Final Project- Learning outcome 2 and 4

L.O.2- Critique the cultural, socio-political and commercial contexts of your animation practice.

When making What to do when the dead come back I didn't really think of how it could be used in the outside of this course, since it's only a one off film and not part one of a larger saga, then it can't really be made as a TV series. The best place commercial place for this film would probably as part of a horror anthology tv show, a collection of short horror stories in one episode, like Tales from the Crypt or the Twilight Zone, both of these shows are not currently running anymore, although there are reports that M. Night Shaman may reboot Tales from the Crypt. one still running horror anthology series is a bbc3 show called The Fear which shows a collection of short horror films to see which one is the scariest. Another potential Anthology is The ABC'S of Death which has 26 short movies, themed around a letter from the Alphabet, this features films from already established directors, however, the first one did have a movie that wasn't from an already established director, T is for Toilet by leeds Beckett graduate, Lee Hardcastle, who was able to get his film in after winning a competition.

There is a market for What to do when the dead come back, mainly for the theme with zombies, the zombie fanbase is so bug that there are summer camps for adults who want to learn how to survive in a world ruled by zombies. But there would be an even better market if this film was included as an anthology with an already established fan base.

L.O.4- Critically reflect and evaluate your animation practice within its global contexts.

What to do when the dead come back has built a lot of skills that could potentially lead into a career after finishing university.

The first being a puppet rigger, as What to do when the dead come back uses 2D digital puppets, compared to the puppets used in one of last years animation, The Unbelievable Truth, these puppets where very advanced. The first puppet took about a month to make whilst the second only took 2 weeks, as i did a lot of experimenting and trial and error with the first puppet (rigging a character for The Unbelievable Truth would only take about an hour at most) . Due to the amount of time it took to rig the characters together, this technique would be best used for a series or something that had a  long running time. Using this technique for something like a 3 second ident would be unwise. If the characters are all shaped similarly then we could quickly make multiple different characters, as a we need to do would change the image/texture of the puppet, an example of a series with similarly shaped characters would be those lego mini figures (the only difference in shape comes from the characters head) so this technique could be used in a show or advert about Lego characters.

Other than rigging, this short had an excessive amount of editing put into it, as there are essentially 2 stories happening at once. the first story is the main plot, guy goes into zombie infested world to get his pregnant wife olives, and the second plot, the PSA. In order to avoid confusion among the audience, as they would need to focus on two things at once. the main plot is used as the foundation for the PSA, if what is happening on screen remotely matches what is being said in the PSA, then the story will be a lot easier to follow. I've also done a lot of editing before doing the animation course and even wrote my dissertation on it.

Finally there is also the writing. I don't see my self writing characters or character dialogue, but i can see myself coming up with the scenarios for the characters to be in. I think the plot to What to do when the dead come back is pretty interesting and unique, as it brings in a new idea into the zombie lore, zombies identifying the living through their heart beats, as zombies will not have heart beats (because they are dead). This idea has an interesting pay off at the end, as at the end of the film a zombie has a confrontation with a pregnant woman, someone who would have two heart beats. In the film this leads to the zombie attempting to eat the woman unborn child.

What to do when the dead come back, animating the characters

The project was animated in a similar way to my self initiated one, using digital cut out. unlike my self initiated project where i used live action images, in this one i used vectors, as i wanted to do things that couldn't be done with the live action images

the horizontal head turn in the my final project  is just an an animation of a head doing a full 360 turn. in the film the animation is just being rewound and fast forwarded. as seen in the  gif below

the vertical head turning is achieved by placing parts of the face at different distances on the z axis, when the head is looking to the side everything is in the same place on the z axis.

the bodies are also done in the same way

there are also a ton of other expression involved as well, such as on the ears, when the character is facing either front or back and looks up, the expression makes sure that the eyes are above the ears, and vice versa when the character looks down. 

