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).

YCN: Action on Hearing Loss - Pre-Production

Since the brief emphasizes the building of our professional portfolio, I found it more substantial to choose a live brief for which an animation can be made. Collaborating with Stacy Straub, we picked the YCN brief Action on Hearing Loss because of its altruistic nature and video-requiring platform. Initially, the treatment of the animation was much more complicated (as outlined by figures 1 and 2), and because we felt that simplicity would derive a more powerful punch, we then simplified and shortened the story (as outlined by figures 3 - 6). We divided the proposed workload equally to meet our individual set of skills - I am mainly doing the digital work (post-production, 2D animation, storyboards) alongside animating, with Samuel Gray (music student) creating the soundscape for the ambient. We worked on the puppets together, her creating the armatures and me molding the clay on top, whereas we are both going to animate together considering there will be multiple characters moving at the same time. Based on the median of the very first clay models we made for reference, we chose the size of the claymen to be 15 centimeters in height in order to make the best use of the aluminium wire armature and non-polarized bolts for balance (with a magnetized perforated steel floor underneath the set).

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7 - Fully done puppets 

Figure 8 - First armature and measuring schematic

Extended Practice: Collaborators

Even though this project is generally a solo work of mine, I still have collaborators working on it with me - nothing that's animation. Initially, Ana-Marija Simeska from Macedonia, Skopje is doing the background designs. In order for them to be symbiotic with the animation and perspective of shots through Skype me and Ana-Marija analyzed and wrote down how many iterations there are to be used in total, which backgrounds could be re-used, and which perspectives are based on the shots. Conclusively, because I am not that skilled at drawing environments I outsourced it to a collaborator. Although I believe I could draw the backgrounds for Pact, they would take quite a bit of time as I would keep correcting the perspective and the style in order to get it "right".

In terms of soundscaping, music student and musician Ryan Scott has taken the course of creating the background music for my animation, with scenes being respectively presented with their own soundtrack. Some shall bathe in an absence of music, fitting to the tone. He will uptake as much as he can for the soundtracks, whereas the rest will either be filled with royalty free music, already created music from friends of mine back home, and even some ambient tracks will be mine, all effectively evading any copyright if this were to go to a festival (which is something I plan on).

Finally, the voices of the characters are based on college peers. I felt that there is vocal acting potential in some of my peers, which is why I picked them separately based on who I thought would fit the character(s). Hiring voice actors outside of college would present an injunction in time: limited time means prioritizing. If this animation were to be of a more free, non-confined nature, I'd have a lot more time to take feasible risks at acquiring external voice actors.

Robert - Vladimir Voinovski
Doug - Max Ardron
Darryl - Steven Tran
Ralph - Christopher Hoare

These are the main voices of the characters, whereas the supporting ones are of me and several other peers.