#reflective post

Reflective Blog Post 1: Red vs Blue - Finished Animation

This is my finished Animation from the Red vs Blue brief. I am relatively happy with how this turned out, however there are still a few aspects that could be improved.

Things to improve - Feedback from 1-1 and in class:

* One aspect that could be vastly improved is how the characters are composited with the background.  Due to how my characters were exported from Toon Boom to Premier Pro (the software I used to edit the video assets together) there is a pixelated line around the drawings that I could not fully get rid of when keying out the background. The issue I had was if I made the keying too strong the colours of the animated frames would be distorted and they would appear slightly transparent, this less aggressive keying however has left a small but noticeable outline around each of my drawings.

* If I had more time on this project I would have also liked to include shadows on and around my characters. I feel that this would improve how the characters and background work together rather than the characters looking like cut outs over a flat image.

* At one point my Blue character does not move in time with the background and they slide from one point on the ground to another. This also detracts from the believability of the animation .

* I should have been more ambitious with some of the character movements. I focused more on getting this project done on time rather than experimenting with the character acting and having fun with the technical aspects of the film.  For example I could have played with the long gangly arms of the red character more and implemented real world references of Orangutans into their movements and mannerisms. If I were to expand on this film I would do a lot more visual research and create much more elaborate, engaging and exaggerated  characters to really showcase their different personalities in the film.

* One criticism I received about the films narrative was that the blue characters change of heart (from being hostile and guarded against the red character to the two becoming friends). This was a change I tried to rectify by adding in the head scratch scene but since this is the main turning point of the narrative I may need to make this more apparent. I could probably do this by exaggerating the character movements in the animation to add to the visual storytelling.

Things I liked/ Positive Feedback:

* I’m happy with the fluidity of the animation in this film, although the movements could be more elaborate and the characters more expressive what I have here does look like a finished product in terms of animation.

* My narrative was understood and the general tone of the film and how the characters were conveyed came across well. The personalities of my two characters were obvious to my audience and the low angle shot I added of the Orangutan (the red character) as he looked down on the Blue character was successful in highlighting their size difference and in portraying these characters as very different from one another.

Characterization and Character Performance:

Wells, P., 2009. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture. 1st ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

If I was to move forward with this idea I would like to make improvements to the character performances, particularly the performance of my Red character. I am happy with the expressions and mannerisms of this character, and feel as though his calm performance contrasts the feisty nature of the Blue character he is trying to befriend, however, the characters movements do not resemble that of an orangutan.

Pages 94 to 98 of The Animated Bestiary goes into detail about the use of anthropomorphic animals as characters, describing Disney’s Donald Duck as having quote: “A big mouth, belligerent eyes, a twistable neck and a substantial backside that’s highly flexible” and concluding that these features make duck characters ideal candidates for animation.

Similarly I could have taken advantage of the unique characteristics of Orangutans when animating my red character such as their long gangly arms and their tendency to use their hands as feet. This would have added a lot to my red characters performance.

Wells, P. (1998). Narrative Strategies: Acting and Performance. In: Taylor & Francis, ed., Understanding Animation. London: Taylor & Francis Group, pp.104–111.

This section of the book titled Acting and Performance went into a lot of detail about characterisation through character performance and motivations that drive character. The chapter cites Stanislavski who breaks down performances as having one of three different sets of objectives,

“Places Of The Mind” our second project, which i’m really excited about. First thing that came to mind is imagination. Imagination fascinates me. People refer to two types of imagination. The first one is that they refer to it as creativity. for example saying that someone doesn’t have an imagination is saying that he/she isn’t creative. The second is mental imagery. Imagining things that aren’t present around us at a certain time, or not even realistic. 

I partly disagree with the imagination being referred to as creativity. In my opinion they are two different things. Imagining an apple on the table or recalling a scenery when you close your eyes or even dreaming is a completely different concept than creativity. Creativity is what allows humankind to fly to the moon, create art and cure illnesses. But that doesn’t mean that imagination doesn’t have a role in creativity.

I stumbled upon a term called Aphantasia. It is when someone can’t imagine something in their mind. For example if someone with Aphantasia is asked to imagine a bench on the beach, they know what a beach looks like, what it consists of, but they can’t picture it in their head. But does that mean that those people aren’t creative?

What intrigues me the most is the idea that each and everyone one us imagines things differently. Imagine a world you see through your eyes. How would it look like? What would you see?

 I actually worked on something similar a few years ago which was my main inspiration. I took photographs and digitally drew on them. So I thought to myself, why not develop this idea for this project and integrate a simple animation about a character in an everyday environment that I live in. 

Here are some examples of my previous work.

References:

 Brain Science: How Do You Imagine?, 2016. . Jami Gold, Paranormal Author.

In order to design my characters I first needed to do some research on color psychology. What they mean, what they represent and how we feel when we look at them. I stumbled upon a really interesting article that states that the color blue doesn’t exist or didn’t. Humans didn’t actually see the color blue.

Scholar William Gladstone found that in the Odyssey (which is one of the two ancient greek poems attributed to Homer), Homer describes the ocean as a wine-dark color and other weird hues but never uses the word blue. A few years later a philologist decided to analyse ancient texts, such as Hindu, Arabic, Chinese and Hebrew. He found no mention of the word blue. In fact the first society that had the word blue was the Egyptians, since it is the first culture to produce blue dyes.

Knowing about this really intrigued me to go deeper. Then I found a video that declares that the color blue that we see in nature is actually just reflections. The color blue only exists as a fabricated pigment. This actually makes sense. Simplest example that comes to mind is the ocean. The ocean isn’t actually blue, it’s just the sky’s reflection. What stops that from being the case for other things in nature?

Going back to color psychology the color blue is intellectual. It has its positive and negative aspects. It represents intelligence, trust, serenity, coolness, calm, logic. On the other hand it represents sadness, unfriendliness, coldness. It is soothing when we look at the color blue rather than the physical and mental reaction we have towards red. It clears our mind and helps us concentrate.

 I chose to go with the positive aspects of blue which helped me design the character as it is below. Her physical main feature is curves. She is more curvy than Red which for me represents a character being calm and good hearted.

BLUE. She is dominated by logic. Her peaceful personality is her strength, but being passive and not standing up for herself is her biggest flaw. She is seen as a weak candle by Red.

As for the color red it also has its positive and negative aspects. Red is excitement, it is strong and courageous. But on the other hand it is evil, aggressive and dangerous. I chose the negative aspects to design Red for the sake of the story. As it is shown Red is more edgy than Blue, for me edginess represents an evil character.

RED. She is dominated by emotion. Anger specifically. She dominates Blue by her powerful personality. Her biggest flaw is being malicious. She is willing to hurt Blue in order to be the only candle lit by her human. But what she doesn’t know is that it’s not gonna be a good ending for her.

REFERENCES:

-   Psychological Properties Of Colours - Colour Affects [WWW Document], n.d. URL http://www.colour-affects.co.uk/psychological-properties-of-colours (accessed 12.4.18).  

Overall thoughts

I got done with the second project called Places of the Mind. I am not so happy with the outcome of this project. Since I have to move to UK in two weeks, I am too busy with the moving stuff so I could not give my 100% in this assignment.

I think I could not manage my time properly in this is assignment. I spent too much time thinking about the ideas and could not decide which idea to work on. Also there is so much on my mind these days that I could not completely focus on the assignment.

Analysing the Animation

When I showed the animation to the class, most of them could not understand the meaning behind the animation because the narrative is about personal experience and emotions. They all liked my idea, and suggesting me a couple of things that can be added to the visuals to make the narrative strong. Such as adding some clothes around the suitcase or inside the suitcase would have made more sense.

I think when we work on something personal that can be hard to be understood by the audience then its better to give your animation a title or a tagline at the start of the animation that coveys the basic concept of the animation. By doing this it would become easier for the audience to understand the film.

Lastly, the instructor did not liked the sound. He said that the sound is too dramatic and is not going with the animation and suggested me to look for some other sound options for this animation. He also asked me to try not using sound in one of my projects and see how it turns out.

Reflection

This blog documents my progression as a 2D character animator. I've shown this progression practically with the animations I have created for the Practice 1 module, through academic research and through my own analysis of existing work that relates to my field of study.

I primarily researched academic texts on topics such as fictional character writing, characters in animation and animated character performances. Character writing and character performance was also my main focus when analysing existing animated films.

I used the universities Online Library to find my academic sources by searching for terms such as Character, Performance and Animation. Not all the sources I covered were specifically to do with characters in animation.

Having conducted this research I feel as though I now have a much better understanding of my craft, and that I am able to communicate so much more in terms of personality and general appeal in my own character performances.

Applying research to my own Practice:

The biggest improvements I have made in my own practice have come from my development projects, in particular my development of the Places of the Mind film. Though it is only at the animatic stage currently I feel as though the narrative, themes and characterisation are a lot stronger than in the first iteration of this film.

Reading and analysing academic sources such has given me a deeper understanding of character performance in animation. Through applying this deeper understanding and consideration of animated performance to my own films I believe I have shown improvement in my craft. The film I made for my 'Optical Sound' brief, for example depicts a character with a clear personality presented through the way they move and their mannerisms, visual characterisation through performance that was somewhat lacking in the first film I made for practice 1 (The Red vs Blue project).

After finalizing my narative and storyboard for the Light and shadow project, the next step was to start the animation process. Since te start o the term, I wanted to learn Adobe Animate so now I thought to use it for the light and shadow project.

I watched a couple of youtube tutorial to learn how to animate in Adobe Animate. These videos helped me understand the user interface, learn the basic tools and how to use them. I then tried to make a simple animation to test, Initially I animated a very simple shape.

Yesterday our Practice 1 Instructor had a tutorial session with us in which he taught us how to draw and animate a walk cycle in Adobe Animate. This activity was super helpful. I animated a full walk cycle by myself and I am so proud of it. It was very rough but the animation was very smooth.

I think the more I practice, the more I will be good at the software. I need to spend so much time practising this software to be able to produce complex animations in it.

After a week, I had an individual session today with my course instructor Alex. and later in the evening we had a collective seminar session as well.

Individual discussion

In the individual tutorial my instructor looked at my work and we talked about whatever progress I made over the week. I showed him the storyboard and we discussed how I can improve the story. He also advised me to work on the personality and traits of the characters as it's important to know who they are and how the audience should feel about them. After doing extensive research on the colors, their meaning, personality and psychology, I gave both the red and blue character a certain personality.

Group discussion

In the seminar session, we all looked at each other’s work and gave constructive feedback to one another in order to help develop our projects further. I showed the class my storyboard and got some great suggestions to improve my project in terms of visuals and story. After the discussion, I planned to change the story a bit. I subtracted the human characters from my story and kept the focus on the kites.

Reflection

After this session I learnt a couple of things that I would like to stick with in my future projects as well. The first thing that I learnt through these sessions was that Its important to show your work to someone and have feedback on it. It always leads to better ideas and improvements in your work. So from now on I will always show my work to as many people as I can in order to have their opinion.