Most of the things where controlled using sliders that where all located in the a controller layer, each character ad their own controller layer for things like eye position, eyebrows rotation and bod tilting and jaw size (for when a character open and close their mouth)

this is how big the expression controlling the jaw size was

Before I could even think about starting this project there was one problem i had to over come. Before when i talked about rewinding and fast forwarding the character head turn, since i was working with a video it meant i would not be able to change the characters expression without manually moving the different parts. if a character is looking to the screen is sad then looks to the side, then becomes happy then looks back to the screen. then the character will go back to looking sad as i had to rewind the head turn.

eventually I worked out an expression that would allow me over come this issue

Instead of including the expressive parts of the face in the video of the head turning, i instead put them on top of the head turn comp (he video of the head turn) in the main comp. the data for where they should be is in the head turn comp. the expression works out where the parts should be by looking the difference in time of the main comp and the head turn comp, then taking that way from the time of the main comp, the result of this is the time of where the parts should be by looking at the position value at that time.

for example: the main comp is at 5 seconds and the head turn is at 2. the expression finds the difference by doing the sum 5-(5-2) which is 3. then it says find the position value 3 seconds before the current tome. since it 5-3 seconds. it'll end up the position value at 2 seconds

some things had to be hand drawn as i felt it would be easier to do it this way, such as on hands and mouths

originally the film was going to be in colour, but because of the limited amount of time i decided that to make everything back and white instead.

Final Project- Character design

Draft Zombies

Zombie drawings based on images from the internet, the last three were just images of regular people, I just made them look a bit zombie-ish

Draft Man

Final Man

Draft Woman

Final woman

Draft Soldier

Final Soldier

Draft Shop Zombie, top row and full figure on the right. 

Draft Zombie Man, bottom row

Final Shop Zombie

Final Man

Experimenting with art styles

 I was told to have a go of giving the character a thicker outline. The first is the regular line, the second is the thicker outline on only the contours of the figure, and the last is thicker outlines on all the lines

Production schedule

Drawing- 27th November 2015

Just did some traditional head measurement drawings, tried a technique i saw online for drawing limbs, you draw a circle where the beginning, middle and end of a limb would be, then join them together.

 I wasn't able to finish most of the drawings on time but I got another chance to do so since the model was repeating the poses. The 2nd years were doing something involving light and shadows, so I decided to add some shading to mine. I tried shading using cross hatches to help imply the 3d curves of the body.

Drawing- 13th November 2015

This lesson focused on hands, I took part in the second years task as it used a technique that I hadn't used before. In the first drawing we drew hands in that ever way we felt like

for the rest of the hand drawings we used a technique where we drew a box, then drew lines to  remove segments of the box so that it would form a shape slimmer to the hand, from that point on we drew the hand as normal, below is the first attempt

After the first attempt we did a rotation of a hand using the same technique, 10 minutes on each drawing. the hand gradually opened as it rotated. with the exception of the third and sixth one, these hands turned out pretty well. the drawings had realistic form and the ends of the fingers looked a lot less cartoony than the very first hand drawing of today

we finished of the day with a quick 10 minute sketch of the model

Drawing- 30th October 2015

First time doing life drawing after a four month break. since 3rd year students don't get their own class so we have to share with second, but I also don't have to follow the classes task and can do what ever drawing I want in class, They let us choose our selves to best suit the final project.

The drawings above were done using the classic measuring heads style, the one below I alternated male and female models after each head measurement

For my first session back after a long break, these drawings didn't turn out too bad

3rd Year

AP5: self initiated- The unbelievable truth

Heres the version of the film I handed in for marking, its not finished but I did include the animatic for the final parts. The film is animated using Duik, a plug in for after effects that allows you to do a  animation that looks like a more advanced version of cut out animation. The music is from incompetech.com a website that features royalty-free music to download, the downloads are free but if you want to edit the individual instruments in the song then you will have to pay for that file.

Even though I originally pitched more facts, I ended up narrowing it down to three individual facts that I felt where the best

INSERT FINAL VID HERE WHEN V/O IS COMPLETE

When it comes to how this would be shown, this would either be a short show that is shown during ad breaks for a children's Television channel, such a nickelodeon, or this could be part of a larger factual programme and be short segment shown sometime during it.

Opaque-eration: Experimental film completed

Heres the final cut of the experimental film, this film was made with the combined efforts of myself, Michelle Lumbert (writer, visual effects and lighting), Kaya Oldaker (animation) , Robert Poller (actor), Maryam Abdulla (sound) and Ash Moules (camera).

This film is about a man playing operation with a mysterious shadowy entity

I made the storyboard for this film and I knew how the effects where going to be done, so I was made the films director.

Arts Ident

I worked with one of the third years, Sarah Berry, on one of her indents for her final animation before graduation. She told me what to do and gave me animatic to go by and I just animated it. The music was composed by James Poupard. This was my first time working with vector images, which meant I had to turn rasterise on in the vector images layer properties so that the image stays the same quality of picture no matter the size. There where some annoying side effects to rasterisation, such as effects light bevel being cut off when the image is near the edge of the screen, though but I was able to figure out a way to work around the problems, they probably weren't the ways that professionals would use, but they worked.

Drawing- May 1st

Todays session was more of a do what you want as long as it relates to the self initiated project sort of lesson. I looked up some images of woods and Croatia to get some ideas of what the setting for those two scenes will be like.

Heres the woods

Heres a street in Croatia

Experimental film test shots

Drawing- 24th of April

This lessons drawing had us going to the Yorkshire sculpture park. The park featured a wide variety of  sculptures from sculptures of people, abstract shapes and some sculptures that were just weird. The park also featured some of Henry Moore's work, he's a pretty big deal in the world of sculpting, some may even say that he is the biggest deal of all sculptures.

One of the first sculptures was this small building with a square hole in the ceiling, this was so that the roof could act as the frame for the sky.

This is one of Henry Moore's sculptures, called "Reclining figure: Arch Leg" this is one of the many sculptures in the park that are based on abstract shapes

Heres another one of Moore's work, "Large Totem head". It looks more like two conjoined canoes if i'm gonna be honest.

Draped Seated woman is also by Moore. it's of a broad woman with a uniquely shaped head

This is one of the more weird sculptures, "Crawling" by Sophie Ryder. it's a huge anthropomorphic rabbit, if you look closely you can find things like gears embedded and other industrial oddities into the rabbit

Self initiated animation story board

For my self incited animation I decided to find facts on the internet and add visuals to them. The style of animation would be the same seen in my videos for duck test and the skeleton walk cycle, where I get images from the internet and animate them using the Duik plug-in in for after effects.

one thing tutors said about the project was that I should retitle it so that it could be a TV series, with this episode being on animals. 

The first fact is about crows playing pranks on each other. I decided to do the idea of using the fake can of pea nuts that is filled with spring loaded worms prank, we have one crow fall for the prank, then pull back the camera to reveal that there are other crows think the spring loaded worms are real and they want to eat them

 

This fact was about how the extinct colossus penguins where as tall as basketball player Lebron James, so thats where the idea of basketball came from. In the idea a basket ball player tries jump for the ball that is in the penguins hand, the penguin throws the ball at the guys head, and it lands in the net.

In this one we see some lamp post being knocked over by a mysterious force, the camera then moves out to show that acid in a dogs urine has been corroding the lamp post metal.

This is one about whales singing the same song, as the song is spread among the whales. This is shown with the whales playing instruments. The fact then says that the music changes as the song is passed on, this is shown by showing a different set whales singing a remixed version of the song but in a different musical genre. I was also going to work in the fact that sea lions are the only animals who can keep a beat, so I made the drummer a sea lion, still not sure if I will include this in the final product.

the camera then pans up to an angry person in a boat who is trying to sleep but can't because the next fact is about how whales make the loudest noise out of any animal. He is hitting the floor with a broom stick in try and get them to shut up. Similar to how in TV shows, when the person living above them is being loud, they start to hit the ceiling with a long stick.

The final fact is about squirrels being able to remember 10,000 places they burried nuts we show this by having a surreal think of a map with all the locations marked with an acorn icon. the fact then says that they forget some locations, causing the nut to grow into a tree. We show this by having the squirrel burry a nut, leave, then come back to try and remember where he put it, as he searches we see  that the buried nut is growing into be a tree. The squirrel gives up his search and puts up a missing poster for the missing nut on the tree that the missing nut grew into.

I may not do all these, as there is potentially some other work that I may be doing for other peoples projects. To make time for this work, I may cut scenes from this project.