Because I really disliked the angular jump in the first newt scene (which we had to do because the tripod had been moved), I asked Hayley if we could redo this after we completed the rest of the newt scenes, if we had time. She agreed that it didn't look right, as the rest of the newt animation is all face on, making that particular jump even more pronounced. Therefore we took it upon ourselves to redo these few seconds as we already had our mouth poses planned out!
This is the result of the re-animated scene. We decided to stick head on, so that we could use the same shot throughout through stabilising any jumps, OR zoom in, if we decide to add close ups! I am so happy we changed this scene, as it now looks much more fluid and cohesive!
And this is the new newt scene slotted into the first newt part without the green screen and stabilised! I am much more happy with it. Though there is still a bit of a jump, it is less noticeable than previously.
Hayley felt like my bird mouths could have been better if I made the teeth behind the lips, so together we remade the mouths for the sheep. I brought in my peach fimo and Hayley brought her brown and we made a set of mouths which do indeed look much better than the ones I had made!
This is our set up for the sheep set! It looks very desolate and bizzare from far away, but through the camera lens which is what the audience sees, it looks much more effective, and once we add a background it will be enhanced even more! We used the grass we bought from Hobbycraft to break the line between the blue and green screen, and then sprinkled some around the grass area for more detail. I think it looks quite charming, and allows the audience to focus on the character speaking, which is the sheep!
And this is what we animated today! We animated this straight after our final crit so we were feeling motivated and ready to be productive! Hayley animated the first half and I did the second, and I love this sequence so much! I think it will be a great sequence to open up with, as the character is very simple and friendly which is perfect to entice and appeal to our younger viewers!
When directing Hayley, since there isn't too much of the sheep to move, I suggested we really focus on the language within the animation and play those words. For example, the sheep talks about being on a hill and higher up a lot, therefore I thought we could emphasise this by making the sheep try and shift the audience's focus to, this hill. So when she says 'all the people down the end of the road', I thought the sheep could nod her heads toward the right, suggesting to the audience that the bottom of the hill is there, as well as move her eyes that way when she says 'because i'm on a hill'. These are just subtle hints, but I think this increases the chances of the sheep looking natural and feeling like a real animal! This was really fun for me to think about, as I feel like I am quite an exaggerated speaker anyway, as I move my hands a lot, so I have some inclination of what to project through the characters!
I especially love how we have emphasised even the slightest sounds. For example the sniff at 0:07, and the mouth clicking noise at 0:08. I animated these to be really exaggerated and I think it looks really well, especially as the voice is very slowly paced in speaking, so needs these over dramatised movements or else she would just be severely static and bore our viewers!
However I loved our outcome of today and how we are progressing even more!
Today we had our final crit which was interesting seeing how far everyone else has gotten in their project, especially as Hayley and I have chosen a different medium to work with.
We presented our animatic yet again as this had been a successful choice for us in the past crits, and we showed all of our animation so far, minus the sheep which we did ten seconds of today! (which leaves us with only 20 seconds left, ah!).
We didn't receive much feedback that we could apply to our animation in particular, but we were advised to think about 'g' sounds for when we animate the sheep next. Sara and Martin wondered why there was a small o on the word 'exaggerated' for the newt, and we said that is what we felt mirrored our own references when we continuously spoke the word aloud to each other. Martin told us to treat it like an 'ou' sound, so now we have this for future reference.
Both Martin and Sara complimented us on our use of the mouth poses and how realistic they look, which I find such a great compliment because we sat down for ages to try and work the different poses in conjunction with their correct sound. I really worked hard on the timings of the poses, making sure they lasted for the exact amount of time they needed so that meant less post-production work for us, and it seems as though it has payed off! Our peers also liked the bird shake for the word 'drizzle' which I thought was another compliment for us.
Overall I am so proud of what we have achieved so far! Hayley and I have combined all of our skills to create something that is new to us, and I feel like we are learning every day from the problems we faced and the mistakes we made. This is so new to me, but I am becoming more confident in animating and directing, and I am really enjoying the whole process!
The last scenes for Hayley and I to animate were the sheep scenes! We didn't really know what to prepare for the set, but we bought some modelling foliage from Hobby Craft and experimented with the quantity on top of a green piece of card. The biggest concern for me was the line between the blue and the green card, and if the viewer would able to tell where we would be editing our green screen, however this was just a test to see if what we had planned, was in fact achievable to a good standard.
