Background Process

ok so i finished off the backgrounds and i have to only create maybe another two or three to be completely finished with them, so here you go you can check out the backgrounds below. The colour palette in themovie is now very unified and allows us to tell a simple but interesting story, we hope to transform these scenes into moments the audience will remember, keep watching there is still many more updates to come.

Motivation

I dedicated this weekend to researching more into jungle flora and fauna. I collected a huge amount of reference material and decided to create more backgrounds for the movie. I believe the material really helped the production value. i am still working on them at the moment but when they are completed i will give you guys a sample. in other news we have around 50 seconds of completed animation, we still have a ton of work to do but on the good side we are almost 1/3 of the movie completed coloured, animated and looking sweet we just have to crack on.

Hanging in there progess

so very close to finishing shots 3 and 4 just a few colour fills and line adjustments then they will be ready to cross off of the list. here is a screen shot of around the finished look of the shot. As you can see there were many changes the background was popped out with detail and the lighting has been adjusted to feel
true to the situation. Lets hope this will fit in with the mood and setting of the rest of the film.

with another weekend approaching to update you guys i have created another background to fit in with a shot where our character spots her captain dead on the ground. This is now completed and leaves only 1 background left to have them all completed. Animation wise I have finished the shot I was working on (see above) adding another 16 second to our completed animation giving us a grand total of 37 seconds of completed animation. Flare is almost finished her shot and with that completed we are nearing the minute milestone. As we have heavily weighted ourselves towards completing the beginning of our movie, we feel that floating around and completing various smaller shots will keep us fresh and invigorated with the project.

Update on progress

After a weekend of solid animation, and an assessment yesterday, we received some good and some
negative feedback which we will take into account, there are a few changes to be made here and there but overall we are heading in the right direction both animation and time wise.

​We have nearly completed shots 3 and 4 and will be moving on ahead to the next two shots, we are very behind on our own schedules but i am sure if we keep working at this pace we should be ok for our final assessment. once we complete the shots we are on i will upload a few screen caps and maybe a little taster of how the animation will overall look. hopefully you will enjoy seeing it move and when we have the sounds in that should really bring the atmosphere to life.

Work in progress animation

Flare and i have been busy bees over the weekend cracking on with our movie, at the moment we are working between Shots 3 and 4 which are each about 12 to 13 seconds long. The decision to work between 2 shots keying in rough and then alternating between shots while the other person comes in and black solid lines over the red rough seems to be working both quick and effectively, example below. when the keys have been inserted in black we are able to go through and in-between quite quickly, this is still quite time consuming as most of the actions we have so far are slow moments the in betweens really cant be too wobbly or inaccurate or it would stick out like a saw thumb. whilst working with these shots we have found that we are able to derive quite a lot of emotion and acting from very rough key frames, and are able to impart enough emotion to tell what is happening without needing a face or any final line what so ever, we are basically attempting to show whats happening blind and doing so this allows us to work purely with body language without leaning heavily on facial reactions. Also over the course of the last few weeks we have become aware that our deadline is creeping up at an alarming rate with this in mind we have cut out a few pieces of our main characters equipment and have taken more of a simple approach to her appearance. See image below.

Compared to the original design her equipment has been exponentially downsized her belt, braces, extra bits and pieces have been removed to speed up the animating process. But whats great is that if we have extra time during post production there is nothing stopping up from creating a layer above our line and colour and adding the other equipment in. Speaking of colour moving on to my last point of the post, the colouring stage is being tackled along with the animating mainly so when a shot it lined and coloured thats one more shot finished we dont really need to keep coming back to add colour etc. and really the process takes no longer than 2 hours to fully colour a 12 second shot which is great. mainly due to the wonderful colouring tools that TVP has to offer its users. When the colour is added we have many other tricks up our sleeves the help composit our character and background as on there own they seems very separate, but with a little love and dedication we are able to really pull them together and add a nice atmosphere to a scene. On the right is a screen shot of what a coloured still looks like at the moment there is as i said before much left to be desired but once the finishing touches are added it should be fine. Finally Flare and myself have really been pushing each other to get this movie to be the very best we movie we can create, we are sparing no expense ( which at the moment seems to be sleeping around 2 hours a night if we are lucky and pulling extended work periods) not that i am complaining we love animation and everything it en tales. We just hope that when its finished everyone is able to enjoy it as much as we are working on it.

