Initial Ideas
- Story book
- flip through pages
- show a journey of us going to different places we like
- We are animals instead of humans
- shows two different sides of our lives
- Use blue and Red to contrast our animals more as well as to set the animals apart from the rest of the animals in our scenes.
Developed thoughts after finishing
The concept of this animation was to create an finished/unfinished film based on the prompt point of view in pairs. I suggested an idea to do a contrasting view of our lives before we came to UAL. Since me and my partner come from differing backgrounds (My partner has lived in Beijing however was not born there, my ethnicity is Chinese however I was born in Britain). This was the main focus of our story and at the end we would meet at UAL (University of Art London).
There on the bottom is a loose guide on how the story was going to progress having multiple shots showing different locations on where we lived that was visited often. I do have some regrets of not developing this part too thoroughly as we did not do that much research on older photos of places that resonated with us, as well as not visiting some of those places to get in person experience as we just went on past experiences . If I had to do this again I would try to visit those places in advance to gather the feelings, smells and the environment as I did in previous workshops.
We decided on animal characters instead of human ones as we decided based on the time restraint and on the characterisation that animals that can represent us in some sort of way will help show contrast as the opposing animal would populate the other persons home since again we are differing in ethnicity to where we live in. This will also help show our personalities and somewhat our appearances (My partner is taller than me so we assigned her a rat as she associated it with that animal before and I chose a narwhal as they are flatter and rounder contrasting the rat which has a more angled shapes.
Storyboard Ideas
- Keep it simple and easy to understand
- have the more important scenes be longer
- Make sure the pacing isn’t too fast or too slow
- Make sure it isn’t unmanageable in the time frame we have.
- Try to keep the style and characters consistent.
Developed thoughts after finishing
We initially had a different idea on how to present this story as we wanted to use a similar style of book art from a previous artist in our work we used in the Elephant and Castle project called Maria G. Pisano. Where the beginning would have a flipping book animation showing different places we have been to, however we discussed and decided it was not a good idea. This was because putting our audience into that first shot they are simply unable to comprehend what is going on just yet and assuming they can read all the flipping pages is not possible due to the 30 second restraint. So we decided to change the opening shot to have us walk outside our homes as it would show a start a journey as well as establish the idea of our differing living places.
Me and my partner created a timeline and how long we were going to spend on each part of the animation. I realised by doing this how short 30 seconds truly is and how much of a challenge this was going to be however we were able to prevail as we prioritised more important scenes that needed longer time to soak into the audiences minds. An example is the travelling scenes (Walking and Travel scenes) as well as the final shots having time to develop as well. In the end this was a good split in timings and as I animated these timings they were exactly the timings needed for each scene while also making sure not to stay on one scene for too long to keep the pacing of the animation smooth.
Thoughts when making
- Photoshop keeps crashing which is not ideal and I lost some progress but I will come back from this with a plan.
- I am not used to photoshop but I will use this project as a means to learn more about the program when creating a more professional looking film.
- Make sure it is consistent and checking in with my partner to make sure we have tasks divvied out to each other and on schedule.
Developed thoughts after finishing
When I made this animation I used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects. They are both quite new programs to me so I am still getting used to animating in these programs. Troubles I encountered was Adobe crashing when I would do a certain action so to avoid losing progress I saved very often as well as backing up multiple saves to make sure I was progressing well and had a backup to fall back on if I did lose any progress. I also reduced the amount of times I did that action as it was avoidable. I also encountered issues with setting frame rate but after doing some research I was able to use the correct frame rate conversion to Adobe After effects.
When I animated I used more simple types of animation such as boil animation as well as animating very loosely to get very exaggerated expressions using squash and stretch techniques. I did push the animation in the train travel scene which is one of the best put together scenes I animated in this short film as it emanates a lot of life from that single scene alone. The lighting and use of soft blur on the whole scene itself brought this warm ambience that I was going for. If I had to change one thing about that scene is the way I didn’t have the narwhal doin g much, to show off my personality more having it draw or be on its phone would be more accurate to personifying me.
Overall I am very happy with the result as it is exactly what I set out to do at the start and it portrays the difference of our lives till now very well as well as displaying our individual styles combined and working in tandem which I am content that we were able to merge them together that well. If I were to do this again I would develop the ideas much more In the beginning as well as add more detail within some scenes to add more of a professional look much like the train scene had.
Link to the animation:
