I meant to include this with my earlier post about old anime shows but it slipped my mind, so here it is now. Released in 1988, this feature-length anime is based on the manga story of the same name. Stylistically it carries all the traits of anime from that period, featuring fantastic animation, colours and lighting, all wrapped up in an epic Sci-Fi storyline. I first saw the movie when I was younger and it inspired me way back then, so to still be influenced by it now, and able to study it in depth is a great opportunity. The more I watch it now, the more I want to apply a similar visual style to my work now, much the same as Dave Rapoza's Metroid retro-styled animation. Here are a few screen grabs from the first ten minutes of Akira:
While I'm still trying to figure out the narrative for the animation, I'm going to begin drawing up some character designs and style tests. The most important thing for me to do is get some original images/designs that I can also use for animation tests, to try out some of the new techniques that Blizzard's "Lords of War" has taught me. Also, sometimes just sitting down and drawing stuff is a good way to kickstart the imagination and get some fresh ideas, so it might help me out with the narrative at the same time. At the least, it'll also provide an opportunity to get some of those ideas out of my head and into visual form, rather than just words and notes. I made up a few mood boards to show where my early inspiration is coming from. The majority of these images came from my hard drive, a collection of inspiration that I've been amassing since college. This collection is a mixture of Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres, with some blends along the way. Initially I'm looking for anything attracts my attention: lights; colours; shapes; moods; characters; environments etc. The images here are sourced from concept art from a number of different projects, retro music related themes, development sketches... all manner of places, really. Since my next step will be some early concepting (something I regret not spending enough time - if any - on for my last project), I'm looking briefly at Sci-Fi environments, a huge variety of character designs, and several different art styles that might help me determine my own style later on. I'm already fairly certain that my story will take place in a Sci-Fi environment, so I think I'm on the right track there already. As for characters, I'm thinking the main characters will be a male and female of some Sci-Fi design, while the enemies will feature a genre-twist of some sort - maybe futuristic horror. At lot is uncertain right now, but that's why the next stage is so important: to test out as many ideas and visuals as possible before thinking about further ventures.
I recently came across a series of short movies by Blizzard Entertainment: "Lords of War". Based on the World of Warcraft universe, this series of short cinematics serve as backstory for one of their game installments. I can't believe I never knew of this before, it is as complete a lesson in what I want to do as I could hope to find. Each episode begins with a short 3D rendered scene which serves as an introduction to the backstory segment. The backstory segments are digitally painted, 2D parallax-style animations. Here's the entire video, consisting of 5 parts:
Each episode has it's own story and characters, focusing on different aspects of the Warcraft lore/history. The episodes each have their own mood and style, using different colour palettes to keep things varied. The illustration style is maintained throughout each short, while a huge variety of shots and dynamic angles keep the movement fluid and diverse.
To say there's a lot for me to learn from this animation is an understatement... all the questions I had previously, regarding how best to portray movement and dynamism in my own work, can be answered here. This is my bible now, and should teach me just about everything I need to know in order to get a good result from my own animation.
I watched the whole series yesterday and began making some notes, trying to narrow down what gaps in my skillset need to be addressed immediately, so I know where to focus my studies. Today I took a few screen grabs from the first episode to see what kinds of techniques are used here, that might benefit my work later on, or even during the planning and storyboarding stages.
This shot's a pretty straightforward slow pan, lasting 4 or 5 seconds. There's nothing much happening in terms of movement, but the camera does have a nice little shudder effect applied to it, breaking up the simplicity of the pan and adding some realism to the shot.
When I was working on my last project, I thought the best way to approach this style of animation was to treat each image/shot as a still moment in time, through which the camera was the only thing moving - as if the viewer was moving through the still image. The problem with this is that despite the movement that comes as a result of the camera motion, there's still a static quality to the finished animation that I wasn't too happy with - I wanted a bit more motion from each scene. I wasn't sure how to properly go about bridging the gap between these still 2D images and traditional animation styles (cartoon animation, for example, which I can't do) without fearing that I might be doing it "wrong", but this example shows that there is way to do it that maintains the still illustration style while getting some extra motion in there. By simply drawing the hand in an extra couple of positions and fading in and out between each (which in slow-mo, or frame by frame, reveals a subtle onion-skinning transition effect between positions), the simple movement works effectively, without it appearing as a cheap gimmick (I don't think). The 4-step movement above occurs over 5 seconds, with a very slow, shuddering camera zoom added to the shot for good measure. In my opinion, it works great: it maintains the feeling of 2D still images, with extra motion where it's needed. This is something I'll definitely be applying to my own work.
