Here's a collection of warm-ups done before work. The drawings are in chronological order. At first I thought about just drawing only black and white sketches but when I realized that I can do that under 3 - 5 minutes, I thought of trying to paint over the sketches. I don't paint that much at all so I thought it would be nice to practice it during warm-ups.
There are lots of ups and downs in these sketches. You can tell when I knew exactly what I was drawing and when I was struggling. I learned that one of my bad manners is that I keep drawing way too many details even though it isn't really needed. This happens especially with simple subjects where details are not necessary. I have to avoid this because that's often my downfall in my drawings. Pay more attention, observe and keep things simple.
Photo references from Google were used in all of them.
10 min
10 min
10 min
15(?) min
10 min
10 min
10 min
10 min
10 min
10 min
10 min
15 - 20 min
20 min
10 min
20 min
20 min
20 min (my favorite, and a proof that anger is the best motivator)
20 min
The blog will be on hiatus for the next 3 weeks so don't expect anything new for a while!
No how many times I tell myself to actually plan these cards beforehand, I never do that. I just start working, get panicked because I have no idea what I'm doing and start adding things to save the card somehow. In the end it starts looking quite nice, but I can't stop wondering how it would have looked like if I had planned everything first.
Alright. Here it is. My graduation film that I wrote about few months ago when I was working on it. Some of you sweet visitors have been asking to see it so I guess it is fair to show it.
The animated short can be viewed on Vimeo. But I have to warn you that the the quality isn’t the best. I have no idea what happened when I uploaded it on Vimeo, maybe the file was too large and they had to lower the quality a little bit. I try to do something about
it when I have time to work on it again.
Also, the video is password-protected. The password is: keliakia
Screenshots
If you don’t understand what the “story” is about, don’t worry. Even I am not sure what it is supposed to be
about. Your guess is as good as mine. So far it’s just about a “dancing” rabbit
because that’s what I wanted to animate back then. How silly.
I threw one shot away because that wasn’t necessary. And surprisingly the whole animation didn’t get any shorter. It actually got longer. What the-
The animated short has a name, by the way. But I’m not going tell reveal it yet! Let’s just say that.. haha, you will be disappointed when you hear it.
Doing some clean-up for that shot. It was one of the first shots that I animated for this project. The animation is very wobbly and the head movement doesn't look good. Back then I didn't even try to animate that carefully because I thought that I will work this out later. And now I have to deal with my past mistake and try to fix every single frame. Damn me!
And don't freak out! The ears will be added later. The bunny is not going to be bald. :)
Let's keep fingers crossed and hope that this whole thing will be finished during this month. I'm so tired that I just want it to end already.
I’m now doing clean-up and backgrounds. And there's a problem..
The situation with clean-up process is now this:
Ready: 3
WIP: 4
Undone: 16 / 23
I seriously have to think about this clean-up process again.
I told before that during the dance scenes the rabbit will be a black silhouette that is dancing in front of blueish background. Now, I can draw dark silhouettes easily and quite fast, it's not a problem. But the highlights make things complicated. You have to draw those very carefully and always keep in mind where the light and shadow comes from. It takes more time than drawing the black silhouette. And that is the most painful part of the clean-up. It's so painful and time-consuming that I don't even know is it possible to finish this whole animation in time.
I could easily get rid of the highlights and draw just the dark silhouettes, but it doesn't look good enough. Here's a screenshot of the clean-up process:
Those highlights make the character look much interesting and three-dimensional. Most of the movements wont even work well if there's no highlights. Aaaargh.
Alright.. I think I will first draw the character in every single scene black and then later add the highlights if I have time for that.
And now the backgrounds:
Ready: 5
WIP: 2
Undone: 11/ 18
Luckily backgrounds aren’t that hard to do. I can do 2 or 3 of them in one day. Here’s an example of one:
Did I mention that the backgrounds move? Just a tiny amount? Freaaaakyyy.
- 15 shots of 21 are roughly animated
- it has been decided that 3 more shots has to be added
Whaaat. Could this mean that.. I can do this? In time?
Okay, part of the reason why this is going so well is because I made a bet with my friend. If I haven’t done all the rough animation by the end of this month, I have to watch a movie called Gladiator (2008). And I hate that movie. I hate it so much.
I also somehow managed to screw up the continuity in the animation. You know, some basic things like for example the legs are supposed to be in certain position and on the next shot they are completely differently. And I noticed this after animating both shots. So yes, you can imagine that there was a lot of swearing for a while.
The 3 shots that I have to add are not a problem. Just some flashy “strike a pose!” shots and each of them will last about one second.
Photos:
I noticed that there are 32 people reading my blog. That’s wonderful! And I also know that there are at least 8 invisible people who spy on this blog. That’s.. a bit creepy, but still great! Or maybe it’s not that creepy because I know who these people are. That's right. I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
So far:
- storyboard is complete
- animatic is complete
- 5 shots of 21 are roughly animated
- music is under development
Looking good.
I’m not going to show the animatic here but you can have some screenshots. They are not in specific order.
Backgrounds are still missing because it depends on the music what they will look like.
This is going to be insanely short animation. Right now the animatic is 1 minute and 10 seconds long. Wow. Of course it will be possible that it will be few seconds longer but that’s still very short.
I decided that half of the animation will be drawn on paper and the other half digitally. I will especially draw those scenes digitally that worked perfectly on animatic. The other scenes that are good but still have some staging problems, I will try to figure out by drawing them on paper.
I would love to draw every single scene on paper but there are many problems with it:
1. Scanning takes too much time.
2. Some of the storyboard’s digital drawings have already perfect keyframes for animation. All they need is some inbetweening and that can be done on computer.
3. When I start to animate on paper I get tensed because my mind keeps telling me that everything has to be done perfectly. I just can’t relax and just work. I had the same problem before when I worked on my first animated short. It has been two years now and I still haven’t got rid of that feeling.
It will be interesting to see if there’s any difference between digitally and traditionally drawn scenes in the final work after the clean-up. Hmm.
And here’s a rough sculpture of the rabbit that I made one night (because obviously the best time to sculpt is nightime!):
The model was made from children’s clay and it has some wire inside to support it. And yes, because it was made from children’s clay it means that it doesn’t dry. At all. But it will be easy to reuse!
Remember when I said that the ears will be tough to animate? Turns out that those are the easiest parts. The thoughest is the head. THE HEAD. What the-
Some ramblings about my future animated short film. There's so many things I have deal with and I think the best way to keep on track of the process is to write reports in this blog.
I'm just writing what comes up in my mind so don't get confused if I jump from one subject to another.
So, my animated short will be about a dancing rabbit. Yes. That's about it. The idea came from an old sketch in early 2011 when I drew a rabbit posing like a dancer and wearing a tutu.
Naturally, at first I thought about animating a rabbit dancing ballet. But because I have no experience or good knowledge of that kind of dancing style, I decided that the rabbit will just do lots of random movements that look like dancing. Brilliant.
Why I chose a rabbit? Just because. It has long legs, the body twists nicely enough and it has ears that can be used in many ways. The ears can flow nicely along the movement or even do something independently.
This was the first concept art that I did for the project. I was trying to figure out the colours, feeling and testing what would it look like if the character had shadows. I wanted to create something minimalistic looking and yet something that makes the character look three dimensional, not flat. Think about the two dancing elephants from the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence from Dumbo (1941):
That is one of my favorite moments in the film and I just love the animation, clean-up and the choise of colours in that part. I don't know exactly why, but I always think that those two elephants are made of glass.
Light and shadows obviously make the character look more three dimensional but all that would take so much time when doing the clean-up. I tried to create a look that would be easy enough to handle during clean-up process.
The character looks very, very flat in this style. But there's actually an advance in it: you can make many impossible transformations and movements with that design and people would still believe it.
There was also an idea that when the rabbits dance, there would be something cool visual things after every move. But I rejected that idea very quickly because I have no experience animating special effects and I don't have enough time to practise that. I only have two and half months to animate this.
After making first concept art, I was thinking about the story. The idea was that there are a white rabbit (the protagonist) and a black rabbit (the antagonist). The Black one challenges the White to dance (or "battle" in freestyle dancing) but the White refuses and tries to run away from the situation. But what ever the White does, the Black rabbit always manages to catch it. Finally the White rabbit has no choice but to dance and then.. well, they dance one of the most intence dances ever. Okay, cool.
I started making the first draft of the storyboard...
.. and left it unfinished. Why?
The problem is that if I include so much drama in the short, it will be longer than 2 and half minutes. And that means that it would take more time to finish the animation. Like I said, I don't have enough time for that. The only way to make this animation is to cut all the drama in character animation and just animate action. Action after action.