At the time, and looking at the camera setup on DragonFrame, I really liked the bottom right picture, where there was a lot of foliage/greenery and some shrubbery at the back, however looking back I am more so leaning towards the less is more foliage, because I feel like the sheep doesn't look as real as the material, and I am afraid of the uncanny valley happening in this particular scene.
Nevertheless, I found some pictures that I had taken of skies throughout the year and put them into Photoshop to see if they would look effective up against my sheep model.
Sadly, I was not that impressed with the outcome because again, I feel like there is a great discrepancy between the model and the background, even if I blur it. I am not sure why this is such a big problem compared to the newt scene which Hayley and I were able to replace the green screen with various images, but it is very frustrating. I am glad that we have tested this before animating, because it means that we can change the setup if we really are unhappy with it.
This is a screenshot of Hayley's attempt at replacing the green screen and I do really like it. I think it is much more effective than my attempts, but I am still not sure about the realistic image in the background. This is something that we are going to have to test out further I think, especially as we want it to be cohesive with the other scenes as well!
Today we animated the final part to our birds scene which was only around four seconds long. Because we have become accustomed to animating this way, it didn't take us very long at all, especially as we plan thoroughly before we even begin a scene.
Due to the nature of the voice, there wasn't many words that we could choose to stress, or add emphasis on, for this particular sequence, so we focussed on mouths, eyes and then slight movement of the characters. I wanted to have some more wing movement when the female bird stutters, as well as make the two birds turn towards each other and smile, to conclude this scene as we only see them once.
I really enjoyed animating this sequence because it was quite simple and is all in the details. I think that the end does stop abruptly, so I did duplicate the last frame a few times so that it holds, before the audience sees the next character.
This is the bird scene as a whole and I am very proud of what we have achieved. I think that the bird matches the voice really well, syncing wise as well as personality wise. We tried to elevate the character more so because the voice is very timid, but we still wanted some exaggeration and movement in there. Hayley and I have worked really well as a team directing each other and really thinking about the next frame and what will look most natural, but also entertaining for our family viewers (target audience). I am also so happy to see my models really come to life, and I am proud of how I made them!
And this is the birds scene slotted into the animatic. I am glad that I added more frames to the end as this makes the transition to the newt more palpable, instead of being too blunt. I am so happy with what we have achieved so far and we are sticking to our schedule! We will now move on to the sheep scene which we sorted out mouth shapes for today!
Because Hayley and I struggled with keeping our animation smooth in terms of the camera angles due to multiple factors (the gradient of the floor, the awkward access to the scene, etc), we decided to move our setup around so that we would be giving ourselves more room and opportunity for a more stable animation. Looking back on this, as we have now completed the first part of the birds scene, I am so glad that we took the time to do this because we had so much space to work with the models, as well as stand back and evaluate the animation as a whole on Dragon Frame, allowing us to contemplate our next move more coherently. Our animation also has a lot less shake to it, which I am very pleased about.
Martin also came to speak to us about this shakiness, and gave us a few tips on ways we can fix this. He told us about the stabilisaton in After Effects, or tracking the background which both sound like ways we can test out once we come to the post production stage.
Before we begun to animate, we borrowed some thick wire from Mike and cut about two lots of 6cm which I pushed into the models, as Hayley made two holes in the fence (which looks so realistic, Hayley has done a great job on it!). We did this so that the models will stay in place as we manipulate them, but will give us some room to move them around at the same time. We did think about hot glueing them down but because the fence was more lightweight than the models, this was not a sensible option so wire seemed to be the most effective. Using a similar lighting set up to the newt, we then began to animate.
This is what we animated so far. Like previously, we took turns moving the model whilst the other person directed. I began to animate first which as you can tell gets better as it goes on. I defintely feel like I am learning so much the more I am animating, and taking note of my mistakes. For example, in the beginning here, I knew that there was maybe a bit too much eye movement. Though it seemed like I wasn't doing enough because it takes such a long time to do, once I put we put it into Premiere, I could see that it was perhaps a bit too sporadic and therefore slowed it down a lot!
