Animated Exeter - Special Effects

Within After Effects there are lots of effects and presets, which with a little bit of manipulation can be used to great effect. I think, as with most things, it comes down to the individual user and individual taste. On the whole I think less is more but it always depends on the project. Until I actually have a scene to put together, there is little I can do with these effects, but the end scene features a smoke trail as the phoenix emerges from the clock tower. So here is a "magical" smoke trail, that can be adapted to follow a motion path or just make random movements by using an expression (which you add to the object - or smoke trail - properties and it will tell it to move in a specific "random" pattern).



This smoke can also be put into 3D space and so can be used to wrap around the tower within the film. The great thing about this effect - which is actually a plug-in called Particular - is that it has about 20 or so presets, so it is very easy to get a variety of results without a huge amount of extra work. It really is down to the individual user to adapt the presets to fit the project. Again, as I also said above, it is difficult to create too specific a look at the moment without either a final shot of the set, or more input from the producers, who are a bit busy at the moment. I guess it would help if there was one person overseeing the post production, inc sfx. But no one seems to be in that role.

Here are some other examples of the same plug in...

fire and smoke:


fireworks:


even snow:

Animated Exeter - 3D compositing

So, I've taken a picture from the Ivan Biliban book which Ben brought in as concept art for the project. In photoshop I have cut all the elements into individual layers and then put the whole composition into After Effects.

I then converted the layers into 3D and created a camera. Each of the layers can be moved away from the camera at different distances which means I can move forward or sideways and create an illusion of depth.

It's not perfect, but it's been very useful as practice for using a camera and 3D space. I spoke to Kathy yesterday and she seemed to like what I'd done, but I suspect that might be because the art work is Bilabin's.

I was using this as part of my "research and development" for the compositing role for this project. At the moment, there doesn't seem to be much else I can do. I have spoken to Adam, our producer, and he has told me to continue with R&D. There have been some delays to the stop motion section which means everything else has been delayed.

Animated Exeter: Sunshine

I have been working on recreating a sun from one of the Ivan Bilabin images we have been using as concept art. This started out as an exercise so that I could practice using After Effects, but there is a possibility that it might be used in the final film. Either way, I'm quite pleased with how it works so far.



I drew it out in photoshop and added a filter to get a slightly grainy look. I then cut up each circle to be on a separate layer. Then, in After Effects, I imported my pohotshop file as a composition (which means you get all the layers as seperate, er, layers). I could then rotate each one individually. I have also added a glow effect, although I think this needs a little more work as it lacks for subtlety in my opinion.

Pitch Project: Editing, recording and more editing

I booked the radio studio and we have recorded the new version of the script. It was a little annoying as Dennis blundered in with all the delicacy of a wildebeest to find out of we have the studio booked (er.. yes, that’s why we’re in here recording). This threw Ben for a few moments, but he soon got back into character and we continued with the recording. It is very odd listening to the session because occasionally Ben slips out of character and the voice changes from Professor Piddle back to Ben Dennett.

I went through the script and broke it down into individual lines. I then went through the recording and did the same. For each line of script (there are 35 in total) I have got between 1 and 5 versions. My current task is to cut them back together, making sure they flow and that the sound levels are all the same. I am finding that there are some lines that just don’t work and so I am starting to cut a few of them out. I have to get this finished so that Will can finish the storyboard for the final cut of the script. I then need to put the animatic together. I have offered to take this on as I don’t really feel I’ve done enough for this project so far, but as far as the rest of the bible goes, I think we are a long way behind and I sense that Will may be starting to panic. I feel a lot like I’m letting him down by leaving him with so much work and the fact that everything seems quite last minute. I’ve always struggled with managing my workload and just at the moment I’m not sure I’m doing a great job.

Animated Exeter: everything changes

With wonderful timing, the day that our animated got selected for the Animated Exeter ident, I got sick and spent the next week in bed feeling very sorry for myself.

Now I have returned to college, everything has changed. It is odd, because I know it is only becuase of the timing of my absence, but I completely missed the transition from this being mine and Ben's project to it becoming a group project. Ben is now art director, Adam and Holly are producers and I have been marked up in the whiteboard as comp'ing.

I have no objection to this (although have added myself to SFX and post-prod sound), but it is very weird to find so many people now involved in a project that I have already spent so much time on. I suppose on one hand I feel a little defencive, on the other I feel a bit bored by it after spending so many hours on the animatic!

The advantage to being post it that I do have more time now for our other project and I can rescue Will a bit. I have started some R+D too, with further experiments in 3D space ready for the compositing. Luckily I have already discussed smoke trails and fireworks with Pete Felstead, when it was still at animatic stage. Again, I feel a little defencive about other people working on it, whilst at the same time I don't want sole responsibility for anything on the final film! Grrr... I can't have it both ways! Don't know quite what's wrong, I've just lost a bit of my enthusiasm, which is a shame cos I thought I was doing ok so far this term.

Animated Exeter: A pitch and a win!

We had to give a little presentation of our idea, which essentially consisted of Ben pressing play.

The end result? Our idea was selected! Ben is stepping into the Producer role, which is a bit scarey, and I have offered to be his assistant producer. I don't really have any desire to be a producer, but Ben and I have worked together on this for so long I don't want to abandon him!

Animated Exeter: The Animatic

OK, this Exeter project is taking up all of my time. Ben completed the storyboard and I was able to scan it in on Saturday while I was at work, ready to start putting it together as an animatic this week. We have spent every day working on this now, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it wasn’t for the fact that we have completely abandoned Will on the pitch project! Hopefully once this is finished there will be time to fix that! In the meantime, I have been having a go at using 3D space in After Effect, to give the animatic more depth and movement. The part where we pan in through the clock face and past the cogs into the interior of the clock now works quite nicely, even though it flies past and I doubt anyone will notice the effort that went it! I guess that’s the whole point really: if it’s done well, no one really sees it because they are too busy watching the story! Ben’s little duck creatures inside the clock were much more work than they should have been! And although I mocked up a spinning floor which I think Ben quite liked, it wasn’t as good as it could have been because I was just exhausted by that point (and the end was finally in sight!)



Mike has been working on some sound, but it’s been tricky for him because I’ve spent longer on the animatic, which means he’s had less time to prepare it. I suppose at the end of the day it is only the animatic, but there is a real sense of competition in the group now and I am torn; part of me wants to win the pitch, the other part really hopes we don’t because then we have to make the thing!! Either way, I want to do the best job I can because despite its sometimes-tedious nature, I actually just really enjoy working on this. It’s tricky sometimes not to be too much of a perfectionist and just let it go...

Animated Exeter: pre-production continues

So, I seem to be getting into this pre-production stuff. I have done concept art and a storyboard. Now, I can’t imagine that either will actually be used, but I’m not sure how much I care. I’m just kinda pleased that I did it. Also, my idea of having a clock that only goes to 10 is being used in the final idea. I quite liked a combination of the oddness of a 10 numbered clock, plus it’s Exeter’s tenth anniversary of the festival AND of course the roman numeral for ten is an X. Neat, huh?







Kathy has suggested that maybe we have too many people all working on this stage of the project and that the storyboard should really be one person’s vision. Ben has been nominated for the role of storyboard artist, which I think is definitely for the best; for one thing he is very good at it, plus he has the strongest ideas. I think I will probably be involved in the next stage of transferring it from storyboard to animatic as I am a little more familiar with the computer stuff than Ben. But as I have mentioned before, Ben and I have worked together quite a lot so I think it will be a team effort.

Pitch project: Sound workshop and voice trials

Steve Carter – the audio technical instructor – has given us an induction for the radio studio. The timing of this is just right for our pitch project, as we have been discussing how we can best use sound. It is pretty much settled that we should have a voice over. Kathy helped us out by recording a child reading from the script, but it just didn’t work. I think it might be the timing, but the bottom line is that we don’t have access to a 11 year old actor and we can’t expect to just ask a child to perform for us.

Meanwhile, in the sound studio, Ben put on a wonderful voice, which has now been named Professor Piddle. Will and I were both thrilled by Ben’s performance. To be honest, I don’t know how happy Ben is with it, but I genuinely believe it will work. The next step seems to be to finalise a script and continue creating artwork. The art side of this project is being totally carried by Will as Ben and I are being distracted by the Exeter project, which is very time consuming at the moment. I hope there will be an opportunity later to rectify this imbalance, especially if Ben is going to be our “voice artist”. It’s really starting to feel like I’m just not pulling my weight. Ahh, the guilt…

A quick word about Maya...

...I hate it.

I just do. I can't help it. I don't know what to do about it. Maybe some kind of psychological help is required.

I went along dutyfully to the first 3 or 4 Maya sessions, but I can't keep my mind on it, my brain just tunes out after about 15 minutes and I suddenly find it's coffee time and I have no idea what's been going on for the last hour.

What now?

Soundscape! A Lazlo Woodbine thriller!

Using a basic digital recorder and library sounds, create a soundscape no longer than 3 minutes that captures some form of story…

For my soundscape project, I wanted to begin with a story and try to communicate its atmosphere. I am a fan of the fiction writer Robert Rankin. Although he is usually to be found in the scifi section of the library, his style can be more accurately described as preposterous-fantasy. I find his writing style to be very visual – I know exactly what his nonsense world looks like – and I wanted to see if I could recreate one of my favourite characters through sound alone.

"Lazlo Woodbine is the undisputed master of the 50's era American detective genre. With him you always get what you pay for, when you pay for the best private eye in the business. He doesn't come cheap but with him you can expect a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, a corpse-strewn alley and a final rooftop showdown. No loose endings, no spin-offs and all strictly in the first person.

