Capstone Project

1/3/2020

background for the first shot. It’s been an interesting challenge to get both sides of the split screen looking separate enough that viewers can tell it’s split screen, but cohesive enough to fit in the same shot. cam’s side (left) has warmer colors in this shot while andy’s (right) has cooler colors, and in later shots, after their bags are switched, i’m going to swap the background palettes. :”D

cam’s side is also straight-on, whereas andy’s has more dynamic angles. i’m hoping it doesn’t look too jarring together, but also, if we want to get deep™, it represents their personalities more too. so there.

my current goals are:

-refine Andy’s side of background

-do backgrounds for all of the shots

-begin sketching keyframes—this will come later in the process than i realized, since i’ve got a fair number of backgrounds to draw, but we’ll get there

-after it’s all done , i’ll go back and make the colors prettier. this quality of painting IS NOT the final product

january 1 

20 of 20 baybee

what’s up youtube it’s my first post-semester entry

i don’t have to keep this blog going (probably?) but i will anyway.

and because it’s not for a grade i don’t have to use capitalization AND i can say fuck hahaha hell yeah >:D actually nothing was stopping me from doing so before but now i can truly go feral god bless

i haven’t worked on my senior project much, and i have been feeling stressed about that. so today i worked on drawing an official background for the first short of this goddamn project; the sketch (right) came out pretty good and i’m happy with it! most of the buildings are based off a photo i took while in d.c. today. three cheers for leaving the house and taking reference photos!

the lines (left) are giving me grief because i think i set up the perspective rule wrong in clip studio paint and i don’t know WHAT’S going on. but um it looks good to my sister so?? and it will only be on-screen for a few seconds. maybe im failing the art world or maybe i’m being too harsh on myself. idk.

i was initially going to model the backgrounds in maya and paint over them in photoshop etc. based off of something i saw another artist do, but my brain said maya? i don’t know her? and while the model i have isn’t awful, i don’t want to spend a bunch of time on a process that might not be super productive anyway.

anyway so i was doing that thing where i hit 4 months of working on a project and go “hm. im going to do something else.” i really really want to work on my current personal project about superheroes and stuff because i have this silly ambitious dream to turn it into a webseries or something one day—and i also want to storyboard out some ideas for a Tragic Backstory comic from that project—and i want to refine storyboards that i did for my test animation and build a storyboard portfolio To Prepare For My Future! because doing so might make me feel less dizzy about my future. idk.

I broke my hard drive because I’m bozo the clown and I knocked it off my desk. Twice. Luckily, all the stuff for this project was backed up to Google Drive, so I lost nothing except for all the other art I did from November-December, revisions for a short story, my final paper for English, and my notes for my history class. I spent so much time yesterday frantically retyping my essay and going to Best Buy with the sad little corpse of Harold Hard Drive that I didn’t do any test animation. It is my fault; if I had managed my time better, I wouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place.

The bright side is that there are two valuable lessons here:

1) back your stuff up. then back up the backups. then back those up to a backup for the backups. Google Drive. Box. Dropbox. Hard drive. SSD. Flashdrive. Paper. Papyrus. Stone tablet. Have backups.

2) manage your time better so that you’re not hopelessly behind when disaster strikes

I am going to take a depression nap, and by depression nap I mean I am going to go to bed by 11:45 pm like a reasonable adult instead of staying up late to animate.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

I still only have maybe 8 seconds done, and I’m really struggling to keep the proportions right. Another lesson learned: in future projects, it might be best for me to practice my foundational animation skills and have extremely simplistic character designs. Maybe over break, during some free time, I can do some abstract animations with shapes and lines—just to practice getting the movement and the timing right. The test animation would also have benefitted from me using reference footage. I did act out the scene in my dorm and I used a stopwatch to get the timing down, and I am pretty happy with the timing, but the anatomy is another story. Foreshortening makes me so, so sad.

The good news is that the semester is almost over. I’m going to turn this in by 8pm tomorrow, and then I’m going to go home and see my dog. I’m going to make gingerbread cookies, cobble together some Christmas presents, take a break for like 3 days, and then get back into it with working On The Real Actual Animation!!!! I’ll keep updating this blog (maybe) because I like to blog.

I’m working on my test animation right now and trying to get into the groove of things.

this is the face of an unhinged man.

I realized something very freeing. Frames of animation are only on screen for a fraction of a second...so if an individual frame looks a lil dinky....what does it truly matter In The Grand Scheme Of Things? What Is The Worth Of The Mite To The Eyes Of God?

In other words: it’s more important that I get things done and draw frames, rather than spiraling into despair because they’re not perfect, completely-rendered illustrations. This mindset has helped me let go of perfectionism, though I am of course still aiming to produce something of good quality. The best way to get better at animation, after all, is to practice animation.

