Jodie Haslam

Animation. Year 2 - UWE

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Developing Practice In Animation

Final Showreel

My main pieces created during this module, compiled into a showreel.

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Organisation

Throughout the project I kept organised by making daily notes in a notebook. I treated this as an ideas space too, so anything related to the project in terms of my own ideas for the Random Word Project, or any other work was scribbled in. As the nature of my work this module was subject to change based on various factors, like the main timetable/ workshops changing and that I didn’t know how long each skills/ software would take to learn and implement for example, I made daily ‘To Do Lists’, written in the morning or the night before. These really helped me to plan out my day loosely, allowing me some freedom, but clear direction for what I wanted or needed to accomplish that day. I’d worked with this method on previous projects, starting it in my Foundation Course, and I’ve found that it really works for me. It leaves my mind free for focusing on work, instead of having to remember what I need to do. Plus, this meant it was easy to reflect back and see what I had done over the past module as my activities were documented in it and I could keep a track of hours spent completing Work Experience too. Overall, a really easy, but effective planning and organisational method that I again found worked for me,

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Developing Practice - Semester 2 Conclusion

Overall, I feel that I’ve met all of the aims that I set out in my agenda. Summed up more extensively in my Module File, below is a list of my aims and how I set out to and how I ended up achieving them:

Learn about the variety of software available for me to use as a 2D digital animator and try them out - this should be done by completing a Gif every time a skill/ software is learnt.

Accomplished:

Completed a Gif or short movie clip every time

Learn After Effects - this should allow me to use effects and camera moves easily next year.

Accomplished:

I learnt a variety of skills on it, from rotoscoping, to editing green screen, to animating the camera, a character and suing the puppet pin tool as well as masking and lip sync. Live action and animation footage were both experimented with too.

Reduce my pipeline - to make me more employable and to make L3 more efficient, I should try to contain my practice as much as possible.

Accomplished:

I was able to complete a 10 second animation with no additional help, despite needing to use After Effects and Premier Pro.

Improve application of animation principles, character animation and drawing ability - through regular practice and Life Drawing.

Accomplished:

Attended Life Drawing, did additional observational drawing and used the animation principles regularly in my Gifs and 10 second film.

Practice strong design, story and movement led animation - through a Random Word Project incorporating Gifs, plus perhaps a 10 second film.

Accomplished:

I created quite a few Gifs, plus a 10 second film (a Do It In Ten entry), that was very based around design and professional practices.

Explore the illustration side of my practice - through research and generating pieces, like zines. This should help to strengthen my animation and illustration work through different avenues.

Accomplished:

I researched a lot into this area, looking at events, practitioners, styles and the business side of this. Plus I made a range of items:  zines, a phone cover and laser cut figures.

Attend workshops and complete online tutorials - to learn as much as possible, I should actively try to learn as much as possible. Whether offered at UWE or if I have to search online.

Accomplished:

I did attend as many of the workshops as I could - all of the 2D ones, if my information is right, plus I researched and found a lot of online tutorials and help guides.

Create a greater online presence - by posting work regularly on my blog.

Accomplished:

I posted work regularly on this work blog, my main, more curated and streamlines blog and I also set up a website to showcase my work.

For improvements, I would have liked to have created even more Gifs. This would have built up a substantial collection, that would have benefited me with skills, promotional wise and been fun. However I ran out of time and I did cover all of the basics that I wanted to this module. Additionally, I feel my speed in working to a professional working manner still needs to improve. As while I did succeed in sustaining it and making my practice cleaner and more efficient, I was slow to implement it throughout. This will probably improve through continued practice though, so more experience is necessary here.

In summary, I feel that I have done a lot to meet these aims and have consequently now quite a good body of work and skills to show for this module.  I do feel much more ready for Level 3 in terms of my practice, but I also feel that I have a better idea of what kind of animator I’d like to become in the industry, preparing me for a career.

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Level 3 Prep

Thinking about Level 3, I have tailored all of my work this module to hopefully aid me in making a short film next year. From seeing that I’ll probably work in Flash/After Effects or TVPaint, to the design aesthetic I’d like and how this will be to animate, to additional promotion materials alongside of it etc. Overall, I feel I’ll be able to cover just about everything from pre to post production without any limitations on my ideas.

Consequently, as well as writing an early story synopsis and planning a schedule chart, I’ve worked up one piece of concept art so far. I’m aiming for a modern, illustrative style, utilising texture, but one that lets the actions show clearly. From my previous work this module and for what I‘ve got planned, I’m really excited to start on this film and for Level 3.

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Epithema

- A horny excrescence upon the beak of birds -

Trying out rotoscoping on my video of a pigeon, part of Random Word Project.

This was a quick test of using the tracking feature in After Effects and Mocha. After the workshop last week, I really wanted to cement what I’d learnt with another gif/video. As it’s nearly the end of this project, I went for an extremely simple idea and test - of attaching a horn to a pigeon. So after recording the footage and making a simple horn in Flash (to utilise the vector image, to reduce any possible pixelation), I used the tracking feature. I struggled a bit, as the horn didn’t seem to want to align correctly. This was made harder as the area of the pigeon that it was set to track was really small, so the software had trouble maintaining the movement. However, after a bit of playing around it started to work.

In the end, I’ve really started to like the misalignment and sometimes clunky effect this gives the horn movement. It looks strange but this matches the idea of an appearing and disappearing horn. With more time I could have tried to correct the motion, but here, I think it works fine. A nice exercise for trying tracking out again. It’s definitely a skill I can carry forward and gives me a lot more flexibility when using live action footage.

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Workshop

Green Screen - Explosion

Adding a ‘Hollywood’ look and explosion.

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Workshop

Green Screen - Band

The sound doesn’t match to begin with...but that doesn’t seem too much of a loss.

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Workshop - Day 2

Green Screen - After Effects

This session focused on using footage that had been taken against a green screen and editing it to (first) add a new background in and then to add a new background and special effects (an explosion) in.

This was a good extension of the green screen tutorial that we had on Tuesday, that covered setting one up. Through that session and this, it was stressed how key it was to get the lighting right and to reduce shadows as much as possible. Editing the footage, it was key why this was. Areas that had less shadows required much less editing and where there was ‘spill’ (green light on the person/ object in shot), this was quite difficult to edit to make it look part of the scene (the drum above).

After Keylighting the green screen out as much as possible, we then added a background in and then edited the foreground (person) elements to make them appear like they were all part of the shot. For instance making the background blur the people because of the shining light and reducing their pink hues.

Next we transferred all of the skills that we’d learnt here onto a similar scenario - of taking out the green screen. But then we also changed the lighting and grain as well as the background. Then we added an explosion, as well as key framing the man’s movements to accentuate the blast. Making lots of little tweaks to the footage (in terms of editing the look) just made the whole scene look more believable.

It was incredible to see how footage could be edited in After Effects, and relatively quickly (half a day), to achieve these effects. To totally transport and change a scene. Although i don’t use too much live action footage, this whole (2 day) workshop has vastly improved my skills on this software and made me realise some of the effects I could create with it, especially using green screen and live action footage. It’s opened up what I thought was achievable and kind of made me think that there’s hardly any limit to what I can do in third year on my film. It’s really pushing me.

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Workshop - Rotoscoping

Applying Effects

First tracking the areas in Mocha and then adding the effects to the car, lights, windscreen and sky separately, helped to make the elements all work together and stand out as being edited less. The challenge was making it look as if it hadn’t been edited.

I was seriously impressed that another image could be mapped to the footage - it was possible to track it and apply it to the car through using Mocha. Although we went for text on the car front, we did try an image out momentarily as well. It’s highlighted more of the possibilities of the software.

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Workshop - Rotoscoping

Tracking (text)

Video of text being tracked to the footage of the car, so that the text follows the movement without needing to be individually keyframed. Easy process and saves so much time. I’ve never used the tracking process before, so this was a great surprise that this feature existed in After Effects.

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Workshop (Day 1)

Rotoscoping - After Effects

Screenshots from a workshop on rotoscoping footage. In it we covered motion tracking, masking, editing and adding text. Great workshop - I learnt so much about After Effects and using/editing live action footage. I can see how useful the tracking feature can be - especially as we were able to add an image onto the footage to follow the car, as well as extra edits, to make the footage and car a different colour and to make it look like it was driving at night. It was very comprehensive - taking into consideration how the windscreen could give the application of effects away.

Combining After Effects and Mocha, meant that by using the shape of the car, effects could be selectively applied to these parts as well as additional elements tracked to them later. I had no idea that this was what was involved in the process. but having a workshop on it made it easy to understand and quite straightforward when you know the process.

It’s given me a lot of freedom of how I can work with live action footage and ideas of how animation can easily be added to live action film now. After this one day workshop, I was already starting to feel more confident with After Effects.

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Research

Ed Cheverton - Self Publishing/ Small Press

Cheverton is a self publisher of zines/ comics, working under the name Jazz Dad Books. I’ve seen his work exhibited at the Bristol Comics and Zine Fair and ELCAF.

I was really interested to learn more about self publishing as while I’ve been playing around with making zines, I’ve been struggling to think of how I’d produce them to sell. So when I saw that Cheverton was holding a talk on the subject (from his tweet), I really wanted to ask him about it. Kindly, he obliged and answered all of my questions on the subject. Below is a basic round up of what I learnt from our email exchange.

