Applied Production Diary - (15/5/17 - 17/5/17)

This week is the submission week and we spent it getting everything together and creating the DVD cover, finishing off the pitch bible and creating the press pack to submit to festivals.

I took the job of creating the press pack, whilst Emma finished off the pitch bible and Amy sorted the DVD case. I had actually never heard of a press pack before, so creating it was something completely new to me!

Here is what I created after we decided as a team what our house font would be.

I felt I didn't do too bad of a job at this and my favourite is the front page. Before creating that page, Amy and I went up to the stop-motion studio with a DSLR and took some really funky pictures of Louie to use as a cover and had a mini photoshoot. Below are the pictures we took.

I decided it was better to take dark pictures and then it would be easy just to lighten them in Photoshop, as sometimes if the image is too bright it's hard to edit.

These pictures were also really great for my portfolio as a puppet I have created!

Amy then made the DVD Cover and we put the products together.

I'm really happy with how these products have come out and I think they look quite professional. It feels strange to see our animation as a final product as I have never taken an animation this far before. We are now ready for submission!

Applied Production Diary - 12/5/17

FRIDAY

On Friday, I put all of the animation together and edited it all. There could only really be one main editor, although I had lots of input from Amy and Emma. I also got some good sound effects of the diggers and a gunshot from Harry (who has helped out in previous projects), and put them into the edit. This took quite a while to get all of the edit together but by the end of the day it was fully finished! All we had to do for next week now was to sort out the DVD and the press kit, ready for submission.

Below is the final animation on Vimeo.

The Consumed from Stacy Straub on Vimeo.

Applied Production Diary - 11/5/17

THURSDAY

Today, I did a lot of animating again and I feel like we are starting to really get through this project with more and more scenes being completed everyday.

I kind of took over the animating for this day as I really wanted to do it and I felt that Emma and Amy were stepping back a bit to give me a chance to fully animate as they understand that, that's what I want to do. Emma and Amy are more interested in the pre-production side of stop-motion, such as building puppets and sets, whereas I am not. So, I really liked how they let me take the lead for these scenes.

This was the first scene I animated, Louie rolling over as a close-up of him sleeping. It was quite hard to animate as he is not magnetised at all, so getting him to roll I used sponge behind him to prop him up as he rolled. 

This next scene, I again fully animated but Emma and Amy did give me some help. We had a funny production line going where Emma would prepare the tape, Amy would stick this to the crisp packet leaf, and then I would stick it on and animate. This made the whole scene so much quicker and I think we all had very greasy/oily hands after this scene.

This scene shows Louie waking up, which was fun to animate. I made Emma keep doing the motion on beanbags so I could get an idea of how he would get up, which was quite funny. After he gets up and looks around the smoke starts to come in the scene and as I was quite tired from animating the other scenes, Emma and Amy came to animate the smoke, whilst I animated Louie.

After I had a little break, I then animated this scene above of Louie hiding and by this point he was so difficult to animate as both of his legs had broken, meaning he didn't have much stability to him. I had to again use sponges and tape his bum to the set to try and keep him steady.

This was the last scene of the day and the last scene of the whole production process! The smoke is completely animated by Emma and Amy here and they did a fab job in comparison to the first smoke scene we did in the forest. I carried on animating Louie in this scene, although he doesn't do much. I feel that we definitely should have experimented more with the smoke materials and done a few more animation tests with it before going straight into the scenes, but you live and learn. This scene is playing very fast in this preview and it's just because of me not exporting it as 12fps but as 24fps.

Below are all the shots from filming.

Applied Production Diary - 10/5/17

WEDNESDAY

On Wednesday, we decided to put the scenes we had into Premiere to check that the timings were going right, that we worked out. This meant that we had counted all the frames to match up to the lyrics in the song, otherwise the animation wouldn't be as clear.

We found that it was really confusing as we had filmed on twos, however Dragonframe was exporting out the images as ones, so when put into Premiere it was playing in half the time and really fast! To tackle this we had to change the sequence and video settings to 12 frames a second so that technically it would play at 24. How complicated!

After looking back at the footage so far, I really felt that the whole thing lacked different shots and it felt quite flat. I suggested that we add some close-ups in and after Emma and Amy had spent a long animating the cuddle scene, I volunteered to film all of the close-ups as it wouldn't take me too long,
as they were only a few seconds each. I also love animating so to me, to go back and film again into the scenes we already had was fine. I think Emma and Amy, weren't too keen on going back to polish things off and wanted to move onto the next thing, but going back was the best decision.

So, I went back into the stop-motion room and animated these scenes on my own.

Here is a close-up of Marie's face, I felt this helped the audience see her more clearly. To have made her character have more performance, it would have been better to use eyes or eyebrows that could  move!

