Branch 1b finished with sound

Branches 1a and 2a finished (with sound)

 

Intro Finished (with sound)

The finished intro animation, with sound. Not a lot to talk about in the sound department – it’s basically the same as the sound test was, with a few timing tweaks – but exporting the file was a bit annoying. I do my sound editing in Adobe Premiere, because After Effects’ sound preview is basically useless, but Premiere (for some reason) exported the file with a lot of flickery lines running across the video. I ended up exporting the audio only from Premiere, moving it into After Effects, lining up the audio with the video, clicking “make movie” and hoping the timing worked out. Fortunately, it did. Unfortunately, I had been using the “make title” function in premiere to create credits etc; I did not export that part so long story short this is why there’s no title card. I’ll have to fix this for the version I submit for the screening – might just give up and use Premiere for that; I need to attach credits for copyright reasons.

Website is almost there!

Just a quick note to say that the website for this project is now live and should be fully functional – I’ve tested it in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari (plus my housemate had a look at it in Google Chrome) and it seems to be working fine. I’ve tweaked the colours and I think I’ve fixed the problem with the main section getting shoved underneath the menu when the screen is too narrow. However, I have no clue how it will show up on the projector during my assessment – I can’t really test for this – and I’m basically hoping there’s nothing I’ve overlooked.

Most of the content is there – going to try and replace the videos there with ones that have sound tomorrow morning, once I’ve actually had a chance to export them from Premiere. I’ve also added a credits page.

Branch 1b

Branch 1b in animated form, incorporating the revisions mentioned in my previous post. This animation was supposed to go all the way to when she catches up with the man and gives him back his letter, but the studio closed before I was able to animate that part – I’m hoping to finish it early tomorrow morning. We shall see.

Branch 2d storyboards, revised

One decision I made while thinking about restructuring the various branches was that I wanted to keep the ending where she returns the letter to the man who dropped it. I liked that it provided a “simple” route through the story, one that made sense in and of itself, but looked different when viewed with information gained from other routes. However, that particular route did not involve talking to the juggler (or even show him in any detail) and the narrative relies on the viewer being able to recognise him as one of the people in the photograph found in branch 2b. My solution was to merge branches 2c and 2d into one branch – she still talks to the juggler, but he simply points her in the direction of the man (the role the stallholder played in branch 2d) instead of asking to see the letter. I feel this is the best decision – it keeps the juggler present in the story, while not being overly confusing.

Branch 1a

The animated version of Branch 1a – the protagonist opens the letter, reads it, and seeks out the address mentioned. An example of my new style at work – I do think this style lends itself to animation very well. It is simpler than my previous work, and because of that I think it is actually more suited to movement. It also has more of a resemblence to a children’s cartoon, but that’s no bad thing – while I have not been envisioning this as specifically targeted to children, it is definitely an “all-ages” piece: there is nothing in there that would make it unsuitable for children either. This art style strikes a good balance, then, because it is not so simple that it would appear overly childish and put adults off – basically, I have no wish to restrict this project’s appeal to any one audience.

If you compare this to the storyboards, you will notice that I cut a few shots out. This was partially because I did not think they were necessary to convey what was going on, partially because they could have been difficult to draw, and partially in order to complete the animation more quickly. (These reasons are all linked, really.) I’ve done this in a few places – in general I am more likely to cut shots at a late stage than to add them in.

A New Style

Okay. So a few posts ago I talked about the feedback I got at my tutorial and how I was given some advice on how to complete the project in time. Well, scaling back the number of endings wasn’t the only suggestion my tutor made. When I showed her my sound test she said that she liked my placeholder art and suggested that I try working in limited colour, with black lines, as this would be a way to speed up the production of images.

As you can see, I gave it a try. I liked the result, and feedback from my fellow students was positive, so I decided to use this style for the animations I had not yet completed (at this point I was doubting my ability to complete anything resembling a coherant narrative, as the entire middle section was unfinished). The plan was to then re-do the intro animation, which I had already completed, in that style, but unfortunately I ran out of time to do this.

The result is that my project is now a mix of multiple art styles. I’m a little disappointed in this – I don’t think the result is horrible or anything, but it’s less coherant than I would have liked: if I am going to mix styles I would have preferred to do so as a deliberate stylistic choice.

I continued to use watercolours for these pieces, but I kept the colours much more limited and used a lot more white space. I also outlined the shapes with fineliner (except in some earlier attempts, where the outlines are darker watercolour – I was still figuring out how I wanted to do this). Finally, I applied a black overlay layer in Photoshop – this was initially to make the lines properly dark, as when I was using watercolour for the outlines they often came out looking too washed-out, but I continued using it in the fineliner pieces because I liked the effect on the colours. I did not, however, use the overlay effect on the background images, because it made them look too heavy – I don’t mind the backgrounds looking less bold than the foreground images; it puts more focus on the characters.

Watercolours, part 4

Another batch of watercolour paintings. These ones were for branch 2b, in which the protagonist explores the old house. I had all of the paintings for this branch completed, but unfortunately ran out of time to animate them before the studio closed on Saturday. Since then I have been unable to do so – my home computer does not meet the system requirements to run After Effects and the studio has remained closed due to the bank holiday weekend. It is possible that I will be able to animate them in the few hours before the deadline tomorrow morning – and I plan to try –  but my top priority is finishing the sound editing on my other animations (my computer is likewise unable to install Adobe Premiere, which I have been using to synchronises sound to my videos as detailed here) so I will have to see how quickly things go.

Branch 2a: Watercolour Animation

In this ending, the protagonist explores the garden and encounters some weird plants. I had this completed when my tutor suggested that I cut down the number of endings to two, but as I said earlier, this isn’t one of the two I would have chosen. It has some of my favourite bits of animation – specifically, the gate opening, which I am rather proud of – but some of the art is rather rushed (the shot of the broken window in particular stands out to me as something I should probably have spent more time on) and it doesn’t really do much to tell the story.

I decided that it would be better to use the ending where she explores the house instead of this one – I still wanted to have the story branch when the protagonist picks up the envelope, as I consider what she does with the envelope to be the most important decision for the viewer to make (it kicks off the plot, after all). However, it is looking more and more like I will not be able to complete that ending in time – I do plan to try and finish it at the last minute, but we will see – so I may end up using this ending after all. That would be a shame, as the ending where she explores the house is the one that hints at the connection between the juggler and the man, but if it’s that or only having one ending, I choose to include this one regardless of its importance to the narrative. After all, the point of this project was to explore branching narrative – I can’t do that if it never branches.