As I’ve said a lot, I thoroughly despise my finished project. I pretty much hindered myself from the start because I didn’t like this night out ‘theme’ that we were given for it and from there my motivation for it remained pretty low. Then when I thought of an idea I ever so slightly liked I had to pretty much change it entirely because while I had thought about the aesthetics of it I hadn’t given any thought whatsoever to any ‘emotional attachment’ I may have to the piece. I agree that it should have a meaning, but an emotional attachment isn’t something I really have to a night out. A night out, is a night out, that’s that. In any case, rant over, evaluation time.
To begin with, in terms of my research I thought I started off reasonable well, my initial idea was to show the alternatives to a night out, to not follow the given norms of our society’s ideas of a night out because I don’t drink I feel that for the most part I have a different experience to most on a night out. The feelings I eventually focused on were those of alienation and being left out whilst those around you are deteriorating as the night progresses. There was no real personal experience that this was based on because I’m not much of a club person, I’m more of a pub person. So why I chose to set it in a club I have no idea. I just pretty much ended up making more and more problems for myself as I went through the project.
I knew how I wanted everything to look in my head and had a vague idea of how I was going to go about it, but it was the actual doing that caused the issues. I spent ages trying to get my outdoor scene to work properly and then realised, while it still wasn’t working, that I did not have much time left to do the rest of it. This is a bit of a recurring theme throughout this project, spending ages trying to tweak things, then realising that there is an easier way to do it so starting again and having a finished project that I don’t like all that much.
There’s not really much I can/want to say about my piece except for the fact that I know full well that if I had been more enthusiastic about it I would have been more motivated to put more work into it and produce something that I actually like. Besides that, ugh, well, yeah, I just hate the final piece. Let’s move on. Bring on the 3D stuff.
Speaking in incredibly loose terms, i’m pretty happy with how my animation has turned out, but there are so many ways in which I want to improve on it because I’ve grown to dislike it more and more over the course of the project. I ended up having to scrap my outdoor scene because it was becoming too fiddly and taking far too long to render because of the ridiculous amount of layers, it’s a shame because that was probably my most preferred of all the scenes, and the one that related to my still image and where the whole idea came from. Never mind. I’m pretty happy with how the music ended up working with the video and well, all I can concentrate on really is it’s many flaws. I’ve learnt from this little fiasco and in the future I’m going to spend a little less time doing the research and planning and spend more time on the actual making of the project because it didn’t quite sink in how tedious the whole process was going to be. Had I been able to do it in Maya however, would have been a whole different story. Anyway, I digress, here’s the final thing and after finally thinking of an idea for a theme I was not all that fond of here it is in it’s lack lustre ‘glory’:
Huzzah for the 2D animation finally being out of the way, at long last. Here’s the process I went through to make it all:
First of all I started off by taking some photos of streets in town at night to give myself a good idea of how I was going to construct the little town for the outside scenes of my animation in the establishing shots at the beginning and end.
After this I made my street in Photoshop to then export into After Effects when it came to making everything move.
I then proceeded to make a series of three characters, one main one (loosely based on my research of strong leading female characters) and two other characters that would be there for the main one to interact with, along with a couple of silhouetted people that would be loitering in the background of the inside club scene and huddled in groups on the street scene outside.
I also made little replicas of the back of my car and the front of a taxi to be travelling up and down the street whilst we are still in the outside scene.
After this I started putting everything into After Effects and promptly scrapped the outside scene because it was taking far too long to get everything to work properly and how I wanted it too, I was being too much of a perfectionist at the time to let it lie and carry on and decided to eliminate this scene altogether, now I kind of wish I hadn’t. From here I started building the inside club scene straight into After Effects and started putting in my characters and parenting everything and all that jazz.
After I started I realised I was doing things the most long winded way possible but didn’t want to give in and start again out of sheer stubbornness, however, eventually, as the deadline grew nearer I did start it pretty much all over again and gave the individual moving parts their own compositions and then merged them altogether at the end.
Motion sketching saved my life really because I forgot how fiddly it would have been to make all of the letters move on their own, likewise with the poorly dancing people in the background!