Normally I like animating subtle facial expressions but right now I have urge to animate action. Something cool looking. High jumps, somersaults (wow, now that's a crazy word in English), falling, spinning.. all that. But everytime when I plan these cool sequences in my head I always feel like there's something holding me back. Something tells me that "I should make this story more about the characters. There's so many animated shorts these days that are technically gorgeous but lack the story. I shouldn't do something that just looks cool, it has to have a meaning." You have no idea how frustrating that is.
And then there's this thought: "Do I really want this to be my final animation at school?"
Of course I want to create something that I can be proud of. My first animated short was absolutely horrible and I vowed to myself make much better short. But is this really something that I want to do? Two rabbits dancing? Well.. yes. I have to. And.. I want to.. I guess.
Maybe it would be better if there was only one rabbit. That would make the animation process faster if I only have to deal with one character.
The sad thing about clean-up is that if you do it wrong, you will lose all the appeal and everything that looks so great in the sketches. I like these sketches so much but I am afraid that I don't have skills enough to make good clean-up for these. And even if I do, I will lose my mind after finishing the first 20 frames..
There's still some technical problems with the design too. In some poses and angles the head and the neck don't really connect well. In these sketches you cannot really see it that well but the problem is there.
Those ears will also cause some trouble, I just know it. The ears have to keep moving after the rabbit has stopped and because they are so big they will block the view. I have to find a way to make the ears flow nicely and be able to show show the movement and the poses clearly. Or maybe I should just make the ears smaller, I don't know. I like the big ears, though.
It's also hard to decide what kind of eyes the rabbits have. Do they have pupils or not? Characters without pupils are cool but menacing looking. And characters that have pupils in their eyes are easier to relate to and also more appealing.
I always draw the rabbits without pupils when I sketch them so maybe I will stick with those.
I like the rough look in these sketches. I know that in that one sketch the ear is way too big compared to the other but I still love the look of them.
I also find myself drawing these cool poses but what I really should do is to draw actual movements frame by frame. I have to do at least some tests before I start the actual animation.
And the colours.. Oh, my. I'm very lost when it comes to choosing colours for this short. At first I thought that there would be no colours or backgrounds at all, only black space. That way you could focus fully on the characters.
But because I am curious person, I made few colour sketches just to explore what would the short look like if it had some colours or at least abstract backgrounds.
DAMN.
Now I want to use colours. I mean..you can almost feel the dancer's passion and energy when you use colours! Okay, maybe I am over-reacting because I have been mostly working with black-and-white drawings for the past few weeks but..
The music for the animated short.. This is very awkward but I haven't decided what kind of music I am going to use. That is very, very stupid, because everything about this project: the style, colours, design and so on depends so much on the music that is going to be used in this short film! Aaaaaaargh.
Alright.. I have at least some thoughts about the music. The music that originally inspired me to start this project was Zack Hemsey's Mind Heist, that music from Inception (2010) trailer:
Now I could ask from Hemsey if I could use his music but there are two things that are problematic:
1. I have to pay to him for using his music.
2. People will automatically connect that music to Inception.
But luckily my brother is willing to make music for this short film so I don't have to pay for an outsider to use his/her music. But it is hard for him to create any music without the storyboard of the film and any idea what kind of music I would like him to compose. But I can't decide because there's so many possibilities!
Of course it would be amazing to have very dramatic and intense music, something that big budget movies have. I love that stuff. But that kind of music can be too dramatic and slow paced for this..
Dance music is also one of my top favorite choises but it can bee a bit too fast paced for short animation. But I think Dimrain47's music would work in animation because it creates, at least for me, clear visual images in my head. If I had to choose one of his works, I would take Dimrain47 - R.E.M. III:
Sometimes I would like the music to be something like Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes (The Glitch Mod remix). A little bit twisted and kinda "dark" but I like it:
Yeeeeah... I guess you all now understand why I am so stuck with this project. And I have to start to animate this in next month! Whups.
And, of course, sometimes when I have spent hours drawing those simple looking rabbits, I just want to take more realistic look on them. Not too realistic but something that makes them look organic and not so stylised. Like this:
Aaaargh..! Why can't I just do pencil animation like Joanna Quinn? Then I wouldn't have to care about all the clean-up progress, colours.. Oh, yeah. Because that style doesn't work well with the idea and the music. Dammit!
And for those who are not familiar with Quinn's work, here's her probably the most famous animated short called Britannia (1994):
I don't know. I have no idea what I am going to do. Maybe I should just to the same thing like this guy did:
Okay, maybe not, but you have to admit that's very entertaining!
Lets see if I have decided anything tomorrow. Of the day after that. Or ever.
