08 // Establishing A Workflow (pt.03)

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.

07 // Establishing A Workflow (pt.02)

Following feedback from class and my own concerns with certain elements of the animatic, I returned to the narrative to do a bit of re-working there. There wasn't too much needing changed so it wasn't an ordeal or anything. This is the result of my second narrative draft:

Next up was to sort out the storyboard. It had been pointed out to me that the order of the shots might need a little refinement, which I completely agreed with. I swapped around the shots and made sure I was happy with the change before moving onto the next thing.

One of my personal gripes with the original animatic was the demon-lord design. As I had come up with his design during the storyboarding - rather than doing some proper concept stages earlier - I wasn't entirely happy with the rushed result. I spent a day sketching out some designs for the character and considering a more impressive composition for his shot until I had something I was more happy with.

The last major thing I had to do was to consider an environment and setting for the animation to take place in. A lot of these ideas had been in my head since the very beginning, so I'd always considered these things to some degree. However, I still had to get the ideas down on paper before I could really start problem-solving. I felt it was important to get these details into the next storyboard draft to make it feel a bit nearer to completion, so I spent an afternoon sketching out some ideas for that.

I was becoming more and more drawn to having the story in a winter setting, maybe a desolate land. There were a number of reasons this appealed to me so I continued to explore some ideas until I was certain I could make it work.

The winter setting would allow me to use a lot of snowy atmospherics in each shot, which would benefit the depth and parallax effect. Also, since the narrative was to feature a transition from the cold land to the dark underworld, there should be a good opportunity to play with colour temps and lighting throughout.

With all these changes made, I assembled the new storyboard draft and followed the same steps as before to have working files that could be easily animated within After Effects.

(My plan was to include the atmospheric particles in the latter shots too, as I could use them as hot sparks in the fiery underworld, rather than the soft and snowy type from the earlier shots).

Following this draft of the animatic, I could see some more points that needed attention. Having the environments and atmospherics in place made a big difference and allowed me to see more clearly how the animation was progressing visually.

My major concern at this point was that I hadn't applied any audio to my tests. It should've been something I'd accomplished at the start as I understood that having a soundtrack and voice-over would have a major effect on my progress. If I had the soundtrack over the animation, I would better understand the atmosphere I was creating, and if I had the narrative voice-over applied, I'd have a better idea of how the whole thing flowed. It would also bring attention to any problems with the narrative script itself.

At least I was making the effort to take care of that at this stage though. Thankfully it all worked out quite well. I won't share this version of the animatic as I had to use my own voice as a temporary fix for the voice-over - I plan on getting someone better suited to voice-acting for that role - and my voice makes it sound a bit funky, but the exercise served it's purpose and showed me that there's a slight gap where an extra line of dialogue could definitely help. Besides that though, the timing worked out fine and the pace seems nice.

My next mission was to apply the lighting to each shot. Again, this was one of those things I'd had in my mind from the beginning but had never properly sat down and figured out. I took care of this and applied a variety of basic lighting styles to the storyboard to try and get an idea of the dramatic lighting I hoped to achieve throughout the animation.

06 // Establishing A Workflow (pt.01)

When it came to figuring out the most efficient workflow for this kind of project, I gave quite a lot of thought to the steps I would be taking to produce the final product, and worked backward from there. I'd already established that my artwork style would work alright for this type of animation, so there wasn't too much to worry about that.

I've worked on a solo project of this scale before at college, where I followed a workflow that looked a little like this: concept art > design > storyboard > 3D modelling > animating > rendering > sound production > editing. I wasn't too intimidated by this project to begin with, although I realised the importance of having a steady, planned workflow, as things can get a little hairy in places.

This is the college project animation that I produced, if it's of any interest:

I wanted to present a lot of dynamic shots in that video, and have good variety in camera work and compositions - much like I'm doing now - but there's definitely a degree of flexibility when working with 3D software: it's a little more forgiving and makes it possible to correct shots and angles on the fly. On the other hand, with illustrations like I'm working with now, if I decide a particular shot isn't working out I need to get back to the storyboard then redraw that whole shot from scratch - as I did later on in the parallax project. So I'm very aware of the possible extra man-hours required of illustration-based animations. However I've learnt now that if it's planned well enough in the early stages, the need to go back and make any changes/corrections should be minimised.

I figured that in order to get a good, clean start to my parallax project, I'd have to get a narrative planned out before beginning work on the storyboard. After a day or so of scribbling down ideas and sketches I finally had something to work with. The important thing was to choose a theme and characters that would keep me interested throughout, which would help me to stay engaged and work faster and harder. So I chose the Fantasy genre, with a story about knights and demons.

