Testing

A test from today.



Some problems encountered today:

First - the light did not go through my cardstock correctly. I used a piece of paper to diffuse the backlight, but I didn't cut out a hole around where the head was (like I did in my concept imagery). So I will have to figure out a different way to diffuse the light or to get light into her head. There is also problems of shadow showing up but I don't mind that so much. But I need to get the light composed properly.

Second - paint on glass has a nice aesthetic but in this case I am on the fence about the sharp black and white contrast. I cannot get the nice gradation that was in the concept imagery. Maybe this has to do with the paint I am using - it is just tempera. I wonder if gouache would be better. I really like the paint texture on the paper but it would be terribly time consuming to paint papers individually. It is really key to get the right gradation around her for the halo effect so I want to investigate that more.

I did get an image I liked when I cut out the paper and took a still photo. This is more along the lines of what I want ..

3D planning

My template for Fia's proportions:



















Right now, I have been trying to model her arms in 3D- but it is not working out so well. I am looking into other methods to make her arms.

On Female Characters

I was thinking about character design choice and that my character is a female. While the film is about a character experiencing growth I have thought about it specifically towards Fia being a girl, and what roles she faces (or doesn't even know of) in post-civilization. I have often used male characters because there is a neutrality that comes with a male role, particularly with sexuality and emotion. I have been addressing female characters more since I went into animation, while before I had avoided them because it feels too easy for them to sway into a stereotype and I just didn't want to deal with that. I feel like it is important for me to use a female character in my grad film now in expressing something personal to me.

I have been looking at some characters which are interesting to me in film and animation because they perform in a way natural to their individual nature. Whether they act in a way that might be separated into feminine or masculine roles becomes secondary to their personality and environment - for example, when I watched Nausicaa in my animation history screening, she is introduced with the role of an explorer/hunter, and on returning to her village she helps repair a windmill. The way her character is portrayed is not as a butch one, though, she is still very much feminine - she is shown to be driven by a logic that stems from her environment. She lives in a small rural village, so it seems natural that she is hard working. She is a princess in a small community, so she has developed personal connections with the townspeople. Etc.

I saw an argument recently on the character of Mattie Ross in the Coen brothers adaptation of True Grit not being a feminist character. The argument was in that Mattie tries too hard to fulfill a traditionally masculine role, and this does not fulfill a feminist role because she should portray more feminine characteristics. I found I disagreed with this argument because Mattie, like Nausicaa, is a product of her environment, in this case the gritty west. How she acts only seems natural to the time and place she has been raised in.

I have been thinking about how Fia is driven as a character and how she is portraying female characters. I want to focus on her actions having a lot of logic and reasoning behind them. In the prequel piece I am working on, I want it to represent her personality and hopefully bring some dimension to her.

Planning

My goal right now for this project is to get it moving. I had a some good chats yesterday with Martin and Ruben about the technical aspects of this project. I want to preserve the painted and hand crafted aesthetic in my test images, but use the computer to my advantage to speed this process up. I have split up the various elements in Fia's swimming image into what would be shot on set and what would be composited later using After Effects.

The head, hair part and nose will be crafted and animated on set. The parts of her body that are out of the water will be made out of cardstock and replacement animated. The ripples from the water will be paint on glass. All of these things will be animated simultaneously in stop motion. I am hoping once the 3D station in the camera room is free, I will be able to do this with luma matting - for now I will have to use a white background and a bright light underneath. It may just have to be thinner paper than the cardstock I am using in order to get the contrast I want. It is just something I will have to test for now...

The body parts that are seen underwater, underwater reflections, eyes, cheeks, mouth and hair will be painted by hand, scanned, and then tracked to follow the head. James brought to my attention today that I won't be able to do the paint on glass until I animate the body, because the ripples are secondary to that; they also create the halo effect around Fia's body. I think for now I will try without, and create the halo primarily around what body parts are above water.

These are my sketchbook notes:














I painted some character concept art for Fia today as well. I backlit them as well after insistence from James...

