This month's title for LoopdeLoop is Sisters, and I'm really excited about it. I grew up with four sisters and I have always wanted to create an animation based on my experiences with them but I've never got around to it. Now I might actually have the chance.
I feel this brief is going to be more beneficial to me than the RedBubble project, as I am going to be able to practice my animating skills which I am more interested in doing than creating still 2D images in photoshop. I also have a greater interest in this topic than I do with plants, and I have a lot of first hand experiences that will help me with production.
Unpicking the Brief
I picked out from the brief what I thought was relevant/important and conducted further research based on these points. My first port of call was to find out more about The WANDAA project.
This month's brief
(Laurie Holden is an Actress and Human's Rights Activist)
It turns out the Loop brief summed up what the WANDAA project is very well and I didn't manage to find out much more about them, other than that it's an independent project that is currently a voluntary labour of love, trying to raise the profile of female animators, producers and other female roles in the animation field.
The WANDAA Project's Website
WANDAA's Social Media
I even looked up whether they had any social media or if they had posted anything that could influence my pre-production for the better. They do have a number of different accounts but I didn't find anything that could be of use for my designing. I think the best thing to do here would be to simply create strong female characters within an interesting narrative.
For my third and final brief I was hoping to be able to produce a bunch of designs for RedBubble. The thought came around when I was doodling different plants, and I decided to add colour in photoshop and had the idea to make a series of drawings in the same style that gave different rules for taking care of plants. I actually ended up putting them on RedBubble, firstly for my own portfolio but secondly because I thought they had a 'cute pastel' aesthetic that I know can be quite popular on RedBubble.
My Designs (Nature Commandments)
Having discussed my plans with Mike, he suggested that it could be a good idea. In order for this brief to be substantial I would have to research the current market for RedBubble and try to contact people that would be interested in my products. I think this would be possible, and with the right advertising I think these could be quite popular but I'm no longer going to being doing this for my final brief. It was brought to my attention that I would be able to do a second LoopdeLoop for a substantial brief, and this month's title appeals to me greatly. Because of this I am going to be creating a second Loop.
Having said this, I'm not going to completely forget about these designs. I plan to return to them in the summer and finish off the designs I have planned out for the rest of the collection. I'm also planning on handling it like a responsive brief and I shall make an attempt to show the work to different plant enthusiasts to try to make some sales but mainly to get my work out there. I think I prefer doing this this way, as I find making designs for RedBubble something to be quite relaxing and is usually something I do in my spare time and for my own amusement and I would like to keep it this way, but this time around I am going to consider trying to get my designs seen rather than them just being in my portfolio.
The day has finally arrived. We're finished with our animation.
Final Version
Emma experimented with adjusting the shadow beneath her character's feet to make it no longer look like her character was floating, but we weren't happy with the results. Instead of spending hours on trying to edit this in post we simply decided to re-render the scene and slot it into the composition. This worked a charm, and it seems that Emma had simply forgot to save the adjustment that made the character stand firmly on the ground and that is why when she rendered it a second time it was hovering. It's great that we had managed our time well enough so that we were able to rectify this mistake, as the inconsistency would have really bothered me.
Overall I think this project has been a success. I've encountered a few problems along the way but now I feel I have the knowledge to be able to avoid them in the future, and I definitely think there will be Maya in my future as I have very much enjoyed working with it. I'm also happy that I have now experienced what it is like working in a team. As it stands I think I prefer working on my own, but I am definitely going to continue working collaboratively to benefit my working practice, and to work with different people and different amounts to see whether my view on team work changes.
Emma has finally got all of her scenes rendered and she has done a great job at adding in her character's pupils in after effects. She gave me her USB containing all of her exported videos and from there I was able to put all of our scenes together in order. The final length comes to around 1 minute and 5 seconds, because we claimed seconds at the beginning of our animation as titles, but rather than add in text in post for our title scene, we just assigned more focus to the cover of the book to act as our title scene. We have still both animated and rendered 30 seconds of animation so we're fine in that aspect.
From here we were able to revisit our sound.
Added Sound
In order to do the sound, I imported the new movie file and lined it up with my existing project/sounds from my testing. I then extended the first sound clip to the beginning of the composition, and the second clip to the end of the composition...
Editing the Sound
… but I found that I was still left with the little gap in-between the two different sections of the song. I didn't want to simply extend the 'montage sound clip' (top audio clips) to the beginning, because I liked how the other sound clip lined up with the walk and fall in the previous scene. To try and get the two sound clips to blend together, I extended them to make them overlap, and then made one fade into the other. When I played it back it seemed to work quite well but because I had been listening to the clips over and over again I could hear when the clips changed and to me it stood out like a sore thumb. I beckoned Emma over to have a look without explaining what I thought the issue was, and once she had finished watching I explained the dilemma and she said that she didn't even notice anything.