Same deal here, but a shorter shot - this one's only 3 seconds long. The camera moves in on the finger and the tearing fingernail occurs quickly, before cutting to the next shot.
This 10 second shot uses simple fades to cut from long shot to close-up, then to change location and lighting entirely. Very smooth, very effective.
These 8 shots occur over 15 or so seconds, to set the scene of the gladiator location. Each shot lasts between 1 and 3 secs, with subtle camera motion, parallax effect, camera shudder etc.There's plenty of variety from shot to shot: lots of different angles and points of focus, lighting, depth... it all adds to the scene-setting. When I went back to check these shots out frame by frame, I noticed that there were no fades between each shot (in my last animation, between each shot, I used a black screen fade-in and out to make a 2 or 3 second transition between each image). I initially thought that the only reason they didn't do something similar here was to maintain the speed of this scene, cutting between shots quickly. When I looked through the rest of the episode to check this theory, it turns out they don't use transitions at all - each shot cuts quickly into the next, regardless of the scene's pace. So I guess I've been doing it wrong all along! Although in my own animation I think it was actually quite handy, maybe because there weren't many images to work with, so the pace wasn't as swift as this animation.
This fast zoom occurs over 3 seconds, during which there's some camera shudder as it moves along it's path toward the warriors. The parallax style takes effect here, much like my previous work used it. There's also some very subtle motion coming from the arms of the fighters - I think they used the puppet warp feature in After Effects to do it. It's barely noticeable, but would be even more noticeable if there was no such motion at all.
Fast action pan here, uing the onion-skinning technique mentioned in some of the earlier shots, to provide a smoother motion to the action.
Same technique here, in a very quick static shot, but with the motion effect to make it an effective addition to the scene.
Conclusion
These examples just show a little of what this series of shorts has to offer. There's so much more to learn from the animation, and if I can pick up some of these skills and apply them to my own work, the end result should be all the better for it. In the near future I'll be studying from the other episodes, to analyse the techniques and see how they use colour theory and lighting to improve the scenes.
I've spent the past day or so trying to gain a better understanding of the track I'm working with here; since I first heard it a few months ago, I recognised that it stirred some emotions in me which in turn led to my imagination coming up with all sorts of visual ideas, so I've been trying to make sense of these and get some of them down on paper. I started off by getting the track into Audacity (music editing software) so that I had a graph of the track to use as a visual aid. By listening to the track repeatedly, I was able to break it down into its different sections and apply my thoughts to each in the hope that a narrative structure might begin to reveal itself. It was pretty easy for me to remember all my earlier ideas and visuals - my imagination seems to work like a sketchbook where I can store imagined shots/angles, especially if I make a note of it somewhere - so I went through this process a few times, making notes in Photoshop and in a notepad, trying to find questions - and answers - as I went. This seemed to be working out pretty well, I was able to juggle a few different ideas and try to imagine visuals that might fit the track. It's a vague process as the only notes I get down are words/phrases that really mean anything to myself, so for anybody else reading it, it might not have the same effect. So far, at this stage, it's a quicker method than sketching, but I'm definitely going to have to get onto that really soon. For now though, my imagination is doing a pretty good job in conjunction with pages and pages of notes. Also, since I'm using this stage as a means to try and figure out the narrative, I want to make sure I'm creating a world and story that makes sense and is plausible. The story has to be just right before I invest any more time in it, or else I'll just have to come up with something else. I'm pretty happy with what I'm coming up with so far though, so I think a bit more tweaking will get a good result. Here are some of the notes I made:
When I started thinking about how the tempo of the track might influence the cuts and edits of the visual shots, I noticed that the speed of the music doesn't have a major shift; it seems to me that the build up of emotion comes from added instruments and pitch (I'm no musician, so I'm probably completely off the mark with that assumption, but that's kind of what I was getting from it). From all the notebook notes I've made on narrative ideas so far (which I'm not going to share until I've solved all the problems) it'll be the heightened emotion sections that feature the quickest shots and highest paced action scenes. This might not have been the most efficient way to go about this kind of thing, but it's really helped me to figure out a lot of the problems early on, and gain some new ideas, so I'm happy to continue in this manner for a bit longer until I'm happy with where things are going. This is just the start of my attempts to figure out the transition I want this animation to take, but I'll be looking into visual structure soon and seeing how that might have an effect on things. Something I want to try and focus on with this animation is to present a relatively straightforward story, but support it with transitions/twists in genre, colour, mood, emotion etc.
Towards the end of my last animation project I began to change my art style a little and refine my technique. Unfortunately, I was so far into the work for that project that I wasn't really able to apply that change to any real effect. This time I'll be integrating the style change from the very start, and should hopefully be able to stick with it all the way through - I'm pretty happy with the new technique I use, so I should be comfortable working with it for the entirety of this project. Quick recap of my latest lineart and render style:
For this project I want to take all the animation techniques I've learnt so far and add to them, to make something that more resembles an actual animated music video. I know that I'm going to be focusing on the sci-fi genre, likely with a retro visual style or design, so I looked to old anime and cartoon shows for some early inspiration.
Fist of the North Star (1984)
I've never seen this show before, but when I mentioned to a friend what my plan was for this project, he recommended I give it a look. The anime ran from 1984 through 1988 and is still a popular franchise to this day.
I like the visual style for how it looks nowadays; it now has a retro feel that is mimicked by some modern projects. For me, it's more specifically the character designs that hold the most appeal: characters are larger than life and you can feel the strength in them instantly, which makes for interesting battles later in the show. The exaggerated realism and realistic colours are also something I'd like to implement in my own work.
The shots used are typically anime: fast and rapid close-ups of violence make for high-impact scenes, with effects adding to the style. I'll be looking at this in more depth later.
Some screen-grabs from the clip:
Silverhawks (1986)
The clip I've shared here is a mash-up of shots from the Silverhawks cartoon, edited to run alongside a track by Lazerhawk. The clip still gives the idea of what the show was all about though, and the visual style of it is clear enough.
Silverhawks was an american cartoon and the visual reflect this. Compared to Fist of the North Star, I'm not as interested in this style but it does show a lot of similar effects and shots, so at some point it might serve as good reference when it comes to learning techniques and methods, to add variety to my own work.
Super Metroid (Dave Rapoza)
This animation was created by Dave Rapoza and published in 2013. It's a homage to the Super Nintendo game of the same name, released worldwide in 1994.
Dave is a well-known artist who specialises in digital art and illustration. This project was an experiment of his to see if animation might be something he could add to his interests and skills. He uses a visual style that is directly influenced by old anime shows such as Fist of the North Star (1984) and Akira (1988), which adds to his retro re-imagining of the classic video game he portrays here.
I first saw this clip back when it was released (this was as far as he ever took it, opting to leave it as a teaser rather than make it into a full-length feature) and loved it, particularly for its reference to one of my favourite games. When I watch it now, I appreciate it even more that I can recognise the amount of skill and time that's been put into it. This clip alone could teach me a ton of exrta tricks to use in my next piece of work.
His visual style for this is influenced by the anime shows I mentioned earlier: he uses custom brushes within Photoshop to get the hand drawn lineart looking just right, and he keeps the animation quite loose - again to mimic the style. His colour palettes also pay homage to the 80's anime style. This clip has retro written all over it.
The more I watch it now, the more I consider using this style in my own work... rather than keeping the clean lineart and tight grad-render style I've been developing lately, maybe I should adopt Dave's techniques and go full-retro. Would that benefit my animation? I'll have to give it some more thought.
Here are some screen-grabs from the Metroid clip:
Summary
This post should give an idea of what thoughts I'm having at this stage, and what options I have to consider before deciding on visual style and execution. On the one hand I could use my current art style to produce a much cleaner, refined and polished result (although this method might be quite time-consuming, especially considering the track I'm working with is 7 mins 30 secs long) and on the other, I could choose the same path as Dave and work with the looser, quicker retro art style. It's a lot to thin about right now, but it'll be at the back of my mind for a while, so I'll do a few tests before coming to any decisions.
