Here are some doodles for a character based on a guy I used to know at my old work, he would make a great politician.

Animation

In character design it is good to emphasise the face because you can show so much emotions through the face. Animation is concerned with creating an illusion, synthesizing movement in space. To do this it often helps to break things into smaller pieces, for example we put the background on one level, the figures body on one level and the head on another level.

The Disney style of animation is so labour intensive that it becomes unproductiove for begining independent animators to emulate. It is better to work in a smarter way by breaking characters into smaller parts which can be animated independently without having to redraw the whole drawing again.

The analogue way of doing animation has 80 years of history behind it, the digital world of animation is only a few years old, at this point it is often good to work in between the two. Creating images in the analogue world and then using the digital realm for helping to animate them. We looked at various examples of past students work showing how they used 2 1/2D techniques in their films.

Justin Foo, a past graduate working in the industry now, visted us for the hunters and gathers lunch and talked to us about his experiences working in the industry and his year at RMIT working on his film Unmarked.

Editing
The Preproduction, Production and Postproduction stages of a project were discussed and where editing fit int the whole process.
Flow diagrams of the the way hand-drawn linear animation, flash animation and stop-motion animation progressed were drawn.

Non-linear editing, refers to editing which is done on a computer where we can jump to any point of the film at any time. This is in contrast to linear editing done on film where to get to a point on a film you need to wind the film to that point. Linear editing forced the editor to THINK before he did anything. But with the introduction of the computer you can now do before you think (with mixed results). It has become so easy to cut here and cut there that many beginning editor don’t think about what they are doing and end up with 50 different cuts and then can’t chose between them, the tyranny of choice. A better way is to think about your cut before you start clicking away. In editing the stuff that you leave out is just as important as what you leave in.

Our screenings will be on Betcam SP and our frame rate will 25fps. The dimensions of the image depend on the pixel aspect ratios. The computer has square pixelsand video has rectangular pixels. When doing stuff on the computer work at 768 x 576 PAL. DV Pal is at 720 x 576, this is the dimension as it is written to the Betcam SP. If working in flash then use 768 x 576 Square Pixels 25fps. SMPT time code was explained.

We were then given a crash course in Final Cut Pro.

In animation the relationship between the animator and the character is one of master/slave, where the character can be made to do anything by the animator and this god like power is what attracts many megalomaniacs to the field. When the animator know his/her character well the charcter starts to have a life of it’s own and the animator knows how the character would act in different situations.

Since the appearance of a character can be readily changed in animation, the character designer is able to push features in a direction which suits the personality of the character.

Here is a list of things that the class came up with in regards to what makes a character:

• Physical characteristics/clothing
• Anthropomorphic
• Idiosyncrasies
• Contrasts
• A past which influences the way the character behaves now
• The way they sound
• The way they move (e.g speed)
• Relationship with others
• Flaws
• Wants/Motivations
• Abilities/Disabilities
• Environment and how they react to it
• Their mood
• Personality
• Reactions
• Change, character arc

It is important to remember what a character sounds like, it is easy to get caught up with the visuals of a character but the sound will make up a large part of this character. The character does not necessarily have to be humanoid, for example a chair is in Norman McClaren for at NFBC. For the character to be believable it must act consistently within the story, the character can change (an the audience enjoy seeing the character change in some way) but this is a gradual change (character arc) and is different to the character acting one way one minute and acting in an inconsistent way the next moment. In this case the audience will find it hard accept the character, is he one or the other?
The audience’s imagination is powerful tool, use it to save on animating things, you dont have to spoon feed everything to them, leave something to spark their imagination and it will be more powerful than any animation. Interesting results can be achieved by putting known characters in new environments.

We looked at the short film Cloud Cover which elegantly deals with the issue of depression. In this case depression is represented as a cloud which is a character of it’s own in the film.

External Manifestation of an Interior State (EMIS)

• What do we know about the character?
• How do we know it?
• What do they want?

As an example we looked at the short film Hitch where in the first part of the film we are misled by the clues that we are given about the types of characters we are seeing. This surprises the audience and puts a smile on their face. It’s good to play with the audience’s expectations to break them out of the patterns which they have seen over and over again. Balance your characters so that they are a match for each other, stories are about conflicts and no one likes to watch a one sided conflict.

Here are the notes for character: http://aim.adc.rmit.edu.au/kcawley/Scr_chrctr.html

After a lot of discussions with the glass shop about how 2mm glass is too thin and very easily broken, I ordered a circular piece of 3mm glass to be used for the working surface of the Samtiq. The glass has 3 holes drilled in it and bolts into the wood underneath it and then the little metal knobs screw ontop of that to hide the bolts.

I started by placing the glass on top of the Samtiq and marking where the screen was going to be. I then masked off the underside of the glass and started painting the glass black. Oh I made a Samtiq logo stencil and painted that orange before going over it with black. Need to wait for the logo to dry completely before starting with the black, which I didnt do and so I had to do a bit of a fix up later. Anyway it will look really messy painting the back of the glass but when you turn it around you get this even smooth colour (just like they used to paint animation cells). I had to do 4 or 5 coats of the black to make sure all the holes were filled. Here is a shot of me painting the glass:

Then I just marked where the bolts were going to be and drilled the wood and that was it. I am happy with the look of the unit now. Since I have the protective glass I can now use full pressure without worrying about damaging the LCD, although the glass is a bit too smooth and doesnt have the grip feel of paper but I hear that the felt nibs from wacom help with that. Here are more shots of the unit:

In Michael Dudok De Wit’s Father and Daughter, the stage is set with a father and his young daughter riding their bicycles to the edge of what looks to be a lake. The father says goodbye to his daughter and goes down to the water’s edge, there is a moment of hesitation before he runs back up to his daughter and gives her one last hug goodbye. He then goes down to the water’s edge and he rows away as his daughter anxiously looks on. This is the first plot point.

What follows feels rather odd because we are so used to things happening which have significance in themselves but in this film we see mundane scenes of the daughter’s life repeated as she grows up and keeps visiting the lake, hoping that maybe her father will return. Although the scenes in this second act are everyday occurrences they still hold the audience’s interest through the use of interesting actions such as the effect of a very strong wind on the cyclist, cycling through puddles of water and interesting shadow scapes.

The second plot point is reached when the daughter has grown old and is hardly able to cycle any more. She arrives at the lake and puts her bike on its stand, intending to go down to the lake but the bicycle falls over. She picks it up and tries again but it falls once again, she picks it up again and it seems to stay put this time before falling over again. She considers it for a moment before deciding to leave it on the ground. This scene prepares the audience for what is to come.

She is leaving this world and in the final act we see her going through the lake which has now gone dry and become overgrown with tall grass. She finds her father’s boat in the sandy clearing and curls up inside the boat and goes to sleep.

In the final scene we see her waking up and finding her father waiting for her, she transforms to her younger self as she walks towards him and is finally reunited with him.

I think this sad but beautiful film is about the cyclic nature of life, as symbolised by the wheels of the bicycles which run like a thread throug the film. In regards to this film using the “Big Three”, I don’t think it has “outstanding characters” as they are always seen from a afar and because act two deals with her growing old it is better that we don’t have a concrete image of the daughter. But the film does have interesting actions and locations. Although the location is the lake in every scene, each time it is looked at from a different point of view or with interesting lighting effects which helps to keep the audience interested in these repetitive scenes which I think symbolise the often mundane and meaninglessness of life.

The characters in this film are not individuals but symbols hence the film is already missing one of the Big Three: “outstanding characters” so if we were to experiment by removing another one of the big three, lets say interesting actions, then I think the story would still work but the audience may get bored by the repetition of act two.

Could we take out an act and still make the film work? Maybe we could take out the beginning and show the daughter character returning again and again to the lake but the audience not knowing why she keeps returning to the lake. This may make the audience more curious about what it is that draws her back to the lake, but I think the daughter character would need to be made more recognisable, maybe with distinct habits and mannerisms which can be carried through as she gets older.

The second film that I chose to look at for this exercise in narrative structure is Pan’s Labyrinth. A film with many threads running through it but our heroine is Ofelia, a young girl caught up in the chaos of 1944 Spain. She is traveling with her pregnant mother (who has married a murderous captain) to a military post in the country so that The Captain can be present at the birth of his son.

The movie starts with the narrator telling us about a girl from a different world who is attracted by the light of the human world, so much so that she starts to spend too much time there and is lost to here own world, but her parents wait for her knowing that one day she will return.

We are introduced to Ofelia as a girl living in the world of her fairytale books and stories. On the way to The Captain, her mother has a touch of morning sickness and the procession of cars must stop while the mother is recovering. It is here that the seed of the other world is planted. While walking around, Ofelia notices a piece of stone on the road which has an eye carved into it, looking around in the forest she finds the statue that it belongs to and puts the piece back in its place which results in a fairy creature materializing. This creature becomes her herald and once at the military post, leads her through the labyrinth to meet her mentor, the Faun.

Ofelia is called on to perform three tasks to prove that her essence is still in tact and has not been spoiled by living amongst humans. She is committed to perform the tasks and the refusal of the call to adventure comes more from her mother, who has dressed her up in a pretty dress and wants Ofelia to give up her childish books and wanderings.

But our heroine is worthy of the task and disobeys her mother in order to perform the first task assigned to her, which involves her entering the other world via a tunnel at the base of an ancient fig tree. Her task is to destroy a toad which has been poisoning the fig tree, she successfully completes this but in the process her dress is ruined and her mother is very upset with her.

Meanwhile the other characters in the film are on their own journeys and more is revealed about the monstrous Captain and why he is the way he is.

Having completed the first task, the Faun warns Ofelia that the second task is very dangerous and she should be careful not to eat or drink anything in the place which she is about to enter. The little helpers which the Faun has provided seem to show her the wrong keyhole, she finds the correct one by using her instincts. This results in Ofelia ignoring the little helpers as they try to warn her not to give into the temptation of tasting some of the food at the sumptuous banquet table as she is about to leave. Two grapes are enough to awaken the monster guarding the table and two of the three little helpers pay with their lives. On her return the Faun is furious with Ofelia and breaks all contact with her.

Here the heroine experiences a little death and is forced to reflect on what she has done. Everything around her is falling apart, her mother dies while giving birth and she is tormented by the heartless Captain. Having had enough she tries to escape with Mercedes (the sympathetic housekeeper) but they are captured and Ofelia is imprisoned in her room. It is here that the mentor returns and gives her another chance but warning her that this is her last chance.

In the final confrontation, Ofelia has fetched her recently-born brother and taken him to the centre of the labyrinth on the Faun’s orders. Here she finds out that the blood of her brother, an innocent, must be spilled in order for her to be free of the human world. In this climax she refuses to hand over the baby and her step-father emerges from the labyrinth, takes the baby and then shoots Ofelia. Ofelia’s blood, also an innocent, is spilled and she has fulfilled her final test.

She is taken to her father, the king of the fairy world as her body is grieved over by her human friends in the ordinary world. At the king’s court she is reunited with her family and rewarded for her actions.

A clear conformation between Ofelia’s journey in this film and the Mythic Cycle can be seen. Some areas are lightly touched upon but the structure is certainly present and can be readily recognised.

The characters in Pan’s Labyrinth demand a lot of attention, whether it be repulsion from The Captain’s evil acts, the uncertainty about the Faun’s motives or the motherly strength of Mercedes who has become the surrogate mother of Ofelia, they all keep the audience interested in what is going on. Add to that the surreal imagery of the other world, action-filled battle scenes of the human world and the mythological symbolism and we have a film which can be watched a number of times and still there will be more to discover.

As a very carefully thought-out film, I think removing any part of it would make the film suffer, but the story may still work. For example if the character of The Captain or Mercedes were not expanded upon then we would still understand Ofelia’s journey but it would be a less interesting story. If we omitted the slow descent into the other world and Ofelia went from Separation in the human world to her Ordeal in the fantasy world then I think the audience would get a jarring effect.

