Karen goes live!

 It's done. Finally. After an insane few months, I have finished my graduate film. Although I have loads of post-production paperwork to get around to now, I present to you, Karen. Sending out masses of love and gratitude to those who helped out with the project, you know who you are.

Almost There...

After a couple months of animating, filming, editing, re-filming, editing some more and compositing like a square-eyed beast [with intervals of pulling my hair out and yelling obscenities at the computer screen], I can say that Karen is so very nearly finished. And throughout all of this, I can definitely say that I've got a much better understanding of After Effects, which was totally alien to me end of last year. Every cloud and that. To give you a little taste of what's to come, here are a couple of stills from the film so far. [These are screengrabs from Premiere so apologies for the not-so-great quality images].

Parts of the Process, Pieces of the Puzzle...

  

Karen is coming together rather slowly, but surely nonetheless. Here are the results of a couple months worth of frantic tests and drawings, some of which will be animated over live action footage. Although some of these are incomplete, this should [hopefully] give you an impression of the style Karen is going to be animatied in.

Ink and Watercolour

Ink and Adobe Photoshop

Karen will be played by the lovely Kathy Foote. I say played. Mysterious images of Karen will appear intermittently throughout the film. Although the storyline, in a way, revolves around her, I have chosen to keep her physical identity anonymous and represent her in various objects, one of which will be a newspaper.
[At the moment, I'm a little bit stumped over which image of 'Karen' to use in the newspaper collage, but here are the three I'm thinking of using].

 

And this is some stuff that I've made stuff move.

Hand drawn illustration, Adobe Photoshop and After Effects

Hand drawn illustration, watercolour, felt tip pen, Adobe Photoshop and After Effects

Hand drawn illustration, Google images, Adobe Photoshop and After Effects

Hand drawn illustration, Adobe Photoshop[Voice over courtesy of Mr. Arthur Hirst] 

Karen in the making...

What a busy few weeks! Since my last post, I have been learning [very slowly] how to use Adobe After Effects, which has been both exciting and slightly confusing [I'm still very new to it all]. Still, it's about time I ventured into other ways of animating, it's proved to be massively useful as well.
Here are a few tests that I've recently made experimenting with masking, pacing & Photoshop:

 [This one is SO awkward, I know. I did it in a rush one morning, allow me...]



 

I have also put together an animatic for Karen, made from the appalling illustrations from my storyboard. I ask you kindly to please excuse them as I tend to get a bit impatient with some sketches. Despite it being a bit rough, this has helped me figure out how to time certain scenes and visualise the film a bit more.
This is still subject to change but this is Karen in it's most raw form:

Animation Deux

 Autumn falls and it's back to school! So now the time has come for me to make my second animation but unlike my previous film, I'm exploring some rather dark themes. I came across a rather chilling article about those who have committed rape and/or sexual assault on the time wasting website Reddit. [I'm fully aware of how contrasting this is to my last animation but oh well]. What struck me most about these stories was the sheer ignorance of the men*; some blamed the girls for being too "provocative", others just couldn't control their raging erection but in many of the of the cases, they didn't realise they were violating women. Despite the remorseful confessions, I found it difficult to feel sympathy for the writers but in an odd way, found them quite insightful. These are just some illustrations I did based on some sentences that stuck out to me.

*I don't mean to generalise here but most of them were written by men.

 

And here are a couple of line tests experimenting with portraiture and rotoscoping:

Black and White cont'd.

Shaniqua does Black and White

Okay, so I ROYALLY FLOPPED on the '52 Week Challenge'. Oh well. Who cares. Taking part in the project had the desired effect [even if it was for, like, 4 months?] and got me taking more pictures and being more pro-active blah, blah, blah, etc, etc, etc. Just a couple of snaps from last month, this is only the 2nd roll of film I've used with her. Better late than never eh?

Meet Shaniqua

I hoard cameras. A lot of them are second hand cameras. Some of which are, unfortunately, a bit faulty. This doesn't, however, get in the way of my inane habit of collecting them. The latest addition to my camera family is a fully functioning Konica, which I am absolutely LOVING right now [excuse my excitement, I haven't had a working film camera in over a year now]. I have decided to call her Shaniqua. Here is a brief account of what me and Shaniqua have seen this month.

April

 

 Admittedly, I was pretty slack with this month for the 52 Week Challenge, missing out the 'Get Framed' and 'Contre-Jour' themes. So what if I didn't do them at the time, I can always find time later on in the year to compensate for my laziness...

 

 

 

March

Argh!! Kinda screwed this up by posting a couple days late but here it is anyway: A [belated] account of March as part of the 52 Week Challenge.

Schadenfreude Goes Live!

After a very intense 3 months of testing, puppet making and familiarising myself with the wonders of stop-frame animation, I have completed my debut short film!

So here you have it, from the studios to your screen, here is Schadenfreude!
Unfortunately, I don't know how to alter the embed settings so in order to see the full thing, you may have to full screen it....[I know, effort].

February

Happy Leap Year!! For my second installment of photographs for the '52 Week Challenge', I bring you February! As you can see, breaking my lens has definitely not got in the way of me and this challenge. Well, not yet at least....

Lights.....Camera.....Line Tests!!

After finishing my moodboards, I've been trying to put my ideas in motion. Literally.
Over the past couple of weeks, I've made the animatic for my cheekily titled short, Schadenfreude.
Schadenfreude is the story of Old Owl and his struggle to feed the birds in his local park, which is constantly disturbed by Little Owl and her painfully oblivious playtime. When Old Owl's patience is pushed to the limit, he resorts to devious plans to get the peace and quiet he's after.



Schadenfreude animatic


These are a couple of line tests I made to familiarise myself with certain movements of my characters.







This is a pencil coloured line test of Old Owl's previous line test, I was trying to create a bit of a messy look with some of Wilko's finest colouring pencils. [The reason there is a weird page strip on the left towards the end was because I ran out of paper and had to use sheets of a failed line test I did with Little Owl, which resulted in me concealing this error rather ungracefully].




To emphasise the playfulness of my aesthetic, I experimented with making 2D puppets, which not only has quite a charming look to it but wont test my patience as much as hand drawing each frame. Although I wont the that kinetic, scruffy the pencil line test provides, I can use more interesting and intricate patterns when making my puppets. Here are a couple of puppet tests to, again, familiarise myself with making the actions and finally, a title sequence test.

MoodBoards Galore

For my animation, I wanted to create a cutsie and sort of naive aesthetic by using simple shapes and bold colours for my background. Inspired by the likes of Michel Gondry, Petér Vácz and Magdalena Osinska, I've chosen to use familiar materials such as craft/tissue paper and a variation of fabrics to give my look a soft and playful feel to them. These are a couple of moodboards I've done over the past few weeks to help formulate an idea in my head of what kind of look I want my animation to have.

I scrumpled up the tissue paper when scanning it in, giving the trees and clouds more dimension, which constrasts quite nicely on a 2D image. To make the bark and branches more interesting, I decided to use an image of long, straight hair to mimic the intricate detail of tree bark and wood in order the make the trees look a bit more graphic.

Mixed Media and Photoshop

Meet My Owls...

Old Owl & Little Owl

I'm 3 weeks into a 12 week intensive animation course as part of my degree. In this time, I am to produce a short animation between 1-2 minutes long and due to my ever growing obsession with owls, I decided to make my main two main characters............well, owls. Although I don't have the biggest confidence in character building, I was inspired by the drastic expressions of the white faced scops owl to give my characters anthropomorphic qualities: Old Owl's being comparable to a bitter old man and Little Owl's playful, childish qualities were inspired by the hyperactivity of the burrowing owl.

This is my first ever line test exhibiting Old Owl's expressions.
Despite the annoying light change about halfway through, I was still rather pleased at the outcome of my first attempt.
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