The video!

Sorry Sorry Sorry for being so late in posting this. Since getting back it's been a little hectic and go go go. And I keep forgetting to upload the video. However, here it is! The outcome of our stay....


The Animatic!

It should play here fine, if not here is the link....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idib9J7Hba0

Hope you all enjoy!

Premiere Pro Fun

 

Sharing our Storyboards

 

Time to put this thing into premiere!

 

We took pictures of Erin's storyboard and adjusted the timing in Adobe Premiere. After some fiddling with, it flowed like an animatic should. However, it still needed some fixes. 

We then examined Erin's and Emily's similar storyboards to determine which scenes and shots conveyed the story most effectively. The two storyboards were a little different, but close enough to the same general storyline it was possible to cut-and-paste them together.

 

Taping together the storyboards

Literally.

 

We added in a few frames in red pen to fill in gaps that formed between the storyboards when we merged them. The clearer the story, the better!

 

Taped-together storyboard, looking spiffy!

 

 

Some of the frames we added.

 

Then we put our new-and-improved storyboard into Premiere and edited the timing once again.

 

My personal favorite part, where Nessie slurps sailors up her nose

 

The animatic was nice, but what might the finished product look like? Andrea (the middle person in the above image) advised us to make concept art: a few drawings of colored, finished-looking scenes and characters from our animatic. Erin and I drew line art of a couple scenes, and Ashley outlined it in Adobe Sketch on her ipad. Then we took turns coloring the scenes.

 

My drawing of Bean stuck to the kelpie

 

 

Erin's drawing of Bean walking in the forest

 

 

Ashley's Adobe Sketch tracing of Erin's drawing.

 

(Tip: don't use black as an outline color! It makes the drawings look flat.)

 

 

A colored scene by Ashley.

 

We spent a while discussing and testing out colors for our main character Bean and decided on a light gray tone. I changed some of the colors in the concept art and drew  and added cast light and shadows from the moon and lantern.

 

The visual concepts of the final product looked great, and so did the animatic-in-progress.

Now it was time to add audio...

Final Roughs and Style Studies

 

Style study by Erin, Wonder over Yonder

Well, we have decided on a final rough of our animatics. Both Erin and Emily had a list of the final qualities we wanted in the animatics, that being woeful tale of Bean's demise. He is traveling in the forest, comes across all or some of Scottish mythical creatures (Bean Nighe, Nessie, 

Mermaid, and Kelpie). The Kelpie being the main creature that kills off our character. His objective is to find the Fairy, and it ends in his death. 

From this final list, Erin's tale begins in the day with him jumping from a tree in his search for the last ingredient, a Fairy Leg. He is searching through bushes and trees. He hears something and comes across Nessie who is a bit derpy, (Her method of snorting people up her nose in stead of her mouth is a great testimony). He's disappointed, next while searching near the water a siren tries to entrance him with her voice, though Bean knows this and plugs his ears. She has some anger issues about this and starts to scream, but Bean continues on along with river. As the day wears on he's being disheartened, then notices red throughout the river along him. Looking up he seas a Bean Nighe that's high on the creep factor as she washes blood from clothes in the river and has our protagonist screaming like a girl. As darkness descends he pulls the lantern from his head and lights it up, upon finally having some light, he notices he's almost run straight into a horse. As his eyes travel up and he sees a tempting sign telling him he'd be taken to the fairies, he's trying to figure out why she doesn't seem to trust this so much. Then with a flash, he see's the Kelpies true form and let's out a breathless chuckle. Off he takes, screaming like a banshee the horse shakes off it's illusion and gives chase. Right before being overcome, the fairy deciedes to tease young bean with showing up and letting him know he was right there. 

Emily's begins with an intro of hooves and mermaid tales, then an over shot of the setting. He is searching for that last ingredient. He's looking high and low, leaving no rock unturned. He comes across a serpentine Nessie who's just swallowing people whole from a boat, then after hearing some beautiful music Bean runs off and gazes upon a mermaid. The mermaid isn't the best of singers and on a particular high note breaks his lantern attached to his hat. The rest is lite by moonlight as its been dark the whole time. Then he to, comes across the Kelpie and at first almost falls for it's charm. Upon figuring out it's true form Bean throws his sandwich at the kelpie and takes off, chase scene ensues. Finally in slow motion, the fairy shows up and zips past him, he tries to reach him but is unsuccessful. 