Up to Date

well i think that about sums up everything we have so far, we look forward to letting you in on the production in the future and hope that you are willing to keep up with our movie, feel free to comment or send us a message in the contact section.

Inspiration

There is a very big part of our film we have not spoke to much about and that is the fact that our movie is still a psychological piece and should feel like the action in the movie is going on within her head, there are times within our movie that our character lapses into a hallucination where things are not what they seems and the jungle although docile will become a very brutal enemy and affects her in a very physical way. to really get into her head we began to look at as we said before Alfred Hitchcock and many of his inspirational pieces, we also wanted to keep the viewer hooked below you will find a few pieces that helped inspire us and really brought out the best in our piece.There is a very big part of our film we have not spoke to much about and that is the fact that our movie is still a psychological piece and should feel like the action in the movie is going on within her head, there are times within our movie that our character lapses into a hallucination where things are not what they seems and the jungle although docile will become a very brutal enemy and affects her in a very physical way. to really get into her head we began to look at as we said before Alfred Hitchcock and many of his inspirational pieces, we also wanted to keep the viewer hooked below you will find a few pieces that helped inspire us and really brought out the best in our piece.

Previous Animatics

As I have almost fully caught up with where we are up to now, I would like to take a minute to look back at the previous animatic versions we had created, just to show how much our movie has grown and changed, at first it was a very simple piece (which in essence is good) but considering that there was no tension building or escalation of ticking clock we revamped the idea for a while completely Taking into consideration all of the feedback from people around up, we attempted to fit everything they wanted to say as well as our own goals and how we felt about it, it became very convoluted and compact with dense information that really didn't help raise tension at all and instead worked against us. We did however keep key elements by the time we began our most recent and complete animatic.

the version on the left is the earlier V1 animatic, which contained only a short section of base information, and the version to the right contained a more final look and feel with sounds and musical composition to go with the feel of the movie. But when we had our critical reflection session with our class before the Christmas holidays, we were given very good feedback that allowed us to strip away a lot of the information that we believed yielded no glory for us. and we began again using our original and simple story and made the situation revolve more around her has a character instead of incorporating the captain so much.

Scheduling

Once we had found our basis in animation, and things were running smoothly, we had reached our production stage, we began to block in animation and reached the 20 seconds mark, this was dated February 5th, we have a very tight schedule to stick to, to be able to finish in time by April 17th. Our sheduel is to animate around 3 full rendered coloured and illustrated seconds a day (not including weekends) which would allow us enough time to reach April and still have time to edit and attach sounds and voice overs during the editing stage of the project. There are a few other things to take into consideration when working on the movie that may stretch the production time, and I mean that the acting has to be right, it would not be if rushed though it just to get to the end goal to soon.

Animation Test

We played with many techniques to achieve the look we wanted, and to test out movement and flow we decided to make a few seconds test were an army man would swing a knife and show off his skills. We had decided that most of the film will be shot on twos but very fast actions on ones so that it is smooth and engaging.

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Building the world

February 6th- (Building the world) Once we had a grasp of the movie we needed to begin adding in an illustrated world that would convey they deep and docile place untouched by man but at the same time very beautiful as mother nature can be. 

​We chose many dark greens, blues and browns when creating the landscape, it is full of moss and hanging branches, and is softly lit with dispersed partials of yellow light from the burning light. We researched many abandoned areas especially the jungles of south america, Venezuela and the jungles of India. I have found that in those places there is a very ethereal feel that ghost like essence. that both scares and intrigues, and having these production paintings really steps the animatic up. we have not uploaded all of the areas these two above are just a sneek peek you will have to stay tuned to see more.

