Extended Practice: Lessons Learned / Post-Submission Plan

Organization of scenes v storyboard panels

The animation has been finalized for submission. There are many things to reflect upon as well as consideration for the future in regards to WHAT shall be done with this graduation film. Firstly, as evidenced by the background artist leaving, I will find a new background artist with a motivational incentive for the project, since if it gets submitted to a festival it will offer exposure both for me and the artist. Planning this in advance, all of the animated shots have been divided among separate After Effects and corresponding Photoshop files for each one. I have done this so meticulously so that when the new backgrounds are created it would be extremely easy to replace them within the After Effects files without affecting the animation or the synced and exact frames per shot. On another note, for submission the credits have not been animated. I haven't thought of any ideas for how the credits would look like, however after the final crit session on the 3rd of May I got a suggestion to make them form with smoke, complementary to the final cigarette-lighting scene. This would be another post-submission task to handle in order to finish the animation to an aesthetically-pleasing standard fit for festival submission. As for the music - all of the music for the animation was provided by my collaborators from Leeds College of Music - Ryan Scott and Harry Laird - which will be respectively credited in the final festival version of my animation. All of the sound effects were found on https://freesound.org, where every single one of them were established with the Creative Commons 0 license, fit for public domain without any attribution. The soundscape of the animation is finished for every completed scene, and omitted for every placeholder one (for the sounds mimic the movement). For any future projects I believe it would be more than efficient to develop a rubric for order of production in order to eliminate any self-inflicted obstacles - a formality that I must implement.

Extended Practice: Division of Final Piece Into Acts

First sequence of Second act - outro to animation

My animation "Pact" has turned out to be way too lengthy for a whole submission. Thus, I have divided it into several parts based on the number of acts within the script. After the crit session on the 3rd of May where I presented the animated first act, both the tutors and my peers came to the conclusion that it on its own is a self-contained film, fit for submission, and hitting right below the 3 minute mark of the module's expectation. Luckily enough, most of the animation that I did belonged to the first act and with this I successfully compiled a comprehensible piece of film. Reflecting on my practice and methods, had I made a rough animatic this would have been predicted earlier, thus preventing me from animating scenes beyond the first act (as I have, evidenced by the progress storyboard blog post). I believe that splitting the animation into pieces would also be beneficial if by any chance I pitch my animation to a network - without the ultimate death of the remaining 3 characters there is a chance to build up upon the introduction of the pact and Robert dying. Perhaps, as an example, the spirit of Robert lives within the skull and speaks to and assists the characters that are currently in possession of the ash-tray, calling for an interesting premise for an animated series. Nonetheless, I will finish the remaining acts once the first one has been completely finished and ready for festivals since even by the off-chance that it gets accepted in a future pitch, I would love to make my own trilogy of small films hence all my animations before have been single stories without parts.

Extended Practice: Art Book Design and Reflection

Upon the sudden and abrupt shift of the art book's focal point, I decided on refining it based on the entirety of the art, idea, and immersion of my animation "Pact". Previously it was supposed to focus on the pre-production if I'm not mistaken, and due to the inferred substitute it became to blog posting but ultimately not realizing its initial purpose I have decided to make it visually appealing for potential readers. Yes, it does include a myriad of pre-productive works, but only those that envelope the personal methods and techniques of how I made it (or shall make it) be what it is. With the extremely didactic After Effects induction sessions, I have learned how to use the program accordingly and adhere to the art of geometrical layout and interrelation of objects instead of just placing images and text that looks accurate solely by my eye. Finally, the art book outlines the lack of backgrounds and the need to reinvent the space and realm of the film, which would involve a more sturdy and ambitious collaboration with a background artist. Ultimately, one learns best from mistakes and it is these inconveniences that increase an artist's astuteness in who to collaborate with - artists with integrity.

I am extremely satisfied with both the printed and my digital outcome. I did not believe that my first printed design would look so immaculate, or at least in my eyes. Goes to show that along the pathway of this course I have learned profusely not only about animation, but also design, among other multimedia skills.

