Animation Year 1

Summary of the final narrative (+ analysis):

The story follows a character who tries to collect falling stars to put onto their cape. (since at the start of the story, one hits them and attaches to it, thus leading Leora to become enraptured by the star’s beauty). The character is arrogant in nature and has an unattainable goal which leads to their downfall.

We purposely kept the story vague to leave room for people’s own interpretation.

The theory that the events of the story happen in a dream/the events are not entirely grounded in reality turned out to be popular during the screening session. (since it’s set at night, the star imagery and the night gown we chose to dress the character in)

Another interpretation is that the sparks that consume the character just before the final scene could represent burnout.

Reflection (750 words essay):

For the length of the film we were expected to make, I think this was the ideal group size. Since there was only two of us working together, it was easy to combine our ideas to form a narrative and agree on things like character design, concept and how the final product should look early on because there was no need to consult as many people about what they thought of things. It was also easy to split the workload evenly, focusing on allocating tasks to the person better suited to do it in order to form the best outcome possible.
Doing tasks we were more specialised with already also enabled us to try new things within that specialism too. For example, currently I think my animation skills are not as strong as Layton’s so while he focused more on animating the main sequence, this project gave me the opportunity to start experimenting more with the colour palette of the animation (since I don’t use extremely bright colours in my work very often) and also begin attempting minor fx animation to accompany the final film.

Layton would animate on Toonboom, then he would export the frames to google drive where I would then take the images into procreate to begin colouring and cleaning the existing line art. This allowed me to have access to an advanced brush engine which I used to enhance the visuals of the film.
However we encountered a problem during the exporting of frames from Toonboom which made the image lose its transparency. To solve this problem, I used another program to extract the line art before I could add any colour. This was the main problem that made me think that it could have been more efficient if we stuck to using one program to colour and animate. If I only had to fix a few frames using this method, then it would have been more manageable, but I would not want to fix every frame in the animation again like this if it can be avoided in the future.
Overall the making process we arranged worked well since transferring files was efficient, but if possible, next time I will choose to stick to one program to animate and colour instead to avoid any major setbacks like the one described above.

The initial concept we came up with together was derived from the words picked from the given word cloud at the start of the project. (The chosen words were ‘Star, Electrify, Fall, Devour, and Pity’.) The final story follows a character who tries to collect falling stars to put onto their cape. (Since at the start of the story, one hits them and attaches to it, thus leading Leora to become enraptured by the star’s beauty). The character is arrogant in nature and has an unattainable goal which leads to their downfall.
We purposely kept the story vague to leave room for people’s own interpretation. This in turn gave us the opportunity to add in a lot of symbolism through the visuals, for example the changing colours represents the struggle Leora goes through near the end of the film. Even the character’s name was chosen because it means light according to https://nameberry.com/babyname/leora. The name is never mentioned in the film because there is no voice acting, but overall I think that the concept of the film and the accompanying symbolism we added is already enough as it is even without mentioning the name of our main character.
For the sound, a specially composed piano piece made by my friend was used to enhance the dreamy night time mood of the film, no other sound effects were added mainly due to time constraints since we did talk about adding sound effects for the shooting stars and explosions etc. I do recognise that using sound as a clarifier to enhance the importance of the stars in the narrative would possibly have made the film even stronger if done right so I would like to further explore the potential of sound in this way in future projects. Overall, I think that the film works fine with just the piano music and adding sound effects unnecessarily in a rush would have ruined the immersion and destroyed the atmosphere created.

None of this would have been achievable without good communication from both of us, so overall I think that our collaborative efforts made the project more enjoyable rather than stressful, and in turn resulted in a strong final film.

https://artslondon.padlet.org/sjohnson0320211/3qbb921y2w88wejj

Contents of this section of the padlet + detailed notes below:

https://aggie.io/7csohtjnk6
The photo on the left is what is on this link. It depicts the first notation of what our ideas for the visuals of the film could look like.

We decided very early on that the colour palette would be unnatural at the climax of the film.

In the image above, we were exploring different colours for the character and discussing what their design could look like for the final film.
We decided to make their hair resemble a star since it’s on theme for the film’s aesthetic, and in a way you could say that they want to become one.

During this discussion session was also when we finalised the narrative. I wrote out the full series of events we came up with on that day in full (see previous post*) and started storyboarding the film soon after using the rough thumbnails on the above image as a guide.
*note: the previous post’s summary of events has a few ditched ideas that did not make it into the final film due to reasons like time constraints and the 20 second long time frame being too short to effectively execute some of the smaller less important ideas in conjunction to the main ideas.

Initial storyboard sketches:

Many things changed from the time that I drew these boards near the beginning of the project. For example: the first shot was meant to be of the character running down a hill/through some grass, but this was changed to a back shot of the character that slowly zoomed in to focus on them. I think this change helped create a stronger sense of foreboding through the cinematography right from the beginning.

Actually overall I wasn’t too happy with the initial boards I drew since the angle of the camera was very static for the majority of them. I had trouble with envisioning the final film and I’m not completely used to moving the camera around in animations yet. Luckily many of the angles were changed later to make sure the camera is not just staying in the same place, but I’ll do better for next time.

This drawing by Layton was made after the sketching and discussion session we had about the character’s look. I used this as a reference to finalise the design and colour palette and make a turnaround sheet for the film. (both colour versions of the sheet can be seen below)

https://artslondon.padlet.org/sjohnson0320211/3qbb921y2w88wejj

^^^ PLEASE CLICK THE LINK HERE TO SEE THE ANIMATION PROCESS TOO ^^^

Some of the contents of the padlet are arranged below in case the link is inaccessable.
Additional writing about sources used has been added below too.

Moodboard, research+ notes part 1:

\Chosen words: Star, Electrify, Fall, Devour, Pity

Initial story ideas from word cloud words : Star= character (could symbolise a happy character bc of light or a hot headed character bc stars burn) 

Electrify= smth inspires them to action, or something makes them curious etc 

Fall= they trip up over their own pride, they fail etc

Devour = The action or the something that sparks curiousity in them can devour their everyday life, or it could be something related to food 

Pity = Another character could pity them and help them out of their fall, or they can have pity on themselves and get out of the place they ended up

List of references (in order of idea progression from start of the project to the end):
Glass Mask
CONTRETEMPS
Spirited Away
Howl’s Moving Castle
Norman McLaren (Dots)
The Little Prince (in terms of story themes and mood)

Animators/films looked at for inspiration (+notes):

The monsters in ‘CONTRETEMPS’ are similar to No Face in the banquet scene, but instead of food, they are devouring the main character’s sense of security in the outside world.

The freeform shapes in Norman McLaren’s dots and his use of sound design to accompany the shape’s movement and transformation was a key inspiration to us for our project since the beginning when we first started thinking about how the stars in our film could move.

Finalised series of events (written before animation begun)

Beginning: Character gets surrounded by stars
(Zoom in to character’s eyes/face)

Middle: They try to catch one (having an over confident demeanour), (Zoom in to cupped hands holding the star or them grabbing the star so hard that it splits, see initial sketch sheet) 
Star splits into multiple and this dissolves and surrounds them.

The character will have a shocked expression and then the star will zoom into their mouth, causing them to swallow it and combust.

End: Zoom in to the beginning scene with character missing but with signs they were there in the past (cape floating,  ribbon floats to the ground (resembles the stars), indent on the ground where they once stood

Additional notes:
Perhaps instead of the character being missing they can be transparent and fade away, (wearing star crown and star design appears on their cape*) 
*appearing after the star they try to catch splits and surrounds them

Main colour scheme will be blue, yellow, pink (before saturation caused by the stars appearing)

Story goes from night time to early morning, see mood board corner for time of day colour inspiration