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.
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 obviouslydidn'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.
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.