In the end, our storyline changed even more when abserving the slight differences in the storylines. We then cut up the physical paper and started to combine favorite aspects of each story; like Erin's Nessie slurping up it's victims, Emily's chase scene with the Kelpie, Erin's intro to the kelpie, Emily's lantern cracking and breaking. So we combined and took away, the Bean Nighe scene disappeared all together, and then figured out where new scenes needed to be added so as to better connect the story. We changed it so his goal for the fairy isn't for an ingredient, it's because his magical lantern on his head is dying out and he needs a fairy to help recharge it. We kept the setting mainly at night with moonlight and his lantern to light the scenes. We reinforced his magical ness by adding in him making his map appear and disappear. Certain scenes had to be flipped so as to keep the directionality alligned. 

Overall we had a Final Rough we all enjoyed and had part in. 

Storyboard Explorations

So both Erin and Emily came up with two varying styles of storyboards for our plot line. Erin's had some dark humor in it while Emily's was light and child friendly. Both main characters wanted to discover fairies, one just wanted proof they existed with his camera the other was just following a map (later evolved to him needing fairy wings for a potion).

   

Getting some inputs on our drafts, Here's some from Sara. Next up was Sandy.

So the story's these two put their two cents on goes as follows...

Emily's: Our character is on a mission to prove fairies exist. He's been teased for believing in them for as long as he can remember, so he wants to prove everyone wrong. Along his adventures he stumbles upon Nessie, who upon seeing his camera makes sure to give him a pose or two, the boy who won't be deterred just puts up his map and continues on. Nessie was not pleased. He continues on and thinks he hears a fairy, only to scare a Wulver who was delivering fish to a family. He stumbles across one or two more characters on his journey, all he ignores cause they are not his target. Finally he comes across a fairy and takes his pictures. The fairy though, asks him not to keep them. As fairies are a secret no one should know of, or else they'd take advantage of the folk. Our character is undecided, in the end he does the right thing and deletes the photos. He receives a gift from our lovely fairy and is happy to have done right by the creature he cared about. However he has his camera, and it's empty. What to do what to do, so he follows his tracks and makes a photo collection of all those other creatures he underrated. To come home with a memory card full and no idea what to do with all the photos of Nessie.

 

Photo of a page of Emily's first Draft

Erin's: in her tale of woe, the main character is stumbling on all sorts of creatures he doesn't need. Exaggerated faces on both creatures and characters adds humor throughout the storyline. Finally as he takes a break for food, a Kelpie stumbles upon him. Kelpies being a water spirit that drowns it's victims. He's disguised and has a sign saying free ride to the Fairy's but our character isn't fooled, he smells something fishy going on and he takes off running! The kelpie disliking its meal leaving, transforms to its tar like gruesome form and takes off after the boy, while running a fairy flys the boy, moving as if in slow motion. It frustrates the boy his goal was so close, and with this slight distraction the kelpie over takes our character and forces him to be stuck to his hide. Then gleefully the end clips show the kelpie prancing back to the water so as to drown and eat our character.

 A photo of a page from Erin's draft.

After a few days of working on these storylines and creating two roughs, we decided on the dark humor of Erin's plot line. Both Emily and Erin will create a third draft of the same plot line, that we will combine with favorite shots and scenes from each. We will then import that into photoshop and work on creating a digital and final version. In the mean time, I am working on sound bits and finding Celtic/Gaelic music that will be used as our audio sound track.


Emily and Erin Discussing the drafts at Rose Angle Cafe.

Storylines, Storylines, Storylines.

After a long weekend of exploring, and an extraordinary day in Edinburgh on Monday. Tuesday started us off exhausted but excited to continue our work.

 

A group meeting started us off. Throwing out ideas from the storylines we'd developed. They ranged from a clip show of sorts with many versions, 1 scene with the character moving in it, a character finding a place to meditate and being disturbed where ever he went, a duck drinking tea, a paranoid women afraid of forgetting something and the house being flooded or destroyed and being over anxious finally resolves her paranoid feelings to end with her house on fire, alien invasions with different results then you believed, a Godzilla attack and multiple character reactions to the event throughout the city, the list continues from there...

We each decided on one from each of our sections, to then create a nugget. This nugget we searched photos for to see which one we liked, inspired us the most and then laid it out in indesign. Our Final 3 were a clip show combining the scenes of multiple Scottish Mythological creatures, a dramatic scene of drinking tea (by duck or human), and the woman's house burning down.

After a full day of creating nuggets, brainstorming how the 3 would play out, and Emily doing some more acting, we settled on our favorite. The clip show of Scottish Mythology. Here we did not decide on a final course of action with the clip show, from here we separated and started to storyboard mini scripts of how this clip show would play out.

 

We got some info from one of our instructors on Act set ups in a story and Theme combinations. This lead us to some base story ideas, for the clip show. One being; The character needed proof fairies exist, and through his travels he comes across more then just fairies and ignores them all for his proof. We used the creatures as obstacles he had to overcome through his adventure. The next few days were of storyboarding. I was out sick for Wednesday and Thursday both Erin and Emily had solid first drafts on the story that they were progressing to a second draft and I felt my resources would be best continuing onto more technical things then drawing out a rough draft myself. I began the base for the blog and researching music we could use.

