OUAN405 - Process & Production: Men in Black Ending (Research)

OUAN405:

After creating the elaborate, time-consuming and wacky idea of a black God creating our Solar System out of Revels, a family member brought up that it sounded exactly like the ending of the first MIB film where the aliens have a bag of marbles and Earth happens to be one of them. I looked into this to see how it was filmed and watched the ending for possible ideas as they approached a very similar topic...

It was very interesting how you do not expect that Earth is in fact a tiny marble in comparison to the giant aliens. I like how the narrative has almost "run backwards" as I would imagine it to zoom into a marble, then show the galaxy, then Earth and continuously zoom in. Instead it zooms out to show the grand finale and conclusion. I, however do not have as much time as that to create something as unexpected as this in 20 seconds, but it was nice to think about in terms of shots, angles and so forth.

OUAN405 - Process & Production: The Classical Elements Ideas

Soon after the brief had been released, I had already jotted and sketched out plenty of pages worth of ideas. We had the choice of using one of the four classical elements for our animations; Earth, Fire, Water and Air. I managed to get a good range of ideas, and eventually settled on Earth. Below are my pre-production sketches. Some of them baffle me completely as I cannot remember even thinking about them and find them bizarre when I look back on them, but nevertheless, it helped me settle on a final idea in the end...

OUAN405 - Process & Production: Narration Audio (Research)

Along with my background audio which I mentioned in my previous blog post, I contemplated having some form of narration to help the animation feel more relaxed and give a feeling of "story time". I was hoping for some form of Morgan Freeman's voice (which is impossible as I can hardly get in touch with him and ask him for some voice acting!) as I think he has the most beautiful and soothing voice that would work perfectly with my animation if not anything!

I looked into using the "text to speech" feature that most Windows laptops have as this would give a robotic sounding voice and would also make the animation feel a little uncomfortable to watch which would pair well with the style of character. However, after much thought I felt that this was not the best option and I decided to turn to the web for more answers.

I found a brilliant website that is free to use and download created speech off (so long as you don't gain from using the clips commercially) called "Yakitome!" - I imagine this means "Yak it to me" as in "talk to me" which is quite clever! http://www.yakitome.com/tts/text_to_speech# It was there I found a fantastic little text to speech converter that allows you download voices and change the speed of the voice and so forth. This is good research for me as I am able to find a way of acquiring a high-quality voice with an almost synthetic feel (well, it is a fake voice after all!) to it without having to hire a voice actor (which are hard to come by considering I wanted a Morgan Freeman-esque voice!)

OUAN405 - Process & Production: Animation Audio (Research)

After much debate over what audio I would plan to use in my animation, I decided that I would like to add some background music of some description. I knew that because of the setting, space, I would want something calming, almost surreal and ambient at the same time. I thought about creating my own on some music editing software such as Sibellius or GarageBand (the latter isn't as professional and I don't really favour it) but my schedule didn't have any room for a "Creating Backing Music" sort of task!

In the end, I stumbled upon a handy little website called FreePlay Music. http://www.freeplaymusic.com/browsemusic.aspx It was here that all of my music needs were satisfied and I spent happy hours listening to all kinds of music as I tried to picture and get a feel for which track worked the best. Eventually I found the perfect piece called Interstellar Aurora by FreePlay Music themselves from an album called Electronica Transmissions Volume 3.

In order to use this piece of music, which was free of course so long as the terms and conditions weren't breached, I had to agree to the rules that I would not use this music for any commercial use and that regarding I do not make any money off the track, I am free to use it as part of a composition online under the condition that the creator is credited. So, knowing that I wouldn't get into any trouble for using it, I decided on happily using a twenty second clip of that track.

OUAN405 - Process & Production: Chris, The Simpsons Artist (Research)

Taking into account my research on the way Disney made his characters appealing in terms of mannerisms and attitudes/personalities, I then went on to create my very own character - or protagonist rather - to bring my animation to life. I started by jotting down the most bizarre of ideas for my "God"-like character. I can't even remember jotting down half of them!

I started with a naked figure of an emaciated male suggesting that God doesn't need lavish clothing to represent his benevolence, nor should he be the picture of health, he is one of us, he has flaws and so forth. Eventually, I thought about the comedic side of what God's potential appearance really could be...