This was my first narrative draft:

When I wrote this up, I was trying to plan ahead and take into account the pace changes that I'd seen in several of the clips I had studied from earlier.

From there I went on to draw up a storyboard, with some of the sketches I'd been working on providing me with inspiration. I'd never been great with storyboards in the past, so I sought a little help with technique and came across this post from Videomaker.com, which made things go a lot smoother.

I was also referring to Setting the Scene (MacLean) which is invaluable with several sections devoted to storyboarding, scene layouts and animation planning.

This is the first storyboard I created:

In hindsight I wish I'd established more of a concept art stage beforehand; my character designs were based off an image I'd drawn a couple of months prior so I was able to draw up a few alternate designs easily enough, but the demon designs I was having to make on the fly for the storyboard, so there was a bit of lag there and the final result probably suffered quite a bit.

I'd made sure to keep all the important layers seperate in each panel of the storyboard so that I could quickly get them into After Effects to edit together an animatic. This would be the first test for flow and timing, so it was a major step in the project.

Here's the first draft of the animatic:

As soon as I had the animatic playing, there were a few points I noticed would need refinement. This was to be shown to the class for group feedback, so I hoped that any errors I'd missed would be brought to my attention.

05 // Alternative Style Test - Inspired by Borderlands

Earlier on in my Animation project, before I began work on my own narrative and illustration workflow, I'd been quite interested in this clip of the Borderlands backstory cutscene:

I liked the style they'd used: by presenting line drawings with hatch-shading, they used a technique to animate the drawings appearing on the page while the camera was animated to swoop by and zoom in and out on different areas. While it wasn't something I could see myself using for my final work I wanted to at least try and mimic the style, to see if I could learn anything new from the experience. It's one thing to study from watching a clip and another to try and replicate the techniques: sometimes you can learn a lot more from a practical experiment.

Since my own artwork follows a similar linework-based approach, I was able to use some of my own work in the experiment. I'd been sketching out some character ideas earlier to try and jump-start the creative process and gain some ideas for my project. I used this sketch as my basis for this test. Cleaning up the sketch and adding an inked BG to give it some extra interest, I figured I was close enough to the Borderlands visual style for this purpose, so arranged the file into various layers ready for animating in After Effects.

I'm going to copy-paste from my Animation blog for this part, as I gave a pretty accurate description of my process for that, and I'm basically just repeating myself here:

"I had watched the Borderlands (1) animation a few times to refresh my memory before trying something myself. I noted that they weren't always using parallax, so I decided to try the same kind of shot as they used several times, which was a camera gently floating across a drawing as it gradually appeared upon the page.

The method in which the drawing appears looked as if they were using some kind of animated cloud effect (it reminded me of Filters > Clouds, in Photoshop) as a mask to gradually reveal the ink lines. I only knew the basics of masking in AE, so I watched a few tutorials to see if they referred to any advanced techniques. Which they didn't, so I just went ahead to try it out myself.

I quickly attempted a few things before finally getting some progress. I can't entirely remember the first few attempts and what I tried, but they were way off the mark so not really worth mentioning. At that point I was thinking of using the parallax effect, but I abandoned that idea and decided to keep the drawing (character and BG lines) on one layer, while a paper texture provided the backdrop,

The idea was to create a new solid layer which would have to behave like an animated mask, changing from black to white with a cloudy style, gradually revealing the drawing upon the paper. 

I made the solid layer black and kept it above the drawing. I scanned the AE effects folder to see if anything resembled the clouds filter from Photoshop. A quick bit of experimenting with several of them and I found Fractal Noise to be the best. It was highly manipulatable and every aspect of the cloud formation could be animated, which was exactly what I was looking for.

I knew what look I was going for - similar to the way film reel burns, swiftly and erratically in big spots spreading out and catching onto others - so I adjusted the brightness, contrast and evolution of the cloud to resemble what I had in mind. Once it was behaving as I hoped, I animated each of these elements to get a bit of variation to it.

The next part of my theory was to make this black and white effect act as a mask and reveal the layer beneath, keeping the paper backdrop intact throughout. I didn't really know exactly how to do this kind of thing in AE; in Photoshop it's fairly straightforward to apply a black and white image as a mask to a layer, but AE is a little more confusing.

I played around with a few different ideas before stumbling upon track matte. I watched a short tutorial on the fundamentals of it and tried it out on my own file. By changing the track matte property of the drawing layer to Luma Matte "Black Solid 1", the effect I was after worked perfectly.

I tweaked a few of the animation settings so that the effect would occur over the space of 15 seconds or so, producing a slower, more dramatic effect. Then I took each layer into 3D space and added a new camera that would be animated to float across the page and zoom in or out on the drawing as it appeared.

I made a few different passes and edited them together to get a mini showreel to showcase the effect."

"The effect worked as well as I could have hoped, so I'm pretty happy I managed to figure out the technique (despite not fully getting what I was doing, I can always go back and get better understanding of the process later). It might not look anywhere near as good as the Borderlands style, but I've picked up enough tricks from it that I might consider applying something similar to my own style later.

What I didn't like about the animation style is how the image becomes distorted as the camera floats by. Perspective plays a big part in the camera view and can have some drastic effects on the proportions of the drawing, making it look a bit weird in places, but I'm sure that could be adjusted in the camera settings.

I'll have to do a test at some point to see if parallax is as effective with this; I ran into some masking problems when I first tried it, which is why I went for the flat drawing look. I'll try that out again soon and see where it goes."

I still think that the style is something I won't use again for my own work, but there's no denying that I learnt something from the test. Plus it gave me a good bit of After Effects experience - I'm probably barely an intermediate user of that software, so any extra hands-on time I get with it is going to be good prep for my final work. 

04 // Studies from 3D Rendered Game Cinematics and Movies

I briefly touched upon this during my work for the Animation class as I realised that even though I'm working with 2D illustrations, I'm also using a lot of camera techniques which I don't know a whole lot about. So I figured it made sense to broaden my research a little and take into account 3D rendered cutscenes from games, and even movies.

I chose a couple of games that had inspired me in the past - Diablo 3 and Dark Souls - and also Pixar's Up, which features an extremely effective backstory intro cinematic that tells it's story with only visuals and music.

What I hoped to gain from this was a little more exposure to some of the camera techniques and compositions that industry professionals are using in their films.

Diablo 3

Dark Souls

Up

There was quite a lot to take in from all of these shots, and these are just the ones from each clip which appealed to me the most. The main thing I had to take into account was that while each of these clips are fully animated, the style I'm using is treated more like a frozen moment in time that the camera is able to pass through. My characters and objects aren't animated, so not of all the techniques used here will be applicable to my own work. I had to make sure and focus on camera movements, colour theory, placements and compositions, in order to get the most from this exercise.

When I first made a quick study of Dark Souls and Up, I noticed things like: changes of narrative pace supported by quicker editing and faster tempo audio; dynamic compositions and angles; and also atmospherics and lighting. Now that I'm returning to these clips after having already produced most of the practical work for my animation project, I'm noticing more techniques that I should be able to implement into my next experiments.

I managed to apply change of pace to my own work, which I planned for during the storyboarding and narrative writing stages. I later emphasised the pace change with quicker editing in my animatics. I'm unsure if I've been entirely successful yet, but there's still time for refinement there, so hopefully I can rescue it if I have to.

I also thought about the influence of colour; how each shot should follow a similar colour scheme, with a transition taking place somewhere throughout the storyboard to reflect the shift in mood/emotion and provide variety to the visuals.

When I see these clips now and look into them a little deeper, I'm seeing that when it comes to presenting dynamic compositions and more interesting shots, the planning stages are by far the most crucial. When I look at some of the shots that I've studied here, it's plain to see that a ton of effort has went into figuring out the best angles and sets. I'd already learnt that storyboarding was a very important stage in this kind of a project, but this has reinforced that idea and made it clear that it's possibly the most important step, requiring refinement and revision in order to produce the best results.

Throughout each of these clips there's a fluidity of motion and variety to the camera shots - something that I feel my own work lacks at the moment. I feel as if my current animatics suffer from repetitive camera motions. This is something I might be able to fix by the end stages, but then I may not have prepared myself for enough during the storyboarding stage. If anything, this has again taught me the importance of placing more emphasis on storyboard planning and refining.

I feel better off for having made these studies and I think I'm far more prepared for my next project. I'll be taking into account a lot of what I've learnt here and improving my workflow with the extra knowledge. In future posts I'll make some more of these studies, aimed at movies, to see if I can pick up any interrsting camera tricks from that; I'm quite interested in leanring a bit more about the dolly-zoom maneuvre - which I attempted in some earlier edits - to see if this effect might be useful in my practical work.