At the Beginning of a Treacherous Road

For the final module of this year, Consolidation is certainly an appropriate title. For over seven years now I've been creating videos, steadily increasing my technical acumen, from improvised radio shows made in Microsoft Sound Recorder to near-professional level films made with the Adobe Creative Suite. Ever since my first year at PCA on the Level 0 course I've been attempting to improve my drawing skills, from crude characters made out of simple geometric shapes doodled in a notebook to not-too-shabby digital art made in Illustrator. Now, both of the practices I've been training in are coming together in this module, or 'consolidated', if you will.

The premise is simple, if far, far, far easier said than done. I will write a script for a hypothetical film, and then shoot tests for it. This may sound rather simple, until you get to the catch: the film will be a Who Framed Roger Rabbit-style story made in live-action, but with one or two animated characters in the cast. Although it isn't a certainty as of yet, this experimentation could lead to a similar project in the third year.


This isn't the first time I've tried my hand at something like this. The film I created for the third term of my Level 0 year, When Worlds Unite, was a crossover between the characters featured in all the films I had created that year, and thus was a combination of all kinds of animation disciplines, from limited stop-motion techniques to one of the aforementioned crude geometric characters digitally inserted into the scene. Although I may have many issues with the poor storytelling within, namely the lack of development of the new characters introduced in this film, the awkward dialogue, the extremely lame ending scene after a promising and intriguing set-up prior to it, and the fact that knowledge of all the prior videos is required to fully comprehend what is happening and to get a full understanding of what the characters are going through, I remain proud of what I did with the film on a technical level (as well as a few creative elements, mainly the digital character's role and her interactions with the male digital character who was made corporeal during the events of Through the Fourth Wall, and her reaction to her evil counterpart, which I think is a great, effective little character moment which says a lot about her with just one simple action. Also, her reaction to one of the villain's sarcastic questions is the only part of the film I find genuinely funny). Even if I could do better now, it still stands as an achievement and a crucial milestone in the development of my video-making skills.


When Worlds Unite from Ashley Watts on Vimeo.

Now though, things have advanced. Technically I'm far more adept as an editor, and my art skills have come on a long way in such a short time. However, one aspect of this that I haven't developed so much is my skills in animation. I've played around with the animation program Anime Studio Pro 7, learning how to use the software and a some idea of its limitations, but I haven't yet produced anything on a major scale. The only real tangible thing I have to show for my testing is this short video I made while playing around with the example character model.


Animation test from Ashley Watts on Vimeo. password - consolidation9

As seen in that video, the animation style created with Anime Studio Pro is quite limited, based around digital 'puppets' that are animated by moving a collection of static parts around which can be swapped out by the use of 'switch layers'. You can see the technique in action in the video, with the body and arm as static images that are moved around while the eye, mouth and hand segments are swapped via switch layer to give the illusion of movement. I'm certainly not anywhere near the level required to do frame-by-frame animation, but when done right, animation done in this technique can be perfectly convincing.

I still have a way to go in that respect, the animation is pretty clunky and 'floaty' for the most part, but the brief moment where she inspects her hand, starting after she slaps her face up until her hand wavers after pulling it away, is not great in of itself, but isn't nearly as 'floaty' as the rest of the animation and shows that given enough time, I can make passable animation at this stage.

As previously stated, I'm not nearly skilled enough to create a proper frame-by-frame animation yet, and thus will have to stick with this limited animation style (unless it completely and utterly fails in which case I'll have to have pretty limited 'animatic' sketches inserted into video footage as a final test). While this may cause problems with making the character believable, I do believe that it is possible to integrate an animated character with animation this limited to an acceptable effect. Although the incredibly low frame-count may have unintentionally aided the effect, the digital character in When Worlds Collide fit in well enough (even if her horribly designed evil counterpart didn't do so nearly as well, I think good character design helps maintain the illusion a great deal), and while this may be confidence borne of ignorance, I do believe that the same can be done with a character created in Anime Studio Pro. I don't yet know to what extent things like ambient lighting effects will be used on the animation, I don't think ASP has such a feature outside of manually creating a silhouette of the character to place over it in each frame and darkening parts of the image frame by frame. After Effects may also be an option. It may not even be an issue, since the minimalistic designs I create and the limited animation style I'm using already creates a disconnect from reality, and using such lighting effects my send the animation down into the uncanny valley. As mentioned above, inserting a character with even more limited means and even less realistic has worked before, so maybe lighting effects will only make the illusion break. This is one of the qualms that will be investigated in this project.

Although most testing is still being planned rather than carried out, so far there has been some development on the project. I will be designing the character that will be used in this project as part of the Projections module, and will then develop and build a usable animation puppet as part of this module. The outline of the story has already been developed, and will be posted in the next post, with the deadline for a full scene breakdown set for the end of the month and a script due five days later. From that script, I will cherry-pick scenes or even just individual shots that I believe will work for this module's testing.

As for technical development, some immediate technical questions had to be addressed. The very first one, naturally, is ensuring that the animation can in fact be composited into video footage at all. I know it is possible to import video footage into ASP as a background layer, thus animating to it directly, but whether the program can handle working with HD footage is another issue. Instead, my preferred method is to export footage with a clean background that can be composited into video footage. The method I was recommended by my tutor was to try exporting each frame as an individual targa file, since that file format has the option for an 'alpha channel' - i.e. transparency. While there is an option to do this, I found that there is no alpha channel options for transparency in the export dialog box, and the frames are exported with a white background.

After a Google search, I found the advice that I could export the file as a transparent .mov. When exporting as a .mov, set the compression type to PNG and colour depth to "millions of colours+". I mistook that plus symbol as a typo, and exported with the default "millions of colours" setting, which yielded no better results than the targa method. After rectifying my mistake and re-exporting, I had a video with a proper alpha channel, and I proved it worked properly when I dropped the video on top of other footage and had a clean composite.

No keying effects were used, the video is simply placed on top of the other layer

With that, issue #1 is solved. Now only issues #2 through #346 remain.

It's appropriate that the footage from Illustrating Atmosphere be used here, since the focus of this module, I feel, is an extension of the Practices module. It deals with the same dilemma of how exactly you can make limited visuals convincing. As another example of this idea, compare these two images I created for a commission I undertook to make a logo.

The work-in-progress

Note that even though it is the correct colours and is vaguely the right shape, you don't see anything above other than a blue circle with green squiggles on it.

The final version

But with more detail on the continents, you immediately see the Earth, not the blue circle with green squiggles on it that it still is. I know I've harped on this point endlessly in prior modules, but it's a difficult concept to get across and is the crux of both Practices and Consolidation. It's a difficult and often confusing road to go down to try and get it right, but the destination is reachable in my mind. Hell, just a few scant months ago doing something as convincing to the glancing eye as that Earth above (and the logo as a whole which it comes from) would be unimaginable, so these things are possible. One of the best decisions I've made so far with this module is to keep it purely to experimentation. Attempting to produce a final product in this timeframe with this much to learn would be even more insane than usual.

For the immediate future, I have ordered Richard Williams' book The Animator's Survival Kit. I'll go further into it in its own post when it arrives and I have read some of it, but for now suffice to say that Williams know his stuff and this animation theory book is highly recommended by my tutor and online reviewers alike. Also, I will be learning about 'dope sheets', which are tables used by animators to map out timings for movement. Hopefully using such sheets will aid in preventing the floatiness of the above video test in becoming a problem.

In the next post, the outline of the film's story.