Yesterday and today, I worked more on my test animation, and now I’m a little over 7 seconds. The minimum is 10 seconds, so I’m going to aim for that, but it would be cool to try to finish the whole thing (all 40 seconds). I’ll keep my hopes low but my work ethic...higher?

Speaking of work ethic, I find that I keep getting distracted. I do two frames and then get up and make soup and come back and forget what frame I was on and then I think “you know, all this sitting is bad for my health” so I try to do pushups but I have no upper body strength so I fall to the ground and just lie there. Then a song comes on so I do an interpretive dance like an unhinged animal and tell myself that small amount of exercise is sufficient to stave off cardiovascular disease. Then I go back and draw 2 more frames. This is a journey.

But it’s a fun journey! The more I animate, the more I feel like I have to learn—but the more I want to learn, the more I want to practice. yay!

One last note: it’s been really interesting to see all the iterations my ideas for this project have gone through. I started out wanting to focus on a large cast of characters, which I gradually cut away until I ended up with 2 (not counting the pigeons or Twisty). The length of the film has gotten a bit longer (my original goal was to get it under 3 minutes; it’s about 3.5), but I don’t think it’s gotten too huge. I think it’d be fun to return to some of those original ideas from my moodboards and story splines, one day. But ah, looking back at all of these posts makes me nostalgic. 

A lot of the semester felt frantic and wild—I thought animation had a straightforward production pipeline, but in reality it’s a lot of multitasking, redoing things, trying new ideas, scraping those ideas, iterating on iterations. It’s messy and wild, but I’m so glad I’m doing this. I’m grateful to have this class and the senior projects class as motivators for me to stick to a project and see it through. I’ve started so many creative endeavors in the past that I left to rot, and now I’m doing something that I might actually finish.

test animation work in progress!

animating is hard. I haven’t made much progress, but I like the timing more than I’d liked it earlier. my animation workflow is all over the place, and I had a hard time figuring out the style I wanted to animate in/how I wanted to actually draw things. I started with very rough sketches just to get the movement and general ideas down. It was a bit frustrating when it came to drawing things in a more final form, or at least more detailed and cleaner sketches. I feel like I don’t know how to animate. :)

11/20/19

This past week, I kept working on my animatic. 

Because Tumblr can’t handle files of this size, and I don’t want to upload it to YouTube because I used copyrighted music in my scratch track, I put the animatic on google drive.

isn’t it gorgeous ! :”)

I’ve got more to work on for tweaking the timing of the last half of it, but when I’m done with that I’m going to send it to a music composer (a few weeks later than I’d hoped to get it done, but oh well)! 

I also need to add more sound effects—everything right now is a scratch track, and I hope to record Real Things over break and/or next semester.

11/6 and 11/13

I forgot to post last week MY BAD !

anyway I’m still working on the storyboards; last week I spent some time thinking about the transitions between each shot. Now I just want to focus on the first shot, and I think I’ll finally have it figured out (hopefully).

I’ve got extremely rough and ugly test animation stuff started. I’m figuring out the timing of the acting and stuff. It was very bad last week; this week it is slightly less bad. I also referenced footage for a small section of it, which helped a whole lot. Once I have the basic ugly sketches down, I’m going to work on getting the proportions right. Then a final pass to clean them all up!

I was also tweaking the color script. Once I finalize the storyboards, I’ll just have a couple adjustments to make and it’ll be good.

Color Script

10/30/19

I have a finished first pass of the color script for my film. It was a lot of fun to work with light and color, and to experiment with balancing the mood of the scene with the local colors.

I do want to make some adjustments to this (after getting some feedback). I feel like the color scheme can be a bit all over the place; I tried to keep colors consistent within a scene, but I’m still figuring out how to transition between those scenes. 

I also definitely want to change the last panel—I love the colors, but it feels out of place. I’m considering making the last scene more saturated, too? I was going for a warm, soft, subtle late-afternoon/early-evening glow, but other parts of the color script look very graphic, with bright cartoonish pops of color, so I don’t know if the overall look is cohesive enough.

That said, I’m happy with what I’ve got! I’m going to take my revised storyboards and time them into a rough animatic, then send it to a music composition major that I’m lucky enough to work with!

Aside from that, I need to start working on some test animations. I’ve got ideas, many of them too long and complex for the assignment. But we’ll see. I’m also working on production stills. I’m struggling to figure out what style I want to go for—I guess I just need to test out a bunch of different things and see what develops.

10/23/19

Color Script (WIP)

Storyboards Pass 1

10/16/19

I crawl out of the pit of hell with a sore back from sitting too much and 86 storyboards of varying quality. They have been renumbered (so they’re not all 1-20) and I will be adding text descriptions to them by the end of the day.

