Sea Sick

I've been working on how the sea will animate during the memory part of our Sea Project film. I wanted it to look really violent and scary so I used sharp forms to create the waves. I made this test shot by painting the 10 different wave shapes with ink and then using Flash to actually stick it all together and tween it. I wanted to get quite a lot of motion in to make the sea look rough, which is why I chose to have the waves actually rolling rather than just moving in a fixed position from side to side. I think I've achieved what I was after :)

This is the same as above but I used Olivia's scribbles on top of my waves and i cleaned up the edges of the waves as they were fairly messy.

I thought the scribbles made the sea look less intense as the addition of white caused them to look a bit weak and washed out, so I went back into Photoshop and played about until I got the colours shown in the video below. I think this version works the best as the sea looks the most frightening here. If you stare at these waves for long enough without blinking, it does actually make you feel kinda sick, as well as screwing with your eyes, so I'll take that as a success in itself!

Sinister Sea Designs

These are some of the images that have inspired me in my design work for the sea of Elise's memory. 

And these are all pages from my sketchbook:

I had a go on Photoshop but I think these all look pretty hideous, so I think I'll stick to hand drawn.

Scribbles

Below you will find a test shot that Olivia did. We all really liked the scribbles on the waves as it made them look really violent, so we'll hopefully develop this further.

First Test Shot!! Woop Woop!!

This is my first test shot for the sea project. I animated it in Flash (I'm getting to grips with the pen tablet, finally!) and I'm pretty damn proud because it turned out way better than I thought it would. I mean it's still in a very rough state but I think this has potential and I loved doing it, so really want to take it further. Once the background gets all painted up I think the vector character and the painterly background will work really well together too. I'm not looking forward to doing the lip sync though, since I really suck at that..... 

Elise Character Designs

The main character of our story is the surfer Elise. Below are some of Eline's concept designs for the interview Elise. Basically our animation is split into the interview style shots at the beginning and end and the middle section where the action takes place. The interview parts will be more realistic in style so that they contrast with the more stylized middle section which takes the form of Elise's memory. We decided to make the memory part more abstract because when you remember things it's not as clear and things get distorted, so the style helps show this.

Here are the awesome final designs for the surf board and Elisse. She's in kind of a weird format because we're going to do a test shot of her in a cut out animation style.

These are more concept designs but for the more simplified Elise of the memory section. We want to have her in black and white to make the middle section more dramatic and sinister and to contrast with the colour of the interview sections. Elise tells her story as though it wasn't a big deal, even though the events she describes are quite painful and gruesome, making her seem brave. By using sinister imagery it makes her seem even tougher.

Sea Project Background Design

While my group were at Porthmoer Beach we were trying to find something that we could include in our animation that would identify it as Porthmoer, and this came in the form of a hill with a stone building on it, as shown in the photo to the right. So for the first interview shot we want to place our surfer girl on the beach so both the building and the sea our visible in the background. 

The fairly graphic looking image below inspired us, with its use of dashed lines. The dashed lines also look like the stitches that appear towards the end of our animation, so this repeated imagery helps enforce the themes of our animation.

Eline then designed this awesome background, which will eventually gain some colour. If you look closely you can see the dashed texturing.

Sea Project Animatic

This is our first stab at the animatic for our film and I've gotta say, we're all pretty pleased with it! We still need to add sound effects and Dereck suggested we put some inky, bloody, swirly shapes in when Ellisse blacks out and the screen is black, which sounds quite cool, so we'll definitely have to give that a try.

The Sea Project

We were set this project ages ago but I've just been lazy and not posted anything about it, until now. On this project I'm working with Eline and Olivia (check out their blogs: elinelindaasanimation.blogspot.com and oliviareaveley.blogspot.co.uk) and our group was given a sound clip from an interview with a girl who was injured while surfing. All three of us were really glad we were given this one as we felt it stood out from the rest. 

Here is the transcript:

Hello my name's Ellise. Ermm I was involved in a surfing accident. One day I was surfing at Porthmoer Beach and then while I was on a wave I fell off, and when I fell off my board wentforward and hit someone else's board, so as soon as I popped up from the water, the board came back and hitme, with a fin, in the face. And sliced my face.I thought that I'd bruised my face cuz I had this really sharp pain but then when I looked at my hands there was loads of blood and all on my wetsuit, it was horrible. And I had to have 8 stitches. I've got a, a little, like a half moon shape on my face. In 2 years the doctor said I can get it removed, but I don't think I want to, cuz I quite like it. 

One of the first things my group did was go on a little journey to check out the beautiful Porthmoer Beach for ourselves to get reference material. Below are some of the photos I took.

Final Experimental Film In All Its Glory

So yeah that was my film..... below is a lot of ramblings pinpointing my reasonings and thoughts....... read on if you're bored and you have some time to kill....... 

I decided to use the track 'Billy The Kid' as it had both fast and slow parts so that I could have calm and dramatic sections to create variety and interest. The music sounded very dramatic in places and through brainstorming sessions I decided it sounded like a war, due to the track's use of call and response. The sharpness and sinister quality of many of the sounds led me in the direction of a nightmare and the strange, flowing quality of dreams lends itself to morphing and random imagery. This brought me to the theme of someone trying to wake up from a nightmare, when there is a battle to become conscious.

I listened to the music and made notes of what I associated the different sounds with, then thought up imagery that had a slight sinister quality to it and I also included repeated imagery of wide open eyes, linking with the waking up theme. I decided that the animation would start and end with pixelation, with the middle 'dream part' being created with charcoal, paper and paint as the use of a person as the thing being animated is visually vastly different to art materials being used, emphasizing a change in state (the real world vs the dream world). I planned my animation out thoroughly, working out how long I had to make sections last in order to hit the beats, which actually ended up being fairly accurate, with only a bit of tweaking needed during editing. I then photographed the whole dream sequence in one long shot as the whole thing morphs from one thing to the next, leaving the shooting of the actress until the end.

Creating the right lighting was difficult during the first and last scenes of the person as I wanted it to look like night time. This did not work well as the photographs came out quite grainy due to the low light and the light source ended up too close to the person's face making them too bright. The face paint was also very difficult to apply and looked quite messy, again the light was far too bright and gave quite bad images. My actress had to turn away from the camera to let me apply the face paint, so the images jump around a lot. I had an issue with the morphing from the red dripping out of the actress's eyes and into the next scene. It was meant to flow but the change in background and difference between ink and face paint meant it did not flow as I had hoped and I had to have a change in shot rather than a downwards pan which is what I wanted. There were no further problems and the rest all went quite smoothly, apart from the paper curling when the winged creatures dive bombed the ground.

The sections that worked especially well were the charcoal runner which then morphs into birds which fly off and the very fast moving scribbles and stripes, as I think they fit the music very well and look good visually. I decided after I finished that I no longer liked the look of the paper winged creatures as they looked quite amateurish, although I do think their movements work well with the music. It probably would have looked better if I animated them in charcoal. The entire dream sequence may have worked better if it was all done in charcoal as charcoal's smudgy qualities do have a dreamlike, half formed feel to them and its dull black colour is very sombre (the reds I used were too bright for the sinister atmosphere I was after). Perhaps it was wrong to mix media as drastically as I did during the middle section but I do believe it was worth trying out, as I did want it to be quite chaotic.

If you bothered to read all that then respect is due! And I need to thank Olivia for letting me scrawl all over her face and shine bright lights in her eyes, so yeh, thanks dude!

Deep Space

Here are some watercolour attempts at creating deep space. Everything gets more and more blue as it gets further and further away, until it goes very pale and grey. I'm pleased with these apart from the second one, where I accidentally made one of the mountains too bright a blue, which made it appear to much in the foreground. I think stylistically the last one is the best as I've managed to create more of a supernatural kind of atmosphere, with the reddish colours and gnarled trees, but it looks a bit flat. The first one is the best at indicating deep space, I think this is because the grass and leaves are really close to the camera and the closest trees extend off the page vertically, giving more of a contrast in size.