Animatic Process

Our storyboards once refined were put on a timeline that were then expanded upon to create timing and emotion, we spend from November to the end of Christmas 2012 working on the layering and sequences, they were interspersed with sounds and voices so they became themselves a movie in essence. During this process we continually were watching movies such as the 1992 movie "Alive" that focused on an Argentinian group of football players that were stranded in the mountains for over a week. and others such as 127 hours, Buried, The incredible shrinking man, 9/11 etc. Basically anything to get out minds motivated towards this subject and also to help us get in the mindset of what it would be like to be trapped in the jungle, far above ground with no way out. We sat down and took this data into consideration when we worked with the animatic. We then made sure to use the wonderful film making skills of Alfred Hitchcock.



We extensively researched and watched Hitchcock movies that we felt matched the one we wanted to create also taking into account the steps and techniques he would use to create masterpieces. some of the effects he used most

of all were a things called a Mcguffin where by showing nothing sandwiched between a very tense action or shot, just to keep the viewer hooked, strategic and holding cameras for a very long time to build tension, these are essential in our movies, as over the process of 4 animatic's we began cutting our film from say 70 shots to almost half that amount as to build the character and stay with her though her trauma. A final thing when producing a clear animatic before moving on to the animation process, was as Hitchcock said if you can do it with out sound it would be better, and it worked that way for us, as when we did our first two animatic they were filled with voices and dialogue sequences of the thoughts of her inner mind, but they clouded the movie and rushed it along not allowing you to feel anything for her as a person.



Once we resolved that and stripped it away it really pushed us to know that the only way she would come over was with visual acting, in her minute body movements and the way she moved and turned. taking those things into consideration is a key point when working on this movie. We then began to work with backgrounds to fit a world to our story.

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Storyboard Process

We over a period of two months created an extensive amount of storyboards and animatic versions conveying our movie through stills and then stills added onto a timeline:

These are early storyboard designs, showing our heroin attempting to escape through various situations

as well as the effects of hunger, and disease setting in we culminate with her cutting her ropes and falling
to the floor, we do not want to spoil any more than that. What we can say is that the events she goes though
were hand picked and selected as they gave the characters a very suspense filled feel and with minimal cutting we hope to achieve something very special.

Hanging In There Characters

These are our main character (Flora Pathos) designs, as well as her supporting character (Chris). Flora's character design went through many changes, originally Chris on the right was the main character But after feedback from many people we decided to change a him to her. The concept of a male lead suspended in a tree, in peak physical condition, (as an army personal would be) would seem considerably more capable of escaping the situation than a younger less trained female intern. Not that we are intending to say women are less physically capable then men but when we made the jump to female out test audience they seemed way more interested and we felt seeing a young woman trapped and in pain seemed way more unbearable than an action man. Chris on the right is a capable elder agent that is a support role in the movie.

Hanging in There Introduction

I have decided to use this blog to catalogue and show the process of Flare and my selves graduation movie "Hanging in there" below is a snippet of information about the movie and from now i will be posting our production notes.
About The Movie:

​​Subject- A woman is stuck and suspended in a tree in the rainforest with a mortal injury and time running out for her.

​Plot - Flora Pathos is sent out on a mission in a harsh jungle environment, she is landing by parachute when disaster strikes she is blown off course and lands suspended in a tree, on impact she breaks her arm due to strap. Not knowing what to does she tries everything she can to get down, but with blood loss and fever setting. She cuts her strings and plummets to the ground using the animal to break her fall. She rolls over and drags herself free of the area. Does Flora survive this hellish nightmare gone tragically wrong or will she find a way out?

Technique - Hanging in there will feature an almost realistic style with high resolution details down to thistles bushes and wood grain on trees, the characters will be created using flat solid colours then blended down hopefully creating a soft but gritty realism. Hanging in there will be produced using 2D animation software, TV Paint to create the line work and coloured backgrounds, the backgrounds will also be edited with Photoshop to add effects and such. After effects will be used to compose jpeg sequences and add any sounds and musical composition.