See hear part 2

For the second part of see hear we were given a piece of sound and we had to animate to it. We were all pretty much on the same page from the start. We knew we wanted to make a more narrative based film this time. We also all agreed that the film should be based around space as that was what we thought the sounds evoked.
The first thing to do was to make a story board

Our idea was to have a space man going through a strange planet and encountering all sorts of strange creatures. We divided the work to see who could do what and to make sure no one was doing too much.

Tyler then went on to make an animatic so we could get our timings right when we began animating.

Pamela also made a shot list

we also sketched a couple characters, I found that alot of mine were too cute, which wasn't what we were really looking for

The cuteness is unbearable.

We did want to make this project stopmotion, but all the 3D spaces were booked out so we decided to do it in the style of the Moomins on the rostrum.

I cant really remember what I did in what order for this project, its all a blur to be honest so here it all is rather randomly. 

Its a little fast but here I tried to animate this octopus with the sound. I've put it in silent because I think the movement isn't that good and you can see it more without the distracting soundtrack, It does go with the sound but If you look at the character he doesnt really move in that much of a realistic way. After talking about it with some of my team mates they suggested it should just float across the screen, I thought it would be a good idea for the lights to flash in time to the sound instead. I think this version looks much better. 

One of the other characters was a space prawn, I made this out of FIMO and plasticine. 

I didnt know how to get pictures off twitter so here's a screenshot, it's upsidedown because.....eh because........aye. 

 This has probably been one of the most intense animation I've done so far, I was determined to do 25 images per second and I managed it, after losing my sanity and 20 buckets of sweat in that darkroom

After this initial test I tried a bit of compositing, The keying as usual wasn't perfect but it looked okay.

The second scene for the prawn was that it would go into the distance. I thought that what I would do would be to film a scene of the prawn circling in the same position and then gradually make the image get smaller in post production. 

I'm pretty happy with how that turned out. I was in the darkroom till about half 10 at night but I think it was worth it.

At first we thought that we could animate onto backgrounds on the rostrum, but then we thought it would actually be easier and more effective to animate on green screen and then composite onto a background. I painted the backgrounds to animate on. 

We came up with a colour scheme of red, purple and green, as colour was something that let us down a bit in the previous project. 

Another scene I made was the big character coming out of the sand.

We were running a bit low on time so I just filmed it at home with my dslr. 

I think the movement is again a bit unrealistic and a bit clunky.

 I then animated the sand that it would come out of

This was also a scene that I composited together to try and convey the spacewoman being eaten.
4

When I was finished animating on the rostrum I do would do the colouring for the rotoscoping frames. 

We thought  it would be too much work to ask Tyler to do all of the drawn scenes, so I took the still drawings he did of the spaceship and animated all of those scenes. 

I added some wave into the final cut to give the effect of heat waves. 

When editing together we realised that we didn't quite have enought footage so I had to make a few extra filler scenes. This light sequence was one of them. My style of graphics tablet drawing is slightly different to Tylers but I think this sequence doesn't stick out too much.

We also wanted to have a close up scene of the blobs, we thought we could zoom in to footage we already had but unfortunately the footage was too pixelated, as Pamela had to leave to go to work, I quickly stole her wee blob characters and animated a last minute close up scene to fill everything out. 

I think that's just about everything that I did for this project, it was pretty stressful and pretty work intensive. 

 I think it was worth it in the end, our final film isn't perfect, we did some cutting and elongating to try and make it up to the 2.40 mins and I think we managed it fairly well. 

See Hear Outdoors Part 2 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

Entire project improvements

I think the start of this proejct was pretty good, I think our sound composition was pretty good and our visuals were effective, We were told that the visuals in the 3rd sequence could do without the colour, which I agree with, other than that I think it looks pretty good. My sequence could do with a bit better syncing for some of the scenes, I think the second last scene with the salt is slightly out.

Other than that I'm happy with it

I think the second half needs more work however. We were told that some scenes were pretty clunky and I agree. For my own animation I think that my big character coming out of the mountain could do with refilming. I rushed it a bit just because I was worried about not getting everything done in time. I think I was more concerned with getting it done rather than making it look good. I think for this film we didn't really have a clear idea of what we wanted and narrative is lacking in some places. I still think its a rather successful piece but it could be better.