Animation Techniques by Agha

After attending most of the workshops and classes at LUCA in my first semester of the Re:Anima program, I think I’ve come to a (not final) conclusion: I want to take a more experimental and intuitive approach to my work. It feels like this approach connects better with what I want to do with my film.

Sound Design Workshop

One of our last workshops was for sound design. For this, we went to the Royal Conservatory and RITCS School of Arts in Brussels. We learned about sound design in films and animations.

We were asked to form groups of four (Agha, Helena, Rossana, and Rebecca) and select a one-minute short animation to direct the sound for it. We were paired with sound designer Casper and music composer Kenza.

The film we selected was Helena's one-minute film Zum, which she had made for a festival some time ago. It was a good choice, as much of the sound was to be designed intuitively, given the nature of the film's story.

We asked the sound designer to watch the film and experiment with the sound as they found fitting, taking an intuitive approach. Kenza composed the sounds and created a very cohesive piece out of it. As discussed, she experimented with different sounds, such as her own breathing and a recording of a choir, adding various layers of effects over them to make them unrecognizable while keeping them interesting enough to connect with the visuals.

Blender Experiments

I tried to replicate my drawings in 3D and am trying to look for new ways to animate them. For this, I used Blender and Brushstroke tools to develop a method to animate the strokes on a 3D object.

Brushstroke tools create the mesh strips on the object. I find it hard to animate these strokes for now, as they kind of limit the intuitive approach to the drawings. But since this will be the production part of the film, I shouldn’t worry about it right away.

I manipulated the shader in a way that it animates the UV along the mesh strips. Then I used light linking so it only reacts to a light nearby, thus creating strokes on the mesh. I used the compositor to make it look like drawing paper, which wasn’t a necessity, but it was a good exercise to do.

Automatic Drawings Along with the drawings I did in Ada's classes, I started automatic writing, which I found very liberating. There were no rules I had to follow, just my intuition—something I think I should have started a long time ago. Using the same technique, I started drawing to accompany the writings. I then began doing both things at the same time, which started to make sense, and I could see the direction my film could take.

I think these practices will be a good exercise for my film, and I plan to keep practicing these techniques and use them to experiment with ways of animating them.

AR Workshop with Bahar Kiamoghadam

This was one of the most demanding exercises of the semester, in my opinion. We had to use photogrammetry to scan a real-life object and place it into the world using AR techniques.

I used Polycam3D to photo-scan a small toy, which was a cartoon swimmer. I then used Blender to clean up the scanned mesh. This required a lot of time and effort because the app doesn’t work well unless you pay for the subscription, which was also the case with all other 3D scanning apps. Then, I rigged and animated it to make it look like it was swimming through the clouds, as if it were an airship.

Character Walk-Cycle Exercise

For the Character Animation class, we were tasked with designing a character, coming up with a story, and then giving the character certain traits that would dictate its body language.

My character was an alien who had killed an astronaut and was now living in the astronaut's suit. The alien tries to infiltrate the human astronauts' environment and mimics their behavior to stay inconspicuous.

I tried to come up with several ways of creating a walk cycle for the character—2D frame-by-frame, 2D animation, and 3D. Almost all of them seemed too technique-focused and required a certain type of practice, which wasn’t possible due to the other assignments and workshops I had during the semester. Since my film won’t have any characters, I won’t be using any of these techniques, but it was good to exercise a few methods aiming at one result.

Analog Film Workshop

It’s a unique experience to work on something by hand and then watch it on a screen with no digital steps involved.

For this workshop, we formed a group of seven people and worked on 8mm film. Everyone had their own way of interacting with the film. We were instructed on the tools and techniques for using film. The best part was that there were no strict rules, so we could really go crazy with it. At the end, we joined the film strips from every group member and projected them on the film viewer.

All the group members also wrote a piece about the film, which was then projected on the wall with a spotlight. These film strips were later scanned and used to create the sound for the final output.

I used archival footage and etched on the film with a nail to give the frames another life. The process was repetitive for me since I don’t come from a 2D animation background. Because this technique involves using works from someone else and reusing them to create something new, I don’t think I will be using it for my film, as my film requires creating something from intuition.

Visual Development with Suryara

We had a Visual Development workshop with Suryara Bernardi. The task was to visualize Franz Kafka's novel The Metamorphosis. Through random selection, I was assigned to create the living room of Gregor Samsa's family after he turned into an insect.

I tried to set the story in a South Asian household, similar to the kind of place I grew up in. It was a bit challenging to put my thoughts on paper this way since I don’t have much experience expressing nostalgia or my memories in such a manner. But it was a good start—and a necessary one. After all, it’s a crucial step for an artist to connect their past experiences with their work.

Since I didn’t have any pictures of the house I grew up in, I had only my memories to rely on. After scouring Pinterest for South Asian architecture and interior design, I began building a map of the house and setting the little details in the scene. For instance, the dirt behind the removed picture frames, the grime coming out of Gregor’s room, and the broken furniture—details hinting that the new tenants were not taking care of the house.

Mixing Everything

I hadn’t modeled anything for a really long time and started losing confidence in the skill. I chose a relatively challenging project to get back into it. To wrap it up, I decided to combine everything I had been learning.

In this series, I tried to master the Freestyle Line Art feature in Blender. I spent a few weeks experimenting with and testing all the modifiers that Freestyle Line Art provides.

I created a shader that gives a guilloche texture to any 3D geometry. I used three line sets of Freestyle Line Art and overlaid them in the renders using the compositor to achieve a hand-drawn and hand-painted feel in the final renders. Once everything was set up, all I had to do was import the 3D models, UV map them (not perfectly), and render the scene.

I think this approach is closer to the kind of art style I want to pursue. Even though this method is best suited for worldly objects, I want to experiment with it for otherworldly objects as well—similar to what I draw in my sketchbook.

Using Grease Pencil with 3D geometry

Grease Pencil is a really powerful tool especially for 2D animation. I had been seeing artworks online where many artists used Grease Pencil, and I wanted to incorporate it with other things I had learned, like 3D and toon shaders.

In this practice, I used very basic 3D modeling as a base to draw Grease Pencil lines over. I then rigged the Grease Pencil to the geometry so it sticks to the surface while it moves. I applied a toon shader to give it a basic shading style and used the compositor to add glow and color grading.

Stylized Rendering

I think everyone who learns 3D always starts with or eventually moves to creating realistic renders. I did that too, but after a while, it became really repetitive, so I challenged myself to shift towards stylized art. My very first stylized animation was a loop: Takumi's AE86 drifting in an endless loop.

I learned a very simple trick to create a basic toon shader in the EEVEE engine. I mixed these shaders with generated textures and used mapping nodes to distort and animate them, creating an effect of stretching and motion.

Stop Motion Workshop with Vera Verhoef | 4th October 2024 Coming from a digital background, I was very hesitant about stop-motion animation, but with Helena's experience and help, we made a small clip.

The assignment helped me overcome my fear of animating inanimate tangible objects, and it also helped me discover what I enjoy most about it: lights and effects. I was fascinated by the steam—how it boils, comes out, and then dissipates. I'm really intrigued by the way it forms and drifts away into nothingness.