Pressure is on

    1 Week To Go

Backgrounds

The backgrounds have been a main priority alongside layouts for me. As Tom is solely doing the Old Man animation, im solely doing backgrounds. When im doing backgrounds i need to keep many things in mind when doing them.

Things such as:

Lighting: When I add lights into the background i need to see how that would effect the colouring of the character, aswell as making sure the shot is lit up right

Colouring: The colouring needs to be done in a way that doesn't over shadow the character.

Layers: I need to keep the layers between the sky, boat and other parts separate for the composite shots to work. Adding in effects like water and shadows need this.

Time: I really need to do this fast, as there are so many to do. I should be spending around a day on one, but due to complications such as how long it will be on screen and its complexity differ in the time it takes to complete

The process in how i create these is quite simple, but the method took time to understand and getright. Starting from the layout i begin by block colouring and roughly light the shot. I then begiadding textures and more details to the areas which are more shown. Lastly with all the layers separate, i experiment with glows and other effects that would make the piece better. The layers are then named and saved in folders so that the compositor can see were everything is.

Here are a few backgrounds I have done so far.

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The Style

The style is an essential component for the film to work. It is also the most difficult in my opinion to get right. Finding a balance between it looking good and it being "do able" in the time we have, has been a struggle to get right. Throughout the development of "Escuridao Decente", the style has been shaped through various aspects, such as team, time and ability.

I will show how the films looks developed over time from

When I developed the idea and concepts of the project, I originally did not prioritise the style as a main focus of the project (foolish of me). But i did keep in mind a Waltz with Bashir styled animation throughout the animatic stage of development. I chose that film primarily on the fact it bought both key elements that would suit the film. One being the look, which I thought for how simple it was, had a really powerful look in terms of its lighting and colour. Its use of colour really inspired me to understand how colour works and how it can really affect moods and feeling in a scene. The other reason was that i really kept in mind the fact that the animation would need to be coloured in a relatively simple but effective way to both be achievable in production and work well to provide the right look for the mood.

I obviously didn't want to rip off the style or anything, i just wanted to use it as a platform for colourists and myself to use as reference for the colour and lighting style. This way I can have a style in which others can see what im trying to achieve instead of trying to create one which only myself can fully visualise. The story itself was created with time and contain in mind, such as the the setting. Which was made to compensate for less background to be done and the addition of an old man for simple animation. But towards the end of the animatic stage i got carried away with the aim to make a great animatic and throwing all these principles of making a do able film. With complications such as hair and dog animation, i had to find a way to cut corners and make it possible to complete. Plus the animatic reached to over 10 minutes which at the time I intended, because i thought my story didn't make much sense to begin with and became too ambitious to be picked. But with it going into production, serious thought had to be done in creating my story in 4 minutes and creating a look which seemed possible.

Having Tom and Grethe onboard with the project, we sat down to think about the workflow. Straight from January, we just thought to ourselves that we dont have the time to plan and faff around with the details, since we dont have other people we can give those jobs to. Tom prioritises in animation, Grethe in colouring and i prioritised in backgrounds and layouts,but this didn't mean these were our only jobs. Were other projects proberly have a single job or a couple, we as a small team have to take multiple jobs to compensate for that. Tom takes the helm of producer and now current editor, Grethe is helping with further concepts and I'm trying to stay ahead of everyone by planning and following behind with the sorting of music and all the loose ends that need to tied. Since we haven't really made a film before this is a trial and error kind of affair were we are constantly trying to find ways of doing things.

Here is one of the very first animations and colour tests we did (animation-tom colour-me).

Using colour similar to how Waltz with Bashir uses it we made this test to see how it would look. One thing I decided to do, was let Tom recreate the Old Man in his style. Theres 2 reasons for that which are: 1. Tom is going to animate all of the scenes with the Old Man with them, this is because from working on Swing Heil I felt like it was difficult to share a character through various animators and keep the same style. Tom had a very different animating style compared to me, aswell as a different drawing style. This made it really hard to to match his skill. 2. I relieased it would be a nightmare for Tom to try to match my design of the Old Man, not in terms of a drawing but it terms of animation. I felt it would suit Tom to animate a character he developed and fully understood. With Tom taking fully responsibility of the Old Man, he has been able to do a large amount of animation, which has been great so far.

Turnaround done by Tom.

From the turnaround I began to play around with colouring techniques and ways to colour the character to fit the backgrounds and be time efficient. What Tom liked from my original animatic was the painted look of it all. As i do aswell, i felt it was going to be difficult to imitate in motion. Despite this we did various tests.

This one was done in TVP by Tom.

