Character Designs, Tests and more storyboarding

A the end of last week we had a meeting were I was able to share some of the shots and ideas that I had for the story board and I had also shared these rough character designs. Although again, Anna couldn't make it - we decided to discuss something she had brought up on the group blog about our mime being invisible. She was wondering how we should show features like the eyes, inside of the mouth and tongue. She a said -

'I thought a way of solving that could be starting off with a regular man who puts on a face with creams and crayons. In the process of miming and as he is being ignored his make-up is turnt into a mask that he breaks to reveal an invisible face. He has disappeared'

I'm not sure I understand what this would ultimately convey through the story telling but it would perhaps be clearer if Anna story boarded it out.

My feeling about the issue were similar to Bev's thoughts on the matter, in that that our mime is so neglected and ignored he becomes invisible (quite literally). In the end Bev had suggested that If nothing more suitable can be devised we may just have to run with it and as long as we have a rationale we can back up our decisions.

During the rest of the meeting, Bev and Amy had given me some positive feedback on my story board and both suggested that I continue on with it while they tackle the character designs. I said I was happy to do so and suggested that they make their best attempts to draw their characters in character, from interesting angles. Then their character's poses can potentially be used as key poses for the storyboard or actual panels themselves, that way we'd all still be working on it. After the meeting, Bev had summarised what was discussed on the group blog.







These are quite useful poses I found on the net that I had in my reference archive, they seem to simplify the human figure in ways that perhaps makes drawing and posing figures an easier task. I decide to share this with the group in hope that it might help them with their designs. Although our group has been sharing character designs, there isn't anything I can really use to feed directly in to the storyboarding yet -

Amy had shared some quite dynamic poses that she may have referenced from images except I don't feel that they're key poses that really tackle the exercises in the brief, which is what I am in need of and what I feel we need to work on first.


Click here to see Amy's character poses/designs


Bev seems to be on the right track - She has done a few sketches of the mime doing a rope pulling act, using central arching lines that seem to help determine the balance and weight of her figure. It's also really good to see her attempting to drawing the sequence of the action that she's is trying to draw.

Please click here to view some of Bev's drawings

However, Anna has not shared any designs as of yet.

On that note I decided to share some videos I found on youtube from a collection of videos called 'how to draw the Marvel way' (Marvel comics). These videos talk about the figure posing techniques above in a lot more depth. They describe the steps/processes that the Marvel comic book artist can go through to ensure that they produce the most dynamic poses for their comic book characters. I personally think these are great videos to have to reference and learn from.

I had also shared a line test I had done with the group of  someone pulling on a lead, which seems to work ok. Even though it's pretty rough, the information is there.

Please click here to watch line test

Meanwhile, I was starting to think about how we needed a location in our animation, and I couldn't think were to situate it. Bev had recently uploaded some rough drawings of our mime in two different scenes where background people past him by during his act. She had said she was thinking aboutmaking the sene more prominent, perhaps by dipping the street lights around our mime, to maybe indicate that he once had the lime light.  

Click here for Bev's post.

Seeing her drawings and reading her comments had actually helped me think more a about staging and  I liked the idea of conveying our mime as a stage act. I then started thinking about maybe portraying the character in large square where people could surround him as he performs his acts. 

This was the kind of thing I had in mind, these large squares are quite common in France and sometimes large markets fill these empty spaces. I shared these with the others on the group blog and asked for their thoughts or to even help provide similar examples.

Bev managed to find a lot more examples and created a facebook photo album so that we could reference them which is really helpful, here are a few of those images.

Anna was actually thinking of perhaps situating the act near a café with an outdoor seating area, something that these kind of squares are often surrounded by. So perhaps this location Might be quite fitting. I'm also quite fond of the interesting old architecture found in these images,they could influence the design of our scenes.

Bev's Mime animation idea - refining the story

Everyone is being pretty enthusiastic about Bev's idea! I will refrain from posting her synopsis and story board twice within our individual blogs, but please refer to it here.

Despite being a good idea and a great starting point I also think 'Mime' is a great art form in itself and should be quite a challenge to animate.

'Dynamic' is the word I think.. There's notably a great level of precision in mime and it seems really uniform with balance and rhythm. I personally think good referencing and life drawing should play a huge part in informing our work as it should give our overall performance more sincerity (if thats what we're after).

In light of this, I sent everyone a George Bridgman's drawing book 'BRIDGMANS - Complete Guide to Drawing from Life', particularly for its two sections on balance and rhythm that are definitely worth a review.

I also decided to share this artist's work with the group - he's one of many of my favourite sculptors. He tends to use a lot of circus acts as a subject matter for his work. Please take a look at his drawings/prints as well if you can and you should see how much they must inform his sculptures.

Please click here to view his website

Although these references are 'still', I find it easy to imagine his pieces/drawings as potential key frames for an animated sequence, and I think theres no doubt that key frames are a good place to start.