10/16/19

On October 5, I had the pleasure of attending the Sweaty Eyeballs animation festival. I saw the Joanna Priestley screening as well as the Baltimore Showcase.

Some thoughts:

1) it was very cool to see my work and my classmates’ work displayed on the windows of the Parkway !! It was also very cool to see a UMBC alumni (Ezra) have his animation senior project showed in the Baltimore Showcase. I loved “Wilow”- it had a surreal, dreamlike quality to it that was infused with a sense of nostalgia and moodiness. And it was a great example of things that can be accomplished in the senior projects class.

2) I am biased towards “Foreign Exchange” because I was one of the animation assistants (I got too excited when I saw my name !! in !! the !! credits !!!!!!!!!) but I really think it was such a cool piece. Hollywood found dead in a ditch!! Corrie’s sand animation and the intricate, beautiful animation of the bank notes was so captivating. A lot of animation that I’ve seen tends to be focused on character and have a very... “Pixar storytelling feel,” if that makes sense. i.e. it fits into a specific structure of emotional beats, like character A tries something twice and fails but on the third time they make it. which isn’t to knock on formulaic narratives, but to say that it’s cool and refreshing to see something different than that.

3) Joanna Priestley’s work was amazing !! It was very interesting to see how her work got more abstract when she transitioned to digital animation, though there always was a sense of abstraction even in her earlier works. I got very excited when I saw that Pascal Campion had worked with her on “A Streetcar Named Perspire” because I love Pascal Campion.

4) I was super impressed by “Stitches” because it was made by high schoolers. It was cool how they combined digital 2D animation (I think they used rotoscoping?) and what looked like stop motion to create a fascinating Frankenstein-esque romance story. The drive... the motivation... the collaboration... the skill... I hope those kids go far in pursuing their dreams.

5) My favorite animation was the trailer for The Indies. It was a promotional trailer for a kickstarter-backed series about hip hop in a dystopian future, and the trailer was an action-packed introduction to the main characters of the series. Showing the trailer at the Baltimore Showcase was a smart way to get people who otherwise wouldn’t know about the project excited for it (me. I’m talking about me. I didn’t know that The Indies was a thing, and now I do know, and I cannot wait to see it in its fantastic final form). It was a fun, exciting animation to watch. I’m interested in sci-fi/fantasy/dystopian stories, so this was plenty of inspiration fodder for future projects!!!!

6) I’ll be honest: I liked the technical part of “A Love Letter for the End of the World”—I think it was animated beautifully, with its combination of home video, stop motion, and traditional animation, but its message annoyed me. It was basically about how Earth is dying, but at least the filmmaker got to enjoy the world and cherish what she had. 

Which is sweet. 

Really. 

I’m just being cynical. 

But. 

I will say, when I think of climate change, I don’t really want to hear messages of “it was good while it lasted uwu”—I want to hear, “Hey, this crisis is preventable!! What the fuck!!! Stop killing the planet !!” in an eat-the-rich, end-capitalism kind of way. So my enjoyment of the film was hindered by my own feelings towards the subject, as well as my desire to hear what I wanted to hear. Is that close-minded? Is that selfish? Perhaps. Maybe if I rewatch it, it will feel less like a simpering white girl whose home isn’t being destroyed by climate change talking about how lucky she is. Sorry, that was harsh. I’m an asshole.

While we’re on the topic of my personal flaws, I did feel bad after seeing Joanna’s work and the Baltimore Showcase because I didn’t talk to any artists. I just kind of stood in the lobby looking uncomfortable as I waited for my friend to get done talking with her parents so we could leave. That was not cute, and if I want to be involved in the local animation community, I have to...involve myself...in the local animation community. So I’ll have to work on that.

10/9/19

some prop design !!

The biggest challenge here is to make the bags look similar enough that the characters could believably mix them up, but not so similar that the audience mixes them up and gets confused. I will need to adjust the colors, perhaps? Right now there’s maybe too much of a difference between the tan and the pinker color.

Even though the content of the backpacks don’t play a large role in the film—something I somewhat regret, but ah well, I like the story I have as well—I wanted the props within them to reflect the characters’ personalities. I’ll probably make Andy’s bag more scuffed up in future iterations, since he’s a mess. Maybe Cam’s is a little raggedy, too—just slightly, from carelessly throwing it down in a state of apathy—but not too torn up, because he’s got a little more eloquence than Andy has.

If I were to do final prop designs, I’d also like to clean up the line art. The sketchy quality isn’t inherently bad, but it does feel very much like a student film. Then again...I am a student...so maybe it’s just being honest. :’)

Process pics for a location design. 

