SOVIS_02

For this project I worked with George Smith ( mrdinosaur.co.uk ) Originally we wanted to use the story from the book which portrayed the Idea of a man being full of confusion, he is stuck in the past and still believes he is young, when in fact he is in his elderly years. To begin with, I worked on some basic concepts for this to get an idea of how we might portray that in an animation.

Then I started on an animatic.

but following this we decided we wanted to influence our animation using the story, ‘a man who mistook his wife for a hat’ as we didn’t feel that the piece we were working on had any kind of way forward for improvement, it felt that it had become static as a piece and we wanted to try something else.

For this project, we’re using the piece of music titled, ‘Garden Party’.

Again, I started out by creating concept ideas and then a storyboard portraying a rough idea that my concepts had inspired. It helped that I had the music to base these conceptual pieces on as I feel it helped me to bring them to life more.

Following this, we compared our concepts and came together to create a general idea for our overall narrative, this is also when we decided that we’d like to split the animation down the middle in terms of shots, George will animate the first half and I will animate the second half.

For this piece we knew we needed one character and we wanted him to have abstract qualities, therefore we did some character designs, below shows mine:

Coming toward the end of pre-production we decided to use one of George’s character designs, shown below:

As our piece is mixed media we are going to be using a variety of techniques, some of our sequences will include 2D animation, some will use 3D animation and there will include some traditional techniques, we may also explore other areas such as live footage but that is still to be confirmed at this stage. These different techniques may also work within one another, for example, we might try using boiling 2D animation textures within our 3D sequences.

As we’re now starting to get an idea of what we wanted to produce I put together a storyboard that helped me to get an idea of my parts, the shots I will produce and an order.

Looking at this initially it may not make much sense, but creating this really helped me to put together my ideas and what I plan to do.

So the story is depicting a person who sees things for what they are simply but not to detail, for example, he will see a pair of shoes but not be able to differentiate between trainers/boots etc. To portray a man who goes through this in everyday life we decided that objects around him should flutter, changing their appearance and sometimes there should be no background to portray the idea that he’s simply focussed on what he’s doing so might not be able to take in the background mentally.

As I was so desperate to jump into the film I decided to create one of the shots, in which the character is checking on his frying egg.

Then, I worked on my part of the animatic making some cuts and some improvements to the piece. While I was creating this I decided that it would be best to cut out the egg sequence simply for lack of time in the piece. I went over my initial storyboard and cut out shots and added in others, to be more realistic to what time I have as this is only a 30-second slot, there were too many shots for this.

Next, I worked on some shots and added them within the animatic to see how they fit in time-wise, I felt that this made a good improvement upon the piece.

shot 4

shot 5

shot 7

An update on my animatic with more shots of the film added in:

I’ve now completed shot 2, this was the most challenging shot for me as it was created completely traditionally, with pencils and oil pastels.

shot 2

animatic with more shots added

shot 6

For this shot, I used images off of the internet, took away their backgrounds and put them into my own setting to create this flickering flower sequence.

shot 8

For this shot, I drew different types of shoes using oil pastels and acrylic paints and put them together in a similar style to the flower sequence.

shot 10

For the foreground of this sequence, I animated using Adobe Animate CC and then added in the background clip which I found online, keying out the existing background to create this abstract look using after effects.

shot 11

The below shot I animated myself but the model in this clip, it’s rig and its surroundings were all created by George.

My half of the completed film. All of these shots were animated by myself.

Below is the film in its entirety including both the work of George and myself: