little update: this project isn’t dead, but I have decided to put it on hold so I can improve anatomy and animation fundamentals. I can see... so many flaws in my old work on here, which is a good thing because it means I’m improving! but also underlines that this project will need to be almost completely restarted once I come back to it. that’s ok though!
you can see progress on that at Uranium Light on twitter. more finished animations will get posted at @uranium-light on here.
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Initial test animatic for the opening scene of the animation.
Obviously everything about the timing is subject to change (I probably want to slow down the first part considerably more once there’s actual inbetweens) but hopefully this conveys a little of the concept!
that is: we see her with her eyes shut practicing a men strike, and then she opens her eyes and it turns out she’s not in a kimono, her sword is actually a plastic pipe or something, and we get a sense of where this is set (background will be considerably more interesting). the swordmaster pats her on the shoulder, she walks over to her girlfriend in the background, we pan up through the slum roofs to the first big text block.
also i think i need to like, find a different way to draw storyboards which doesn’t tempt me to start doing keyframes ><
I wrote a script for the first part of the film - an opening montage telling the story of how the GIANT HEAD came into existence, how our protagonist fits in, etc. I’m going to get to boarding this tomorrow either with Krita or Blender Grease Pencil (I will definitely be using Blender to handle the virtual camera stuff that this script demands!)
all in all this calls for about eleven backgrounds - easily doable - and a lot of very complex perspective drawing animation, which is really going to push the limit of what I can do, but hey, that’s the whole point of this project!
the big concept is that each scene in the montage has text that’s physically present in the scene saying how long ago it is, and the camera flies through this text to transition from scene to scene.
film is divided into two parts: opening montage and main sequence. the opening montage tells the story of why there is a GIANT HEAD, the main sequence explains how the giant head is destroyed by one plucky antifascist lesbian
SCENE ONE
locale: outdoor combat class
the SWORDMASTER is training the GIRL
GIRL is holding her bokken ready to strike, her eyes are shut, so there is a black screen
she opens her eyes, dojo fades in
her eyes narrow and she swings her bokken towards the camera
camera pulls back, revealing other student who parries
they lower swords, bow
SWORDMASTER pats GIRL on the shoulder
GIRL wipes away some sweat
walks to edge of square, camera zooming to follow
the TECHNOWITCH is standing at the edge of the square
she passes the PROTAGONIST a ragged towel, they lean on the wall together
camera pans upwards to slum skyline
BIG RED WORDS: "ONE YEAR AGO"
camera flies straight through the letter 'A' in 'YEAR'
required backgrounds: outdoor dojo panning up into slum skyline (panoramic perspective)
SCENE TWO
exterior street scene; a busy market. various cyborgs wandering around.
the protagonist buys something and then walks along the street to join the TECHNOWITCH, who is hanging out with a GAY COUPLE. atmosphere is relaxed.
camera continues to pan as the group laugh at a joke. the pan reveals the words "ELEVEN MONTHS AGO" and we fly through the "O" in "AGO"
SCENE THREE
street scene, past curfew. shuttered market stalls. scene is lit by moonlight - city lights in the distance, but not here. contrasting colour palette to the previous scene. there is a dark alleyway in a prominent place in the frame, with "TEN MONTHS AGO" stretching across it, and the barely visible silhouette of a parked car
the same GAY COUPLE from the previous scene is running home, only to be stopped by car headlights suddenly appearing in alleyway. silhouetted in the lights is the COP ; body language aggressive and smug, e.g. tapping baton in hand (no dialogue). other COPS hanging back behind, laughing
GAY COUPLE backs off, hands in the air. COP gets up in their space
the GIRL sprints out of an alleyway and tackles the COP. two go sprawling into the street. girl shouts (again no VA, but clearly shouting) for the gay couple to run, and they do
COP calls on his guys for backup, they start advancing forwards, with sort of 'i can't believe you did that but you are going down' expressions
cop lights suddenly turn off, there is a spray of sparks
blur of silhouette past the camera as the girl legs it
camera flies through the "O" in "MONTHS"
backgrounds required: street scene dark, street scene lit by headlamps
SCENE FOUR
exterior scene. a crowd is standing under a big pyramid, with cops in the same uniforms as the ones before - our specific cop is in the near foreground, possibly with a bruise. the FASCIST LEADER is giving a speech. (crowd should be static, don't try to animate a whole moving crowd). behind the crowd is some monumental architecture: lots of pillars and pyramids and such. symmetrical composition. balloons and drones float around in the sky.
the words NINE MONTHS AGO stretch between the buildings above the podium
camera pans up and zooms in on the FASCIST LEADER, who's doing some exaggerated gestures. we don't spent much time with him - this is just to establish who he is (a bad dude). nasty sneer.
camera rises over his head and zooms through the "O" in MONTHS
SCENE FIVE
interior scene. some kind of map room, prominently featuring a map of the city with little models of the various monumental architecture. we can see the boulevard where he's giving the speech. there is a line of portraits on the back wall of previous fascist leaders in front of buildings they've created. intended message: he wants to build a building to one-up his predecessors.
the FASCIST LEADER is standing over the map, reading some kind of report. a nervous-looking FUNCTIONARY is standing nearby, rubbing his hands together.
the FASCIST LEADER sneers and tears up the report. he picks up one of the models on the table and throws it over his shoulder. the FUNCTIONARY runs after it as the leader peers at the table.
the FASCIST LEADER gets an idea. he walks to the back of the room, and picks up a bust of himself, and lugs it over to the table. he places it down, on top of the area that represents the slum where our protag lives.
the FASCIST LEADER nods, looking very pleased with himself.
camera zooms in on the table where there is tiny red letters reading "EIGHT MONTHS AGO" and flies through the "A" in "AGO" just to shake things up
SCENE SIX
a street scene in a clearly residential area. a large crowd of people are gathered, looking shocked. facing them is a bunch of cops and some bulldozers (only they're like, cyborg bulldozers with someone like physically wired in or something). the GIRL, TECHNOWITCH and SWORDMASTER are near the front; the NERVOUS-LOOKING FUNCTIONARY is standing beside the lead cop with a long roll of paper. in the gap between the two crowds is the words "SEVEN MONTHS AGO". try for a kind of spherical fish eye perspective where we can zoom in without it looking weird?
the camera zooms in on our protagonist; she shakes her head like "no you are not going to bulldoze our houses to build a giant fascist head".
the camera then pans quickly over to the COP and the FUNCTIONARY. the COP smirks; the FUNCTIONARY legs it into the cop line.
the COPS start firing tear gas rounds and shooting their guns in the air, conveniently avoiding the requirement to draw an entire crowd running away at once. blurry figures leg it from the crowd. a few people run forwards instead - our protagonist among them.
the camera zooms through the battle into the "O" in "MONTHS"
SCENE SEVEN
interior scene of the GIRL and the TECHNO WITCH's room. tech paraphernalia is scattered around; there's the GIRL's martial arts equipment. on screen left is a window; on screen right is the door in. the bed is in the foreground.
suddenly, the door pops a bit in; the GIRL jumps out of bed
the COP bursts in through the door only to get hit over the head by the GIRL with a chair or something. meanwhile, the TECHNOWITCH kicks out the window, and starts climbing out.
they jump out the window. the camera flies through the window this time - oh shit we're having two scenes in this part of the montage?
SCENE EIGHT
the camera looks down onto a street scene from the first floor
outsie the window, the cops are advancing down the street with riot shields. behind them they have flame tanks; the street is on fire. they're just fucking shooting people
the GIRL and the TECHNOWITCH run across the street and duck into an alleyway. they can't do shit against this.
the camera flies into the flames, where it meets the words 6 MONTHS AGO with a really big 6 and goes through the hole in the 6
SCENE NINE
the GIRL and the TECHNO WITCH are running under a bridge in a dry canal. a bunch of trucks are driving overhead carrying sheets of copper for the GIANT HEAD (right to left).
a truck drives in carrying the words FOUR MONTHS AGO and we fly through the "A" in "AGO"
SCENE TEN
the FASCIST LEADER is standing on a metal platform with camera drones flying around. behind him is the GIANT HEAD, but in broad daylight. he's nodding and looking very proud of himself. the head is in a slightly earlier stage of completion.
the camera pulls BACK this time, and a CRT scanline filter is applied. as we pull back, we find ourselves in a dusty room containing the GIRL and the TECHNOWITCH; the TECHNOWITCH turns off the TV, revealing the words TWO MONTHS AGO. we fly in through the O
SCENE TEN
an interior scene. a dusty room; a sketch of the GIANT HEAD on the wall, next to a window with the construction site in the distance.
the GIRL is sitting, tapping her foot. the GAY COUPLE from earlier are also there, and some other PARTISANS. the TECHNOWITCH is pointing at something on the diagram. there is an arrow running along the bridge we saw on the TV, down the scaffolding, and to the base of the GIANT HEAD - and she scribbles an explosion in there.
the camera goes out the window towards the building site. this leads us to the word YESTERDAY and we go through the D, leading us to the scene in progress now.
couple of kinks to work out still, like displaying notes pages properly and adding some useful descriptive pages, but this website is pretty much good to go! if you’re on desktop, please click through and have a look... [best viewed at 16:9 resolution or wider]
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Rendering basically done, I want to refine that lens blur effect (would be nice to have it looking properly bokeh rather than just blurred), otherwise it’s just filling in some final details and doing the various strings and wires! Then we can make this site look good, and I can return to the real animation work.
Today I rendered a bunch of cloth! Slowly but surely getting there on this painting. I’m pleased with where I got to with the long diagonal stretch folds from the body’s twist, though it took quite a lot of iteration to figure out what worked.
Painting progress for the blog theme. (see here for full composition!)
It was a lot of fun figuring out how best to render skin for this and I’m happy with how well it’s coming along. A little bit more needs to be done to finish off the far hand and the feet.
I think I may have embiggened her head a bit, looking at it now? a little ironic given the title of this project. but that’s something to worry about tomorrow - hopefully it will be a quick rescale + cleanup sort of job
This blog could stand to have some actual web design done on it (since it’s currently the default theme with the main logo badly cropped on desktop), so I’ve started on a big painting that will take up the left side of the screen (with posts like this one on the right). With some CSS magic I’ll have the samurai’s saya overlapping the posts. Hopefully to finish rendering in a few days, but there’s lots of details to pin down, since this is gonna be lineless! It’s been a great chance to try some serious perspective and poses and pin down the energy I want from this film :p
it’s sooo good to be drawing characters again instead of meticulously swinging boards around, let me tell you
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Another pass working on this. I think the physics is looking more convincing now although I think I need to increase the momentum to the left when she first grabs on, and I’m not sure about the way the panels on the right hang... they probably flip up too far. I’ll do some more on it tomorrow, and then start fitting the character on.
First few frames are on 2s, the last few on 5s, with computer inbetweening. I think I could stand to let the computer do even more of the inbetweening, but I should play around with different easing settings..
The rig is just about good enough. A better design would be to have a smaller number of control bones - not as many as the boards - and use drivers to control the boards, so I don’t have as many little clipping errors. I could also stand to re-weight the wires. It may yet be worth doing this, but on the other hand I like the way the hand-animated boards don’t have that computer precision. I’ll play around some more.
Starting to seriously miss doing actual drawing, but I’ll be back on it soon!
I did some further work on Blender rig, setting various constraints to reduce the number of parameters I need to worry about, and started animating the boards in Blender.
Obviously there’s a fair few glitches (I need to move the background further back for example lmao, and a bit of jiggling where I haven’t kept the motion arcs and rotation consistent), but I am feeling a lot more happy with how much this has sped up my ability to animate the bridge panels doing fairly complicated motions. With a bit of cleanup, I can get this ready to use as a drawing aid. (please rest assured I have no intention of directly mixing 2D and 3D!)
Built myself an animation aid to make it easier to keep track of the boards. I’m still going to be animating this manually on 1s, no physics simulation, and I’m going to rotoscope the result to keep a consistent line feel, but Blender will save a lot of work guessing on how things look in perspective.
One thing I realised already is that the way the swing off the wire currently works doesn’t make a lot of physical sense - the girl is producing much more of a vertical upwards force than a horizontal force, which means the moment will be in the opposite direction than I animated it. Basically I animated it as if the boards are hanging from a single central line of wires instead of pairs of wires.
So I’m experimenting with animating it so that it flips up a little bit as well as swinging. Early days yet, no animation is ready to show, but the IK bones on the wires are working (more or less, could maybe do with more bones) so that’s pretty sweet. For some reason pole targets weren’t working correctly, that will be something to investigate another time.
Also speaking of conservation of angular momentum, I am aware her rotation speed abruptly slows down as she starts to fall. I will address this by having her spread out her arms and legs to increase her moment of inertia. It’s funny, it seems obvious in retrospect, but I never realised that that’s why a somersault works the way it does!
While attempting to tie down the initial animation of the girl jumping onto the bridge, something felt wrong, and I just couldn’t figure out what. Eventually it occurred to me to think about motion arcs, and so I traced the major masses (hips and shoulders) and sure enough they were jiggling about like mad. But that led me to a more fundamental problem: the animation as I had it did not conserve momentum (linear or angular)! No wonder it looked wrong.
So I went back to revise the swing animation, animating only the hips and shoulders (and later, the head) and focusing in hard on timing, spacing, motion arcs and conservation of momentum. I couldn’t really make it fit the original timing and spacing, but I had an idea to add a bit of extra flair. Now she is going to catch the swinging boards themselves and go under them, then do a gymnastic flip before landing perpendicular to the boards. Definitely more complicated, but even at this early stage I can see how much better it’s going to feel.
The bridge will need to be totally reanimated to match this new motion, and make sure the bridge feels realistic forces from where the girl grabs it. The plan is now:
revise wires and boards to get them swinging weightily and lining up properly with this new animation
draw artist dummy type figures over the revised hips and shoulders (not box people, the days of box people are done)
continue to animate straight ahead to connect up with original rough animations, then resume tie-down as originally planned
This may seem like a setback, but it will look so much better, and it’s made me feel excited rather than demoralised, so... bear with this!
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Our protagonist’s girlfriend, the (self-described) techno witch, who has made her home in the infrastructural interstices of the city. Her day job is keeping all the rickety, second-hand machinery around her running.
Her staff allows her to take control of the enemy’s vehicles, provided she can get close enough to stick it in the right place.
I made a value painting of the face (bottom right), following the suggestion of @lyravelocity​, and that helped me get the shapes more or less right in a way I found really hard on the line drawing. Then I picked out lines to draw from that, resized the head drawing to fit, evened out the line weights, and went through the flats and shading process. Pretty happy with the result, though I definitely gotta draw this girl’s face some more with different expressions and angles.
The staff is inspired by some character designs recently leaked from NieR: Reincarnation. I didn’t have a specific reference for the face/clothes but I made some faces in the webcam to help figure out how smiles work :p Since her jacket resembles the cop’s, I figured I’d have her steal it in the opening montage.
