Honda Grrr

Honda Grrr is an advert campaign launched by Honda back in 2004. And since it was on television eleven years ago and I am writing a blog post about it now, it obviously had a lasting impact on me. The visual aesthetic is beautiful and it almost looks like it was created by an animated movie company like Pixar. It seems like a rarity in adverts where there is a lot of attention to detail, particularly in the background design. But what the advert campaign Grrr did so well is it took the viewer to a magical world full of wonder. So even though I know it's an advert for a car company, this advert had the same effect on me as watching the game Journey or Flower due to it's incredible visual aesthetic and attention to detail.

Bee and Puppycat

So, I was introduced to this series not so long ago and i found it very intriguing. This was namely because it is something that started from very humble beginnings. Bee and Puppycat is an internet animated series by the production studio Cartoon Hangover who release animated series online. The shows creator Natasha Allegri actually animated the first episode by herself and then after it got picked up it is now animated by a team of people.

The show basically centres around the female protagonist Bee and her bizarre adventures with Puppycat. I really like the visual aesthetic of the show because even though it looks pretty simple, the animation is very high quality and the characters and setting has a very unique look to it.

Shadow of the Colossus

The game Shadow of the Colossus is regarded as one of the best, if not the best video games for Playstation 2 and of all time. And even after playing this game for just five minutes it's not hard to see why. It is a visual masterpiece and even now, playing it on the latest gaming platforms it still looks incredible and holds up brilliantly.

You basically play as this lone character who carries this maybe dead woman on a horse to this giant ancient building on sacred land. Desperate to bring her back to life, our protagonist agrees to take on the tasks given to him by a strange force of light from the ceiling of this ancient building that tells him to go out and kill sixteen colossuses and then his friend or sister or lover will be revived.

It's a fun game to play but there is always this uneasiness as you are never sure whether what you are doing is actually right or wrong.  

Flower

It's not hard to tell from looking at my previous blogs, that I'm not the biggest gamer in the world, but the games I have experienced have often for me not been about fighting, difficulty or completing missions. For me the games I have spoken about all have something in common, they are all visually stunning.

Flower is a game that is even more relaxing to play than Journey. It is a game by the same company that again features no villains, and no conquest to challenging. Instead it too is a game that encourages players to view video games in an entirely different way. You basically control the wind and try to collect as many flower petals as possible. The visuals are not especially ground breaking, in fact many of the backgrounds are incredibly simple yet it looks visually gorgeous and as you play it you will find yourself wanting to spend time in these landscapes.

Finishing My PPP Animation

Well, I have just finished my PPP animation and I have to say that I am pretty happy with the final outcome. It was a project that was incredibly hard to get going with. First there was the difficulty I had in coming with an initial idea. Then once I had the idea to animate a dream I had had, then there was the difficulty I had in drawing initial keyframes and worrying about how complicated to make my keyframes look. On top of this, I also wanted to colour my animation, but when I tried to add colour I found that I was never happy with how it looked. Then I lost my USB stick that had the reference footage I had edited together on it. I never found it.

Admittedly I was just a few weeks ago struggling with getting the project off the ground. I knew I was working hard on pre-production work but as I was looking around at my peers work and they were getting actual seconds of frames of animation done, I was worried I was falling behind.

But then, once I had all the pre-production figured out e.g. character designs, backgrounds and keyframes drawn, once I actually began animating, a sort of snowball effect occurred I found I was getting seconds animated faster and faster. I believe this might be down to my enthusiasm for the project, as it allowed me to be very creative and I didn't spend an unnecessary amount of time focussing on minor details (a mistake I had made frequently in the past and learnt from).

Looking back on my animation I am not a hundred percent happy with all of it. There are certain aspects of the animation that I am more happy with others. For example, I am, very happy with how the audio turned out and felt that Oscar and Lauren's dialogue matched up well with the animation.

Furthermore I also liked the individual little bits of animation such as the swimmer swimming in the swimming pool. This confirmed for me that I often do not need to rotoscope to create good animation fast.

But there are certain sections of the animation that I feel could still be improved. For example so of it is still a bit rough looking and could do with a few in-between frames to create more fluid movement. On top of that, I like that the animation doesn't explain much, but I feel like I could have perhaps altered the animation slightly so it would make a little more sense to the viewer.

Effective Presentations

In this seminar we were given guidance on how to give an effective presentation. I feel I'm am now wiser and understand giving an effective presentation does does not simply mean reading words off a slide. You need to provide a certain level of entertainment to your audience to basically keep them awake and interested in what you have to say because if it doesn't sink in, then the presentation has not been successfully communicated.