After running through silly ideas of Morgan Freeman as God (a bit cliché!), Skrillex (definite no!), Snoop Dogg (Dog is God backwards, right?) and many other wacky ideas, I settled on a rather handsome looking African-American God dressed in hip-hop genre clothing, gold chain, basketball vest, the lot! However, I hadn't really settled on a style.

I knew what I wanted my God to look like, but how would I style his features? How big should his eyes be? Nose shape? Then, I was thankful one night as I was browsing through Facebook and came across one of my most loved artists(?), Chris, "The Simpsons Artist" - as he calls himself. On his website, Pictures That I Gone And Done, Chris shows off his extensive knowledge on creating abstract and (to be honest) terrifying characters which you can't help but laugh at! I thought styling my God with a few similar features to that of Chris' characters, I could recreate that same level of horror yet humour in my work...

http://picturesthatigoneanddone.bigcartel.com I recommend checking Chris out, his work is truly an inspiration!

OUAN405 - Process & Production: Creating Star Fields (Research)

As part of my animation idea for the Classical Elements brief, (see other blog posts regarding narrative, ideas, character design etc.) I decided to set the story in outer space. As a consequence of this, I had to learn how to create a star field; something I've never had the opportunity of doing before! So, I began to look online to find an effective and simple method of creating a realistic-looking universe using Photoshop.

One of the few I looked at was incredibly easy to understand and very useful. This was created by Greg Martin (http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/making_a_star_field.html) and gave a detailed walkthrough of creating a star field using the tools in Photoshop.

I learned a lot from this and eventually managed to create two fairly convincing images of which I could then go on to use as my backgrounds for my animation. I think two or three is a good amount to create as I'll have some variation in where the stars are and I can swap them around in my animation as I please. (Stars don't stay in the same place all the time!)

Although I cannot upload Photoshop files onto Blogger and there is no way of me exporting to JPEG as Photoshop doesn't exist on this laptop, I can assure you that my example ended up looking identical to Greg Martin's...

OUAN405 - Process & Production: Adobe After Effects

OUAN405 - Process & Production: Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" (Animation Technique)

OUAN405 - Process & Production:

After spending my day off watching Japanese documentaries about Japanese animation, animation techniques, styles and methods, I came across a short clip of Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. Not only did this catch my eye instantly as I found it relevant to my upcoming animation about the Classical Elements, I loved the way he animated this particular scene (I love the way he animates all of his films!) and simply had to blog about it immediately!

Below is where I found this short clip. A video from YouTube from Jonathan Ross's 2002 "Japanorama" (Season 1, Episode 2, Part 3) showed a scene where the character is blowing what seems to be leaves or petals out of her hand. This is a side view shot and demonstrates the rule of thirds nicely as your eye is drawn to the left hand side of the screen.

This is shown at time 7:38 of the video below and I am particularly fond of the shot, pace of the animation and secondary animation of the hair and clothes as the character blows the petals against the wind. It is very lifelike and I hope to use a similar shot, staging and pace in my own animation. I will not be using secondary action like Miyazaki has done however as my animation will be set in space, a vacuum, where no wind could possibly exist!

OUAN405 - Process & Production: Adobe Flash (Creating Simple Animation)

OUAN405 - Process & Production:

Today, albeit having some experience on Flash and much preferring it for animating to any of the previous methods and programmes I have used (simply because of its ease of use and simple interface, logically placed options and very simple use of ActionScript), we did some very simple pendulums and and squash and stretch bouncing balls.

I very much enjoyed this and learned something new despite using tweens, the timeline and Flash in general before. Below is my finished animation and feel that I achieved something new as I have not the easing in and out tool on Flash before, so it gave a new feel to my animation which I thought looked appealing and more realistic.

Personally, I consider this small task as a part of research as although I have used Flash for many years for all different purposes, it's nice to touch up on the basics and get back into using the correct methods and learn new ways of creating animation. I class this as research as when creating this file, it encouraged me to look at reference images of creating in-betweens (I have a tendency to opt for straight ahead animation as planning keyframes is tedious to me) thus learning to work out of the comfort zone of straight ahead animation.