Throughout the week we had all been sharing various references within the group, from Buster Keaton, Marcel Marceau, Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx to modern mime and Mr bean remakes. I managed to find some good reference of a mime artist acting out a rope pull.

Scrub to 01.50 seconds for rope pull.

Bev was now working on writing a full script for us to work from. As I had just been to an amazing master class on story telling with Frank Ash from the BBC, I'd been thinking about good story telling and how much we could cut ours down in the interest of trying to put across the most important information. Also because it still felt a bit long.

Since the brief is to do a 1 to 2 minute film and because I have no idea how the actual production of this will pan out, I was all in favour of making this closer to the 1 minute mark - this way we can also spend time getting things right..

Our animation is primarily going to be about our mime, it's his story and his dog is just a catalyst for the ending I suppose, as well as a means of fulfilling one of the exercises.

With that in mind, I'd been trying to think about how we want to portray our character and how this can best be portrayed -

By the end of the animation our character reveals that he is invisible; this could equally be a devious act as well as one of self-pity. So I suppose a good script development question is - In the events leading up to this end, how do we best prepare our audience's anticipation for which one of these it is going to be?

Corbin (our mime) gives up in the end because he is unhappy, and at the moment we are making scenarios to make him unhappy gradually, but I started thinking that we should just convey his unhappiness from the start.





Here are early revisions of the storyboard that I have been working on. I had been keen to experiment with different camera angles and had also been sitting down with Amy discussing techniques and sharing ideas. She had collected some good books, which made me realise that I should probably do the same soon..

At the moment I am just playing around with interesting shots that could tell the story and I'm having a stab at jumping between parts of the narrative simultaneously for the opening scene. At the start our mime is putting on make up getting ready to walk to work. Here we can get close to the mime and give the misleading impression that he is very real. Also at the start we need to be introduced to his invisible dog. This is where I have been play with cuts to alternate between the two sequences, but I'm still try to get it to read properly.

Idea development & visual cues + NEw Schedule

At this stage we are to start playing around with visual concepts - looking at characters, scenes, time of day: visual cues for creating a synopsis

I'm not used to story development but I hoped I could form some ideas from character design and development. As I mentioned in my presentation, I am interested in the idea of referencing from life to create interesting characters. I'm also interested in exaggerating the features of my characters a bit more, and finding a balance between caricaturing and representational drawing when designing.

I used an opportunity during a lecture the other day to do an observational study of another student in the room, as reference for a potential character that I could elaborate on. I didn't know this person either so could more or less interpret them freely, imagining a new personality, mannerisms or characteristics.

 I was quite interested in the result so I continued with  some more concepts at home, I also tried out a little few thumbnail line tests of her, creating a scenario with her umbrella and a gust of wind.

Please click here to view thumbnail test

I decided to play around with the idea of this girl become our main character for the animation exercises and I thought she could have a dog. To make things interesting, I figured she could have a huge dog like a great rather than a small one one like the earlier concept i had done. This way we'd be left to create some interesting scenarios where her dog is really hard to control and ends up walking her - mix that up with some rain and we might just have an animation.

Just as a contrasting character, I thought about maybe including a big guy with a really small dog, who perhaps doesn't know his own strength, which results in his dog getting pulled about  quite a bit. Though I was struggling to think of a scenario in which these two could create a narrative together, whilst including the 5 animation exercises. The most problematic exercise so far is the ball throwing exercise - Animate a character throwing a ball up in the air, which unexpectedly returns heavy. (There's little logical possibilities for this scenario in my opinion)

As a group, we had decided we needed to come up with a working idea sooner rather than later as Bev had now made a more detailed work schedule, which we all hope to stick to. By the end of the week we really wanted to be sharing and reviewing ideas on character and scenarios, along with either a written synopsis or a rough storyboard of a narrative to work with.

At this stage, I was really struggling to come up with a good narrative for these characters I had, and had nothing down on paper. I'd been brewing over rough ideas but only in my head - I figured that if the narrative for the animation exercise wasn't working in my head, then theres not much use putting any thing down on paper.

After a few days I still had nothing, and was getting frustrated. But not too long ago, Lewys had given me a disc with a series of story boarding tutorials by Kris Pearn (a former Storyboard artist in Television) and I remember that his tutorials had suggested to just get something down and almost make the story up as you go along. So I gave it a shot, but decided to do it with a new character, mainly because I had little enthusiasm left for the others.

It seemed to work quite well and I had even come up with a solution for the ball exercise.

Unfortunately by the time I was due to share this idea the next day, it was still incomplete, and I didn't quite have an ending for it.

 Rough Character design and opening/establishing shot.

When we all shared our ideas,  Bev seemed to have the strongest and most complete narrative about a mime which we all liked and were keen to develop and refine. 

Since I was quite fond of this man and his dog idea, I decided to have a go at writing it up to help finish it. This may help explain most  of the rough storyboard panels above

Beginning

Old Man walking his dog to the park from his house or back from the park walking home. It starts to rain and the man stops to put his hood up then continues walking. But the dog doesn’t like the rain so he pulls on the lead unexpectedly the other way to sit under a tree out of the rain. 

Middle: Conflict

The man can’t get the dog to move. The man pulls out a tennis ball to bribe the dog. The dog is interested - So the man goes to throw the ball but it lands in a tree and gets stuck. The man slaps his forehead cursing his stupid throw and goes to try and get the ball back. With a retractable lead, he extends it as far as he can to get to the tree that the ball is stuck in, whilst his dog stays put. 

He takes his hood down and starts to shake the small tree to retrieve the ball. Suddenly, a cat falls out the tree instead, screeching whilst falling with its claws out. The cat desperately grips on to the old man’s ball head anxiously. The man screams in pain and struggles to get the cat off him. His dog starts barking in the distance as he struggles and the bark gets louder and louder.

Ending

His dog reaches the scene, suddenly jumping on the man to get at the cat. The cat jumps off avoiding the dog and runs to escapes. The dog jumps down from the man to chase the cat off. During all the commotion, the dogs lead has tangled up in around the mans leg and he is swept off his feet. He grabs  on to the tree to avoid getting dragged away. The lead snaps and the tree roils slightly, releasing the ball which hits the man on the head on the way down and bounces away. The man is completely disorientated. The rain slows to a stops and his dog returns to the man with the ball in his mouth and drops it to his feet.

Scheduling and Role playing

In our last meeting we had also briefly discussed devising a work scheldule which was then summerise quite well by Bev on our group blog on face book.

Bev's Summery-

- Scheduling -
The issue we have is time. We did a very rough schedule which looks like this:

1. Research/idea gathering - looking at the images or water/rain (where we are now)

2. Visual concepts - looking at characters, scenes, time of day: visual cues for creating a synopsis

3. Create character scenarios

4. Write synopsis or just a simple beginning, middle and end

5. Create character sheets

6. Storyboarding

7. Animatic and sound

8. Animation production (separate schedule to be done)

This process totals around 7 weeks work if we have a week for each item (apart from the initial research). That only leaves us with 7 weeks for animation production.

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This is a rough schedule for now which will eventually become more detailed. 

Roles and responsibilities were also mentioned but not dictated, though it seems that everyone is agreeing on allocating roles according to what we all want to achieve as individuals. I personally want to be taken out of my comfort zone and work on the story telling, so storyboarding narrative and scenario development. I shared this with the group and Amy also expressed a similar interest, so I hope I can work with her on that.

However, it has been agreed that we should all also feed into the concept art/scenarios at this beginning stage. As we feel that If we can all bring our ideas to the table and pick what we feel are the best bits we should end up with a very strong project.

Bev had noted that she was particularly interested in animating movement but again we all agreed we have to play a part in animating the production because of the amount of work. Anna had said that her strength lies mostly with scenarios and storys but believes visual representation of story is not quite the same as writing it. However, she said she would be meeting her challenges the most by animating movement, so thinks it would perhaps be best if she joins Bev in that.

Gathering Images

When our group had our first meeting,  I had brought images with me that I had suggested gathering in the blog.  Although the others had not gathered they're own, they seem to like them and started to recognise how collection of images immediately generates a mood and so they were more encouraged to do the same.

 I was mainly trying to get an idea of potential colours textures and themes for our animation to share with the others, that way we might come to some  mutual agreements over stylisation and possibly start generating ideas

My first load of images happened to reference rain, as I was mainly looking for washes of colours, but then I started thinking of rain as a theme for our film.

These are images from my presentation and I managed to gather enough rain images to categorise them into mood boards that help generate a particular feel, they can readily be referenced for concept art.

I also gathered images of interesting camera angles along with images that apply the rule of thirds. I am quite new to these conventions of image and film making and hope to familiarise myself with them so I can apply them to my own work and also try to challenge there principles.

Here are some screen shots from animated films such as Pixar's Up and '9' that seem to demonstrate rules to their compositions - their layouts are clear and easily read with a variety of dark, light and mid tones. It is important to me that I understand how I can apply this kind of clarity when planning my own  story-board layouts.

These concepts from finding Nemo and Wall-E demonstrate how simple drawings and layouts can help plan more finished compositions.

While these character sketches for the animated series 'the boon docks' can be found in frames of various episodes.

Here is a plan for assigning textures to a scene from '9'

Concept art clearly generate a feel for a scene

I've selected these characters because they all convey a completely different side to themselves in particular situations - I think its what helps to strengthen there appearances in the films.

These human/character comparisons aren't directly related but it suggest the idea that they were inspired by real people, which is perhaps a good thing to exercise when developing a new character.

Ren and Stimpy are perhaps my all time favourite animated characters - They are eccentric, exaggerated and the animation itself seems to cleverly find a balance between highly rendered drawings with depth and detail and conventional 2d line animation, which is worth noting.

These detailed drawings were usually presented as still images on screen as part of an episodes story telling, but they were often so graphic and descriptive that it wouldn't matter if they weren't moving; eventually I found myself looking forward to seeing them in each episode.