Inspiration Explosion

So, we were given "The Brief"... Very open ended, very not what we were expect. How to continue hmmm....

We split up for a bit, then came back together and brainstormed, we wanted to see who was inspiring us for this animatics. Inspirations that bloomed where Chuck Jones styled humor, the Looney Toons slapstick animation. Something Geometic and simplified. Something minimalistic, do we want detailed backgrounds, detailed characters. How many characters, (eh, not more then 3 maybe), Is it gonna be themed? Fantasy styled, realistic, sci-fy? Tied to Reality, expressive faces. These were some random notes taken from our Idea Brainstorm. We watched some videos, and discussed if we had any Ideas. One that came up, was to base it on a character traveling and visiting places, similarly to what we were doing.

I'm trying to be sly.... Did it work?

Our character evolved to a dragon, who had very bad luck on his trip. Horrible plane food, crushed by rocks, large backpack that was twice his size. Things did not always flow well for him. This was the idea we ended on that first day of studio time. We got a good sense of our combined humor and the direction we wanted to go in. But we didn't solidify our idea of what our character was going to do. We established some time to brainstorm ideas and to come up with 3-4 different storylines to explore for the project. Then Emily got dragged into another of the Master Student's film projects. He was making a combined 3D modeled animation mixed with a Filmed short. They needed a female role and she was immediately up for the task. That day ended good.

 
Brianstorm, discuss, brainstorm, discuss repeat until success if found!

We traveled and explored the local area our first weekend. We'd had rain 5 days straight and Saturday finally lightened up. So we took advantage of that and didn't regroup until Tuesday, the 21st.

Emily working her scene in the hallway!

"The Brief"

So, coming into this program, we did not really know what to expect. Four of us planned on doing the animation section, but after some touring our professor, Sandy, bailed on us. She decided to do some lithographic printing instead, pssh fine art work (Animation is a ton better ;)). Anywho, the way the other artists work during this month was planned out to be an exploration of sorts, and you could choose to dabble and explore what ever medium you wanted. This kinda made us think that's how our program was gonna go in animation. We'd get to explore the sections of animation we all wanted to learn about, however when we got there, our objective changed. They ended up having a prepared project of sorts, open ended but having us actually act and work like we were in an production setting. We could choose to all make seperate animatics or work together and make one. The school here describes this as a Brief.

So we got a goal, information, directions on the process, what they expect for outcomes, and the aims of this project. I'm gonna go into some details for you guys, so you can understand our thought process through our brainstorming.

For some background on Animatics, an animatic is 'a preliminary sequence of shots, images or sketches (as for a movie or an animated television program) that is filmed or arranged usually with a sound track and viewed to determine its effectiveness before being finalized.'

 

Us doing some work

Our end goal for this month is to create a script, storyboard and animatics for a short 1-2 minute animated animation or film. The overall brief is open, our choice of story, scenario, genre and style. Our inspiration was left open to us by them, we've personally decided to pull upon our experiences of being here in Scotland to inspire our story, though some of our ideas were off the wall and a few didn't even go with our main inspiration. But that's the fun of being able to do whatever we want.


Stage 1- Script development
    Boil down our idea to an 'uber' pitch, two lines or less, that sums up our film. Develop into a synopsis, and there work up a shot for shot script.

Stage 2- Storyboarding
   Storyboard our script, complete with suggested camera angles, amount of shots and timing.

Stage 3-Animatics Production
   Create a timed animatics, based on your storyboard, add any sound FX and music and prepare and edit utilizing the appropriate software.

So far we have finished stage one, and combined it into Stage two. We just finalized our story idea today, the 26th, and we were given the brief on the 16th. So all in all we're 10 days into working on our project and have made some great progress.

The Outcomes we want, is upon completion we will be able to demonstrate a greater understanding of animatics practices and how to apply their studio practice skills to a project. Our Aims of the class is to contextualise animation and digital film practice skills within an environment that emulates the professional workplace. This module will enable us to create a production of an animatic. This will provide us with experience of managing relationships in a team and the development of transferable professional skills.

We are already seeing the development of having transferable skills, as we've sectioned out each others strengths and letting us use them to our advantage during this project. An example would be, Erin and Emily have been focusing on the drawing, camera angles and making the story come to life, while I, Ashley, have been focusing on the technical aspects and just giving ideas during group meetings. This has allowed our current skills to flourish and us to work at a quicker pace then when working by ourselves.

So this was a chunkier information part of the project, the rest will include more photos and actions shots on what we've been doing and what is to come! But this gives you the information we were given and inspired by to continue on with in making this production which has yet to be named.