Two and a Half D

This post really should have come before the last, but bla bla. I want to go a bit more into detail about the technique I will be using for this project.

I have gone back to the paper technique I used with the pupurun project (http://pepaproject.blogspot.com/). I liked how the animation turned out and I have been experimenting with light through the cardstock. The face of the character will be animated with replacement pieces and the body animated in paint (though, this may depend on the scene). I like the paint on the paper though that might only be practical as a still background, and if I want to do animation on top of that I have considered painting on glass on top of that.

It was nice to paint yesterday and a good way to cleanse myself from stress and routine work for school. I have been using the computer a lot lately and I don't think it is appropriate for the aesthetic I want to make, so I am going to do the next bit of storyboarding and concept art using paint.

Here is a note I wrote down when I was painting yesterday:

"I'm taking a day 'off' and painting concept images and storyboards for my project "Swift". It is about a young girl who experiences a change in her realization of self. While she loses a part of innocence she gains a maturity and dignity in realizing control of those differences. The original idea I stemmed from was centering the film on the word 'fleeting' and looking at brief moments. I am also breaking from the computer today (I made a note here about how hard it is going to be to decode my handwriting, and let me assure you, it is) because I want to reinvestigate the tactile feel of painting and papercrafting. The computer I love but right now it feels too cold and controlled to work on. Fia deserves to be painted (her name means fire, though fiata means fleeting).

A later edit: My official proposal for my senior project.

The subject of my film proposal revolves around a young girl, named Fia. In my film she undergoes a development of consciousness, specifically in regard to self consciousness, both physically and emotionally. Living in a post-civilization world, Fia, who has reached an age of young adulthood, has embarked on a nomadic lifestyle to explore and eventually find a place to settle. After discovering artifacts from the ‘old world’, Fia experiences a time of self reflection as she investigates these objects. The first idea I had regarding this film proposal was to make a series of shorts that centered around the idea of the fleeting, though the working title of the project has now been changed to “Swift”. I want to investigate the idea of childhood, which I see as a series of brief memories and fleeting moments. I want to return to these ideas with Fia, as she experiences this quick and sudden change from one mindset to another, less innocent, but more mature one.

As of now, my aesthetic goals are:

- to encorporate paint and brush textures

- to use a backlight to create a glowing light effect, and to use strong contrast black and white/chiaroscuro

- to have a naïve or childlike style on the character and scene design

- to use 3D relief to create the ‘2 and a half D’ look

I would like this film to be suitable for a younger audience, but to also contain enough of complex ideas and emotions to be appreciated by an adult audience. I would like the audience to be left with an emotion. I want to keep this film light hearted and funny, though I would like to try to make the change in Fia enough to bring a bittersweet note to it. Ultimately, though, I would like to end on a positive and optimistic note.

Backlighting

I have a mission this week, and it is to get some character development going on. I also want to start testing my visuals. So today I did a quick one.

I made some simple shapes with my cardstock (same one as the pupurun replacement models) and stuck them on some sketchbook paper. I made my round piece into Fia, which ended up giving her an interesting design. I painted the water with gouache and her hair with gouache and acrylic.













































Then, I backlit it. I used my animation desk.
































The image with a variation on white balance adjustments.

























































































my next mission - making it move!

Fia

My character has a name now, and it is Fia. I like it, I think it is very pretty.

My new project started out on the idea of fleeting moments, and the root of fleeting is fiata. Fia is short for that, but it is also an actual Italian name, meaning fire, which suits her quite well in my opinion.

Fia is around the age of 13, and is a curious and inquisitive girl. She enjoys exploring the forest and oceanside. She lives in a post-civilization world and currently has a nomadic lifestyle. Having turned 13 she has now left her family and learning about the world before she finds a place to settle herself. She prefers to set site near large bodies of water.

Fia is hardworking when she needs to be, but otherwise she enjoys spending her time observing nature and exploring. She especially enjoys swimming and searching lakebeds or tidal pools. She often encounters artifacts from the 'old world' and may spend her afternoon investigating them. While she enjoys taking things apart to figure out how they may have worked, she is not very mechanically inclined and doesn't spend time trying to make them function in the way they were intended. If she finds a piece that she can use practically (such as her bicycle spoke she hangs fish on) she will keep it on site, but unless it is particularly useful or light, she will not take it with her.

Fia's generation was born post-civ, and only retains ideas of the old culture through her parents or generations that lived in that time. Fia's family originated from a rural fishing village.

Moving On

It's time for me to move onto the next project, and while I don't want to abandon the technical research I have done in the Lumea project, I feel like I need to change directions character wise and start learning how to structure a story. I still want to work with light as an important element in my visuals and a defining part of my characters. I also want to integrate my stop motion techniques from my experimental stop motion project, using paper models printed from 3D templates. I have a few tasks and experiments lined up that I can start planning, and an idea for a scene to introduce the new character.

This is a sketch I did that is the base idea for integrating the two techniques together.








Paper models would be lit from within and then after rolling, break open to show the projected character.

While the character's visuals will be primarily in solid colors, I wanted to develop a back story and defining characteristics of this girl. I think that most of these will never be revealed through the footage, but one of the problems I encountered with Lumea was that I was never inspired to work with her because she didn't carry very much personal meaning to me. It was hard to direct what she would do in a scene because she had a very generic history and personality. A bit like working with dolls. I read an article recently which looked into the different between animating an inanimate object and bringing an object life, and I feel like Lumea ended up staying too far in the inanimate object realm.

This is my new girl, who's history is being explored and will be documented soon...

Creative Explorations Review

I felt overall that the work done on this project so far has been successful, despite the problems that never seemed to stop surfacing throughout. I think what made it successful overall for me was gaining some footage that achieved one of the visuals that I set out to do. I think one of the biggest breakthroughs I felt was only extremely recently, after shooting the footage on Saturday, and finally feeling that this project could be continued.

Technically I was felt successful with the character animation that I did on flash. I felt that it was clear and satisfied the visuals I wanted for Lumea. Once I had started to develop some personality for her it became much easier to animate. I feel that right now her character is still only half formed, and I plan on doing some more exercises and drawings to further her.

One of the things I would like to document too would be her interactions with other people. Back on team time and space we played with the idea of visually representing emotion (http://vimeo.com/16012924) and even though the clips are very brief, they contain a lot of impact that I would like to carry over in this project.

I felt successful in regards to the projection technique because I wanted to capture a 2D character in a 3D setting and I feel that it worked. I think the setup in the footage is very basic but it could certainly be elaborated upon.

While the idea of the puppet is still appealing to me (the idea of the lights on a frame and using the silhouette on different layers of light) the actual puppet I was dissappointed with. I think that the time I had was too short for me to develop a puppet that would have achieved all the specifications I wanted. However, I did like the idea of it with light, so I will keep that in mind and possibly look for another solution to it.

I was surprised by the direction that my project turned, from working with puppets into projection. I think that I was set in the idea that it was a puppet project, but what I was really wanting to work with was light. I was also pleased that I found a way to encorporate my 2D work with my 3D work.

I was also surprised, I suppose, that my shoot managed to come together at the last minute and be able to produce footage I was comfortable in showing. I think the biggest struggles I had was that the ideas I was working with seemed to have a degree of impossibility for a student to do, with the lack of a closed set and etc. I feel like I impeded my own progress at times because I felt that the project probably wouldn't work out and pushed aside testing and building quite a bit.

My next step from here is to work out a lot regarding the set building and Lumea's character. I have a set of tasks for Lumea alone:

- do more gesture drawings
- create context within the drawings as well, such as placing her in everyday situations to determine how she would act, interactions with other people and objects, etc
- determine a situation that I might want to base a film upon
- understand what sort of context is created with her being a source of light, as opposed to a contained light, or an object with lights on top of it

I will continue to research effects regarding projection and lighting in my special effects class. For this class I will be looking at structuring the film and doing more paper animation, probably with replacement animation again.