The Return quadrant of the mythic cycle has already been greatly deemphasised , so too the introduction of the ordinary world which is not laboured on and is only revealed through Ofelia’s brief conversation with her mum in the car as they are leaving for the military outpost.

In order to rewrite this story with some of the structural elements removed, I would emphasise the theme of temptation and take out the Initiation and Return, so our heroine fails to reach her original goal of returning to the fairy world because she has given in to her temptations. The Captain is killed before he can do Ofelia any harm and she survives and takes care of her little brother and finds happiness in doing this in her mortal life.

The above two films have been examples which fit well into the conventional models of narrative structure but many films are not so clean cut. Run Lola Run for example works by breaking with linearity of time and going further and using it as a narrative device.Thirteen Conversations About One Thing also does not follow the conventional structure but keeps jumping back and forth in time and from one character to another but in the end the viewer is left with a complete image of what has occurred.

Going all the way back to 1914 we looked at the amazing work of Winsor McKay, it is unbelievable what he managed to do so long ago. Gertie looks very solid and it boggles the mind how McKay wouldd have animated these sequence without any cells, redrawing every frame!

A major asset of animation is Abstraction, the amplification of ideas through its simplification. What we want to say if filtered through the medium of animation before reaching the audience and the design approach used in the animation process is able to embue character.

Here are some examples of different designs in animation:
Rotoscope - direct reference to live action
Superman - still very figurative
Anime - figurative
Ren & Stimpy - very stylized to the point that it is hard to know what the animals are. This style gives so much room for wild and exaggerated animation.

Character Design can tell the audience alot about the character even before they start to move. The character design will determine what the character is ggoing to do and what their history is, you can feel this history in the look of the character.
There are endless possibilities in character design and stereotypes can be used to some extent to quickly get one with the story since short films do not have the luxury of taking time to establish the personality of a character.

In American animation the inididual is idolized, the cult of the individual. While in European animation we see the character being used more as symbols rather than individuals.

Two examples of character design looked at were: Jaffar from Disney’s Aladin and The Penguin from the Aardman’s The Wrong Trousers.

Jaffar has a very angular face which quickly stablishes his sinister intentions even before he lays his sleazy hands on Jasmine. In contrast The Penguin in The Wrong Trousers doesnt have an y expressive features at all but this down playing of the cliche bad-guy characteristics gives the audience room to fill in what they think the penguin will get up (with some help from sound and under lighting off course!).

It is important to know a character before starting to animate. Take a character that you know and ue this as a basis to start to emblish until you have a design for a character.

Model sheets are important so that things stay consistent. They help you to know your character and how that character works in terms of the actions in the film. Model sheets also have to make sure that the character is able to do the business that is required of it in the action.

It is good to boil down the character to an easily identifiable shape, one which is different from the shape of the other characters in the film, this will help the audience to understand which character is doing what.

There is a dance between Abstraction and Realism and films like the Incredibles try to push things as much as they can.

Mannerism and Habbits can say alot about how a character feels. Try to come up with interesting mannerisms for your character which will enhance communication with the audience.

After the “hunters and gathers” lunch with Al McInnes we looked at some short films where the sound played an important part. After the screeing we were divided into two groups, one group was taught by Jeremey about digital sampling of sound, technical terms such as frequency, amplitude and sampling rate. 44kHz and 16bit is probably the magic figures which we need to stick with for films, this is CD quality.

The importance of recording audio at a ‘good’ level was stressed as clipping and distortion could mean that the sound will not be suitable even if it was a goodd take from the actor. Everything is recorded at the same level and then things are adjusted in the mix. The AIFF and WAV are what we need to use because they are non-lossy formats, as opposed to MP3 which will lose its quality.

The groups then swapped, with Al teaching us about using the sound booth and the software Soundtrack. Various effects were created and we were taught how to clips things, loop them and get them in a ready state for looping. It is important to have the start and the end of a sound which is to be looped at level 0, thhis can be done adding a short fade/in at the start and a short fade/out at the end.