Laz only works the four locations: his office, where his clients come to engage his services, a bar where he talks a load of old toot and the dame who does him wrong bops him on the head at the beginning of the case, an alleyway where he gets into sticky situations and a rooftop where he has his final confrontation with the villain. No master of the genre ever needed more."

When Rankin writes the character of Lazlo Woodbine, it is an obvious pastiche of the genre. By creating a soundscape for the office of a 1950’s Private Eye, I suppose I am doing the same. I hope that the ambience conjured up by the sound effects are “visual” enough for the audience to recognise the genre, even if (or probably because) they are such stereotypes. I don’t think for a moment that a listener will pinpoint my soundscape as that of Lazlo Woodbine, as in actual fact he is a fairly unknown character to most people. But I think the point is to leave no doubt in the ear of the audience as to the genre of the scene and where possible to give further clues to its location, period, time of day and general mood of the scene. The main theme I wanted to get across was that this was a lone charecter, thoughful, possibly weary. I am not entirely sure, with the phone ringing in the background, whether this is the beginning or the end of a story (or case).

My sound effects were: clinking glasses and the glugging of whiskey being poured from the bottle, rain, ticking clock, blinds closing, footsteps, the lighting and first drag of a cigarette, telephone ringing. Apart from the old-style telephone ringing (which I got from Steve Carter's huge collection of sound effects) I recorded all of the sounds myself. Special thanks to my housemate Susan who kindly lit-up for the sake of my homework.

I had in my mind the idea of using music to add to the atmosphere. My plan was to have saxophone but as I listened to various jazz cds from the Media Centre’s collection, I found a piano piece that seems to fit the pace rather perfectly. Mind you, I had to listen to a lot of inferior jazz before I came across something that worked!

I also had a last minute panic about the timing. I spent some time with Ben showing him how to use Audition and how to find additional sound effects and music from the ones he'd recorded. Having played my project to him, it suddenly seemed far too fast and I wanted to go back and re-edit. In the end I think I only added about a second between the phone and the glass, but it was very difficult to let it go; I could have continued editing for many more hours.

Hmmm…. I think I like sound…

I hope to upload my soundscape here, once I’ve worked out how…

Animated Exeter: briefing, initial group changes and more mood boards

We have been asked to produce an ident/trailer for Animated Exeter, an animation festival that takes place in February. The ident will be played before every screening, which means it has to be visually interesting enough to survive repeat viewings. It also has to include the sponsor logos – not the most fascinating imagery ever! I began working with one group, but it soon fell apart as no one else actually wanted to be working on this project. By week 2 I was in a different group, who seemed pleased to see the mood board I had created.

There are lots of ideas being discussed within the group. I find that I am usually the boring one who points out that we have limited time available to us (we can’t spent 5 weeks building a set; the project has to be completed by early December). Ben has got some strong ideas around using a clock tower. He’s also keen to use a wooden egg prop which he has at home. This fits quite well with Ralph’s idea of using the Phoenix from Exeter’s Art Centre. I am lucky in that I live in Exeter so am familiar with the building, so I am doing some sketches of the phoenix and also of a couple of clocks… I don’t know if they are useful but I want to be doing something towards the concept art. I really don’t enjoy the pre-production side of projects, but there doesn’t seem to be much else to do at the moment. I am worried that if I stop working it will be hard to start again! I guess I should try my hand at some storyboards too… groan…

Pitching Project - Mood Boards

I created this mood board using images from the illustration library at Woodlane campus. I tried selecting pictures that suggested collage, fairly crude hand drawings and scribbles and also layering and annotations.

I think the top image (by Nick Gould) has probably influenced the art work that Will has started working on [see below]. It is leading onto the idea that we might have one continuous line, maybe being drawn in a notebook, which will change to illustrate the script. It might also be a timeline of some sort, but I'm not entirely sure how this will work.

Pitching an idea to an animation producer from the BBC

When this project was first discussed, I immediately thought of working with Ben and Will. I have worked with them before on other projects and so was hopeful that the three of us together would come up with some “sellable” ideas.

Ben had found a website by an Amerian English teacher, Richard Lederer (http://www.verbivore.com), which had a collection of school children’s humourous errors from history papers (eg, George Washington was a very social man. He had big balls and everyone enjoyed them…). We began talking about how we would present these funny lines and how animation could be used to enhance the humour. Our initial thoughts were of Terry Gilliam style cut outs, creating a collage of images. We then went on to discuss using a page from an exercise book, with scribbles and pictures appearing as the script was read as a voice over. This lead us on to thinking about having a character presenting the historical-mistakes as a 1950’s style “public information film” but concluded almost at once that this idea had been done before and been done better. The next step is to put together some images into a mood board so we can better communicate our ideas with one another.

New Year

This is my first post of the new academic year. I should have started them earlier, but I've been too busy doing work for the course to have time (or be bothered) to write about the course.

So I will try and do a catch up blog soon, with updates of the course so far...