I've spent a bit of time thinking about what direction I'd like to take this Honours project in and have almost come to a conclusion. I'll be focusing on the parallax-style 2D animation, like the last animation project I worked on, but this time I'll be looking to produce something a little more like a music video, rather than an in-game cutscene. I've been in contact with an electro music artist who goes by the name Soul Spear, regarding his track "Tapestry of Light", which has been my main source of inspiration for the past few months. As soon as I first heard it, it caught my attention and I had all sorts of ideas and visuals floating around in my imagination which I was desperate to get down on paper for future work. This project is my opportunity to do something about that and hopefully produce an animation that supports the track. This is a link to the track: https://soundcloud.com/soulspear/tapestry-of-light-soul-spear I'm planning on taking a slightly different approach to this project: where my last one was a slower, backstory narrative, this one I'm going to try and make more of a fast-paced anime-style animation (similar to the examples I'll be giving in the next post). I already have an idea for the story, which needs some serious fleshing out (to be done this week) and I know that I want the main genre to be sci-fi (possibly with retro-futurism visuals) but with a genre twist somewhere along the lines. I also want it to be as epic a visual journey as I can possibly make it, in support of the excellent track. Everything's a bit vague at this stage, all my ideas need to be brought from my head to paper, so this week's plan is to do some studies on technique and methods, early character and style exploration, basic storyboarding, colour tests, mood boards etc etc.
Over the past month I've been focussing on getting my Concept Development Document complete and making sure I'm relatively prepared for the project ahead. As well as conducting a great deal of research into my chosen subjects I've also made sure to find time to prepare a lot of practical work in preparation for the second semester, which so far has mainly consisted of refining my art style. This is a priority for me at the moment; I've been making changes to my workflow and technique periodically over the past year or so and have noticed some areas that I'm not too happy/comfortable with. I've been trying to find ways to increase my drawing and rendering speed, which on one hand is a direct result of workflow, and the other is related to anatomical and art style knowledge and experience. I'm quite comfortable with where my artwork is going and the workflow I've been using is relatively swift and consistent, however I still find some problems with anatomy that can only be addressed by further study. I did a fair bit of that, combining what I'd learnt with style development: I prefer semi-real, almost caricatured art styles for my characters, so that was something I wanted to implement into my own work. I have loads of pages of sketchbook studies - still to be scanned - which I'll share in a later post. When I was doing these studies I chose to go straight to ink on paper, skipping any pencil sketching phases in an attempt to gain confidence and efficiency. To a degree this worked out for me: by making every mark count, I found myself becoming more careful and thoughtful before putting pen to paper. Although there were a TON of bad drawings during this process, there was some visible improvement along the way. When I next went to create some drawings using my digital workflow, there were some improvements in speed and execution. Here are a few of my earlier attempts at injecting some style into my characters. The focus of these attempts was mainly on linework and sketchy value explanation rather than character design or tight rendering.
The main problem I found while doing these digital sketches was that I was trying to come up with characters from imagination, without any prior character design iterations. This slowed the drawing process down a little, as I was trying to find shapes and designs I liked before committing to design. As a result, I considered how I might be able to further increase my output speed. The first set of sketches were pretty swift to make, taking only an hour or so to get from sketch to refined lineart, so I knew my technique was getting quicker. I figured that basing my next set of drawings on existing character designs might be a good way to focus more time on technique rather than having to worry about coming up with interesting designs on the fly. For that reason, I decided that drawing up some super-heroes in my style might be an interesting idea. I've never really been all that into the Marvel or DC comic universe, but there's no doubting that their characters are well designed and I later found out that they're actually quite good fun to draw too. I made a point of making each day count for this exercise, so over the course of a few days, I used my morning warm-up session - before essays, other projects etc - be about drawing up a different character.
To try and increase the time I had to focus on technique with these drawings, I made sure that I didn't think too much about the colouring stage - I was thinking more of a graphic design perspective with each illustration and kept things relatively simple. The result was fairly successful, I was able to get some experimentation in lineart techniques (even the sketching phases were an improvement for me as I had a little more time to focus on trying to get things right first time - although it didn't always work out too great in the end). Following this exercise I took a step back and began to re-evaluate my work. While I was sticking quite closely to my lineart style from before, seeing it in this simple form made me think that might lines were a bit too cartoony... I'm trying to mature my artstyle in one way, while playing with stylised character designs, so I needed to rethink that aspect. I decided that for the next character, I would place a bit more emphasis on the thought process behind the illustration. I thought Thor might be a good character to draw next, so did a quick bit of visual research to see what the trends in his design were. I gathered that he is often portrayed as a handsome, musculature hero figure - as most of these characters are - so I decided to rough him up a bit and age him a little to emphasise that roughness. Scars upon his face might be a good way to get across the point of him being a warrior too. With this in my mind, I started thinking about my art style and how I could improve that. The first thing I realised was that I had grown out of the bold lines... a number of artists prefer to use more refined linework for their drawings and I've always thought that style looked more improved upon mine, so I thought about implementing that into my work. Secondly was my colouring style: I would generally just lay on the flat colours, some gradients for colour variations, then finish up with cel-shaded shadows. It was about time to evolve that style a little and adopt the comic-book colouring technique (which is fairly similar, but with more highlights applied to add volume to the otherwise quite flat cel-shading). It was pretty easy to implement this new technique into my workflow and I quickly adapted it to fit. Here are the results of that exercise:
So in summary, my linework overhaul worked out well - I'm really happy with the new look of that stage. The additions to my colouring technique worked out ok too, I think. I like the process of the colouring technique as it's technical, yet fast and fun. As for the final result of the colours, I think there's a bit more I could add to them in terms of values, but the end result is far better looking than my previous cel-shading efforts, so that's something I'll be using more of in future.
Next on my list was to get some ideas of the colour scheme figured out for the animation. I wasn't too concerned with having left it this late in the project, I don't think it's a problem to do so: as long as the values are figured out early enough, colour shouldn't be an issue as it's something that can be tweaked easily in digital software. Using all my working files from the last stage made it easy to apply colour to each layer and adjust them as necessary until I had what I was looking for. This process also allowed me to test out a few different ideas on the fly, which is always a bonus. At one point I'd considered having the colour scheme be very cold throughout the entire animation. Once I tested this out though, it just didn't sit right. I decided to keep the coldness for the first few snowy shots, then have it transition into warmer colours as the narrative turned to the underworld setting. I'd also thought of making a gradual transition from light to dark over the course of the animation, to reflect Taal's descent into madness/evil. Although I failed to get that quite right in the examples here, I'll make more effort to get a better contrast when it comes to the final illustrations later. As far as the characters were concerned, I left their colours quite vague at this point. Again, it was something I probably should've had accounted for in an earlier concepting stage, but I was still planning on basing the main character's colours from this image I produced a couple of months before.
I don't think it's a major setback to not have the characters as planned as I would have liked by now, as my colouring technique makes experimentation on the job pretty straightforward. I also reviewed the very first animatic I'd made. I felt that some of my camera motions since then had become quite repetitive and stale; there seemed to be a bit more fluidity in the earlier draft. I considered the shots I'd used then and applied some of them to this new storyboard draft to try and bring back a little energy and variety to the animation. Here are the images to date:
That brings me up to the point I'm at now with this project, ready to get on with the final illustrations and editing of the animation.
Summary of Workflow
As far as my workflow goes, I think it definitely needs a bit of refinement. I feel as if I've managed to do most of the important things well enough, just maybe in the wrong order. If I'd been more thorough in the planning stages I might not have had quite as much having to go back and re-work things later on. This kind of illustration project is new to me though, so it was a bit of a learning curve in places.
I wouldn't say I had any major difficulties up to this point; I managed to keep on top of things fairly well and take the time to reflect on what I was doing. I wasn't afraid to go back and draw something up from scratch in order to improve it.
Feedback was an important part of the process for me as there's always going to be things I miss when working on a project for this amount of time. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes can reveal errors that I might have missed.
In future projects, now that I have a solid idea of how my work-style relates to the end product, I'll make sure and implement a thorough concept stage to the early part of the workflow. I'll focus on designing as much as possible early on and that should hopefully encourage better ideas.
I'll also be spending a bit more time producing test animations earlier, with more focus on storyboards. I think if I begin a project with more composition tests I'll be able to experiment and produce more dynamic shots. With any luck, that approach should result in a more impressive final product.
Having audio to work with is something I really should have taken care of earlier. It made a huge difference to the atmosphere and flow of the animation, allowing me to see even more areas where my narrative needed re-working. Going by subtitles alone didn't reveal the silence gap and meant I was fiddling around with that much later than I probably should've been.
So I think that covers just about everything I've learnt up to this point. Once the animation is complete, I'll feature it in another post here and it'll hopefully be a good result.
