Watercolours, part 3

This gallery contains 14 photos.

More watercolours – these ones from branch 2a. I’m particularly proud of the shots of the gate with the vines around it.

Watercolours, part 2

More of my watercolour art. These pieces, like the ones I posted a while ago, are all for the intro animation. They took longer to do than I would have liked, although I was able to speed the process up quite a bit as I had more practice at it.

Restructuring

The first of several major upheavals to this project that took place over the last week. I had a meeting with my tutor to discuss how things were going, and confessed that I was having difficulty producing work – particularly the paintings – as fast as I had hoped I would. One suggestion she made was that I cut down on the number of branches in the project.

Remember my diagram? I planned this project to branch twice, resulting in four possible endings. My tutor’s suggestion was to cut this down to one branch, with two possible endings. I gave this some thought. I did – and do – feel that four endings is a better way to fully explore the idea of branching narrative by showing that it can branch more than once, as well as allow me to build details of my story more subtly. However, it did not seem doable in the time I had left. One branching point, with two endings, may not allow me to explore the idea of branching narrative in as much depth, but it still explores it.

So, instead of viewing my project like this:

Intro
Choice One
/        \
Branch 1a    Branch 1b
Choice 2a    Choice 2b
/                \                  /                 \
Branch 2a Branch 2b Branch 2c Branch 2d

You could think of it like this:

Intro
Choice One
/        \
Branch 1a   Branch 1b
/                   \
Branch 2a     Branch 2b

Or, if you prefer:

Intro
Choice
/        \
Branch 1   Branch 2

This is obviously far simpler, than what I had originally planned. Hopefully, though, simpler doesn’t have to mean less interesting. And since I plan on putting these on the web, it is always possible for me to update it later with extra branches.

However, I had another dilemma to think about: which of the branches do I choose to keep. At the time I spoke to my tutor, I had one ending (branch 2a in the old outline) completed and another (the former branch 2b) with most of the art finished. However, this completed ending (the one where she explores the garden) probably conveys the least amount of story. Therefore, I decided to focus on completing the endings that would be able to tell the story most effectively, rather than the ones that were easiest to finish.

(Some things have changed now, and I may end up using that ending after all – more on that later.)

Branch 2d Storyboards

This branch – the final one – depicts what happens if the protagonist chooses to ask the stallholder where the man has gone.

The protagonist goes up to the stallholder and asks if she has seen the man. The stallholder says yes, and points the protagonist in the right direction. Meanwhile, the man is standing by the postbox, wondering where he put the letter. It’s getting near the final collection time. Fortunately, the protagonist turns up with the letter and hands it to him. He posts it.

This is the simplest route through the story and the one that raises the least questions. However, I do hope that the presence of other possibilities will be enough to intice people to go through it again and realise that there is a lot more to the story than shown here. I guess I think of this route as a kind of “surface view” of the story – it seems simple, but there is a lot going on underneath that is not necessarily obvious at first.

Branch 2c Storyboards

These storyboards show what happens if the protagonist chooses to ask the juggler where the man has gone.

She approaches the juggler and explains that she’s looking for the man who dropped the envelope she is now carrying. The juggler asks to see the envelope, and is surprised to notice that it is addressed to him.

This particular ending is one that I admit is a little confusing. The story here is that the juggler is the man’s son, but they have been out of touch for some time and the man was going to send the letter in an attempt to reconnect with his son. This is hinted at by the photograph of them together that can be found in the old house, if the viewer chooses to explore that branch of the story instead. However, on its own, this ending is pretty confusing. To an extent this is intentional – the idea is to create enough mystery that the viewer will want to see the other possible endings in the hope of understanding what is going on – but it’s quite difficult striking the right balance between “too obvious” and “too confusing”.

My absolute favourite things here are the speech bubbles. I decided a while ago that I was not going to attempt any spoken dialogue for this animation – too complicated – and that everything should be conveyed through the visuals. In other parts I have relied on characters’ expressions and body language to do this, but the conversation that takes place here – first the protagonist asking where the man has gone, then the juggler asking to look at the letter, and finally the reveal that it is addressed to the juggler – felt too complicated to be able too convey with gestures (at least without resembling a game of cherades). I toyed with the idea of using subtitles, or speech bubbles with words in – which might well be needed for, “It’s addressed to me,” – but I am very fond of the use of images inside the speech bubbles. They are simple and rather fun to draw, and, I think, add an element of humour to the piece, as well as being quick to understand – if I used words, I would have to ensure that the viewer has enough time to actually read them, whereas the pictures convey information much more quickly.

Branch 1b Storyboards

I’ve been rather belated in getting the rest of my storyboards posted – I completed them quite a while ago – but better late than never.

This storyboard covers what will happen if, rather than opening the letter, the protagonist chooses to chase after the man in an attempt to return it to him.

She chases after the man, but loses sight of him, finding herself at a large square with multiple directions he could have gone in. She is left with the choice of who to ask for directions – a juggler, or a woman running a stall.

I am fond of some of the shots in this – particularly the protagonist waving the envelope around and the wide shot of the square. However, I feel like it could be stronger in terms of narrative. The choice at the end is not a terribly meaningful one – the viewer is given no indication as to which of the two people may have seen the man, so deciding which one to ask pretty much comes down to guesswork. If they have already seen ending 2b (exploring the house) and recognised the juggler from his photograph, they will have some indication that asking him might explain some things about the plot, but this requires the viewer to make that mental leap in the first place – something they may not do if they were not paying attention to the photograph, or if they did not remember it clearly, or if my art was not clear enough. The problem could be solved, perhaps, by introducing some greater hint as to where the man has gone, but I am unsure what would fit the bill.