This seminar was incredibly helpful to my own learning as it gave me plenty of useful tips I can use when putting together my own future presentations. For example, do not include too much text as this might bore the viewers, furthermore do not include bullet points.

Reflect Presentation Development

So to finish up a long, eventful and really fun year we were told to create a presentation talking about our year. Mike wanted us to not just state everything we've done, but to talk about our strengths and weaknesses, not only that but exactly what we've enjoyed, what we haven't and what we could improve for the future. I found this task to be quite intimidating, not because of lack of what to talk about, but because we've simply done so much and I wanted to touch on everything. While, at the same time keeping the presentation at a run time of ten minutes and keeping it entertaining.

Effective Evaluation Writing

Writing evaluations has always been slightly tricky for me. In fact I struggle with writing a lot anyway. But when writing evaluations I often have failed to be too critical of my work and have just stated step by step how I've made something without actually critiquing my own work. But what I've learnt is that that is exactly what not to do in an evaluation.

Good evaluations are all about analysing and critiquing every last bit of the development process of your own work, it is not just saying what you did and that's it, in fact talking what you did should be a relatively minor part of the evaluation. But for the most part, writing an evaluation is about talking about exactly how you feel a project wet, what you could have done differently and what you've learnt to apply to further projects.

Copyright

In October we had a seminar about Copyright and how exactly it works. To be honest, previous to this lecture I had a basic understanding of it but not to the extent I'd call myself an expert. Basically I gathered it's all right to use the work of someone else, just credit them and do not sell the product for money. It's when you sell a product that has the work of someone else in it and you've used it without their permission that you could be sued.

Now when I apply copyright to my own work if I'm using the work of someone else, for example a song by someone else on the audio of an animation I've made I will always credit them and not sell the animation for profit without the permission of said artist.

Princess Kaguya

The Tale of Princess Kaguya is a Japanese animated film by Studio Ghibli, directed by Isao Takahata. I hugely enjoyed the film, even if at times it is no easy watch. The story is pretty small which suits the visual aesthetic of the film which is essentially charcoal. At first I wasn't sure of what to make of the style and that hand drawn look where the edge of the frame isn't quite as big as the picture but as the story went on I began to like that home made feel. It's a movie that has a massive heart and looking back I really admire what they did with the visual look of the film.



Even though it looks slightly different to other Studio Ghibli films, it has all the heart and storytelling abilities as any of their other films. I was sceptical going in as I had never seen a Studio Ghibli film that was not directed by Hayoa Miyazaki so I was worried if I would get as sucked in to this one. Those scepticisms vanished within minutes as I was completely swept up in the film's original and touching story.

Weekly News Cartoons

For the past three years I have been doing newspaper gag cartoons for a national newspaper called The Weekly News. Three years ago I wasn't so much wanting to be an animator than a newspaper cartoonist, but after a few months of pursuing this I got a taste of just how hard this would be to make a career out of. I submitted to so many newspapers and no one would reply, but then a newspaper called The Weekly News emailed me back and told me they liked my cartoons but that I should alter my gags and tailor it more towards over 60's, the primary readership of the newspaper.

So I sent them my first three cartoons and they accepted the one below...

Now I try to submit four whenever I can and they usually accepted one. It's a very rewarding experience as it provides me the opportunity to practice my drawing skills and it's also very fun because it's like I'm creating my own worlds.

Usagi Drop

This has to be one of the sweetest anime series I've ever seen. I am a bit skeptical about anything too cutesy but the reason this series is so sweet is because it feels so real. It is basically centered around a cynical thirty year old man who is unsatisfied with his life and becomes a surrogate parent to a young girl. The rest of the series is primarily focused around their relationship and how our protagonist Daikichi goes about learning to be a parent and performing day to day parental duties.

I love this series because the characters are lovable and realistic. What I've found through watching Japanese animation is that they are able to represent kids very well. Often I've found, particularly in western animation, is that the kids are unrealistic, for example; they act a lot older than their age and do things no normal kid their age would. But Rin is a very realistic young girl, she means well but is often unreasonable and gets angry just like real kids do.

But also, even though the series is sweet, Rin and Daikichi's relationship is far from perfect. Daikichi often shows up late to pick up Rin from school and Rin has often got mad at him for this. But this is realistic, all father's and daughters encounter the struggles we see in every episode.

