A Small Story

So I finally finished my degree and my last animation as a student. My film was made for Claire House Children's Hospice using original testimonies from interviews I conducted with the Smallmans, a family who use the hospice services. I'm so happy with the result and the fact that the family and Claire House staff are so pleased with how it all turned out. They might even want some more films made in the future! 

Soundscapes

As this film was being made for a more professional setting for a charity rather than just as a uni project, I wanted everything to be as clean and high quality as possible. With this in mind I planned months ago to collaborate with a musician from my local area who knew the charity well and had worked with me on previous professional projects (The Reedy Boy), to guarantee a high level of quality on the sound. I think knowing your strengths and weaknesses, and when to collaborate, and who with are important parts of becoming a freelance professional.
During my research and design stages for the film I've been in close contact with Jay, the musician, so he is completely aware of the path the project has taken. I helped convey the mood and genre of music I wanted by showing him the animations that had inspired me and examples of other charity adverts, and together we decided that a minimal melody with small low-level sound effects like birds tweeting and children's voices in the park would be best to allow the speech to have centre-stage. We then worked together by sending rough edits of music and film back and forth with extra ideas and tweaks. By showing him examples early on of the animation coming together and the type of line work, texture, colour schemes and imagery I was using, he got a clear idea of the tone we were after in the music and there were very few alterations needed to make the two match.

The joy of handmade things

For my final degree show and professional portfolio, I wanted a way of representing animations that wasn't on screen and wasn't stills... the solution was to go back to some old school animation practices and make a collection of flipbooks.
I chose sections of my animations which I thought would transfer well into a handheld, teeny tiny format and would display enough action in very few frames. I think action needs to be clearer in flipbooks sometimes because they only last a couple of seconds. From here, I went to Adobe Photoshop and made contact sheets out of the film frames so they were all the same size and aligned. With printing boundaries this needed to be checked though and edges realigned and evened up using a guillotine. Once printed, chopped and layered up in order they just needed binding together. I chose a simple Japanese binding using thread which matched my colour scheme.
For the degree show, I'd like to have a hanging forest of flipbooks for people to play with. My interests this year have been all around how animation can bridge gaps with people ,and the tactile nature of the flipbooks is something that really captures this idea because they require the audience to engage with the work.
My portfolio needed to be a box to keep these little handheld animations safe, but the archival box I bought didn't have a pocket so they were rattling around with my prints (not ideal or v. professional). I created a little pouch for them from cardboard bound in bookcloth, but they still fell out sometimes. To stop this I had to create little elastic, button-bound seatbelts for them so they don't get tossed about during transit.

Thin Blue Line

The only problem I've come across with scanning rather than photographing every frame in a hand-drawn animation is that occasionally there are mysterious digital blue lines that appear in your scans and ruin everything by cropping up uninvited across a vital piece of imagery and distracting your viewer. Not fun. 

I tried keying out the lines - doesn't work when the line is blue, and your colour scheme is blue and pink. Do you sacrifice approximately half your images by keying out a thin blue line? No, of course not. Game over. Try again next time. 

I tried spot healing the scans frame by frame in photoshop which took hours but then created what a friend labelled the effect of 'a trickle of rain going down the screen'. Also not acceptable, in fact I thought this was more distracting than simply having the line in it. There was also a weird effect of the screen moving and changing perspective despite no other changes being made to the film. Back to the start and don't pass go. 

Finally I had a little play around with the values in the basic wire line removal tool in After Effects, which I presume is normally used by puppeteers to remove fishing lines in their films. This worked a trick after a few tweaks. Huzzahh! 

I left some of the softer, more subtle lines in at this stage because I thought they added a bit of texture to the film (maybe I'd grown fond of the little buggers), in the same way some of the little black specks do. Although not to everyone's taste, I like features like these because they remind you it's been made by hand and not in a digital environment. There are digital animators who actively try to emulate these effects to make their work look more 'real'. Scanning also flattens everything down and you tend to lose the paper texture working this way, so it's nice to have a bit of real life texture in the film in these little touches. 

The House that Claire Built - Animatic

One of the ideas that was explored with the Claire House animation was to have a nautical theme. The previous post explains all about this, but below is a very basic recording of the audio with some elements storyboarded out as an animatic. I didn't continue any further with this idea as it was clear it was the wrong direction to be heading in. Nevertheless the experience of creating an basic animatic was quite useful, and I can imagine it is a more useful way of demonstrating ideas/timings to collaborators or clients in the future. 
Sometimes I think a detailed storyboard and a conversation can be enough though as animatics can take precious time away from drawing development when you're working solo. 

Stitch samples

There was a point in this project where I would have loved to stitch into every single frame of my animation and create a sewn film. This is a very VERY time-consuming method though and it wasn't practical or necessary for this particular project. I did some sample line tests to see what effect sewing into my frames would have, and although I do really like it and think the drawings are coherent enough (I was worried the changes in stitch would give it too much of a flicker), the effect wasn't strong enough for me to want to complete the whole film this way. I think for the Claire House theme, coloured pencils, paints and a feeling of hand-drawn rather than machine-sewn was more important and relevant to the childhood theme. For a future project where the stitching has a particular relevance to the theme or story though, this is a really interesting way of working. It does take forever though, not including the original drawing time, these small 1 second clips took approx. 45 mins - 1 hr to complete. Maybe this is personal project that I can take my sweet time over...

Real Person Website

I went and made a real website with a personal domain and everything. www.raeraeanimations.co.uk  Crazy stuff! The real person world beckons...