Tabling at specific zine/ comic events, like BCZF, is great - in terms of being fun, having a lovely atmosphere and having the right/ an appreciative audience for your items. Though different events have different atmospheres - bigger events like ELCAF can be stressful and expensive, while BCZF is generally more relaxed.

Organising your own exhibition can be seriously stressful and difficult. It seems like tabling at an event is less so.

You can sell online, but small print runs and making the items ‘special’ leans towards exhibiting at fairs instead.

Self publicising can basically mean just creating and printing your own zines. Cheverton simply uses a standard printer (which fits his messy aesthetic) and binds them together himself, so it’s a very cheap process. He makes zines mainly for fun though, he doesn’t make too much money from selling them.

The content of the zines should have purpose - there should be a reason why the drawings are collected together into a physical copy and not just seen online. They should be something that is collectable.

I really enjoyed emailing Cheverton - he was seriously helpful and we talked a lot about the atmosphere at events. It’s got me really excited about making zines and my own items, as I didn’t know that it was that easy and cheap to make quantity of items (without going to a printing company). Overall, from this I feel that I could make my own zines and sell them at events or just make enough for the degree show next year, that are hopefully engaging to the audience at both (which differ in terms of their engagements with the pieces, e.g. parents vs zine fair enthusiasts). 

[jodiehaslamuwe]

Research

Degree Show

Holly James, from my year at UWE, is currently in Taiwan on Erasmus and she posted a video on Facebook from a degree show that she’d been to there (screenshots above). I was seriously impressed with their show - they had all set up dedicated spaces that not only showcased their film on a computer, but publicised it too through the inclusion of other materials around.

This ties in exactly to what I’d like to do for the degree show next year with my work - of incorporating illustrated materials alongside the film, like stickers, zines etc, to really create engagement with the materials and hype.

From the video there’s so much eye catching material - it seems like it was an immensely interesting and exciting experience to walk around. Plus Holly seems to have discussions with the other students over their work, based on looking at their promotional materials and inquiring about them - this is great engagement and shows how these materials can help to start discussion about your film. From this I’m very much into combining illustrated promotional items with my film next year.

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Observational Drawing

More practice of people walking/ sat down in the sun and monkeys at the museum. Really nice to keep this exercise going.

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Workshop

Green Screen

A workshop on how to set up the green screen. This was really informative for how much work needs to go into getting this process right, to make editing later on easier. The fact that the curtain must be secured and smoothed out as straight as possible took quite a bit of time and a lot of people to sort out. Then it took just as long to consider lighting and to light the subject from the front and top to add depth, but to make sure that they were separate from the screen, which also had to be lit. Lit with no hotspots showing too.

Really long process, but it made me appreciate the work that goes into this and how it can be used in After Effects. Hopefully it’ll make using the footage captured on green screen easier to edit too, as I’ll understand the work that’s gone into setting it all up and how it was done.

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Observational Drawing

People watching from a the first floor of a coffee shop in Broadmead, looking at the people buying flowers down below. Nice drawing practice on moving figures, of having to seriously reduce down and simplify to get them down in time. People move fast in the shopping district of Bristol.

Oh and some random feet from a while back too.

[jodiehaslamuwe]

Work Experience

After Effects - Compositing

I’ve been trying to learn more on After Effects recently, as I still wasn’t too comfortable with the interface. However, I then got asked to do some compositing on a third year stop motion film. I wasn’t sure to begin with as when I was offered this work, I wasn’t too confident with my ability to use the software. But I really wanted to at least try to help, especially as it’s so close to their deadline, and not too many people are using After Effects this year it seems.

The job first of all was to composite the eyes and the mouth (guide) (animated on Flash by Arty Hunt) onto the moving figure. This initially wasn’t too much of a challenge as I just had to reposition them, until I found that I had to apply and animate additional mask layers for the blinks as well as animate them actually moving (e.g. looking up, then down). I really liked this as it meant that I could improve my After Effects skills, while animating at the same time. I was able to complete around 130 frames in a day, so nearly the whole shot.

Then I was able to remove some rigging in a shot as well as loop a section of animation (the stream from the bridge and water pouring from a cup) and mask that to make it look like it was going inside of a cup. I’d never tried this before, I’d just heard it mentioned when I’d had the chromakey tutorial with Ian a while ago. But I found using the masking tool again worked well, especially as Arty had a clean image, which made replacing sections easy. I was able to to complete all of that shot in a day.

Overall, although I wasn’t very confident in what I could do to help to begin with, I’m really glad that I was able to work on this project, even if only on two shots. It provided real challenges for me to overcome and consequently really pushed my problem solving skills and knowledge of After Effects. Plus I really enjoyed just working on the shots - being able to animate a bit and working with Arty, who made the whole process incredibly easy with clear instructions, organisation and being approachable for questions.