Post Production

When I was animating and watching the playblasts of the animation, I felt the timings where good, the actions and movements where not slow or fast...they seemed just about right. Until I started speeding them up in Premiere...

I started editing my movie, and I started this without finishing the animation first, but rather did it along animating, because sometimes whenever I was stuck with something in the animation, I realized that it was better to stop doing it, and start thinking about it instead. So I used the time to focus on something else, and I started playing with speed. 

I found out that if I added a 30% increase in my actions they looked much more intense and believable. This was when I realized that I was animating too slow. Things lacked power and determination, so towards the beginning of scene 3, I was animating everything much faster. And the last shots required a lot less increase in speed. This is probably a very bad way to change the speed, but considering time consumed if I went to 3DS Max and started removing key frames and adjusting this and that, versus the time it took to cut frames out or separate them from the shots to increase the speed of the clip just in some parts, the later was more efficient. 

With this I am not saying that any of these options is just the same. However, considering we have to manage the time we have to complete the project, I think finding faster solutions that produce almost the same effect is learning, and being efficient.

And I edited and edited, and edited so much that my last shot as an example, which was a whole at first, was split in seven different pieces, with different speeds.

In the end, adding speed brought a lot to the action, gave it much more power and more accurately delivered my emotions and reactions.

After this I reduced a bit of the exposure and edited the shadow intensity in of the movie in After Effects and started adding sounds.

At first I had the silly idea of choosing a music that would fit the movie style, and then edit it to follow the action, but this soon proved to be the worst way to give sound to the movie. I think that if you choose a music in a stage previous to the animation stage, let´s say, storyboard, and you plan your shots and animation with the music in mind, is much much easier to just use one music and have the movie follow the beat. But of course, we are doing this to learn and I learned the hard way. 

So, with the help and following the advice of my friend Rui, who is a sound technician, we added some sound effects and some music or background noise here and there. And it turned out to be the more efficient way of having music supporting the action.

I will post the final movie soon, stay tuned! :)

Scene 03 - Le Bank

Finally Flint reaches the performance main stage. Inside the bank is where the story unfolds.

As this scene involved having more characters in some shots, I had to find a way of not having them visible unless necessary to support the action, and at the same time I needed to make the audience aware that there is a undetermined but fair amount of people inside this Bank. And of vital importance, so that I would not have to animate 5 or 6 different characters.

I went ahead and followed Deryck´s advice, and only showed the other characters when necessary. Most of the time my camera just shows Flint reacting to what happens to him along the time he spends in the bank. More on this later.

Entering the Bank was an important moment. In the story board stage, the plan was to have Flint walking towards the ticket machine, that would be out of order, while not revealing the inside of the Bank until Flin realizes that he can´t take a ticket and notices the queues that are a consequence of the machine being broken, and are the main conflict of the whole scene. Initially, this would be shot with a camera slightly behind my character but showing his face so that the audience could see the reaction to the above obstacles.

However, when I placed the cameras in the scene, and started looking for the right angle, I discovered that this scene would work better if it would be a medium shot, from his front. This allowed me to animate the scene in a different way. I was able to make him enter the bank, take a slight look at the inside, but not realizing immediately that there was a lot of people inside the bank. He takes a couple of seconds to realize this, and the fact that the ticket machine is out of order creates the necessary suspense and drama to present the main obstacle of the story.

The next screenshots show the four main points of this shot: 

1 - Slight glance towards the inside, not realizing the queues;

2 - Moment when Flint goes to take a ticket, understands it´s not possible, and thinks about what he had just seen moments before, but did not mind with it;

3 - Moment where he shows he is aware of what is happening, but still can not believe it, but wants to peak at it in a pondering way, like saying "what the hell did I just see?";

4 - Revealing moment. Flint is now aware of what the problem is and will be, and shows it to everyone;

And then comes the revelation of the main obstacle, the queues. The camera changes from a medium shot, to a long shot revealing the whole scenario, by zooming out. I believe this zoom out enhances in the best way the drama of the moment, and it explains very well what the problem is to the audience.

This shot starts a sequence of actions that oppose Flint to a series of obstacles that he needs to find a way of dealing with. First Flint chooses a line after having reacted to the "damn" machine being broken. Then, while in the queue waiting, more people arrive. This action is revealed mostly by Flint´s reaction to the arrival.

 Just then, a new line opens, and Flint notices it. Here I tried to take the audience with me, and show what Flint was seeing, so that I could prepare them for the next shot.

With the action in this shot, the objective is to search for empathy between my audience and my character, by trying to recreate a possible familiar situation that maybe everyone has experienced in some way or another. Flint get´s happy to see that a new line is opening, and that things are going to speed up, and maybe allow him to reach his objective earlier than expected, and he turns to say something to the people that previously were behind him in line, and had arrived later.

He then is presented by an action that can be considered morally incorrect: the fact that people don´t consider the "not written anywhere" rule of respecting the people who have a right to be attended first, since they arrived first. I mean, I have commented on this with several people, and from the small sample, everyone could relate to this feeling because of different reasons, but the important is that they empathized with it.

He then realizes this lack of courtesy (as it is more a courtesy rather then disrespect, moral courtesy), and since it´s the first time that happens, he deals with it and tolerates that it happens, although being slightly frustrated about it.

Then this situation repeats it self. More people arrive, Flint notices it, and a new line opens. However this time Flint has a different reaction. As he is in a hurry, he makes a go for it, and while doing he glances back, just to see that he had been played again. I find that having it happen twice and have Flint react differently to it is funny, but also emphasizes the fact that he is changing according to what is happening to him, and rapidly changing Flint´s emotional state from relaxed to more stressed and aware.

And with the above action comes Flin´t reaction. He expresses a very clear "what the hell" and thinks about it. This is also the moment to make time go by and potentially bring out another feeling necessary in the audience to allow for even more empathy: boredom while waiting in a line that is taking forever, and twice longer if you are in a hurry!

So here I used to shots, one where Flint is trying to see if the line is gonna move soon and another with him just standing, clapping his foot on the ground impatiently. 

And then comes another shift in the action: time went by, Flint is next in line, and just when he is about to say something, the bank employee just closes the line to go for lunch. Here objective was to agitate the action, making Flint react instantly, searching for the shortest line, and there existing none, just quickly moving to one, and swapping lines to whatever one is shorter without the blink of an eye, bringing out a obvious change in behavior, from calm to aggressive.

This was also nice to animate. Challenging, because I wanted to do these movement changes really fast, and when landing having this sort of flexible recoil in Flint as if he was a bit elastic. 

The previous scene also leads the audience to the last but not least conflict and problem in the movie: when both of the only two open lines close, one after another. And after the last one closes, I brought the rhythm to a slower pace, almost like a pause, a dramatic pause, to build anticipation for the comic finale.

In the last 4 shots of the movie, Flint slowly realizes that first, there are no more open lines, second it´s 12 o´clock, so he is out of time, and third he sees the bank workers are just standing and talking there by his side, and he was the last customer there. I believe this is probably the most empathic moment, because we all in different situations on our lives have been screwed like that. 

The last shot is then the ending. I have read that it is hard to end a movie with a punch line comic moment. However, I tried to not reveal or at least not make it predictable at all. Until now I am still not sure if mine worked at all... Anyway, he bursts into anger and waves maniacally towards the bank workers, blind with anger and doesn´t even realize that he is reaching the door and BAM!, the irony.

I thought about several endings, and to be honest I could not see one that would make any more sense than the one I used. Or in this case, not make sense at all and be funny, because it was unpredictable.

Now the real questions here are: have I managed to have the audience with me all the time? Did I bored them? Was my story clear and understandable enough? Has the audience felt empathy with my character?

Asking my self these questions, I don´t have a clear answer to it...

Scene 02 - The Run

Second scene on the movie is a run from Flint´s office to the bank. I wanted to experiment creating a run that would fit most, if not all of my character´s properties. In my movie it´s mainly his visual aspect, however I tried to make it reflect a bit of my character´s personality.

With this in mind, I had to decide the tempo of the run. It had to be fast, silly and it had to bend the laws of physics while at the same time still remain believable. I went for a 6 frames per step run. It´s fast, almost unbelievably fast. Following the line of thought, I then made the distance between each contact position big enough so that it would seem that Flint actually gives a little jump. This distance seemed to big at some points, as illustrated bellow, but it looked good because of the small amount of frames.

One curious thing that happened by chance when deciding the distance he would travel, was that I found a interesting arm and hand position. At first, I planned to do the run with both arms staying behind the character at all times, and only have a small swing when following the opposite leg. But then when I was creating the first and last frame of one step, I had posed the character´s hands and arms randomly behind him, and in a awkwardly high position on the first frame, and when I moved to the last frame, I noticed that in the middle position (frame 3) my character would have both his hands parallel and exactly in the same position.

This just looked so good to me that I decided to only have his lower arms doing the swing, while maintaining the upper arms variation to a bare minimum, thus having the arms and hands behind my character all the time, like I wanted.

I also planned the scenario to have some direction variations, so that I could film it from different distances and perspectives to make the run fun and varied and capture the comic aspect of it. Initially the plan was to make the run along this path and film it all:

However, animating the run was very time consuming, the scenario was big and I would not have time to animate him running the whole distance, so I decided to cut some corners and use my cameras to simulate the feeling of this run being long (enough), and change directions.

So I had 4 cameras, however right now only the first 3 matter.

 One at the door where Flint leaves his office to start the run, and this camera would follow and catch my character doing a direction change by turning a corner. And it would film my character from the side and in the end, a few steps from his back.

Second one perpendicular to the first one and filming Flint after cutting the corner. I used frames from the first run to save time, and I increased the camera distance, but maintained the side view. It captured my character crossing the screen and disappearing. And after leaving the screen he jumps from position one to position two in the screen shot bellow and there starts shot 3 in camera 3.

I then used a Third camera that would be in front of my character and would follow him until he reached the Bank building. The shot starts right after a turn in the sidewalk in my scenario. I was afraid that this wouldn´t look good, and maybe would throw away the audience because it would not make sense in the image sequence, but it turns out that it´s barely noticeable due to the different camera angles and positions throughout the 3 shots. This saved time, work, and still gave the feeling I wanted to transmit.

In shot 3 Flint reaches his maximum speed, and then comes to a slow stop. Looking back at this shot, and remembering what Richard Williams wrote, the camera angle was not the best one. First it´s much, much harder to animate a run viewed from the front and second I think that it does not transmit the feeling of slowing down with the body in the same way as if it was being shot on a more side view. I believe this happens because you can visualize much better the spine movements and the weight shifting involved in the movement of the character trying to slow down his speed. So this is a lesson to next time.

On shot 4, at the bank entrance, Flint is already walking, and I tried to reproduce the feeling of being tired, and feeling the weight of his body on him after such an intense run. Looking at it now, it worked nice, however the shot could use a few more steps, and a bit faster tempo, so that he could drag his feet a sufficient amount of time for this feeling to be convincing.

In retrospective, I feel happy how this scene looks, although now I would animate and shoot it differently.

Scene 01 - The Office

Good day!

As the title says, this post is about the first scene of my movie. When I had made my first draft of the story plot, I had conceived that the movie would start with Flint doing a run towards the Bank, Starting so in the middle of the action already. This was bugging me for a very long time, as I was not sure whether or not the starting scene was explicative enough about why and what was Flint doing running out in the middle of the street towards a bank.

 During the time I spent modeling, rigging etc, I came up with a better entry scene, that would strengthen, explain and even add to the motive why does Flint need to go to the Bank. So my idea was that my character would start inside his office, just like any other day at work, he would be tiding up his desk putting some files away, when he realizes that there is a file that needs to be delivered during that day, and not and not that much time after he notices such file.

Why is this better? Because, simply, it starts my action with a clear, demonstrated inciting incident. And as a plus it adds up to the drama and brings out the urgency of delivering the file in time. This scene also allowed me to insert a comic run from his office towards the bank, that completes the idea or urgency and makes the action rampage towards the last scene.

