11 second Final

Heres my 11 second animation

11 Second Club Evaluation

At the beginning of the 1st term of this year we were given a project that revolved around character animation, and was based on the 11 second animation competition. The 11 second club is a monthly competition which provides a specific sound clip that people across the world can animate their own interpretation of the audio in their choice of style. Experienced and inexperienced animators can enter the 11 second club, and the competition itself acts as a great opportunity to practise and improve our character design and animating skills.
This month’s sound clip was an extract from the film ‘Planes, trains and automobiles,’ but our tutor advised us to completely disregard any previous opinions about the film and just view it from an animating aspect. After listening to the clip, I sat down with the clip looping in the background, and brainstormed all my ideas and inspiration in the form of quick sketches and concepts. I noticed in the clip that there was definitely a dominant character and a submissive character, so I took that into consideration whilst planning my final idea. After mapping out all the sounds onto my dope sheets, I decided that I wanted to steer clear of any obvious story ideas, so I thought it would be good to try and animate characters that aren’t human and are situated in an opposing setting (an environment you wouldn’t predict them to be in.) Eventually, I decided my characters would be bears, and the animation will follow what happens when a rich bear thinks a beggar bear has stolen a note from his pocket. This fits into my idea of placing certain characters in unexpected environments, and fits very well with what is going on in the clip. I filmed a few quick shots of my housemates acting out the script just to get an idea of how movement is affected by emotion, which would provide great reference for when I started the animating.
After deciding what my story was going to be, I started sketching lots of character designs and concept pieces to gain a good idea on what my characters would look like, how they would react, etc. I drew out profiles for each character which focused on how they looked from different angles, and lots of different facial expressions for each character so that I could really express the emotions they were feeling. I also put together a rough animatic just to get my head around how the timing was going to work. At first I wasn’t sure what style to do the animation in, so I took into consideration the fact that I hadn’t really done much character animating before and finally chose a very loose style consisting of basic shapes so that I could get the movements looking fluid. Also by this point we only had a few weeks left before the deadline, so I had to consider which medium would fit with my time keeping plan.
During the first few days of animating I struggled with not adding detail and just sticking to basic forms. I would pretty much class myself as a perfectionist when it comes to drawing so breaking out of my habit of making everything look clean and perfect was quite challenging. Our tutor Andy recommended we looked on a website called ‘Pencil Depot’ which had loads of animated scenes from feature films before they had been neatened out and cleaned up. Seeing this was really helpful, because it made me realise that you don’t have to add loads of detail and pretty backgrounds to make an animation look smooth and believable. After a while I did get into the animating which helped the flow of the movement come more naturally. Previous to the 11 second project we were given a few short tasks which involved key animation, e.g walk cycles, emotion changes, weight lifting etc, and these really helped me visualise the movements that my characters needed to perform.
By this point I had my basic rough animation completed, and I focused my attention towards our experimental project for a while. Once I progressed on that project, I then got back into the flow of animating and resumed my work towards the 11 second club. Once all the animation was completed, I tried adding colour and detail to each frame, but then I realised this made the animation look too fussy and wooden, and it seemed to lose all of its fluidity and expression. Therefore I made the decision to keep the final animation looking rough with all the planning lines and shapes left in, because they give the movements a dynamic element and look far more natural than adding blocks of colour. I may go back into the animation at a later date and add colour, just to see the comparison.
I think I have managed to achieve some good results by keeping the animation style rough and basic, because I think that I would have got too caught up in the colour and detail, and by doing it this way I have learnt a lot about how animation comes together from basic sketches and it has helped me to understand how to break down sounds and express specific emotions through simple movements.