I haven't touched on the visual style which cannot be understated, it looks beautiful with a really effective watercolor paint look that fits the tone of the show beautifully.

It has also inspired me immensely to think in depth about the characters I animate on screen and making them true to reality, it is the perfect subject for studying not just a father daughter relationship but relationships between people in general.

New Genesis Evangelion

I've just started watching the anime series Evangelion and am very intrigued by the series. admittedly I am not as gripped as I'd like to be but as I recall through watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, it often takes longer than four episodes to get into a series like this. But I knew it was very famous and popular so worth investing a lot of viewing time. It's also a 90's anime so admittedly to me it looks a tiny bit dated, not to say the animation visual aesthetic looks past it but it is definitely evident how far anime has come.

It's basically centered around a young boy called Shinji who exists in the world, fifteen years after an apocalypse that forced the world off it's axis and now there are giant monsters that exist called angels that have the intent of wiping out humanity. Now Shinji must operate a giant robot called an eva and battle the monsters, of course this kind of responsibility could have catastrophic impacts on his mental stability.

Matt, who I'm watching the series with has said that Evangelion gets really good during the movies so I am excited but also I know I have around thirty episodes to get through until then.

Cowboy Bebop

So, I'd heard of this series for quite a while but to be honest, I had no idea what it was about. But the first an only episode I watched of the series thus far I found to be pretty incredible. It's basically about a duo of bounty hunters who live in the future where people can travel between planets. Now, plot covered, where to begin? I mean, it's a visual masterpiece that pays huge attention to detail. I love science fiction films or TV shows with well thought out universes, for example rules of the world the characters live in and vehicles characters drive.



On top of that, the show is powered by two very strong central characters. In particular Spike who is the titular character with martial arts skills and a slight tendency to be slightly egotistical. It's also very well acted and seeing as I've only seen the English dub is rather surprising as good dubs are hard to come by.



It also is not obvious in it's storytelling, there are antagonists but it's not all black and white. The antagonists are sympathetic as we see it in the first episode from their perspective at times. Furthermore, the protagonists are not completely good either with flaws that are true to human nature.

The Animated Self Animation Development: Animating Speech

Wow, animating speech is hard, very hard. I knew there was no way to get around it, and upon developing this bit of animation, Oscar brought it to my attention that I was the first person in the class to actually animate speech. While I thought that was pretty cool, it was also quite intimidating. I wondered why no one else had attempted it before, perhaps it is too difficult? Like animating a waterfall? Anyway the way I went about animating speech was to watch the footage I recorded back again and again. While filming my own footage for reference was incredibly useful for my own development process. When Oscar talks, because I told him to have little emotion in his face, he hardly opens his mouth so it is very hard to see how his mouth changes with every sound.

Since this footage alone was not enough for me to figure out to animate talking, I had to simulate mouth movements myself and get various other people near me to act out mouth movements. For example, when Oscar says the word 'Lines' I got James to act out the 'l' mouth movement and then I observed that when someone makes that movement the tip of their tongue touches the roof of their mouth against their teeth.

When I played back the footage, I was nervous, as always when I play back footage theirs that uneasy gamble feeling of having no idea what footage is going to look like until I play it back. But, I could relax since, considering it looked good and the sound matched what was on screen. I mean, it could have been tidied up a bit, but the feedback I received was very positive with viewers considering it to look good considering it was practically my first time animating speech.

The Animated Self Development: Taking Inspiration From Paintings

Whenever you dream there is a disconnect that separates it from reality. almost like looking at a painting. When I was drawing the indoor swimming pool that Lauren walks past in the dream I was advised to look at the swimming pool paintings of David Hockney.

I really liked these paintings as to me they look like dreams with that idea of a disconnect to reality. I wanted to apply this to my own drawing.

Plus, as I've mentioned before I have often struggled with where and how to use colour but the colours in these paintings to me work perfectly as they are very vibrant, yet do not overwhelm the image, furthermore they only add to dream-likeness of the image.

Uncle Grandpa

Immediately after Steven Universe,  I watched the animated series Uncle Grandpa which is basically a polar opposite. This show has zero depth and makes zero sense. I can hardly even explain the premise but I'll give it a shot.