Since a lot of things can be done on the computer when recording things all we need to do is to make sure that the gain for that channel is such that we have a ‘good’ level (not to low and no clipping). Leaving the fader for the channel and the master fader on 0 is a good starting point, the gain of the channel can then be adjusted during a level test before a recording is made.

Out came the computer and the scanner for a demonstration of how we go about scanning art work and what creates a good drawing for the digital inking process.

Tips:

• 72 dpi is the average required for video work
• The smaller the area to be scanned the higher the dpi required to fill the frame
• Nice dark lines with lots of contrast between the background and the line work will minimize the amount of fiddling around which needs to be done before ink and paint.
• An audience will respond more to a film which looks like it has been hand-made by one person (the personal touch) than a film which looks like it came out of a factory of people.
• A fill colour does not neccessarily have stay within it’s outlines.

Tuesday’s are storytelling days and today we were discussing the integral part that sound plays in any production.

We looked at the interactive quiz game “You know Jack” with 2 students volunteers going up against each other in this fast paced, amusing game. With very limited animation the piece relies heavily on audio to succeed.

Sound is a very important part of any audio/visual production and it should be thought of as such. Here is a list of how sound may be used in a audio/visual piece:

• Foley - SFX created
• Dialogue
• Atmosphere
• Music
• Narration
• Effects - fade in/fade out/warp
• Theme tunes - character identification
• Incidental music - to highlight certain events

As an example we looked at the student film “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with the sound off. We tried to guess what sounds would be used in the piece and guess what was actually happening in the film.

A production can be enriched by using off screen sounds and saving on animation.

Having looked at how sounds were used, Robyn then went on with the question of Why sounds are use in a production:

• Anticipation of an action.
• Enhance actions
• Putting the audience in the right emotional state.
• Increase richness and size of environment e.g atmosphere of a city.
• Reinforcement of an action
• change/reinforce POV
• Give information
• Off camera action
• Suggest a different culture.
• Change of mood
• Contradition of image e.g “Apocalypse Now” Ride of the Valkyries
• Creating contrast
• Rhythm of music being the driving force of the piece.

Course notes and assignments can be found here: http://aim.adc.rmit.edu.au/kcawley/scr_index07.html

We spent part of the day today reviewing the animations that we had been working on for the last week. It was great to see other people’s work and to analyse what went right and what went wrong.

Here are some tips from David in regards to their cutout animations and morph exercise:

• Introduce the characters and let them settle so that the audience gets used to them before moving them around.
• Use follow-through to dissipate the energy. Appendages tend to keep moving, adding this to animation makes more rich.
• Separate different actions/ideas so that the audience can see what is going on.
• Don’t make the frame too busy, direct the audience to what you want them to look at.
• Overshoot the action.
• Beware of charcters which seem to be connected together via invisible strings.
• Moving objects will upstage each other, if 2 object both need o be moving, tone one down so that the audience is directed to look at one.
• Ask yourself what is the active character?
• Use preemptive entrance for characters when possible.
• Heavy objects can not accelerate that quickly so you need time to animate, if the time is too short they will not look as heavy.
• Do not evenly animate all the parts of the character.
• Interesting animation will result if a line of action is used for the movement.

We looked a “Cog” a student film done in after effects which is not a very good program for animation. The elements are composed of sampled textures with alpha channels which allows rotation of these elements. This film dealt with the theme of celebrity and why one person is celeberated while another with the same talent is ridiculed.

Advice given after watching this film:

• It is better to leave the harder animation to the end because your skills will improve as you progress through your film.
• Many beginners use too many inbetweens when working in 3D because it is so easy to add more. You must force yourself to decide what number of inbetweens are needed and not trusting the computer.

Here are the course notes on inbetweening:
http://www.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/inbetweens_01.html

We then went on with the topic of cycles, and looked at various examples on walk cycles. The notes go into more details: http://www.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/cycles.html

Some tips:

• Min 3 drawing are needed to give the sense o motion for a wheel turning.
• When doing a walk cycle, work out the stride length so that you know how fast the character will need to move to cover the required distance.
• The way a character moves tell you a lot about their history.
• Think about what the character is feeling when it is moving, try to represent that in the motion.