Intro Animation: Watercolour Art

Over the last few days this project has gone through some fairly large ups and downs. There have been a few major setbacks. I’ll talk about this more in a later post, though – one effect of so much development in a short period is that this blog is now pretty out of date, so I’m going to go through things in roughly the order that they happened in and try and get caught up over the course of the next day.

So, here we have a more finalised version of my intro animation – without sound, in this case. I’m going to use the same music and effects I did in the tester below, but I haven’t yet got a version of this video with the sounds synchronised.

While I am reasonably happy with this animation, I can see some problems with it. The most obvious one – to me – is that there are a few places where there are some white pixels left over from the paper I painted these on. I fixed the worst of these, though, and in the end I don’t think the remaining ones are overly noticeable. Still, it’s something I have tried to improve on in later animations.

I have some more thoughts on this style – and what I eventually decided to do with it – but I think they will fit better in a later post.

Intro Animation: Sound Test

I decided to move my intro test into Adobe Premier and synchronise some sound to it, in order to practice doing so before I tried it with the final animation.

I’ve actually done quite a bit of film editing – including synchronising clips to music – before, though not for a few years, so this wasn’t terribly difficult for me. I did take a little time to get used to using Premier, as while I have used it before, it has been quite a while, and it was never the program I used the most. Still, I found it fairly intuitive – my experience has been that film editing programs are all fairly similar in terms of interface.

The main difficulty I had here was making sure the music didn’t sound too out of time with the track. I animated this clip well before I had chosen the piece of music, and the music itself is a pre-composed (as well as freely available – more on that in a minute) piece rather than one written specifically for this project. (Composing the required amount of music would have been far too much work for me to do, and while I considered hiring another student to do so, in the end it was easier to make use of free resources.) This is a problem with my planning more than anything else – although, having since tried to edit with music in After Effects, I have to say that I find the playback function frustrating enough that it puts me off – and something I will keep in mind in future.

I was able to deal with this problem somewhat by carefully choosing which section of the track to use – the full piece is several minutes long – and also by padding the video slightly with a title screen and credits. These also served as a means for me to properly credit each artist whose work I used. However, as this project is designed to be viewed by following links from video to video – a process I do not wish to break up with repeated title screens –  and any given path through the narrative may not use the same sounds or music, I am considering leaving credits out of the videos themselves and instead having a dedicated credits page on the website. This will mean finding another solution to the timing issues.

The music I have used is by Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com. He has produced a large number of pieces of music designed for use in film (or other moving image) soundtracks. The pieces found on his website are all licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, making it legal for me to use them in my work, for whatever purpose, provided that I credit Kevin MacLeod. I cannot thank him enough for making his work available to others like this.

The sound effects, similarly, come from Freesound.org, a directory of sound recordings that are also licenced under various Creative Commons licences, or in the public domain. Full credits are in the video, and again, my thanks goes out to those who have chosen to make their work available to the public.

Intro Animation, Shot 2

I’m posting this image on its own (rather than in a batch like the other watercolour paintings) because I want to talk a little bit about it and the decisions that led me to make it the way it is.

In an effort to keep organised, I have separate folders for the images I’m creating for each of the short animations that make up this project. I also label each image with which shot it is for (some shots have several images) and, if needed, a quick description. This painting, as the title of this post indicates, is Shot 2 of the intro animation.

Originally – as you can see in my test animation – the second shot, showing the protagonist leaving the shop, was meant to move. The figure of the protagonist could be seen coming through the door and out onto the street. The problem? I’m not very experienced with animation. I decided early on to get around this by mostly having still images moving across other still images – something like a puppet show – rather than full animation. But when I tried this with the shot of the girl coming out of the door, it… really didn’t look very convincing. I couldn’t let it slide. I decided that it would be better to have a still image that worked rather than movement that didn’t.

I don’t particularly mind having still images in this animation. There are other places where I’ll probably use them – although I like to obscure them a little with pans or zooms. The piece still involves moving image in places, so it hits the requirements of the brief, and while a lot of the shortcuts I’m making are to cover for my own lack of experience in animation, I don’t see why they can’t be legitimate stylistic choices.

Visual Inspiration: The Snowman

The 1982 animated short The Snowman, based on Raymond Briggs’ picture book/graphic novel, has been a part of my life since early childhood. It is a gorgeous piece of animation, and it felt natural that I should look to it for inspiration now.

My main source of inspiration has been the art style used. The colours are soft and the forms are rather simple, though the sophisticated camera movements keep it from feeling too basic. The shadows shift constantly, giving even still images a sense of movement, and the lines that have been used to shade it are still visible in some places – the whole animation has a sense of being a moving coloured pencil drawing, something that I find very appealing.

The compositions used in The Snowman are sophisticated and visually striking. While the famous Walking in the Air uses cinematic pans that are rather beyond my skill level (too much movement; too many things rotating) I can still take lessons from them in terms of what makes good composition.

It is also a very good example of animation that works incredibly well with the music that is scored to it – see the moment in the Walking in the Air sequence where a whale’s fin splashes in the ocean, timed perfectly with a cymbal crash in the music. One thing I have been having trouble with is setting my animation to music – I will talk about this more in another post, but as I am using pre-recorded music I am having difficulty making sure the timing of my animation fits with the soundtrack – so this is another element I can learn from.