Through a Lens

Week 20

Collected some sounds for workshop on Tuesday.

Noise of my mechanical keyboard. Deep and clicky.

This is super quiet (my phone mic is very bad) but it is the noise of my cat meowing.

Writing on paper. A nice rhythmic scratchy sound.

Playing around on the bass - playing notes and letting them ring out.

Playing around on the bass using a pick.

We had a project briefing about the new animation project. I'm a bit intimidated - it's a lot of stuff I have no experience with, and learning that I'm going to have to animate over the holidays isn't great fun. I did enjoy listening to the sound examples, but when it came round to actually doing them, I really struggled - sound is something I'm so unfamiliar with that I found it very difficult under pressure to just get used to the software. I understood the principles of the project, but I wasn't able to create any work about it due to getting really overstimulated and under stress. I don't have that many ideas for my project right now, but I'm very interested in narratives, so perhaps doing something with storytelling?

After CTS, I decided to do some research on animation to take notes on how animation interacts with sound, and gain some stylistic references and movie ideas. I started with Hiromu Oka's work, specifically his risograph animated visualisers for the band STUTS.I love the visuals of his animations, but I feel like the movement doesn't match up to the rhythm in a way I find kind of unsatisfying.

I returned to the project brief to pull from the listed references there, and found the database Panimation, a database for finding trans, female and nonbinary animators and motion graphics workers. I found the work of Phuong Pipou Nguyen, a freelance animator. I particularly liked the final short film they made at Gobelins, and took notes on how it uses sound (see below.) It uses atmospheric and magical sound effects as well as sparing amounts of dialogue to create a really lovely, emotional experience.

I also found the work of Marcie Lacerte and their short film Invisible Monsters and Tomato Soup, a short film documenting people's weird dreams over the initial Covid-19 lockdown. I liked how it mixes audio with interviews, and the page also includes lots of details about how the film was made, including how it was animated on 3s (8fps) to create a dreamlike and cartoony feel.

I've been following the Gobelins university grad films for a while, I like them a lot since they're all so different, and they're a great database for just looking at cool animation. I watched some of the grad shorts (like The Name) and some of the recent 3rd year students FX animation experiments, which all have lovely sound design.

Finally, I looked at Victoria 'vewn' Vincent's work, another animator I've been following for a while. Her short 'Agoraphobia' also uses audio from an interview, and her longer film (but still short) Twins in Paradise has a very careful, empty feel to the sound design.

Building off of that, I decided I wanted to do something centred around poetry. I really like poetry, especially poetry with strong rhythm, and I think it would make a really nice soundtrack for my animation, with me adding sound effects, probably with my bass guitar. The first poem I thought of was The Night Mail by W. H. Auden, because my dad read it to me a lot when I was a child and it has a really strong rhythm, then I hit on using poetry influenced by rap, or just rap itself, since that has a really strong rhythm. I'm particularly interested in rap and slam poetry.

Looked at a lot of poetry. Put a list of everything I watched in the dropdown, kind of felt like nothing hit the spot for that rhymic feel I was looking for. Did like Caleb Femi's use of imagery a lot, but nothing clicked. I used this NYT article about intersections between rap and poetry, as well as the abstract of this paper to find poets - as well as just asking other people I knew who liked poetry if they had any poems that they thought fit what I wanted. One of the difficulties was finding a poem that had a good 10-20 second clip I could use, like a specific group of lines I really liked, and ones that had both rhythm and lyrics I was inspired by.

SoM was super interesting! It was kind of funny how both of the animators didn't really like frame by frame animation... I can relate to that. Either way, it was interesting seeing both of their very experimental work, and learning about the oppurtunities they got. I didn't find Sophie Koko Gate's work particularly visually inspiring myself, but I really liked her absurdist humour and committment to this kind of gross and unsettling visual style. Maybelle Peters's explorations of different mediums and different ways to animate were interesting to me, and I really liked her stop-motion short.

Coming into this lesson, I still didn't have a poem, or a soundtrack, so I decided to just try and pick one that I liked and work with it, for the sake of not falling too behind or pushing too hard to make things perfect. I found Debris Stevenson's poetry, which I loved, but I didn't find the lyrics were inspiring imagery when I thought about it, so I decided to pick the aforementioned poem Coping by Caleb Femi, and particularly these lines:

Shoutout to us boys who play out here,
God knows how we do it.
Maybe God doesn't know,
maybe an estate, tall as it is,
is the half-buried femur of a dead god

I feel like in retrospect I should've picked maybe one of Stevenson's poems, to work with a stronger rhythm, but I was just really captivated by the imagery in these lines, and I had ideas in my head about what to draw.

I didn't follow the workshop in class, because I was too worried about the poetry, and not having a draft for my sound. I know this is bad, and I keep falling in the trap of worrying so hard about other deadlines or working ineffectively to the point where I fall behind and have to play catch-up when I'm supposed to be working. I did do a bit of stop motion animation, after familiarising myself with Bandlab and thinking about what kind of sounds I wanted to use. I play bass, so that feels obvious and also fun to include, and when watching the Gobelins FX practices, I was really enchanted by the 'sparkly' marimba/glockenspiel sounds used for magical effects. For my stop motion animation, I played around with visualising those sounds in a graphic way.

Digital skills - I'm already somewhat familiar with Photoshop's limited frame animation capacities, having used it before very infrequently for animatics or beginner animation, so it was easy for me to get the hang of. I think I'm going to use the Timeline option for my animation, since it visually makes more sense for me, even if doing frame by frame is somewhat convoluted, and also it allows you to set a frame rate to stick to instead of setting durations frame by frame. I drew this little guy walking, and then gave it a tshirt to try and create some more movement as I've seen done before. I don't think I got the way the shirt would move right, but it was cool to try. I didn't record any of them, but I also played around with using tweening for opacity, position, and warping.

I've animated in Adobe After Effects before, for a very short looping video on my foundation course, where I used the motion tweening functions & did some basic frame by frame animation, and I was considering using it for my animation. However, since Photoshop has decent motion tweening actions, and I'd have to be drawing the frames anyway, I think I'll just stick with photoshop to save the trouble.

Week 21

Used a handheld recorder borrowed from the Kit Room and used it to mostly record me playing around with my bass guitar and experimenting with making different sounds (using a pick, using my fingers, using my nails, muting the string, chords.) There were some issues because my bass strings have been weird for months now and make a buzzing noise, which picked up on the recordings and impacted the sound quality a lot.

The original video I was using, of Caleb Femi reading the poem, had background noise, and I fixed this by messaging my friend who's doing Sound Arts at LCC and asking if he can scrub the background noise from it, which did work! Thanks Cai. I then picked the bass samples that sounded the best and rearranged them to create this little accompaniment, and then used BandLab's built in instruments to add some marimba for that magical effect. I wanted the soundtrack to go on a journey over the poetry clip, from darker to more magical and hopeful.

I'm feeling eh about this. Sound design isn't something I have any experience with, so of course it's not good, but I get pretty stressed when things aren't up to how I want them to be. I don't want to spend any more time futzing with it though, so I think I'll just keep going forward. It works for what I want to do.

I found the media theory lecture interesting - I really want to read more theory, but I've been struggling with it recently when I put a lot of pressure on myself to work hard on my art, and I can't find the time.

Filled out the worksheet we were given. I definitely want my piece to be more on the 'express' side of the impress/express scale, because I love trying to visualise and express emotions through art, and that sort of is what I want my piece to be about - the power of art and creation for marginalised communities.

I also produced a moodboard from the narrative of my animation, a story about a Black boy's poetry creating a magical force. That first shot with the character stepping up to the mic, I felt it was too disconnected from the rest of the animation and couldn't justify its place.

Worked on blog catchup. Burnout has meant I've fallen behind on blogging and needed to spend a lot of time on catching up.

More blogging.

Had tutorial with Eleni [FIND TUTORIAL NOTES FROM HOME.] I've tried to keep the moving parts of my animation as minimal as possible as to make sure I'm not doing too much work, while also still keeping it as an animation that makes sense.

Worked on my styleframes and polished up my storyboard a bit - will post the full styleframes in the holiday section.

I tried to work on my animation consistently, bit by bit, over the latter two weeks of the spring holiday (I took the first week off for a break.) I struggled with focusing, because I didn't enjoy what I was making or much of the process of making it, and as a result, I really don't have much finished work. However, I did take a useful and relaxing break, and should be able to tackle later projects better.

Two passes at styleframes: I started the way I normally do when thumbnailing anything, which is in black and white, so I can easily think about colour and contrast. Then, I used Photoshop's Gradient Map function to explore colourways. I wanted something with a big range of values and high contrast - the final green/maroon colourway I settled on, I picked because of the high contrast and the fact it's not a colour scheme I normally use.