Extended Practice: Obstacles

As with any and every project in history, the creator(s) is/are bound to run into inevitable obstacles that hinder the smooth flow of the project. Unfortunately, these obstacles shall prevent me in finishing the full film fit to the working standard for the official deadline. However, I would have proven to myself the escalation of my work ethic as well as my artistic development and improvement with the outcome I shall have to that date. I have grown to fall in love with my animation and consider it to be my first ever official magnum opus upon completion. Based on a previous post of mine outlining the time management storyboard ethic I utilized, the projection verifies the aforementioned. The first obstacle is my background artist leaving the project halfway through to my surprise. However, she has created full backgrounds for two background-character interactive scenes, which would facilitate a decent level of consistency. For a future prospect assuring the complete rectification of my animation either I will find another artist fit and willing to complete the backgrounds, or shall do it myself once the animation is done (or the one which does not require background-character interaction).

Ana-Marija's completed establishing shot designs

Another obstacle would be the unexpected time-consuming nature of lip syncing. Although I have surpassed my expectations in doing proper lip-syncing for the first time with it looking up to the standard I desired to impose upon this project, it is taking quite a bit of time cutting up the pieces of dialogue, annotating in which frame what syllable is dominant, as well as re-coloring every mouth position on a frame-to-frame basis. This has not hindered the production in any way but instead has consumed a bigger portion of time within a smaller resolved piece of finished work. In the future, for any lip synced animation I shall need to explore more effective techniques of reusing mouth shapes as is done in almost all animated shows to date. Lastly, during Easter I had to attend to family issues that drove my time away from producing my animation, which arguably isn't something that I should not prioritize. Alas, I did not shirk off my duties but instead chopped up the time remaining to animate, which would be something I would need to improve upon after graduating; must always have a Plan B intact.

Extended Practice: Storyboard Timeline

In order to assure the completion of all the animated parts, I have been using the storyboards as a guideline. In other words, I've been crossing out every scene I have fully finished with red rectangles, whereas every scene that has been completed in Photoshop but not fully finished, animated, or compiled in After Effects as green. I've been doing this so that I may keep track of the production progress and the speed of animation. Unfortunately, according to the projection of the method, I shall not finish animating in time for there are quite a bit of scenes left with demanding graphics in them that will require both patience and meticulousness. However, up until this point, the animation fits the standard and style I've expected where I'm mostly elated with the success of the lip sync scenes - the mouth movements perfectly fit the dialogue, making the characters a lot more real. Although there are quite a bit of consecutive panels not completed, some scenes use the line-boiled loop of a keyframe with the only substantial changes being the lip movements like in the poker scene - it seems like there's a lot more but there isn't really.

YCN: Action on Hearing Loss - Production and Finalization

The animation process lasted a rigorous three days with several tests for good measure. The armatures and perforated steel proved to be quite a useful asset in assisting us with composure, for the puppets were static as we wanted them to be. Once the animating was done, I began the post-production work of assembling the film as well as creating the soundscape. Samuel Grey's ambience soundtrack helped loads with the timing of the animation, as we felt that it progressed too fast instead of lingering enough to sink the motif into the heads of the audience. The manipulation of sound added greatly to the visceral punch of the motif as the preceding silence stands out by doing the exact opposite - omission gives the impression of an empty "unfinished" film. Furthermore, this is even more so highlighted by the simple yet fortitudinous statement at the end of the animation - "deafness is a lonely place to be" with the lack of vivid color and abundance of darkness. To tie everything together, Stacy created a poster that would interjectionally start a hashtag campaign or movement - #highfiveforaction - assisting the dissemination of hearing loss awareness and educating the community through the macrocosmos that is social networking. Overall, I am quite proud of this animation. Quite disappointed that there was not much of a choice in-between briefs for an animated response, which is what we wanted our portfolio to consist of. However, it was good practice for 24fps stop-motion and how to time slow vs. fast-paced movement.

Extended Practice: Storyboards and Animatic

With the consideration that my animation is quite rigorous and arduous to make (alongside lip syncing), I have decided to make highly detailed storyboards in order to visualize every scene separately. Furthermore, when animating the brisk and short scenes I will use the respective panel to draw the main key frame governing said scene in order to speed up the work process and save time. In terms of the animatic, I dubbed it unnecessary considering I am working on my own as well as the limited time I have to animate. The scenes perfectly adhere to the script in order to eliminate any possible confusion when animating and snipping pieces of the voices to match with the number of frames per scene. I figured, while experimenting and testing my method of lip syncing, that the length of the voice(s) per shot would be the length of the animation for said shot itself, effectively enabling me to mathematically lip sync without any necessity for tedious testing (other than the first test).