I am very inspired by Pascal Campion and James Gilleard, and I want to incorporate the geometric designs, bright colors, and strong sense of lighting into my backgrounds. This city street definitely isn’t on the level of a professional by any means, and there are maybe a couple things I’d change—the purple near the bottom feels a little bit too strong and out of place, now that I look at it. Even so, I enjoyed getting some much-needed practice for drawing backgrounds.

When thinking about the other backgrounds I should study/sketch/draw/include in my final, there are a couple different parts of the city this film takes place in. The opening shots with Cam and Andy’s houses will have to look different enough so that people can tell them apart; I think Cam lives in an area of the city that looks more like this design, while Andy lives in a place that’s a little more crowded, a little less residential looking. I also need to design the metro station and the streets they’re walking down.

Beatboards, Logline, Production Schedule

10/2/19

Can’t believe it’s already the month of Halloween! How time flies :)

I’ve written this down before, but the homework slide said we have to have our loglines done today, so here’s mine:

Two strangers mix up their bags on their morning commute and spend the rest of the day caught in a whirlwind search for the other.

Lighthearted and comical, “Morning Rush” is a 3-minute 2D animated short about fateful encounters and the interconnectedness of us all.

Please clap.

Moving on: beatboards! The above beatboards cover the first 7 scenes of “Morning Rush”; beatboards for scenes 8-11 will be completed by the end of the weekend, and scenes 12-17 will be completed by the end of next Tuesday. These are very rough, so I’ll clean them up as best I can this coming week.

Above is also my production schedule. The main thing that’s blocking me is that I don’t know how long it will take me to actually animate each scene, and I don’t know how to have a rough estimate. If I animate 10 seconds per day of a 3 minute film, that’s 18 days. If I only work 5 days a week, that’s 50 seconds a week. So it should take me almost 4 weeks to get the rough animation done ? I also want to devote a lot of time to cleanup; I intend on having my animation be super rough so I can focus on the motion and timing, and then in cleanup I’ll go back and make everything be on model and pretty. So I could give myself 6 weeks for that?

However, this semester is busy for me. So if I can squeeze in 5 seconds of animation per day, that’s 36 days. If I work three days a week, because oh my god I’m dying I have so many essay to write, that’s 15 seconds per week. Then, during winter break, I can amp it up to 10 seconds per day. I like math but man oh man this is stressing me out. I don’t know how to count.

To put things simply, I’m still working out how long it will take me to animate the scenes, and I want to give myself at least 1.5x as much time as it takes to animate for cleanup.

On a related note, I’ve been thinking of taking an extra semester. I have five classes left, and while I’ve been taking 15+ credit semesters for the last three years, I’m feeling very burnt out about it. I need to take two honors classes, an English class for my minor, and two animation classes (one of which is the senior project). I really, really don’t want to spend the semester frantically juggling three essay-heavy classes with the things I want to actually spend time on. I’m already doing that this semester—would not recommend.

So that means: 1) I get more time to work on this! Yay! but 2) I have to readjust my production schedule! Oh no!

Honestly, now that I look at the schedule (is it too optimistic?), I feel like I could get this done by May. But then I remember my breathtaking ability to stress myself out to the point of physical illness, compounded with my lack of an after-graduation plan, and I think...nah. Nah. I’ll take the extra semester. I’ll talk to my advisors about it before I make any real decisions, but...that’s the direction I’m headed.

Anyway. Yesterday I actually sat down and watched a TVPaint tutorial, and I messed around in the free trial. I like it a lot; I think I’ll use TVPaint for my animation. I was going to try ToonBoom Harmony, and I downloaded the free trial, but then I forgot to/ran out of time before the trial ran out. Whoops. So I’ll either sign up with another email ?? or I’ll look at some YouTube walkthrough videos of it and try to see if I’d like it, maybe?

Edit: so I lied. Taking an extra semester would just draw it out, and it turns out I only need 4 more classes (including the senior projects class), so there’s no point to delay. The real reason I liked the idea of it was so I could put off experiencing the real world and looking for jobs. HA. No. Yeah, no.

Script

9/27/19

edit: I revised the script ! It gives me more room to focus on the main two characters. 

(click the pictures to see larger versions)

for sound, I’m thinking of minimal/no dialogue (perhaps some vocalizations, like gasps etc, here and there), as well as music. I don’t want to talk about how I’m going to get the music yet. We’ll see.... we’ll see... but I am thinking of something bright and fun. Listen to Leather Jacket by Hyukoh and that’s the vibe I’m going for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk6xg5D81eI

9/25/19

Expression sheet WIP for Andy ! local 20 year old struggles to tie shoe.

My goals for today and this week are to continue working on my turnarounds and expression sheets and to begin roughing out storyboards.