We discussed how the sound fit with the animation and we were really happy with it, the only thing Emma suggested to do was to make the sound at the end gradually fade out as it suddenly cuts to silence. I added in the fade out and you can still hear that it cuts to silence but it isn't as abrupt because it slowly gets there.
I asked Emma if she was happy with the sound or if she wanted to experiment with different clips, but we both agreed that we really liked how well this song complimented the animation. We both feel that it is light-hearted with moments that are more upbeat and intense (for the montage scene) without being overly dramatic. I like that the song is also quite repetitive which reflects the repetitive nature of trying to teach your child to walk.
We also discussed whether we wanted to experiment with further sound effects, but we no longer saw any need. The music works really well as it is and somewhat almost provides the sound effects of the child falling due to how well the montage scene lines up. We thought that any further sounds would either detract from this synergy, or they would simply get lost in the soundtrack.
A couple of fellow classmates asked if they could watch our animation once they heard that we had been able to put it all together and add sound, and all that watched said that they really like how fitting the music was and not one person picked up on where the different clips taken from different times in the song blend into one, which is a great. We also asked these students whether they would bother with further sound effects (such as the parent sighing like we had originally planned) but they had the same idea as us in that we didn't need them.
The only thing that is left to do now is final housekeeping. For some reason - even though she has rendered the scene out a second time - Emma's character still looks like it is hovering. She is going to have a look what she can do about this in after effects using 3D layers, considering I took over sound. If when she is done the final product looks worse than the hovering character, or for some reason we don't like the 'correction', then we are simply just going to deem this version to be our final version, and just make sure that in the future we leave enough time to re-render scenes if we encounter problems like this one. It's not a massive issue and it doesn't detract from the animated movements, but it would have been nice for the shadow to be as uniform as the other shadows in the scene.
We're almost there for putting all of our scenes together, all Emma has to do is draw in her character's pupils on after effects as she wasn't able to do this in Maya using a ramp shader, as she had modelled her eyes the wrong way around and also she was having trouble unwrapping the eyes in a UV map (which would have been a much easier solution than adding them in in post, if we could have got this working). Whilst she was doing this I thought I'd get a head start at looking at sound design.
I had found a selection of royality free sound clips way back at the start of the project, so I openned the ones that we had decided might be suitable in Premiere along side my 30 seconds of animation, just to get a feel for what it would look like as a whole animation.
Sound Test One
One of the sounds clips I tested was called Monkeys Spinning Monkeys, and I really liked how these sections of the audio lined up with the falls, especially during the beginning of the montage. The timing works well with the scene and the music is lighthearted and bubbly, which reflects the atmosphere of the story. The only problem I have is trying to fill the gaps in the audio were I have trimmed it to make it fit the video. I'm not sure how well I'm going to be able to mend this, but I can't find out for certain until I have all mine and Emma's clips in order in one project file. I shall have a look once she is finished.
(The video settings of this export are slightly out, causing the fuzzy lines. I shall have to change these when it comes to the final version, but for now it shall do).
On Monday night I was able to attend the loopdeloop screening that was being held in Leeds, hosted by one of LCA's third year students. It was really exciting to be able to attend, as it made me feel hopeful for the future of animation in Leeds, and I shall definitely be showing my support again by attending any screenings that are going to be held in the future.
It was also nice to see my work being screened in an environment that wasn't college, to an audience that all had one thing in common. Animation. It was a shame that the turn out wasn't bigger as it would have been nice to get the chance to talk to other animators or people that could have potentially been interested in my work, but it was only the first time the screening had been held in Leeds and it didn't get masses of advertising. Having said this, an audience is an audience, and it was nice to sit down and watch all the entries properly as I had missed out many when I was scrolling through the website.
At the end of the night we voted for which loop we liked the best out of al of the submissions, and then we had a winner for Leeds entries. We voted the overall winner to be Logan Niblock's entry and David Wevill was awarded as Leed's Loop winner. I wasn't disheartened by the fact that I didn't win, not even remotely shocked considering it was my first ever loop and I was up against some experienced loopers. Hey, I was happy enough that I had a couple of votes for the best Leeds' Loop. It has made me determined to continue to enter the contests and continue to practice animating in this way, hopefully in contests that have a better title that I can relate to a bit better.