This one was done by me

At this point it became obvious that spending too much time on deciding on a style was delaying our progress on the project. But it needed to be done. So I went back to Waltz with Bashir and studies its colouring techniques. I then coloured Tom's turnarounds

These 3 just variations of the same colouring but changed through the hue/saturation sliders. This shows how effective the dark tone and the light can be when done using the right colours. I then did a daytime version of the colouring.

From this we had a platform to work from. I now needed to adapt the backgrounds the characters style.

At first i found it hard to find the right method of creating the backgrounds. Finding it difficult to get the colours i needed

This was the first test of a background that i did.

I then experimented with various colours and textures to create this

After the background was done. I had to find the right colours to match the character and fit to the background. I make a palette containing 3 purple greys which would be used throughout the film, so it would be easy for Grethe to colour. This is a final shot that has various effects on top of that colour, which is things like glow, lighting and shadow.

So that the style of the film. It gone through a big change from the original concept, but i think this makes it looks more interesting and appealing as a short animation.

Epic Blogging Time

Well I haven't blogged in a while due to the amount of work, so since I'm dedicated this and next week to dissertation i will do a series of blog posts about the process of the project and how it got were it is so far.

Background Test

Colour Of Night Time Scenes

Photoshop Practice

Heres just a play around i did using a technique used by quite alot ( surprisingly) concept artists. Using a photo to manipulate and transform it into something new. I cant take credit for the photo but its just practice

"Escuridao Decente" The Build Up.

Its been a while since ive done an update on the project. So ill do a few posts to show were the project is and the plan ahead :) At the moment me and Tom are collaborating together to build up a large sum of work including tests, layouts, colour-boards, and other bits and pieces to be available to the team which will be formed early February. Aswell as perfecting the style and bringing together finalisation of the characters and animatic. At the moment the work load is tough but rewarding, as we look back each week with a sizable amount of work to show. We also have Grethe who is keen on being our main colourist. Finalising the look of the backgrounds at the moment is being tricky and until that is done its hard to deliver work to people, but by next week we should be locked and loaded to go full steam ahead with the project

Down below is our schedule for the shortened version of the story. At first glance this looks like an insane amount of work, however we know how much we can get done if we really go for it.

Were hoping to get (more like praying) atleast two more animators to work closely with us so we can pull this off nicely. Well additionally anyone would be great, since there is so much that needs to be done which i could do myself but since im dedicated to finishing the layouts and backgrounds I don't much time to do them.


This is our progress update sheet were we can see how many per scene, what's essential, how difficult each one is, what happens in the shot etc.

Its very useful to keep track of the project and see how much we have done in the past week or so.

I redesigned the boat to be more suitable for the events that occur and look more interesting as a whole

We took the design further and decided since the storyboard drawing were out of scale with the enviroments and the whole film revolves around the boat, it would we wise to make some sort of reference to keep our scale and perpective right to the shots. So we got Jake to create a 3D model using my sketch.

Jake did a great job of recreating the boat in 3D and it's really cool seeing the translation from 2D to 3D. So using the boat ive begun creating the layouts to give to the animators




Ive done quite a few layouts so far and ill upload a few more later on to show the progress.

Here is a quick colourboard I made to get a grips of the colour and mood for each scene. It had a nice arc from light to dark to light. I will be creating a proper colour board later using a colour palette which ive put together.


Here is the "Old Man" redesigns to fits Tom's animation and drawing style. He has a more stylised look this time round which makes him more interesting. The top turn around is a more finalised line drawing of the "Old Man" were as the bottom one is a rough skeleton sketch for me to use in the layouts and rough animation to make it easier for the line cleaners to draw.

Heres a few animation tests that Tom did. We did these tests not just for animation but to test the various styles we keep juggling around into motion.

This one is simple line test to see his body movement.

Using TVP, Tom painted this shot, giving a nice washy feel to it

Curious about seeing the old man in a waltz with bashir style i coloured a test Tom did a while back. It works well but were not sure if the style fits the eerie and dark tone of the film.

Whilst Tom did some animation tests i started doing the flashback scene, were a compilation of quick images get flashes for a very short amount of time. Ive probably put to much thought into these since there in for such a small amount of time, but its great practice to find the right background style to fit the animation itself. A few of these will proberly have a small aspect of animation in them, such as the helicopter scene will have the helicopters flying over and the background will flash as if there was a battle going on. Some of them are not as complete as others but it just to show this is the way were leading the film..

So thats pretty much were we are. I'm currently trying to dish out the layouts out asap for when more people get involved and Toms going through them as quickly as i'm making them, so yeah all good. But we have a long wayyyy to go.