After this I made some loops in Garage Band, which promptly crashed on me so I went back and used one of the loops that I had made earlier in the term to accompany the project and I think that actually it’s ended up working quite well, the audio fades in and out in all the right places.
And ta-da it’s now all rendered and after arguing with the laptop about getting the audio on it is promptly making it’s way to YouTube.
I’ve started on my city, which will be the basis for my 2D animation and I have built it in Photoshop to then be exported into After Effects so I can make it work and stuff. Here it is so far, I still need to make the buildings look colourful/lit up so that they are more than just oblongs. After this I need to design my characters and then put them into the scene.
Here we see the scene starts of in a night time street and the camera swings around to the entrance of a club and then we go inside with the main character and they are stood amongst the crowds and there are lots of bright flashing lights everywhere. The character gets confused at what the people are doing, they have started drinking and therefore they have started deteriorating and as the character is not drinking we see them and what they are seeing. People’s speech starts to become slurred and their words are falling out of the little speech bubbles in the sky to show this, they are losing their composure and falling about all over the place, represented by wobbly lines and shaky figures, then they slowly begin dissolving and the colour starts running off of them onto the floor as they deteriorate. The last shot inside the club is the character stood in the puddles of people and kicks them about a bit before we then see them leaving and walking down the road with no one else around.
As I have previously mentioned, I will be looking at strong female characters in films in order to find a way to portray the main character of my animation to go along with my pre-existing influences of ‘Charlotte’ and ‘Marjane Satrapi’ from ‘Lost In Translation’ and ‘Persepolis’. The films that I have looked at for this are; ‘Princess Mononoke’, ‘Cruel Intentions’, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, ‘Marie Antoinette’ (the 2006 version), ‘There’s Something About Mary’, ‘Juno’, ‘Mean Girls’, ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’, ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ and ‘When Harry Met Sally’. Here goes a brief description about the characters, but without ruining any of the plots.
San from ‘Princess Mononoke’: San lives with wolves, so I guess this classifies her as a feral child. Either way she is a very determined character trying to help Okkoto even though she has been trying to stop him during the film. She is very loyal to the forest and is not afraid to stand up for what she believes in.
Kathryn Merteuil and Annette Hargrove from ‘Cruel Intentions’: I couldn’t really choose one as they show two different sides of a female personality. Kathryn is very dominating and once she has set her eyes on something she wants, she won’t stop until she gets it, no matter who she has to cross in the mean time. Annette however is different in the sense that she is a lot more demure and wishes to please everyone all of the time.
Olive Hoover from ‘Little Miss Sunshine’: This girl is fantastic. She shows a lot of understanding about the world around her despite her age. She comes across as if she is wise beyond her years but still shows her moments of naivety and has a childlike personality. She manages to keep going despite the hurdles she comes across in the journey of the film.
Marie Antoinette from ‘Marie Antoinette’: Marie Antoinette is one of the most iconic female rulers in history, for a number of reasons. She made the most of a life of luxury and learnt to love the life her husband was providing her. When her marriage falls into trouble she strives to work at it in order to maintain the life she leaves. It’s nice to see a woman somewhat ‘using’ a man for once, instead of the other way around.
Mary from ‘There’s Something About Mary’: It’s not the character in herself that I revisited this film for, it is more the effect that she has on the people around her. She seems to have a form of magnetism around her that draws people to her, she has this innate ability to make people happy and she leaves a lasting impression on everyone.
Juno MacGuff from ‘Juno’: It’s obvious that Juno is a strong person, she carries a child while still at college and then gives it away as soon as it is born. It takes a lot to do that and it shows that she has a strong personality as she can handle the staring and all the talking from her classmates about what she is doing. While she has a vulnerable moments she knows right from wrong and constantly holds her own. Irrelevant video clip, but quite amusing.
Cady Heron from ‘Mean Girls’: This may seem like somewhat of an irregular choice for this list but Cady represents a lot of teenage girls at school, what they think, how they act and their perceptions of other people. We see her rise to the top of the pile, tumble and then build herself back up again. It’s the ability to rebuild herself that put her on here because a lot of people may not have the confidence to come back after such events.
