Animation: January 2017

Our Brief for this project is to create a soundscape of our choice for an animation we are going to make, but we will be starting with planning the soundscape and collecting the sounds for it and then move onto the animating based on our soundscape.

My Idea for the soundscape is going to be a misty cold mountain filled with fantasy creatures, I believe that I can retrieve some natural sounds as I am going to be going the Brecon Beacons which sound contain many of the sounds i am looking for.

Sound Score

I was unsure on what a sound score was as I couldn't find anything about it on the internet but i searched for sound in art and found a man called Wassily Kandinsky who does a lot of sound related art work. Here is a good example;

I then looked at a few different wave forms to help me with my sound score.

I then used these to create my visual sound drawings.

Here is my first attempt at visualising sound. I used a combination of 'Triangular Wave' and 'Sine Wave'. I used oil pastels as i have a variety of colours. The blue represents the birds in the ambient track. The Yellow is going to be the rhythm so in this small piece it represents the footsteps. The green is a smooth fluctuating line representing the sway of the trees. The Brown line is the wind in the ambient track. The black represents some sort of falling rock and the pink is going to be a river. I then smudged it with a white pastel to create a broken look to it representing rain.

After my first attempt I then had a go at creating a graph that is more commonly seen on digital recording/editing software. The yellow represents the wind, the blue is trees, the pink are birds, the green is a river that slowly moves away and the brown being footsteps followed by crumbling of rocks or the drag of leaves.

Recording

I took a trip to the Brecon Beacons to record most of my sounds on location. I managed to get a lot of great quality sounds and while i was there I took some reference photos to use for the animation side of the project.

(My Sounds I Recorded In The Beacons)

(Frosted Twig)

(Frosted Tree)

(Sunrise)

(Frosted Tree Close)

(Misty Mountains)

Character Development

I decided to design my character of paper rather than digitally as I find drawing a lot easier on a physical piece of paper.

Storyboard/Animatic

Backgrounds

I used a program online called Adobe Colour to help me pick a colour pallet. I'm using a colour pallet called 'Japanese Garden' because it fits the atmosphere that I am aiming for and it it very easy to look at.

I have managed to finish 3 of the 6 backgrounds I plan to draw. Three of these will be animated, for example the river, the waterfall and the panning shot.

I plan on finishing all of the backgrounds before I move onto animating the characters.

Sounds

Using the birds in every shot really helped keep all of the scenes in one location. I have tried to create an idea of distance by using the violin and editing the volume and location of it.

Animation

Tests

Walk Cycle attempt one.

After receiving feedback for this walk cycle a realized that the left leg changed length and gave a distorted look to the animation, therefore I chose to scrap this walk cycle and move onto creating a new one.

Walk Cycle 2

Walk Cycle 3

Crying Animation

Finishing touches

Animation

For the animation I did one last clean up to make sure everything is smooth and clean. My animation was done on Two's as animating every frame would have eaten into my time and could have cause me not to finish by the deadline.

I really Struggled with the walk cycles and these took the most time. This was because I have never animated in perspective therefore it was new experience for me. The rest of the animation I found quite straight forward therefore took less time.

Improving on my last animations I tried to look more at the arcs to make the movements smoother and lifelike.

Sound

In my last edit of my animation I decided to scrap the idea of having a violin in the final piece. This was mainly due the violin making the sound choppy which ruined the atmosphere, I also chose to do this because of the lack of time to animate the violin player.

From my last presentation I receive feedback about the choppiness of my sound, I was told to add a sound that plays threw out the whole animation. I decided to use the waterfall sound to do this, by changing the volume and the location of the sound I also managed to create a sense of scale of the world I created.

My idea for Tim's Icarus Project is going to be rather abstract. I have thought about a few ideas but the one that i think is the most interesting is the idea I had about falling forever. My plan is to have Icarus fall into the sea, but he carries on falling and then all of a sudden he falls out the bottom of the sea back out into the sky. But this time it's different as everything is upside down. It then flips back the right way again and all of a sudden he is underwater again, this repeats and get faster each time. On his way down there is going to be a variety of creatures such as birds and sea creatures and eventually ends up in limbo (an empty dark void with no sound).

The sound is going to be very important in my animation as I am going to use it to create a sense of Icarus's world falling apart as he is entering 'Limbo'. The sounds at the start of the animation are going to be normal, as Icarus keeps falling the soundscape begins to turn, using more dreamlike sounds for example echoes, repeating the sounds and a lot of other effects. A good example of this is; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXQCo9fLYWI created by H3H3Productions.

The way the sounds are edited in this video create a sense of tension and can make you feel unsettled. I could achieve this by layering up sound creating loops and heavy editing. The sounds that I plan on using are splashing, screeches, wind, birds and a lot of whooshing sounds.

Hopefully, this will portray Icarus's world falling apart on his journey to limbo.

Icarus Concept Art

For my design I thought about the stature of Icarus. I figured that Icarus would have been very muscular if he was going to be able to lift himself with man-made wings, I took it a step further and exaggerated the size of Icarus to be this giant man.

After Deciding this I then went on to looking for some references for the design. I came across an artist called Michael Hussinger who had drawn this gif.

This reminded me of a character from the film 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' who has the same facial features. I wanted to use the idea of the monobrow, big nose and mustache combo.

I then looked at some Pixar character designs and came across Braves Dad from 'Brave' I really liked how his neck is connected to his head so I decided to use this design.