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...

The House That Claire Built

When I first started to think about practically animating the story of Claire House Children's Hospice I went off on a little tangent and tried to create a metaphor for the whole concept of the charity. I came up with a nautical one after I interviewed a family who uses the services and they had called it a 'lifeline'.

I think at this point I was looking back at 'Sarah's Story' for the NSPCC and how they had used a simple metaphor of the train journey to accompany the narrative. Herein lies the difference, Moth (the animators) were still using the original voiceover from Sarah and created a visual metaphor because the distressing subject matter could not be displayed literally. I got a bit lost and carried away with the idea of metaphor and created a whole script around the idea of Claire House as a nautical lifeline, but really it didn't need tweaking that much, which is why I eventually went back to the original voices and trimmed 45 minutes of dialogue into a 2 minute 30 second soundbite capturing the essence of the conversation instead. A much more authentic and direct way of telling the CH story.

Before I went back to original idea of using the family's voices though, I managed to get pretty far along with a script, a storyboard and a partly-completed basic animatic (below). Sometimes you need to abandon an idea to make room for the better one though, not matter how invested you might have been. I think part of me was just scared of getting into the real audio without a 'theme' to fall back on.

Brine-soaked cheeks belong at sea,

Not at The House That Claire built

The House that Claire Built is not like other houses…

It is a special house.

A house set away from everyday life,

Full of extraordinary, wonderful people.

It was made out of hope,

 And painted with joy,

And although days here are a changeable as the tides,

The Claire House compass always helps us to find fun.

Here we learn together how to navigate rough waters and high winds,

For we know well, that calm seas never made a strong sailor;

Claire House is our lifeline,

Our steady anchor when The Great Storm Cat comes prowling

And tries to cast us adrift.

When our tiny vessels struggle in the waves,

And it feels like we are all but lost,

It is The House that Claire built

Which lights our way.

Together we play.

We cast our nets,

We take in the view,

And we treasure every joy-soaked moment

 The Claire House Crew provides.

Together we sing.

We marvel at colours

and light,

and sound,

and touch.

For we know the importance of play,

And the joy that such things can bring.

But most importantly,

We know that we are safe here,

Because our harbour is full of friendships.

And in fact,

Together we are a fleet,

a family.

Notes:

·         Ships can have the Claire house logo as their colours/flags.

·         Possibly an actual Claire House ship? Like a floating house in the colours?

·         Claire house crew and lighthouse in candy-striped patterns.

·         Everything in tones of pink and blue, crayon, watercolour/gouache and coloured pencil. Delicate black line work.

·         Moment relating to sensory stimuli, underwater patterns of light through waves, passing fish, sensory movement of seaweed…

·         Moment relating to singing, scene change from crew singing camera sinks down to see family of whales singing to each other.

·         Cast our nets, collect fish with words about Claire house on them.

·         ‘Tiny vessels’ metaphor for children, but have an exaggerated long-shot of a tiny fleet of sailing boats as seen from above.

The School of Life

New and exciting addition to the Animations for Education list I'm compiling; The School of Life. This youtube channel plays host to a variety of mini lectures dedicated to exploring emotional intelligence and education, accompanied by animations in a range of styles. This morning I watched 'Overcoming Childhood', which had some charming, playful animation going on in it.

I love the use of texture in this animation combined with very simple line animated characters who would not look out of place in a children's book (they remind me a bit of Oliver Jeffers actually). The whole film has a very whimsical quality to help ease the heaviness of the topic. There's a really nice interplay with black, grey and white line work with the light, scratchy and inky textures. The static backgrounds work really well I think because there is so much tactile quality to them; if they moved or had shake it would be too much and probably distracting.

I also think the zooms and transitions into negative colour work really well to highlight the change into internal thought vs external factors. This is where the use of black, grey and white lines works best because it helps to keep  line tonality in both the regular and negative imagery. Very cleverly designed in terms of combining visual consistency and storytelling.

I've tried similar uses of minimal characters/ backgrounds in favour of representing a vibe or feeling that mirrors the dialogue, because I think you need less when there's a clear story being told and can afford to be a bit more abstract or focused on the mood of the piece.

'Private Parts'

It's Nice That recently posted an article about Anna Ginsburg's latest project in association with Channel 4's Random Acts all about sex and that oh so British tendency to not talk about anything remotely related to the bedroom that's not sleep. With a team of 14 other animators and 22 interviewees, Anna created a witty, whimsical approach to talking about peens and vjayjays, and I think it's the animated comfort zone she's created that allows this discourse to happen without it being 'unseemly'.
It's pretty reminiscent of the old school Aardman Creature Comforts classics in tone, using real interviews to give authenticity to the variety of views represented. I also think it's lovely that this is a collaborative effort, but that the film holds together cohesively despite a range of animators being involved and bringing their own style to the audio.
All in all, just a lovely example of traditional animation being used to create conversation in a public platform by Channel 4. Well worth a watch and a read of the article! http://www.itsnicethat.com/features/anna-ginsberg-private-parts-channel-4-random-acts-170516

All The Way

Final week of the degree that has gone by too quickly, of the degree that I would gladly start all over again, and I'm getting my last push of inspiration and motivation from Charles Bukowski before I go diving into the world and try to support myself by artistic means sans student loans. 
(Now considering how lovely it would be to animate every Bukowski poem ever...)

This man knows what he's on about, "If you're going to try, go all the way."