Jane Smith from ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’: Usually, I’m not a huge fan of Angelina Jolie but her character in this made me laugh. She’s very deceitful and scheming and I like that. She’s a strong woman, and she’s a spy. Spies are cool. She has Pitt’s character (John Smith) wrapped around her little finger but he doesn’t seem so aware of to what degree this is.
Vicky, Cristina and Maria Elena from ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’: Like with ‘Cruel Intentions’, I couldn’t just pick one of the girls as they show a spectrum of characteristics that make a strong female. Vicky is very traditional in her beliefs, Cristina is one for experimenting shall we say and Maria Elena is quite eccentric and manipulative.
Sally Albright from ‘When Harry Met Sally’: Sally comes across quite high maintenance throughout the film, which isn’t a great trait, but she also comes across as very inquisitive and curious about life and about the males as a gender. Similar to Mary in ‘There’s Something About Mary’, she has that feature that makes her unforgettable to people, which is clear from what Harry says in the final scene. She has also been the subject of one of the most famous scenes in mainstream movie history
Right, so, from this I can see the traits that I want to convey when I am designing and animating my main character. I would like for the character to also have some of my own traits or examples of appearance. Now all I need to do is get drawing.
Ok, so this is my final still image for the ‘Night Out’ project:
This shows more of what I want my animation to be like aesthetically as opposed to how it relates to me. As it is night time the buildings and general background are dark and I am going to achieve this by going out and taking photographs of city buildings at night. I will also take a couple of cityscape shots so I can see how mine needs to be composed when I am making it in After Effects. The people will be all black and white but actually, now I’m thinking about it, I’m going to make everyone colourful as one sign of the people deteriorating would be to have the colours dripping off of them and then turning into a puddle on the floor so that eventually it is just the character left standing in the room.
I’ve had a bit of a browse on the Internet about how emotions can be shown through colours and I wasn’t aware of how much they can differ amongst cultures, I kind of just assumed that they were always the same. For example, the colour green is related to death in China whereas here it would be related to black and green would represent envy. I found a little chart that demonstrates the different colours and their common connotations here:
RED – danger, excitement, fire, passion, blood, love PURPLE – wealth, royalty, sophistication, elegance BLUE – quietness, serenity, truth, dignity, constancy, reliability, power BLACK – sophistication, elegance, power, rebellion WHITE – purity, cleanness, luminosity, vacuum YELLOW – warmth, brightness, joy GREEN – nature, fresh, vegetation, health
I have found this list quite useful and will use it when it comes to colouring in small parts of my characters in my 2D animation to represent the emotions that they are feeling as the nights change and when the colours start to fade and drip off they will mix together to represent mixed emotions. However, I think I will also do a little more research into this so that I have a more confident idea of how to go about it. As previously mentioned, I will be colouring my characters in a similar style to the characters in Frank Miller’s graphic novel ‘Sin City’.
For my 2D animation I will be using mostly diegetic audio. With the outside scenes I will have the sounds of cars mostly but also people walking around in the background and noises from other nearby places. I also plan to record some drunken conversations when I get the chance to use this for when the people in my animation are talking to one another and the words fall onto the floor.
The only thing I’m not too sure of is the music and how I am going to do that, I need to remember to re-install Garage Band onto here because I keep forgetting then I can have a play and get a bit more of a feel of what I want to do in terms of the music.
Two-year-olds are hard work! However we’ve watched a lot of animated stuff that has given me some more ideas for what I want to do for my 3D animation and how characters move about and interact with one another. After, genuinely, thoroughly enjoying ‘Thomas The Tank Engine’ we watched ‘FiFi And The Flowertots’, which was quite scary but I liked the style in which it had been made. It’s another stop motion and I need to get the idea of a stop motion out of my head really but then we watched an equally terrifying programme called ‘Pic Me’, in which a simple line drawing has a photograph of a child’s head put onto it and it really creeps me out but I might use it for my character design for my 2D animation, and I do like the thick black lines around the characters and this was something that I had considered anyway with keeping my characters black and white.
