Finished! YAY

I have finally finished my animation and it looks great, so happy with it. :D https://vimeo.com/128576739

Finalising in after effects

I have decided to add zooms and camera shakes in relation to the music in after effects using a wiggle control, I thought this adds a nice dynamic feel to the animation and makes it feel more real.

Animating the Fly

I am animating the fly by importing the specific shots that involve the fly as video files into photo shop creating a new blank video layer and drawing over the top of my video frame by frame in relation to the movements of my puppet, these two layers where then attached in after effects, so that I could apply movments and zooms to the camera without having to animate both the fly layer and the puppet layer.

Syncing the Animation

I have gone onto realize that due to all my images being essentially stacked ontop of eachother that small counting errors towards the start of the animation can seriously affect the rest, I have now gone over all of my x sheet and re synced all of the frames.

Shooting the Animation

Due to certain circumstances in my life I haven't been able to start shooting as early as I had hoped, leaving me hardly enough time to be fully animate the piece. I officialy started shooting 2 months before my deadline at the start of the easter half term, I had to come in every single day for at least 5 hours of the half term and the two weeks after to get the full 1000 frames of my animation fully captured, this was a very intence time for me shooting around 50 frames a day averaging around 6 minutes per photo, towards the end when I seriously needed to have it done I did one 8 hour day where I shot 300 frames averaging around 2 minutes per photo, I really wish I hadn't done this as it does show up in the animation, the joint between jaw and face slowly looks worse and worse, oh well.
Actually shooting the animation was fairly easy and extremely fun. It was also extremely rewarding to see it slowly coming to life I am at a point now where I have the RAW animation as one final image sequence synced to the soundtrack, I now need to add in zooms fades and the illustrated fly over the top for the deadline.

Finished Xsheet

Finally finished the Xsheet, and its time to start animating. I have been taking test shots setting up my camera setting up the lights in the stop motion room in university, in there I have a light rig with studio lights but these are extremely hot and after hours animating in there it can start to melt the plastercene so I also have the air condition on.

Designing the Set

These are some photos from my set that I designed, as the story is based in a bedroom I created a door, a wardrobe and a bed from foam board and added material that bested bed sheets. I also made some hand painted posters, that show where my influences for this video came from.

Writing The Xhseet

It would be nearly impossible to produce my animation to the technical level in which I want it to be animated in without writing an Xsheet. An xsheet or dope sheet is an instructions guide for my self to animate, it is a kind of map where you can write 5 different instructions onto a 12th of a second in relation to the exact noise that is made at that specific frame in the animation. I wrote this by scrubbing across my soundtrack in ToonBoom. My xsheet is the fundamental root for me to start my animation from. I cant start animating until it is totally finished, at the moment I have scrubbed over the entire dialogue and recorded it on the sheet, I then have to act all of this out and add in the movement, eyes and camera cuts.
here is a test of the part of ther xsheet you see above looped https://vimeo.com/128576507

Writing the Storyboard/Animatic

 

As my story generally consists of an eye level shot of a bust through out my animation, storyboarding for this project ended up being 20 drawings of the same head in different positions not really helping me produce my animation, I have decided to create myself an 'animatic' consisting of key frames that are still images of my puppet in the relevant positions this is a much better root for me to write my xhseet from and to develop timing and acting out of puppet in relation to my soundtrack. Seeing the images in time with the soundtrack helped entirely.
https://vimeo.com/128576131

Dialogue

The dialogue within my video goes as follows:

‘snore’ ‘bzzzzz’ ‘ugh’ ‘what the hell was that noise’, ‘what the?’ ‘ Tss OW’ ‘blurgh’ ‘cough’ ‘’Throat bass’’ ‘’lip bass’’ ‘’Hiphop beat, hip hop scratch, hiphop scratch’ ‘dnb build up’ ‘dnb for 8 bars’ ‘ blurghhh!’ ‘coughcoughcough’ ‘zombie dubstep splutter’ ‘death rattle’.

This was the dialogue I wrote down for myself and during the recording I tried to act it out as much as possible. To create the recording me and a friend used ‘ableton’ music software, to splice the recordings together. I did the full hiphopscratch dnb build up as one take to start, then I did the zombie dubstep and spliced that in afterwards. I then went on to do the dialogue at the start and added the fly buzzing around underneath.  When the soundtrack is fully produced I am going to memorise the entire track and act it out on video as a reference for my final animation. I think it would be a good idea to get my dialogue test and acted out video on the same screen and synced up so that I can watch them both at the same time and on the same screen when I am using them as reference during the production.