Also taking some feedback from Mike, he thought that our models were a bit too static, therefore Hayley and I discussed how we could make the birds move more naturally. We came to the conclusion that the wings would be our key to making the animation more lively, and so thought about how we could incorporate their movement with particular words.
When the red bird says 'drizzle', Hayley had an idea for the bird to shake, and I suggested we close her eyes at the same time for more emphasis on the word. This was a lot of fun for me to animate, and I feel like it looks perfect in conjunction with the sentence she is speaking. We also had some fluttering of the birds wings to just constantly remind the audience that they are birds, and they are alive, instead of having them just stand there.
Overall I really enjoyed changing the animation up and animating something new. It was quite tricky to animate these models as I made them on such a small scale, so if I ever do stop motion again, I will make the models bigger so it won't be such a complex task!
Today, Hayley and I completed the last newt scene, which means now we can get onto the other characters which I think is quite nerve-racking as I have become very comfortable with just animating the newt.
I am very happy with what we have achieved, we have animated around 30-40 seconds which has taken us a few weeks, but this is because we have had a lot of work to do alongside this project as well. Again, we focussed on eyes, mouth and head movement to try and keep the newt acting as natural as possible, using ourselves as the main references. We tried to ease in and out of the actions, as the more we watch what we have done, the more we realise that some of the movements are quite fast, therefore we are learning as we are going along. I tried to tilt the newts head to the side as we says 'merely' and I love how it turned out, adding character to an otherwise boring word.
I have noticed that the camera jumps, illustrating every new day we have started animating, which does irritate me, but we tried really, really hard to not let this happen. We did not move the tripod at all, and when we go back to the room it has been moved which is very hard for us to get back to the right frame. I am going to try and look into stabilisation to try and see if I can fix this problem, but I am not sure it is entirely doable. Hayley and I have also decided we are going to move our set for the next characters (we didn't move it for the newt because we didn't want to lose the camera angle), to a more safe and secure area so that we hopefully, won't have to deal with these problems.
Then, because I was curious, we uploaded our files into After Effects and practiced green screening out the background, just to see if what we had could even work with an image. I used the notes from our green screen induction and was able to edit the video accordingly.
I am quite happy with how it looks with an image for a background, I like it much more than plain blue, which Hayley agrees with. As you can see from the video, there is a change in lighting, which especially shows on the background (left trees area). I did eliminate this from the first scene in the animation, as I used the white and black shaders to remove it, but as there is different lighting further on, this alteration didn't apply to that. To solve this, I am going to cut each scene up in After Effects and edit them separately instead of trying to do all the newt scenes together, as this is not doable to a good standard. Hayley is going to use an image of hers for the background which she took from near where she lives!
This is the next scene that Hayley and I animated together. For the most part we took turns animating the mouths and I did the hand. As always we planned out our mouth shapes by talking out loud and writing down the mouth shape that we felt suited the sound best. The more we became familiar with the process, the more we started to realise that some words sounded broader than others, so we had to emphasise this with the mouth poses. For instance, when the newt says 'and', he says it like 'und' because it is so quick and northern, therefore we would usually want a teeth pose for the 'd' sound for exaggeration, but since the newt wouldn't naturally say 'and' with teeth, we had to think on our feet and use an open resting mouth, to make the mouth movements really look like they belonged to the sound!
We then got started on the last newt scene which was exciting because it meant that we were almost finished with animating the newt after all of this time! By this point however, the lights were very hot so were starting to make the model look a bit shiny and it was beginning to get a little but soft! Also because we had used his hands so much, they were starting to also become a little withered, but we carried on nonetheless, and took a note for next time, to mix the plasticine with beeswax! Again, we took turns directing and animating. I loved doing both of these roles, though I am sure that I was annoying Hayley because I am very particular when it comes to directing, especially as we were using the tool on Dragon Frame which switches between live mode and the previous frame, to see how much we have moved the model, and what can be altered. I also find it challenging animating, because I have to trust what Hayley is telling me, as I can't look at the screen when it is my turn! But I am very happy with what we are producing, and we get on so well working together!
This is all of our newt animation slotted into our animatic! I am finding this very useful as it shows how much we have left, but keeps the animation consistent with the rhythm of the animation as a whole. After we complete this final newt scene, we will be moving on to the next characters which is daunting because I am so used to the newt, but will also be a great challenge I am sure.
More process of matching mouth shapes with correct frames!