My first go was very clean and shapey, and I liked it a lot, but I thought I'd do another pass with more textured brushes, and I ended up preferring that. It felt more atmospheric, and I drew with more different values, to create more colours while still keeping the strong contrast.

I struggled with getting the movement to feel natural, especially at 12 fps, it felt like it always came out stuttery. Safe to say, I don't think I like frame animation - but that's okay. I would've liked to have had a film that looked nicer. That first shot will be the character stepping into a spotlight as magic faintly swirls, and the last shot will be the same glowing effect from the middle shot rising into the air to form a human figure over the poem's estate building.

I was nervous coming into uni without a finished piece of work, but I do have my extended deadline and I think given what my tutor has told me about being able to take my foot off the gas given the quality of all of the rest of my work, I'm sort of at peace with it. I did enjoy the title design workshop, here were my first titles, following the themes of scale (first two), texture, and bold. I then talked to my peers, who all really liked the textured title, but I liked how the bold title fed back into the shapes in my film, so I decided to combine the two.

I really enjoyed the screening. I love taking opportunities to look at my classmates's work, and I made notes of animations I particularly loved - there were a lot! For my critique, I had Yaz, and this is what I said:

I really liked the camera angles you used, I think the subtle movement of camera and the pull away from the skater falling over gave your animation so much visual interest and character. I liked how you had moments of stillness when the skater jumps, and taking away the background, it put so much emphasis on the jumps and created a moment of tension before they landed. Why did you go with the limited circle viewpoint? I like how you've used a lower frame rate and motion lines instead of more frames per second - it's very stylistic while still being easy to do. The animation ending with the heartbeat playing is a really effective final moment.

Here's the criticism I recieved from Megan Butler:

regardless to your work being unfinished what was shown was still super impressive. the use of angles of characters and colour really stood out. I liked the contrasting dark purples with light green and beige. I'm not sure if the audio starting at the blanket title was accidental or not but I actually really liked the effect it gave it stood out from the rest of the animations showing. overall, the animation was an amazing start and I'm looking forwards to seeing it finished.

As for my short film - turns out I submitted the file with the audio wrong, and I wasn't able to fix it in time, thus the audio played during the opening title card instead of during the film. A lot of people really complimented this, saying it was a really interesting touch, whereas to me, it was just another thing that had gone wrong with this project, and that even my final product wouldn't be as I wanted it. Still, it's a good lesson for how new, interesting ideas can come out of mistakes.

I think, overall, this project was a strong test of my ability to respond to briefs. Animation isn't something I want to do, and neither is sound, but I think looking back, there were lots of ways I could have approached this project from other angles that would have made it easier - a simpler artstyle like Lan Wang's, rotoscoping like Yaz Alhanfif, or been more clever with moving drawings around like MeiLing Fan (all which were animations I really liked.) I do have this habit of panicking when I get the brief and ending up not really thinking clearly about what I'm doing, and then forgetting to, you know, include things I want to do. This is definitely a project to learn from as I go forward into longer projects in second and third year. I want to not push myself too hard and always make sure I'm thinking lots through what I do, bringing things I want to do into a project if the project doesn't interest me, and put less pressure on myself making a strong finished piece if it means I get to explore things I enjoy more.

On the good side of things - the criticism I recieved complimented my colours and style specifically, which I was really happy with - I think my styleframe did look very good. They also pointed out my use of angles, which I am proud of. I did think I interpreted the poem in an interesting and evocative way, through the visuals and sound.

End of IPMP Wrap-up

To prepare for my IPMP submission, I completed my 10 second animation. I used techniues like motion & opacity keyframing in Photoshop to reduce my workload. This helped me finish, as I was struggling with all the frame by frame animation needed, and helped with my lack of confidence in making frame by frame look good. I experimented with the effects of the error of the sound being placed wrong & not playing in the animation itself: in some tutorials, my tutor Eleni had mentioned using the animation without the spoken poetry over the top, and letting the animation stand alone without needing to be explained or contextualised. While I dislike the initial incorrect version (where nothing plays during the animation), I created a version where Caleb Femi’s poem plays during the title card, and the animation purely has instrumentals. I think this adds a unique touch to my animation, and the animation stands alone and accompanies & illustrates the poem in, in my opinion, a much more satisfying way.

The final animation, with the sound mistake from the screening:

The final animation with corrected sound:

The final animation with improved sound: