Keep out sign

Click for full size

Bit of fun with Photoshop in this week's lesson; mostly just getting to grips with selection tools, brushes, text and layer styles. I downloaded a couple of grunge brushes and used them to rough things up a bit. May have gone a bit over the top! 

The doodles (and shamefully traced Godzilla) were done using a brush I downloaded quite some time ago designed to mimic the effect of a pencil. It's one of my favourite brushes for drawing because it's nice and textured!

Character design materials

Met up with Craig on Thursday to have a quick catch-up. We have frequently conflicting timetables and he doesn't live on-campus so it's been quite difficult to find a time that we're both in and available! 

I was initially apprehensive about how he'd respond to the complete 180 I'd pulled regarding my ideas, but to my great relief he seemed quite enthusiastic about everything and was very keen on the balloon in space scene. 

We had a brief amount of time before the afternoon's lecture so I was able to get some quick snapshots and drawings done so that I can start moving forward with character design.

(Sorry for the horrible quality thumbnails — Blogspot's not very good at this sort of thing)

(Click below for a few more pictures)

A complete change in direction

Listening to Dolly Parton managed to set me off in a completely different direction in terms of my ideas. I'm secretly quite pleased — I felt that I was really struggling to get anywhere!

The fact that Disney characters feature so heavily in the video is an added bonus!

I thought I might be able to incorporate this song as the background soundtrack. So far I'm thinking of Craig as a struggling illustrator — working late, his radio on, and as the song plays he starts hallucinating and his drawings leap off the page and start dancing around, wreaking havoc — maybe they drag him onto the page with them and he's forced to interact with an animated landscape?

It would be an interesting opportunity to try and combine live-action with animation.

I think the idea may partially have come from the fact that I was struggling so much trying to get anywhere — workin' from 9 to 5 (and beyond) and still stuck...

Inspiration in windmills

I found a couple of pictures of some silhouetted windmills on Google and they rather strongly reminded me of Lotte Reiniger's work — the striking contrast of a pitch black shape against a simple backdrop. It would be quite interesting to do all the background elements in this style, with the backdrops themselves in very soft focus with just a few colours but all large objects and set pieces silhouetted.

I'd like to with incorporating the idea of colour and silhouettes into the animation itself. I'm not entirely sure how yet — perhaps having the character interacting with the environment in some way and manipulating colours and shadows?

Digital Skills: Backdrop experimentation

Been doing a bit of tinkering with Photoshop, taking some inspiration from the works of Lewitt-Him and Alice/Martin Provensen. I wanted to see whether I could produce a similar effect to their simplistic cutout style using digital techniques.

Click for larger view

Not altogether too happy with it. I'm fairly pleased with the trees and grass and general scenery, but I really lost my groove on the house, which came out horrendously. There was a lot of detail that was difficult to break down and I was starting to get really impatient with some technical issues (read: Photoshop throwing up an "unrecoverable error" at me every 10 minutes), so I ended up really rushing it!

I thought that having quite bold and simplistic backdrops could work quite well if I was to have quite detailed character puppets, helping to bring focus to the scene. I think the colours could stand to be a little more subdued. Though I used a relatively limited pallette it's almost quite garish and potentially distracting. Lowering the opacity might help as opposed to completely re-colouring the entire scene.

The image was quite simple (if a little time consuming) to create — the original image (above) was sourced from sxc.hu, a free stock image resource. Ordinarily, I would prefer to go out and source my own images to use, but for the purposes of a spontaneous experiment it didn't really seem worth a trip to Holland ;] Retrospectively I could have used almost any image but I thought I'd try and keep with the theme of the project!

First I applied a Poster Edges filter to the image. This was to darken existing contrast boundaries and help Photoshop detect the edges of each object in the image when it came to the selection process.

 I then increased the brightness and contrast very slightly — again, to help with edge detection.

The cutout filter is one usually best avoided — in this instance, though, I found its use acceptable in order to help simplify the colours and shapes in the image, providing me a solid guideline to work from.

I then duplicated the background layer and applied a Find Edges filter to the copy. This gave a strong, distinct outline to everything in the image.

 

Unfortunately, in doing so, it also loses its colour information. Ideally I need the guidelines and the simplified colours/shapes from the previous layer, so I applied a Soft Light blend mode to remove the white from this layer and overlay it onto the one below.

 

The result is this fairly ugly but very useful image. It contains both the outlines from find edges and the simplified colours and shapes from the cutout filter, providing a perfect guide to paint over.

Because of the clear colour and edge distinction, I was able to simply use the magnetic lasso tool to make a loose selection around any area in the image. Photoshop was able to very accurately detect the edges of whatever I was selecting and mostly guided itself.

I could then just fill the selection with my chosen colour.

Lotte Reiniger

Craig mentioned Lotte Reiniger as one of his favourite animators (aside from Disney) so I've been having a look at some of her work. She was a silhouette animator and did a massive array of fairytale adaptions, which I thought was relevant!

I really love the title cards — it reminds me of Watch With Mother! Very simple and effective. This might be something I can use?

Looking mainly at the way the backgrounds contrast with the characters — again, very simple cutout shapes similar to the works of Alice & Martin Provensen and Lewitt-Him. The solid black figures against the relatively soft background is extremely striking.


If I were to go ahead with the pop up book idea, the way Lotte Reiniger animated her puppets could be something to bear in mind. In actual pop up books the character puppets are very limited in movement, often with just one or two articulated limbs — a waving arm for example — so I could make several puppets for each necessary action/expression and just flip between them?

Quick ideas

Got a lot of ideas in my head in terms of visuals, so I've started throwing some things at my sketchbook and seeing what happens. I'm trying to translate all this from sketchbook scribbles and make it slightly more coherent, so bear with me!

I'd really like to apply some of what we've been learning in animation principles — my first thought was just to have the character walking across some sort of scrolling panoramic background. In keeping with the theme of fairytales, I'm loosely thinking of a forest or some sort of castle.

I'd like to do something in a very ornate, classic style like old book illustrations — perhaps even using sepia tones and old paper textures to really replicate the feel of a children's story.

One possible idea I'm toying with is to have the title card look like the cover of an old book, with the title of the animation embellished in gold lettering (as very poorly illustrated here), then have the book open to reveal a story, which then begins to come to life across the pages.

Thinking in terms of a pop up book — each time the page turns they kind of spring upwards from the page. Their movement would be intentionally kept very 'puppety' and articulated.

I then got to thinking that it would probably make sense for things to take place in Holland — Craig's listed 'favourite or special place.' I started thinking a bit about how I might best portray Holland visually, and ended up resorting to some very sophisticated stereotypes. Windmills and tulips!

I'm already pretty much decided that I need to use a windmill in here somewhere, probably as my animated background element. I'm thinking I'll either try to find a windmill to film for some footage, or (more likely) create a simple cutout puppet from a magazine image or drawing.






I'm still trying to generate ideas. A lot of the things Craig said to me are related to one another, but trying to string them together into something cohesive is quite a challenge.