So before I go deeper into anything else, the following image illustrates the scenario of the scene, as well as the "cartoonish" style of the movie.

Animating the first scene had four crucial points: The first one is pictured in the image above. It´s the moment when he notices the paper on the file, and I tried to animate it to provide the feeling of movement to reach closer and read properly, and also make his thoughts come out through expression, by behaving as if he couldn´t believe his eyes. In this movement, the Key poses are:

-  when his head goes all the way back, his upper body leans with it and his facial expression is simple. His flow lines all point to the head.

-   when his head is down close to the paper, after having performed a curved movement leaning to the right first, and then reaching the paper. His upper body follows. His flow lines direct to the paper.

The second one is the moment he reaches for his suitcase. This is the point where a fast action that starts on from this moment and only stops when he reaches the Bank building, on scene 02. My idea when animating, was that he would act swiftly in reaction to the inciting incident, and would show and transmit urgency by picking up his suitcase from the floor and slam it hard enough in the table, quickly open it, toss the file inside, close it and stand up. 

Everything was looking good except for the arm swing. It was not energetic enough and the movement was boring. This was happening because I was leading the movement with the wrist. I decided to try and lead the movement with the elbow instead, both up and down.

It worked so much better. Specially because it was a fast action, less than a second. As these are not the extreme keys of the movement they don´t illustrate the body lines so accurately, but the way I drew them is close to how they move on the film.

At first, both the head and body movement on the first moment, and the body and arm swing on the second movement, were looking monotonous and flat, just moving around. The movement arcs were nice, but they were going from A to B. I decided that it was needing to go somewhere after leaving A and getting to B points. So I added middle key positions that would break the movement and give it a more natural feeling. To finalize these changes, I also added in-betweens to slow down the movement at the start of the actions and at the points where movement was changing directions. It worked wonders. I am very satisfied with how it turned out.

The last two key moments where the standing up and the opening the door. 

When he is standing up, I used the same technique as is the head movement I mentioned before. Before the character did the movement to stand up, he first bended closer to the table and then he moved in the opposite direction. This gave more strength to the movement and made it flow very naturally.

He then reaches for the door and this was such a fast action I had a hard time to figure out where to set keys to correctly move the character. I used the same technique, he first slightly leaned to the door and then moved back so that the door could open. It´s possible to observe it in the preview coming in the next few lines.

I think my character is being able to transmit the feelings I want him to transmit, and all these details I added to strengthen the movements and emphasize feelings really add up to the animation. God bless the "animator´s survival kit"!

 Here´s a playblast of the first scene:

After a long silence, some news!

Good day!

It has been a very long time since I have updated my blog, for several reasons that didn´t allow me to, so it definitely is time for an update regarding my movie.

I finished the character, Flint. He had another name, but I just fancied this one a bit more. I am not very good modelling characters and building this one ground up, I learned a lot of things that I will have to have better consideration for in the future. Things like the topology in twisting parts of the body, joints that need to be better thought about, so that in the skinning process, achieving good deformations becomes much more simple.

It was a great challenge to find a suitable way to rig my character according to the control that i desired to have on him. I started by trying out 3DS Max biped, however the fact that the bones are the controllers for them selves made me look for something else. 

It was a great challenge to find a suitable way to rig my character according to the control that i desired to have on him. I started by trying out 3DS Max biped, however the fact that the bones are the controllers for them selves made me look for something else. 

I then decided to try the CAT rig system inside Max. It was all working well, apart from a "few" annoying bugs like changing the position of the hand control and suddenly having the leg snap to an awkward position, completely undesired. It was bearable, but counter productive. What really made me decide not to use was when i decided to use the arm, and forearm twist on the rig, so i could have more control over the deformations. The rig would just behave in weird ways, and would make Max crash several times, and then it became clear that I needed to build my own custom rig. 

With this in mind, I searched, gathered and studied information from the internets, and was able to produce a very good rig in my opinion, that offers a lot of control over the character. Things like having a foot roll done with controls instead of commands. Or even having a spine with squash and stretch, that brings something extra if the character is cartoon like, twist bones to help deformations, ik fk blending... I lost time doing it but it was well worth the effort. And as a plus I learned a lot in an area that I was not very comfortable in.

If I had more time I would have remodeled the character, and used bones to rig the face as well. Morph targets are ok and cut it for this one, but I would have preferred the control one gets with rigging the face.

I will soon post about the scenarios and props.

Cheers.

Storyboard, Character Art and 2D Animatic

Storyboard and Animatic

Greetings!

After having spent last week finishing my storyboard, which is currently hanging in my living room wall as you can see from the above picture, it was now time to start understanding how are my ideas working when it comes to pace, film duration and story telling.

Regarding story telling, I have chosen to build my movie in a three act structure. The first act, is where I am introducing my character, the environment surrounding him, while also giving a hint for what time of the day it is. Now this is done by starting my story with an establishing extreme long shot that reveals The Bank, and it´s where the story action will take place. This first shot is also revealing some of the story environment.

The following seven shots, is where I intend to introduce my character, where I indicate the time of the day that the story is taking place and where I present the incident that leads to the conflict on my story.

From the 8th shot, the second act starts, and with it a series of events that will lead to the climax on shot 29. My character will be presented with the lack of respect from other people towards him, and this will make him change his polite way of facing problems.

Last act is just the story resolution. He is really angry and gets so blind with anger that he crashes into the exit door.

I also decided to produce an Animatic, from which I discovered that my story duration is currently between the 1:30 minutes minimum and 2:00 minutes maximum. It depends if there is need to add one more shot, depending on how I feel that the story is unfolding and also if i need to adjust the pacing of the story, which I think I do. This is merely optional and my story does not require more shots to work, but if I have the time, I believe that adding it might add to the action.

I am not a very good drawer, so my notion of perspective is very off sometimes. I did not manage to do a very detailed Storyboard, neither do my drawings represent the exact camera positions that I have in mind, but I think it is clear enough so that I can determine the essential details, regarding pace, number of shots, and action flow at this point. So here it goes my Animatic:

Character Art

My story involves a few characters, and it might be a challenge to have that many, but I will not have the need to spend too much time animating them because their objective is to be of second importance to the action and to transmit a feeling of monotony and automation to the audience, so that the main focus is on my character at most points of the story. This is essential to my idea. 

Having this in mind, I decided that I will use the same model as of my main character for those secondary characters. The main difference between them is, to start with, the hair. My main character will have hair, while the others wont. This is a subtle difference, not hard to model or to insert into the character rig once its done. 

One other difference is that the characters that are behind the counters will be wearing dark suits, and maybe some different hair. One thing they will definitely have is glasses. I think it looks really good for those "working" characters, and also gives a subtle but noticeable feeling of difference.

The secondary characters that represent the people also waiting in the queues will be wearing gray suits, lighter than the ones the characters behind the counters will wear.

My main character will have bright, warm and happy colors. This is done to support the monotony of the secondary characters, and to emphasize the heavy environment that my character will find once he enters the bank. I have done some paintings of the three different types of characters there will be in the story, that you can find bellow. 

Respectively, you find the main character first, the people that are standing in queues second and the people that work in the bank third:

It is now time to continue with the character modeling and rigging, so that I can effectively test my story with correct camera angles, and with the props in place on my 3D Animatic.

Write you soon.

First Weeks of Development

Good day!

These past few weeks I have been working on the development of my movie. I started off by re-writing my story "Queues", which I chose as my short movie.

After re-writing it, I decided to pitch it to a couple of friends, just to see if there was any major flaws in the story plot, as well as to test how would people understand it. Everyone I pitched it to understood the story and found it funny, but there was a major issue that I kept being asked about: "if your character goes to the tax office why doesn´t he take a number and stands in line like it happens in real life?".

To be honest, when I wrote the story, I didn´t feel like I had to explain why he doesn´t take a number and wait, however after all the comments about it, I felt I probably should find a way of explaining the reason for that. And it had to be a very short explanation time-wise.

With that in mind, I kept thinking how to solve this, and came up with this idea: What if my character, when he goes inside the tax office building, goes for the ticket and sees a notice about the ticket machine being broken, and indicating that he has to wait in line? This simple change made me also have a very good conflict introduction in my story. The best part is that, according to my calculations, this shot takes around 7 to 10 seconds.

I will explain why. After having the previous idea, I also figured out that by adding a simple scene, in which my character enters the building, goes for the ticket machine, sees the sign (all of this without the camera revealing what is happening inside the building towards the counter), and then he just glances to his left, turns back to the ticket machine, and then by glancing quickly again towards the counter, with a very scared and worried expression, the camera pans out and reveals the enormous queues that will lead to the story of the movie. This brings a very strong and interesting conflict discovery to my story.

At the same time I have been working in my main character, and the Art direction of my movie. I want him to look a bit goofy, yet serious enough so that he doesn´t seem like the kind of person that gets angry. This will allow me to better establish and strengthen the message of the movie, even the calmest person can get very angry when not respected by other people.

At this point I made a few sketches, and designed the looks for my character. The rest of the story elements will be in the same style as the following colored picture of my character.

 

I have also done some sketches and I am almost completing my storyboard which I will post soon.

Cheers!

Production Planing

Good day!

And the most exciting part of my school year has arrived. I am to begin producing my animation short film! Alone! And to be able to do so, one last task had to be done: I am to take on the hat of the Production Manager, and be able to schedule and organize the production flowchart and time-estimate for Liron Topaz great movie "This Side Up":

After reading Liron´s Blog, I was able to determine that he had 36 weeks (more or less) to produce this movie on his own. With this in mind, I produced a Flow Chart that in my opinion shows the correct steps to take and in the correct order for a one man production to be able to run smoothly, organized and have good chances of being completed.

So here it is, my Flowchart for the movie:

Open publication - Free publishing - More film

Now comes the most important part of the preparation for the production of an animated movie, the production schedule. Liron´s movie has a duration of 2.5 minutes (150 seconds), so for him to be comfortable and have a realistic objective regarding the amount of seconds he needed to animate per day, he had to dedicate most of his production time to animation.

I estimate he needed around 16 weeks for animation only. Considering a working week (5 days), he had 80 for animation. His production takes 150 seconds total, which allows for 1.87 seconds of animation per day. This is already a bit, but he is a talented animator, so in my opinion this is a very acceptable estimate.

The time-estimate for the movie:

Open publication - Free publishing - More movie

 Comparing my calculations with the only student that I could compare them with (http://katitzisblogg.blogspot.com/2011/02/project-11-production-planning.html), I can see that the flow chart is very similar in its task completion order. Even though I think the flow chart is just a tool to show how the production and its different activities are organized into different stages, it is very important to separate the different tasks into different stages, so that one has an objective. It keeps things organized and easy to maintain a linear workflow.

Now my time estimate is very different from my fellow student. I considered more time, since Liron actually had more time, and this allowed me to probably be more accurate in calculating the necessary time for the whole production stages to take place in a feasible time and order. 

Regarding my Time Estimate, I allocated 16 weeks for animation. I believe, and this will probably also be reflected when I plan my movie, that having good time for animation is essential. Animation is all that it is about at this point. How good my animation will be is determined by how much time I will have to do it, and to be honest the more the better. I also allocated 3 weeks for rendering because the quality of Liron´s movie is quite good, and there is always unexpected events when it comes to rendering, so its good to have a decent amount of time to do it. 

There are tasks in my Time Estimate that overlap, such as the Character and Environment and Assets design, as well as composing and rendering, since one will be rendering shots. I believe they can overlap since they are related and can be done simultaneously. 

In any case I might be very wrong regarding my Flowchart and Time Estimate, even though I believe it realistic. I also scheduled everything and tried to have good time for every stage of the movie, because it is also important to consider unexpected events, and if one plans everything with good time, it is easier to change plans and adjust if there is need for changes.

That´s it for today. Write´ya soon!