I used Premiere to add a spotlight effect, which is oriented on the stars in the background, giving the atmosphere an isolate look (as outer space naturally is). With the lighting I wanted to level the saturation of the colors, giving it a more simmered aesthetic. With this done, now it is time to compile together the sounds which will augment the animation to the max!

Above: Added Lighting
Below: No Lighting, Original

Captain Character: Color Chrome

Once I did variations of my characters positioning (T-Pose, 2/3, Front, etc...), I started thinking about color. One of my aims was to use selective coloring to emphasize Edrik's flamboyant and eccentric nature, to make him appear even more vivacious in terms of exuberance. Firstly, I used complementary patterns to create three chromatics of basic color with watercolors, all varying in aesthetic, just so I could see which combinations of colors would suit him the best. In order to get an accurate choice, I also asked fellow peers to pick one of them, whichever looked the best in their opinion. For example, one peer explained that the middle chrome, a combination of orange, red, and greed, would be the best hence the colors are warm and give off a bigger level of vibrance when met with the eye, perfectly portraying the character's metrosexual and eccentric traits. Upon further consideration, I picked that chrome and started using variations and shades of the color pattern to elaborate on Edrik digitally. Also made 3 variations, I am mostly satisfied by the first one, hence I think that the colors are bright enough, but also dim enough,a perfect balance of extravagance and radiance.

The Other Side - Developmental Stages: The Ketchup Construct

One of the biggest elements in my animation (other than the character, of course) is the Ketchup Construct. As mentioned before, I based the element on the eclectic and "assembling" style of Terry Gilliam, pulling a myriad of images and compiling them together in order to create a mobile and flexible digital animatronic. The only difference is that this one is virtual, whereas Terry Gilliam's "puppets" were not. With the possibility of Adobe Flash to create separate looped and animated movie clips, I combined drawn animation along with the images used to add a level of complexity to the Ketchup Construct. The animated element consists of several parts: one Heinz Ketchup bottle, two cogs, one exhaust pipe, one metal pole, one punching glove, one generator, and one conductor wire. With the bottle being the base, the cogs animated using tweens to spin in a circular motion, and the pole and punching glove to serve as the projectile that hits the character, the generator and pipe have drawn animation to them: electricity passing through the generator and steam getting released through the pipe. Another inspiration that proned me to create such an assemblage is the epoch of art Dadaism, which signified the use of pieces in order to make an aesthetic whole, both beautiful and confusing.

Captain Character: Dynamic Poses

To put Edrik's expressions and structure into perspective, I had to draw him in various poses from different angles. To do this effectively, I drew his posture and basic shapes with a pencil, and then followed with a drawliner as to evade any possible mistakes. However, I also thought that this would be a good moment to practice drawing Edrik without using the rubric reference for his size. Drawing him like this would give me solid control over the character and shall help me draw him quicker in numbers, as animators do. I also attempted at drawing Edrik's poses in various sizes, not all of them uniform just to practice the scale of him. I firmly believe that with these drawings I shall get the technique required to mimic 3D in 2D, as without that concept animations would be less dynamic and a little bit static - not lively as cartoons are!

The Other Side - Developmental Stages: Animation of Elements #2

Frames of Dragon

My animation intertwines still keyframes along with animated movie clips that further rely on layout, and considering this, I had to both animate individual non-repetitive frames that have a stable layout and looped movements that required a sense of good layout for perfect execution. One of the main elements of my animation (other than the character, of course) is the dragon, which displays repetitive movement - gliding through the air. The mouth and teeth of the dragon are the only part of the dragon which were not re-drawn every frame, they were just altered with contour distortion, whereas the eyes, tail, colors, and lines were all re-drawn frame by frame (6 frames in total). As for variation of colors, I used two shades of every color (except white for the eyes) in order to design the dragon, due to the depth they add as they mimic shadows. On another note, background elements such as the background rockets are not re-drawn frame by frame to preserve dynamics because they are not placed in the focal point for the details to matter. That's why I drew them once, based on the sketches and concept designs, and re-drew the exhaust flames.

As for individual keyframes, there is one close-up scene of my character where I deliberately focused on his facial details for the sake of variation and flexibility of action. Or, in other words, so it is not boring (because all scenes are from a side-scrolling, profile perspective).

Rocket - Individual Frames

Captain Character: Emotion

With the right kind of face, every character can instantly evoke an assumption of their traits in the eyes of the audience. It's been said in psychology that people can recognize the main facial expressions that portray emotions everywhere, regardless of culture. Thus, Edrik has made faces! Initially, while I was still drawing itirations of possible characters I took the facial expressions into consideration, which is one of the main reasons why I decided to go with the Ruler Jungian archetype instead of the Sage (hence, most sages are characterized by a signature beard). Of course, the main emotions came to mind firstly (happy, sad, angry), however, I chose mine to be a little more specific than that. For example, instead of happy, I drew Edrik's face when he's cheeky and presumptuous, and the moment several of my peers saw his face they pointed out his perverted grin, perfectly going along with the description. Another example would be his face of indifference, as if the amusements made by the fellow jester do not excite Edrik (as he is a rather arrogant king). Nevertheless, I think that the 10 facial expressions I drew perfectly render my character's traits, as those are enough to be used in any situation in which he might be.

Captain Character: T-Pose and 2/3

With Edrik being chosen as my fabled creation, I had to start viewing him from perspective. Ergo, as a part of our task we are to position our character in a T-Pose and a 2/3 exposure pose to validate his/her 3D existence and dynamic, and to practice our execution of Solid Drawing. Personally, I have not quite practiced character dynamic over the years (with being a stop-motion animator and all), and have had difficulties trying to make characters being viewed from different angles other than the initial one I have/had drawn (if I were to try, the character would be inconsistent). While drawing Edrik's front t-pose, I had no difficulties, however it took me a while to compile the basic shapes of my character, for I would use them for every next drawing of Edrik as a reference. Furthermore, I defined the size of my character mathematically by measuring the distance in between his head, torso, legs, knees, etc, hence with this I would not mistakenly resize any of his body parts. By identifying the basic shapes of a character's figure, one learns consistent design and accuracy in size, and by doing so, I was able to draw a 2/3 of Edrik with a steady appearance in reference to the t-pose by referring to the basic shapes. However, I drew the 2/3 pose from a perspective above the center of my character, as his feet do not meet the bottom line of the measurement. Alas, it's all practice!