ECA Animation Blog

Blog of Anson Ma, 2nd year animation student at ECA.

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10x10x17

As part of the 10x10x17 (Ten Films in Ten Days) project involving other colleges and universities, we were asked to make ten films in ten days, alloting ourselves 24 hours to complete a short animation in consecutive days (disregarding weekends) before we had to move on to the next one.

Given the intensive and time-focused nature of the project, this was indeed a challenging project for me, as I was using the project as an opportunity to try out a new animation software, as well as trying out drawing tablets, something which I had not done previously. Though it was tough trying to get a hang of it in the initial days, I had a lot of fun experimenting with hand drawn animation, whether it be stills or more involved shorts.

My short films can be seen at https://vimeo.com/channels/10x10x17/videos/search:eca-ma-/sort:preset .

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Two Characters and a Setting

For this project, we were told to animate a short featuring two characters and a setting in which they would interact in. Our briefing took place with our teacher, who gave us a short tutorial in constructing a story (featuring the narrative motivation, conflict, and resolution), and showed us a Tom and Jerry episode as an example of a simple but effective narrative.

To start off our brainstorming, I jotted down a few ideas in my sketchbook as to what characters I would involve in my animation. My initial ideas involved a laboratory setting, featuring an amoeba and a virus trying to consume the amoeba, as well as a cowboy and a farmer trying to obtain water in a desert setting. Seeing more potential in the latter, I started working on the character designs.

In addition to our brainstorming, we had a character design session with Rachel, who gave us some reference books and some clay to mould our prototype characters. This was particularly helpful as I was able to gain a three dimensional sense of scale for my character.

A week or so after, I had a set storyline for my animation: A thirsty cowboy and farmer are fighting over a water barrel, a scarce resource in the desert expanse. In the end, the barrel is revealed to contain tea leaves, contrary to their initial impressions. In researching more background material for my animation, I had a look at some spaghetti western films, such as Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, in order to get a better sense of the tone and conventions they use in western media.

After this, I set off to sketch a brief storyboard for my animation. This was a bit hard as I was focused on providing my story a middle segment to escalate the plot. However, I found that this was unneeded during the formative crit as I already had a sufficient beginning and end, and that anything else would be filler. 

I started to animate using Toon Boom Harmony, though I didn’t get very far due to extenuating circumstances. Animating without an animatic was a bit more troublesome than expected, which is something I will keep in mind when doing other projects.

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Y2 Semester 1 Life Drawings. (Click for bigger view.)

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Y2 Semester 1 Life Drawings. (Click to get a bigger view.)

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Y2: Animated Reality (WIP)

In the Animated Reality project, we were told to make an animated mini-documentary that draws its content from something in everyday life, while integrating a narrative into the documentary. I was paired up with Holly for this project. To start off the project, we were to choose a location to be the focus of our film, and observe the happenings of the location while also interviewing people. We chose Portobello Beach as our focus since we thought that business would be lacking in the area due to the incoming winter season, and we aimed to interview shopkeepers around the vicinity to gain their perspectives on this issue. 

After interviewing plenty of shopkeepers, we happened upon a chippie shop by the name of “The Golden Bite”, and interviewed the shopkeeper (Rafaele Iannone), who told us, in great detail, how business around the area had suffered due to the school moving away, and then moved on to talk about his feelings on the general attitudes of people towards the food industry. Though we initially intended to do an animated overview on the shops of Portobello, we found his interview thought-provoking enough to make it the main focus of our animated documentary.

(One of the pictures taken for animation background reference.)

After we had taken photos, we went to drafting our storyboard for the project while simultaneously transcribing the shopkeeper’s interview. We narrowed it down to the main topics, and set up a chart to plan out our corresponding visuals. We wanted to make it so that the visuals juxtaposed with the audio in a subtle way, rather than straightforward, since we had planned to convey the audio in a metaphorical way. (For example, chips are removed from the fryer when the speaker mentions the school being “moved”.) 

During the development of the script, we came up with a more metaphorical interpretation of the narrative: since Portobello’s main attraction was the sea/beach, we wanted to portray the shopkeeper’s discomfort with the situation through the use of water imagery. As the interview escalates into talking about his dissatisfaction with his current situation, the water imagery increases, with the water/sea rising higher and higher to convey the idea of suffocation and helplessness in his current state.

Initially, we intended to produce an animatic after designing the storyboard, but because of time contingencies, we decided to move straight onto animation. During this time, we also recorded the sound for the voice over. Since we were unable to get the original owner to voice for us, we got a fellow classmate who had similar characteristics and tone to voice the script. 

For the style of animation, we decided on two contrasting styles for the background and character - the backgrounds would be done in a painterly style while the character will be rotoscoped in black and white. We decided that rotoscoping would be a suitable method as we wanted to portray the shopkeeper as a real individual with real life problems rather than just a cartoon caricature, and we thought the aesthetics of rotoscoping also provided gritty realism to the narrative, despite the bright unsaturated nature of the backgrounds. I was to do the rotoscoping, while Holly did the background and animations.

The process of animation was fairly straightforward. Rotoscoping was done through Dragonframe with ink pens. My initial thoughts of rotoscoping being an easy task turned out to be wrong - it was a lot of effort repeatedly tracing the same frames over and over, and it did get a bit tedious during the later parts of rotoscoping. However, the effort was worth it, and I had fun experimenting with different shading styles.

I got to working on sound after having received the rough edited cut from Holly, who had put the backgrounds and character animations together. Working with sound was fairly easy, from finding sound effects to compiling them together in one composition. 

We were quite proud of the final version of the animated documentary. It was a lot of hard work, but it was definitely worth it in the end!

(Password: Underwater)

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Y2: World in a Room (WIP)

For this project, we were tasked with combining two different methods of animation into one singular narrative, specifically 3D animation and traditional stop motion. This narrative had to contain a simple structure, with it involving a person knocking at a door, and another person answering it. To start off, we were supposed to draft up an animatic for our narrative. I started off with the initial idea of having a person sulking in a room, with another tentative person hesitating to knock on the door - however, after viewing works from the previous year and finding that it had already been done, I thought of another idea, which involved someone occupying the toilet, with another person desperately needing it outside. Having thought of a suitable narrative, I drew up a rough storyboard before making the animatic in After Effects.

Having received feedback, I was told to edit the narrative to have more of a build up - the escalation of the conflict ended too abruptly. Although I did not make another animatic, I drew a few extra scenes as to how to develop the story further. The first few scenes depict the scenario being escalated, and the later scenes was a brief sketch on how the narrative could end.

Afterwards, I began to animate the stop motion parts. For this, we were given an armature and set to work with. Because of the way the set was build, I was unable to do some of my more extreme high/low angle shots, and had to compromise instead. A major shot which involved the man hitting the radio on the fireplace was also impossible to do with the set since the direction for the shot was obstructed by a wall, so I had to improvise and think up another way to get the shot I wanted.

(This initial high angle shot that I had planned was difficult to do with the camera set up, and was instead taken with a phone camera to demonstrate the unlikely shots I had planned in my storyboard. Initially, I had wanted to use extreme shots to convey a desperate, over-dramatic perspective of the bladder-bursting person, but I had to improvise due to the constraints of the camera set up.)

The stop motion filming was somewhat challenging in technical aspects as I had very minimal experience with it last year, and it was difficult to wrap my head around the cinematography aspects of the Dragonframe program. However, everything else was quite fun to work with and I was happy enough with how the emotions and narrative was conveyed in the stop motion part.

3D animation proved to be more challenging as I had forgotten how to use Maya, and I definitely spent a lot less time on Maya than I did on stop motion. Though it was challenging, I still found it fun to animate once I got the hang of key framing and IK/FK functions of Maya. Because of time contraints, the final version (or rather rough cut) of the project still looks rough, though this is something I will aim to fix in the final version.

After the crit, I had noted some improvements I could make on the rough cut - the 3D animation could be polished and cut down to balance out the appearances of both 3D and stop motion characters, and some parts of the narrative could be edited so that the concept of the narrative was not too overly apparent. The ending could also be edited so that it was less ambiguous as to what was happening (was the person going to the toilet while the man was still inside?). Though it was a very rough cut with placeholder sound effects, I agree that these improvements are something I will need to incorporate in my final version of the project. Still, I was happy with what I managed to do with two unfamiliar animation methods within the given period of time, and will definitely revisit it when I have the time.

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Year 2: Edinburgh Map Project

As an introduction project, we were told to get into groups and go around Edinburgh in a path, and document our journey in the form of an animation. To start off, each of us took a few photos from our own individual walks for ideas. I went along the Fountainbridge route and took a few pictures of both historical and aesthetic interest.

Afterwards, we went around in a group, travelling around Arthur’s Seat, the Meadows, Cowgate, and Greyfriar’s Bobby. Our next step was to link these locations together. We had the idea of linking each location through different perspectives of people/objects in Edinburgh: for example, from the perspective of a bird, the sky of Arthur’s Seat could dissolve into the blue pond of Arthur’s Seat, which is perceived from the perspective of a fish, and vice versa. We would then animate on top of the filmed location footages. As I was doing Greyfriar’s Bobby, I made a brief storyboard: the perspective of a bird would switch to the perspective of a tourist filming and taking photos of Greyfriar’s Bobby.

Since I was animating a tourist, I planned to rotoscope the hands of the tourist as she was swiping through her phone for photos. Initially, this rotoscoping animation was supposed to be composited on top of the hands in the footage, though because of time constraints, this was done quite roughly.

The end result of the collaboration was quite rough due to communication problems and time constraints, and I feel that we definitely could’ve done better in assembling the final version of the animation. However, this was just an encouragement for me to work harder in the projects to come for this semester.

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Final version of the Medusa animatic, with more sequences.

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Test draft for poem animatic - Medusa by Carol Ann Duffy.

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This project was focused on the familiarization of walk cycles. To start off, I focused on exploring the flexibility of the walk cycle and its variations through hand-drawn animation. As I found the walking cycle quite complex at first, I referenced Richard Williams’ guide to animation very closely. With hand-drawn animation, it was easy to create many attempts at different walk cycles that involved variations in weight, bounce and movement. In retrospect, had I been more comfortable with the concept of the walk cycle, I may have attempted to use more frames in my hand drawn walk cycles.

The next method we used was animating digitally on Maya. For this, we had to make use of two configurations: forward kinematics (FK) and inverse kinematics (IK), which are opposite configurations. For FK, we had to input the joint angles for animation, while with IK we had to input the coordinates of the end-effectors. I found FK easier to use than IK, though with the technical difficulties I had with the program itself, I vastly preferred other animation methods.

The final method we experimented with was stop-motion using wire armatures. In the process, we had the opportunity to make our own armatures with wire, masking tape and polymorph plastic. To adhere the armatures to the magnets on the bottom of the animating stage, we stuck tin on the soles of the armature’s feet. I found stop-motion to be time consuming but very easy to do, and more surprisingly, quite enjoyable.

Music: “Thatched Villagers” by Kevin MacLeod.

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This is my animation for the second part of the See Hear Project. For this part, we were given a 45 second audio to work with, and were asked to animate to the audio. The limitations of the project was that we had to work with:

- 1080 x 1920 frame size - 45 seconds limit - 25 FPS - Black screen in the beginning and end of the animation.

To start generating ideas for the animation, I began brainstorming key words and potential storyboards that can be used. This time, I decided to head for a more narrative based direction rather than an abstract one as I had done with the first part of the project. Since the audio gave me some strong sci-fi imagery, my first idea involved an alien in a dystopian setting. However, I felt this was too cliché. After hearing the audio again for a few times, I noticed there was a part that sounded like the fluttering wings of insects, which made me come up with the idea of moths as the main focus. Along with coming up with potential storyboards, I also made note of the major cues in the audio, so that I had an idea of how to time and animate the animation.

Like the first part of the project, I used Adobe After Effects, which I was now more familiar with after having experimented with the basic functions. Thinking back to how a classmate used cut out assets for her animation, I was inspired to use paper cut outs for my animation, which involved the background, buildings, and moths. The background and aesthetics were inspired from the design of a game called Fallen London, and I felt that its gothic theme worked well for my animation. After cutting out the assets, I scanned them and edited them in Photoshop so that they had a transparent background.

The animation process took a long time, as I was still getting to grips with it, but the process itself was quite simple as I was only working with the basic functions of After Effects. These functions involved manipulating the change of position, rotation and scale of the assets. There was limited use of effects as I was not familiar with them, and I think that had I finished the animation earlier, I may have taken the time to explore my options a bit more. The only effect I used was camera lens blur to give the moths a better sense of movement.

Overall, I felt that I had more freedom to do what I want in this part of the project, and I feel that I learnt a lot from using Adobe After Effects. This was my first time doing anything slightly narrative related, which may have made this project more interesting for me.

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Audio log for our (rather fruitless) attempt at recording sound. However, it does provide an idea for the sound effects we were aiming to use for our composition.

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This is my collaboration project with Jessie for the first part of the See Hear Project. In pairs, we had to record sound and compose a 1 minute track, which we would then animate to. Our theme was the word “soft”.

With that in mind, we set off to record sounds that connoted softness, or sounds with a low pitch. These sounds involved things such as piano melodies, the rain, heartbeats, and wind chimes. However, we ended up not recording any sounds due to a misunderstanding with how the equipment worked, so we ended up obtaining sound from a free music archive which worked just as well.

Afterwards, we started to compose the track on Adobe Audition. We first set a beat, which was naturally the heartbeat. This gave us some structure to work with, though we were later told that it could potentially limit as well as help us build up our music. We then proceeded to add the melody (the piano), and slowly built it up with other sound effects. For sound editing, we used reverb, echo, and pitch adjustment in certain areas.

For the animation itself, we decided that since it was supposed to be “soft”, a minimalistic approach would help get across the theme. We also noticed a reoccurring theme of water in our sounds (deer chaser and rain), so we chose to have a blue colour palette through our animation. To make it minimalistic, we used only geometic shapes (inspired by the music animations of Oskar Fischinger), and we animated using Adobe After Effects since it seemed to provide a smoother looking effect than if we had animated it traditionally. This was our first time using the program, but we had a lot of fun learning this method as it proved to be more efficient than traditional hand-drawn in some ways.

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An edit of the Edinburgh Sketchbook Project with sound.

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Top three sketches from the Edinburgh Sketchbook Project. The last one was used in the actual animation.

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Christmas themed experimentation.

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(Click on the pictures for larger view.)

These are some of the research pages I have done for the Human Landscape Project. Because I was focused on the biological aspect of the human body, my research was quite literal in that I spent my time finding intriguing body parts. My idea was that these could have potentially been used to evoke discomfort; in retrospect, my initial idea for the project may have been to explore the human body as a scary, unfamiliar vessel.

The rest of the pages are the planning and brainstorming I did for the project. Included are some rough storyboards for potential scenes, as well as ideas for animation (the end reveal of the mask person) and costume design (the mask being based off Ancient Greek theater masks).