Uncle Grandpa is about a guy with a moustache that somehow is everyone in the world's uncle and grandpa and drives around in an RV with a realistic flying tiger, a talking fanny pack, a walking, talking slice of pizza and a giant lizard that looks a bit like Godzilla, helping kids with their problems.                            
                           

I mean, every episode has basically no plot and is just made up of a sequence of surreal imagery and loud noises. But I would say it was terrible, if I hadn't laughed all the way through, therefore I wouldn't be able to tell you what I was laughing at, sometimes I was probably laughing for the sake of laughing.

But I did enjoy it. The visual gags work, even if at times they are generally quite disturbing. And even the colour pallete that is so bright and so in-your-face somehow works with the mad tone as does the simplistic slapstick cartoony style.

Journey

The game Journey is perhaps the most visually beautiful things I have ever experienced,  let alone video games. Say what you want about the actual game play, but the visuals are absolutely exquisite. It also demonstrated to me how important visuals are to a video game.

The plot is incredibly simple with hardly any threat or difficulty but when playing the game I never found that to be a problem, in fact I feel it would have slightly taken me out of the game to have to fight any villains or go through any obstacles that are very difficult.
                                             

Basically the premise is you're this person who has to travel miles of windswept desert to the peak of a mountain where a bright light is that is always on the horizon.  That's basically it and eventually you pick up the ability to fly.

But every shot could easily be a painting or a desktop screen saver on of itself. I'm not an avid gamer myself but for anyone who appreciates background design, Journey is an absolute must play. Furthermore it has also inspired me to think about background design in every one of my shots in animation

Limbo

Limbo has to win the award for the most depressing game that I've ever played and that isn't a spoiler as what I'm talking about is the premise.

A young boy sets out to find his sister in purgatory (apparently she's there after an accident involving a tree). And he is then faced with many trials and tribulations that involve problem solving.

Although a far less relaxing game than Journey, both games share something in common, they are both visually stunning with their own unique aesthetics.

I also really liked how the animators represented Limbo. I've always thought of such a place been like a dentist waiting room where time basically stands still. But in Limbo the animators have clearly decided to go a different route and represent Limbo as a very dark, bleak, creepy and almost nightmarish place. And yet they clearly have not differentiated between that basic idea of what Limbo is, essentially nowhere where time stands still between reality and the afterlife.

The game is touching despite it's dark subject matter. And although nothing in the game looks visually groundbreaking,  the style works very successfully although very simple. For example it is all presented in 2D with the main protagonist being presented as a black silhouette with two white dots for eyes. And then Oscar who I was playing the game with   commented that it almost looked like it had been created on aftereffects.

Steven Universe

So before having ever watched an episode, I knew it was popular amongst the people I knew so decided to give it a watch. Admittedly, I had my reservations about starting the series, from watching the adverts for it I was slightly put off by the visual style of the show, the way the animators drew noses did strike me as a bit weird and unnatural. But I know this is a silly reason to be put off a show without giving it a chance so taking the same approach I did with anime I gave it a chance.

And I must say I was very pleasantly surprised.  The show although set in very bizarre surroundings with supernatural themes, is actually a very human story about loss, family, relationships and childhood.

I only watched three ten minute long episodes so the premise is still a little bit vague to me. But what I understood was is that the mother of our protagonist Steven died bringing her child into the world. His mother is a Gem Stone so basically a supernatural being and that is why as a child,  Steven has a gem stone in his belly button. Everyone loved his mother,  so now everyone loves Steven. When his mother died, three other female Gemstones who were friends of his mother became Stevens surrogate parents. He does still have a dad, who means we'll but sadly is kind of useless.

Okay so, a story that on the surface sounds very wacky and bizarre is actually to me anyway, at its heart a very simple everyday tale of surrogacy.

I really enjoyed the show and to me it had very good representation, particularly of the female gender. Often in animated TV series I've seen, the female characters are often housewives but in this the gemstones are basically superheroes who care for Steven without the need of help from any man. Plus the female characters do not look a certain way, they are all different shapes and sizes, where as often in animation they have often been just thin and pretty. For example when we see Stevens mother we see that she towers above Stevens dad and she isn't typically thin and slender yet she is beautiful without having to conform to any typical ideals of beauty. The fact that she is taller than Stevens dad is never an issue and is not mentioned.

Although a sadder premise than many other animated shows, it is a comedy with funny characters plus the visual style is incredible and after a certain amount of time I even learnt to love the noses.

The Animated Self Development 7: Adding Colour

From the start of this animation I had an idea of what I wanted this animation to look like visually with it's colour pallet. I was going o go for a quite muted look. 

If you imagine a corridor, but underwater, that's the kind of look I was setting out for. But I struggle with colour in my animations a lot and to me, picking the right colour is a very difficult task because not only does it have to work, but it has to work with all the other colours on screen. I'm a big fan of the ink-dropper tool that instead of creating your own colour from nothing you simply highlight a pixel on another image and it picks up that exact image. 

Unfortunately the colours in the footage I had shot weren't quite what I was going for and when I'd use the tool I found it would't translate very well from live action to animation, often resulting in being too dark. I looked at other animations that I feel to be visually beautiful such as The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and captured screen shots from various points in an episode that had colours in it I felt would work well. 

But then I found that the more colours I was adding in to an already complicated keyframe made it look all the more complicated and messy. There were things I wasn't taking into account such as lighting and shading. Eventually I found that I was becoming so overwhelmed that I decided to turn the image grayscale. This did not solve my problem, I felt by doing this I wouldn't have to worry about colours anymore but a) I still had to think about what shades of grey to use where and b) I didn't really want to animate a dream in black and white because I don't feel I do dream in black and white so I wouldn't be staying true to the dream I had.

In the end I decided that after hours of messing around with colour I needed to imply abandon it and come back to colouring my frames, when I would actually have a decent amount of frames to colour, which at the rate of which I'm animating at might not happen.

But when if I do come to colouring my frames Molly (an expert in colour and colour theory) agreed to help me pick out just three colours that I could use in my animation so I do not get bombarded.

The Animated Self Development 6: Incorporating Rotoscope

Something had dawned on me. My time was limited. And if it had taken me nine hours to develop one keyframe, I knew my methods of production were going to have to become more efficient if I was ever going to get it completed.

That was when I decided to incorporate rotoscoping into my animation. I would ordinarily choose to use it. There are definitely some things I would much prefer to animate by putting pen to paper and then reference footage to get it right. But when I'm restricted for time, it has often proved to be a huge help. Therefore with this animation, I will try to use rotoscoping wherever I can to save time.

I have singled out a few shots that I feel could benefit from being rotoscoped; for example, Lauren passing the sound booth and Oscar opening the sound booth door. Other movements such as facial expressions I feel would need to be animated by hand to remain consistent with character designs and the rest of the animation. The idea is, for example when Oscar opens the sound booth door I rotoscope the door opening, his body and the interior of the sound booth, but then animate his head to fit with his character design (how I've drawn his head in comparison to his body is larger).

When I played back what I had rotoscoped I felt it looked successful and the real life movements fit with my more unrealistic designs.

The Animated Self Development 5: Getting Reference

I knew that my animation for PPP was going to need a heck of a lot of reference to animate, particularly because when I tried to explain my idea to anyone, they didn't really understand what I was talking about, mainly commenting on the absurdity of the dream. My reply would always be 'don't worry, it'll all make sense...' but the fact no one understood the animation apart from me was a little bit worrying as I am trying to make this thing for an audience.

So I decided I needed a lot of reference and since I had my actors together; Oscar, Matt, Olly and James (who all appeared in my dream) and Lauren (playing me dreaming), I felt it would be more beneficial to simply act out the whole dream. This experience was very rewarding. Lauren was very good at playing the dreamer and Oscar was particularly good at giving me the expressionless, slightly creepy character I needed. Plus, upon playing back the footage, I was astonished how close it was to actual dream I had. The challenge was condensing down the footage into a 20 second segment but once it had all been trimmed I felt that I understood exactly how I would go about animating this thing.

When I came up with the idea to animate a past dream I was on a long train journey down to London and I decided to use my phone to record sounds of the train I was on. I was inspire to do this by dream sequences I had watched in The Sopranos. Whenever a character would dream you would often hear slightly odd noises that would not fit the surroundings. After recording three sound effects, I found that the most successful clip was the sound of a train approaching the platform I was on on the London Underground. Listening to it back I really liked how the noise would become more and more intense and felt that if I added it to my animation I could build a kind of sense of anticipation and dread, much like I feel people experience when they approaching the point of waking up in a dream.

Editing the footage together on Premier was a very fun experience and after decreasing the speed of the sound clip by fifty percent it made the clip that bit more creepy and unsettling. There's a really weird sounding voice and the end of the animation, just as the sound approaches it's peak of intensity that almost sounds like a witch casting a spell, but in actuality that noise is the slowed down voice of the automated platform announcer.

I was very happy with the footage and the feedback I received was also very positive with people commenting that it was quite David Lynch like, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at all inspired by David Lynch.