Soundtrack

Today I completed the soundtrack for my animation this was a huge milestone for me. This is now paving the way for me to go on to write my xsheet and then create a dialogue test video using photos of the head with the different mouthshapes in place, involving no moving or acting doing this dialogue test will help me work out any kinks I may meet along the way and gives me time to go over my xsheet. These two things will be finished by christmas along with both the models and all the correct mouthshapes attached to the stage. This allows me to go into full production as soon as I come back after Christmas using my dialogue test and xsheet as a guide to complete the animation.

Frames per Beat

As I will be animating the lip sync to beatboxing that has a time signature (BPM) I will be able to match the frame rate to bpm or the bpm to frame rate. I would like to run at 24fps but this may be far to much work so I will probably work at around 12fps. As the style of beatboxing is drum n bass (which is around 160-180bpm) throughout I will try an get recording that perfectly matches the frames to the beats. To do this I had to work out how many beats per second where in 3 different speeds -160bpm, 170bpm and 180bpm the one that fit perfectly was 180bpm which at 24fps was 8fpb and at 12fps it was 4fpb, this is a nice even number for me to be working with.

Mouth

As I will be doing some complicated lip movements that move from the inside out I am going to need to push the lips from the inside like air would. I have to created this hole in the bottom of the mouth pieces so I can fit my finger in, there is also a space for a tongue.

After long deliberation with tutors I decided upon using 6 different mouth shapes for my head that are attached by the stickiness of the plastercine alone and smoothed over this was a lot easier than creating some kind of shelf locking system protruding from the neck. The mouth shapes all started as matching blocks of plastercine over time I have sculpted them into the shapes of the needed phonetics trying to shed as much weight along the way.

Here are a few more of my test animations.

Ammending problems

After making my first few attempts of the puppet and realizing its strengths and weakness’s I was able to create a new puppet that was rid of the problems that the first ones encountered these included; being too small and trying to get all of the mouth shapes out of one plastercine mouth. I also noticed that by stopping the neck at the shoulders and starting the torso in another colour wasn’t working as they tended to split apart whilst moving the neck I will overcome this by making a small layer of skin attached to the neck all over the torso and then applying the t-shirt and jacket over the top of that to stop the splitting. I overcame the problem of the splitting the mouth during talking by researching some of the great stop-motion movies to see how they overcame this, animators in movies like the nightmare before christmas used a process called replacement animation which uses an array of head shapes/mouth shapes for the characters, Jack had over 300 head shapes throughout the entire film. I decided that this is the way I should go and proceeded to chop the jaw off my newly made bigger puppet (which you can see in the video) . The new puppet employed some of the same techniques from the first with things like the armature being created from two balls of newspaper and duct tape and slightly thicker wire forming the spine as well as things like the eyelids for the blinks as these worked well on the first puppets.

recycling plastercine

 

I have recently realized that a wire jaw will not work as I can not express the amount of movement needed to show convincing lip sync. I decided to recycle all of the plastercine used to create my first few models as they are useless.

This is the second model I have created for my animation, this model contains interchangeable eyelids, movable eyes and a wire bendable jaw. It contains an armature made from newspaper and duct tape to form a small skull a wire neck and shoulders this is then screwed down to my set using straps. Here is a small test animation I did using the animation software 'iMotion' on my iPhone.

start of animation

This is the first practice model for my new stop motion animation which will portray a head asleep in a strange world made of plastercine. The head will be stung by a beatboxing fly and will be infected then going on to beatbox himself to death. The main part of my animation is the lipsyncing to the beatbox which has never really been touched upon in animation before. I built this model to discover if their are any problems with the materials or approaches to the construction of the model before going into full production of the animation. I will probably have to redo this a few times because during shooting a stop motion animation you have to work in a 'straight forward' manner working from the first frame to the last without mistakes. This is going to take a fair bit of planning and will probably go wrong if I use the first model I create.

I do really like the colour scheme of this model and probably going to be the colours I use in my final animation, but their are huge problems around the mouth. If I where to animate at this scale which is about 3 inches high I would be unable to get believable movement from the mouth as well as the fact that it has no jawbone and moves in a weird way.