This is the close-up hug, I loved animating this scene it was so cute. The close-up of the hug I felt just made it much more emotional for the audience as they get a closer perspective of their love.

I loved getting to animate these scenes and I do feel that it works a lot better when there is just one animator, just because then both of the characters movement matches and I will keep this in mind for future projects. I felt that I could precisely move the puppets when I was the only one animating.

Applied Production Diary - 9/5/17

TUESDAY

On Tuesday it was the crit, which I had forgotten about due to all of the recent deadlines and so many things on my mind. Emma wasn't the most optimistic about this crit and wasn't sure of us showing our work at such an early stage in the animating. Even though we didn't have much to show I still threw what we had into the animatic so that we at least had something to show people. I also gathered a few images of the sets/puppets just to give everyone an update. I feel like the crit wasn't really helpful as it would have worked a lot better if we had more to show. I wasn't able to get people's opinions properly than if we had more animation, however it was cool to see other's work and progression.

In the afternoon we began animating another couple of scenes. Emma did a lot of the animating for these scenes and as I had to go to work I had to leave, whilst they carried on with the scene.




This is the cuddle scene, where Emma and Amy animated.





I was quite sad for missing out on animating so I wanted to make sure that the rest of scenes I animated as much as possible as I really want to practice animating and build my portfolio.

Below are images from animating.

Applied Production Diary - 8/5/17

Animating crazy week!

For this week, it is time to pump out as much animating as humanly possible as we still have a lot of scenes to do before the deadline next week. The main thing that is keeping me calm at the moment is that the majority of the animation is the leaf time lapse where Louie doesn't have to move that much and the main focus is changing the leaves. We will have to make sure with this scene that we really go slow with the leaf changing and stretch it out as much as possible.

MONDAY

On Monday, I animated the smoke scene ready to composit on the truck scene at the end and on the scene with Louie sat in the nest. Mat came up and had at look at this scene and suggested that we layer the footage a few times over to make the smoke look really thick and I think this is a great idea.

I animated it onto a blue screen and this is how the rough version looks.

I really like how this scene has turned out and I'm glad that we decided to do this just to add the the whole idea of the smoke completely going wild and taking over the forest. Below is some shots of me testing how it look after keying and compositing it over the digger footage. It still needs a lot of tweaking and colour correction before the final edit but so far it has worked really well!

On Monday, I also animated the scene with Marie's hand coming over to pull the leaves back. We wanted to start with all of the awkward to film scenes first so that they were out of the way and we could go back and fix any problems straight away. I opted to animate these scenes as they were hard and as I want to be an animator I wanted to put myself up for the challenge.

This was the close-up hand scene and it was so hard to get this scene! Amy and Emma carefully set up the scene as I waited in the corner ready to animate it and we actually had to put a cardboard box in the set and set the camera on it with it being kept steady with a piece of sponge. Quite a DIY shot right here! Then because it wasn't on a tripod it kept shaking crazily so no one could move a muscle the whole time I was trying to move the hand ever so carefully, what a nightmare. However, we got the shot in the end and I was so relieved to finish animating this scene. There are a few shadows on this blue screen so I don't know how well it will key out in post, this might have to be something that we ask Mat about.

Finally, this was the last scene for Monday. This scene was a lot more simple for me to animate and I enjoyed doing this scene as Marie is such a lovely puppet to move compared to Louie. I'm really happy with how these scenes have come out and it will be back to it tomorrow!

Applied Production Diary (1/517 - 7/5/17)

This week was when we finally began animating! We have had a lot of problems over the past week with cameras, batteries and lenses. All of this has been a bit of nightmare, however we managed to finally get past all of that and start animating some scenes.

The first scene we animated was the smoke scene on the trees, we felt it would be best to film this scene first before putting any of the green onto the set and work backwards. We used cotton wool for smoke like they did in Fantastic Mr Fox and it worked really well.



I animated the two little diggers, the two trees on the right of the screen and half the big tree smoke.
Amy animated the big digger, the left tree and half the big tree.

I also created the background painting using collage, paint and ink to create a quite apocalyptic-style background! We also animated another digger scene ready for doing a full week of animating next week and getting all of the digger scenes out of the way first, ready for all the ape scenes.



Amy and Emma animated this scene, as we want to try and spread the chance to animate as much as possible and Emma did a great job of leaving trails behind the big truck making it look more realistic! The sets are looking amazing and I'm starting to feel prouder each time we complete a scene as we've put so much effort into all the details within this animation.

Overall, this week we haven't got as much done as we would have hoped. On the other hand, the main thing is that we have now solved all of our camera problems apart from the fact we have limited time with the battery and have to try and cram all of the animating into a few hours as it takes a long time to charge up again. Next week should be a lot more successful and I'm hoping we pretty much finished all of the animating by Friday. This will then leave us a few days to edit and composit all of the shots ready for submission!