Originally for RED2, I planned to do something
more in the vein of actual infographics, since due to the nature of the
audio selected and the rushed nature of editing (due to finding it
difficult to think of appropriate imagery for the audio, despite it
being my best option in that respect) it ended up being a slightly more
intricate version of the original video's
visuals rather than the full-on infographic I intended. As it would
turn out, ironically I ended up going even further away from that
intention with RED2, again due to the nature of the audio.
The opening to the first episode of the Doctor Who audio drama Scherzo was something I heard many years ago, and since then have had a pretty clear image in my head of what visuals to put at certain points, although I never imagined I’d actually be creating them. The thing that came most strongly across from that years-old original vision is the pacing. Although I imagined a more detailed, storybook-esque art style, the static images with slow pans and fades was always what I visualised accompanying the audio. I even replicated some of the more defined images in the film itself, particularly the king’s deathbed speech with the different gestures fading into each other. Of course, the original idea was pared down immensely, originally the king shifted body positions as well as arm gestures between images, and the view was from over the shoulder of the prince, but the needs of the art style and my abilities meant a far simplified version was needed. This had the happy side effect of me needing something to go in the background while he speaks, resulting in the visions of workers behind them, which I felt was really effective.
Speaking of my abilities, one of the reasons why I chose this audio for RED2, a module built around testing your abilities, is that it forced me to create moderately detailed human figures. To date, the closest I ever came to attempting the mind-bogglingly complex and extremely easy to mess up human anatomy was the cut-out figures from RED1. Attempting less minimalistic figures, as well as using basic posing and gesturing was something I’d never been brave enough to attempt until now. Even the sole animation I’ve done, the Consolidation film, has the character viewed from dead-90 degrees and dead-on with very little movement below the face. Hands in particular are something I’ve struggled with, and I’m not alone, since they are hands-down (no pun intended) the hardest part of the human anatomy to get right. Even though the hands in this film aren’t great, and consist of four poses that are reused with a little adjustment to make them fit and less obviously recycled, they still represent a huge step forward for me.
I’m also happy with how the assortment of animals came out. The fish are passable, but the rest I’m varying levels of content with. Again, considering I’d never done animal models before (beyond the rabbit I recoloured and recycled), they came out surprisingly well. The same goes for the castle. When I started it, I thought I’d have to start over since it wasn’t coming out great. But, as I worked on it, added the rest of the structure, finished detailing it all, it came out pretty good. The slight wonkeyness to it adds to it in a weird way. I think the colouring helped. As I was going through the necessary steps to set up the Photoshop file, when it came time to decide on the colour the nebula effect would be, I found that the gradient tool has a ‘noise’ option, which creates a strip of colours that look like the output of a half-destroyed VHS. That and the blurry haziness of the effect makes it work somehow.
If there’s anything I’m unhappy with, it’s the full-body human figures (not the worker ones, those I’m proud of). For a first effort at posing human figures, it’s pretty good, but there are some aspects that come off as awkward. The one of the prince in the cape is just kinda passable at best, the feet don’t look great and it’s pretty clear I’ve never done full bodies like that before (although the feet were inadvertently and fortunately disguised by the camera angles). However, those are in the minority. The close-ups on the other hand I’m very happy about, even if they aren’t stunning, still represent a big leap for me. Even in physical drawings, I’ve never really had a knack for doing anything other than dead-on and 90 degree angles, so stuff like the 45 degree close up of the prince on the bed, or the view from the back as he listens, even if it is a 90 degree head on a dead-away body, is still a far more complicated pose than I’ve attempted before.
That is, I suppose, this module in a nutshell. It built upon the work of RED1 by taking it into a more complex setting with more advanced techniques of drawing in play, and making me more confident in my abilities. At an editing level it isn’t much different than RED1, but at an art level it is far more ambitious and complex. That is a handy thing to take forward, learning and working out the problems now so that I can make more ambitious and technically complex things from now on. Most of all though, it is a thorough boost to my confidence. I was beginning to worry that I’d never be able to progress my art to any kind of impressive technical level, but the deadlines of this project was just the kick in the pants I needed to just screw it and give it a try, and while not perfect, ended up far better than I’d anticipated.
UPDATE
By the time of the first, pre-screening deadline, I had completed the actual story part of the video, but not the concluding title sequence. I felt it was important to retain it, since it would be awkward to just end after the final line, but at the same time I had no idea of how to approach it and no time in which to realise it. I knew I wanted it to be more animated than the preceding story, not only as a way to throw a bone to the abandoned conceit of RED2 being closer in production to actual infographics, but because Doctor Who is up there with the James Bond franchise in how legendary and important their title sequences are. So, for the screening, I left a placeholder. The audio had been edited (I had to replace the theme music from the episode with a cutdown version of the clean music to get a good long fadeout at the end, because the actual episode fades back into the next scene so quickly), but I only added the text and the logo to get an idea of the timing and left the rest as a blank screen.
The screening itself... did not go well. You can probably tell from the pre-update evaluation above how happy I was with the film initially after completing it. The screening has tempered that enthusiasm somewhat.
It isn't like it was hated or anything, it simply didn't stand well against the other films in terms of audience reaction. I personally don't think my work was out of place or substandard in comparison with the others, but it is still somewhat disheartening to get absolutely no comments whatsoever from the crowd while the very next piece gets praise the second it ends and with others throughout the day people are tripping over each other trying to explain why they liked the thing. While at the time I didn't think anything of it, the long pause of awkward silence after the obligatory applause was somewhat telling, either it left so little impact no-one had anything to say and the tutors needed a second to start coming up with things to say, or everyone was too polite to say that it sucked. When the tutor who is usually the one to go into great detail as to how and why particular aspects worked instead sits, mouth ajaw, in dead silence for a good minute or two before saying anything, and when he does it's to the effect of "why do that story in that art style" in the same way you'd ask "who defecated on the floor"... well it isn't very encouraging, is my point. Indeed, when the only post-presentation comments you get are that it's "interesting" and how good RED1 was, you start to put two and two together.
Regardless of the dismal reception it got from others, I was and still am happy with it and think it is good work, and went on to make my alterations anyway. My lack of ideas for how to do the title sequence remained a problem throughout the weekend before the hand-in deadline, for obvious reasons. I attempted multiple ways to recreate the famous time-tunnel from the iconic 1974-1980 opening for the show, and was attempting another way with expanding circles when I accidentally created what now makes up the first shot of the sequence. By coincidence the circles' movement synced perfectly with the music, and I decided to make it the transition to the main bulk of the sequence rather than the actual time-tunnel itself, because even with that brief test it was clear it wasn't going to produce a convincing effect.
It was during a break from working on the piece that I accidentally created another part of the sequence. While looking for different methods to create starfields in Photoshop (the method I used to make the stars in the film involved a solid black background, and at the time I had the idea to try and recreate the 1980-1986 openings with various layers of stars on transparent backgrounds zooming past to give the illusion of flying through space), I came across a tutorial for making planets in Photoshop. After several failed attempts due to the trial-and-error nature of the process and an infuriating program crash, I had a pretty convincing 'polluted' planet image in colossal resolution. After realising that I had to work the image in to the RED2 film somehow, I came up with the idea of having it at the end under the title/writer/episode credits. This fitted in well with an idea I had on the fly during the screening in response to the above-mentioned question of why the minimalist Illustrator art style should be used with this story, that it was similar to Bee and PuppyCat or the Three Brothers story from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in that, since it is a story not taking place in the same time or even universe as the rest of the narrative (in Scherzo's case the story is a metaphorical parallel to the events of the main narrative, in Bee and PuppyCat's it is a flashback being told as a story, and in the Deathly Hallows' it is a legend telling of how the magical artifacts the narrative is focusing on came to be), it would be in a very different art style and method of animation than the rest of the story were it also to be animated. The minimal vector graphics of the story and the titles give way to the far more realistically rendered planet at the end, implying that that is how the story from now on is going to look, and that the title sequence was a sort of bridge between one art style to the other.
With the beginning (the circles were set, and I had already created a TARDIS vector for another project so that part was in place too) and end now done, all was left was the middle part. I still had no idea what to put under either the cast credits or the logo, let alone the gap in between, or how to transition from that to the planet. In the end, I fell back on a segmented-circle technique I've used before in previous work (around the rabbit's head and the robot's head in these pieces), and tried to make it look marginally less lazy by adding a directional blur filter so some areas are blurred while others aren't. It works well enough with the complicated increase-brightness-and-contrast-while-fading-to-white transition out and a transparent, radial-gradient circle over it. It isn't that great in of itself, but surrounded by better bits it holds its own sufficiently to not detract from the rest.
Other than that, tweaks to the rest of the film were relatively minor. They consisted mostly of replacing Premiere camera moves with After Effects ones to add some easing, particularly to the zoom-out of the crowd at the end and the pan-up of the prince after the coffin fades away. The only other fix to the editing was adding a second, identical layer of people to the shot of the prince addressing the crowd. In the original version, the blur filter used meant that you could see through the crowd's heads and see the prince's feet, but duplicating the image 'beefed up' the blurred image so that it was more believably opaque. The rest of the fixes consisted of alterations to the artwork. The side-on view of the prince had some minor changes to make it look better (smoother linework on the arm, tilting the collar so it wasn't so awkwardly vertical), and the second close-up of the prince sitting on the bed was completely overhauled. When I was originally making the art, I was making up a lot of the details on the fly. I was so wrapped up in making sure the proportions and perspective were decent that I didn't keep track of what the prince was wearing. It was only in later pieces, after I'd done that close-up, that I decided on a pretty standard regal look, which in the end just manifested as puffy shoulder-pads in some shots and a collar. Although I always knew the continuity from the princely shirt to the rather modern-looking t-shirt in that shot was poor, I didn't have time to go back and fix it. Although it took several tries to get it to look right, I managed to get a good shape for the collar, and from my experience fixing the arm in the side-on shot I was able to get a better look for the arm outline too.
In the end, although I may not have the giddy enthusiasm for the piece that I did before the screening, I'm still happy and proud of it. It works well as a standalone piece and is a good sign of progress on my part. I'd never even attempted human figures before, and even if they are just minimalist (even by my standards) silhouettes that only look decent most of the time and wonky at others (if I had a lot more time and willpower, I'd completely redo the front-on shot of the prince from scratch, and would seriously rework the front-on shot of the king, because both are a bit poor), they still represent a big step forward to me. They may not seem like much, but as Obi-Wan Kenobi once said, "you've taken the first step into a much larger world".
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Martin, G. Tutorial: Make a Planet. [online] Available from: http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/making_a_planet.html [Accessed on 1st December 2013, at 16:20]
Cartoon Hangover, (2013). Bee and PuppyCat [online video]. 6th August 2013. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOG_UtLxh58 [Accessed on 21st October 2013, at 01:16]
Big Finish, (2003) Doctor Who: Scherzo. England: Big Finish
Watts, A., (2013). The Big Picture Re-Visualised. [online video]. 31st October 2013. Available from: https://vimeo.com/78286435 [Accessed on 7th November 2013, at 10:32]
The opening to the first episode of the Doctor Who audio drama Scherzo was something I heard many years ago, and since then have had a pretty clear image in my head of what visuals to put at certain points, although I never imagined I’d actually be creating them. The thing that came most strongly across from that years-old original vision is the pacing. Although I imagined a more detailed, storybook-esque art style, the static images with slow pans and fades was always what I visualised accompanying the audio. I even replicated some of the more defined images in the film itself, particularly the king’s deathbed speech with the different gestures fading into each other. Of course, the original idea was pared down immensely, originally the king shifted body positions as well as arm gestures between images, and the view was from over the shoulder of the prince, but the needs of the art style and my abilities meant a far simplified version was needed. This had the happy side effect of me needing something to go in the background while he speaks, resulting in the visions of workers behind them, which I felt was really effective.
Speaking of my abilities, one of the reasons why I chose this audio for RED2, a module built around testing your abilities, is that it forced me to create moderately detailed human figures. To date, the closest I ever came to attempting the mind-bogglingly complex and extremely easy to mess up human anatomy was the cut-out figures from RED1. Attempting less minimalistic figures, as well as using basic posing and gesturing was something I’d never been brave enough to attempt until now. Even the sole animation I’ve done, the Consolidation film, has the character viewed from dead-90 degrees and dead-on with very little movement below the face. Hands in particular are something I’ve struggled with, and I’m not alone, since they are hands-down (no pun intended) the hardest part of the human anatomy to get right. Even though the hands in this film aren’t great, and consist of four poses that are reused with a little adjustment to make them fit and less obviously recycled, they still represent a huge step forward for me.
I’m also happy with how the assortment of animals came out. The fish are passable, but the rest I’m varying levels of content with. Again, considering I’d never done animal models before (beyond the rabbit I recoloured and recycled), they came out surprisingly well. The same goes for the castle. When I started it, I thought I’d have to start over since it wasn’t coming out great. But, as I worked on it, added the rest of the structure, finished detailing it all, it came out pretty good. The slight wonkeyness to it adds to it in a weird way. I think the colouring helped. As I was going through the necessary steps to set up the Photoshop file, when it came time to decide on the colour the nebula effect would be, I found that the gradient tool has a ‘noise’ option, which creates a strip of colours that look like the output of a half-destroyed VHS. That and the blurry haziness of the effect makes it work somehow.
If there’s anything I’m unhappy with, it’s the full-body human figures (not the worker ones, those I’m proud of). For a first effort at posing human figures, it’s pretty good, but there are some aspects that come off as awkward. The one of the prince in the cape is just kinda passable at best, the feet don’t look great and it’s pretty clear I’ve never done full bodies like that before (although the feet were inadvertently and fortunately disguised by the camera angles). However, those are in the minority. The close-ups on the other hand I’m very happy about, even if they aren’t stunning, still represent a big leap for me. Even in physical drawings, I’ve never really had a knack for doing anything other than dead-on and 90 degree angles, so stuff like the 45 degree close up of the prince on the bed, or the view from the back as he listens, even if it is a 90 degree head on a dead-away body, is still a far more complicated pose than I’ve attempted before.
That is, I suppose, this module in a nutshell. It built upon the work of RED1 by taking it into a more complex setting with more advanced techniques of drawing in play, and making me more confident in my abilities. At an editing level it isn’t much different than RED1, but at an art level it is far more ambitious and complex. That is a handy thing to take forward, learning and working out the problems now so that I can make more ambitious and technically complex things from now on. Most of all though, it is a thorough boost to my confidence. I was beginning to worry that I’d never be able to progress my art to any kind of impressive technical level, but the deadlines of this project was just the kick in the pants I needed to just screw it and give it a try, and while not perfect, ended up far better than I’d anticipated.
UPDATE
By the time of the first, pre-screening deadline, I had completed the actual story part of the video, but not the concluding title sequence. I felt it was important to retain it, since it would be awkward to just end after the final line, but at the same time I had no idea of how to approach it and no time in which to realise it. I knew I wanted it to be more animated than the preceding story, not only as a way to throw a bone to the abandoned conceit of RED2 being closer in production to actual infographics, but because Doctor Who is up there with the James Bond franchise in how legendary and important their title sequences are. So, for the screening, I left a placeholder. The audio had been edited (I had to replace the theme music from the episode with a cutdown version of the clean music to get a good long fadeout at the end, because the actual episode fades back into the next scene so quickly), but I only added the text and the logo to get an idea of the timing and left the rest as a blank screen.
The screening itself... did not go well. You can probably tell from the pre-update evaluation above how happy I was with the film initially after completing it. The screening has tempered that enthusiasm somewhat.
It isn't like it was hated or anything, it simply didn't stand well against the other films in terms of audience reaction. I personally don't think my work was out of place or substandard in comparison with the others, but it is still somewhat disheartening to get absolutely no comments whatsoever from the crowd while the very next piece gets praise the second it ends and with others throughout the day people are tripping over each other trying to explain why they liked the thing. While at the time I didn't think anything of it, the long pause of awkward silence after the obligatory applause was somewhat telling, either it left so little impact no-one had anything to say and the tutors needed a second to start coming up with things to say, or everyone was too polite to say that it sucked. When the tutor who is usually the one to go into great detail as to how and why particular aspects worked instead sits, mouth ajaw, in dead silence for a good minute or two before saying anything, and when he does it's to the effect of "why do that story in that art style" in the same way you'd ask "who defecated on the floor"... well it isn't very encouraging, is my point. Indeed, when the only post-presentation comments you get are that it's "interesting" and how good RED1 was, you start to put two and two together.
Regardless of the dismal reception it got from others, I was and still am happy with it and think it is good work, and went on to make my alterations anyway. My lack of ideas for how to do the title sequence remained a problem throughout the weekend before the hand-in deadline, for obvious reasons. I attempted multiple ways to recreate the famous time-tunnel from the iconic 1974-1980 opening for the show, and was attempting another way with expanding circles when I accidentally created what now makes up the first shot of the sequence. By coincidence the circles' movement synced perfectly with the music, and I decided to make it the transition to the main bulk of the sequence rather than the actual time-tunnel itself, because even with that brief test it was clear it wasn't going to produce a convincing effect.
It was during a break from working on the piece that I accidentally created another part of the sequence. While looking for different methods to create starfields in Photoshop (the method I used to make the stars in the film involved a solid black background, and at the time I had the idea to try and recreate the 1980-1986 openings with various layers of stars on transparent backgrounds zooming past to give the illusion of flying through space), I came across a tutorial for making planets in Photoshop. After several failed attempts due to the trial-and-error nature of the process and an infuriating program crash, I had a pretty convincing 'polluted' planet image in colossal resolution. After realising that I had to work the image in to the RED2 film somehow, I came up with the idea of having it at the end under the title/writer/episode credits. This fitted in well with an idea I had on the fly during the screening in response to the above-mentioned question of why the minimalist Illustrator art style should be used with this story, that it was similar to Bee and PuppyCat or the Three Brothers story from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in that, since it is a story not taking place in the same time or even universe as the rest of the narrative (in Scherzo's case the story is a metaphorical parallel to the events of the main narrative, in Bee and PuppyCat's it is a flashback being told as a story, and in the Deathly Hallows' it is a legend telling of how the magical artifacts the narrative is focusing on came to be), it would be in a very different art style and method of animation than the rest of the story were it also to be animated. The minimal vector graphics of the story and the titles give way to the far more realistically rendered planet at the end, implying that that is how the story from now on is going to look, and that the title sequence was a sort of bridge between one art style to the other.
With the beginning (the circles were set, and I had already created a TARDIS vector for another project so that part was in place too) and end now done, all was left was the middle part. I still had no idea what to put under either the cast credits or the logo, let alone the gap in between, or how to transition from that to the planet. In the end, I fell back on a segmented-circle technique I've used before in previous work (around the rabbit's head and the robot's head in these pieces), and tried to make it look marginally less lazy by adding a directional blur filter so some areas are blurred while others aren't. It works well enough with the complicated increase-brightness-and-contrast-while-fading-to-white transition out and a transparent, radial-gradient circle over it. It isn't that great in of itself, but surrounded by better bits it holds its own sufficiently to not detract from the rest.
Other than that, tweaks to the rest of the film were relatively minor. They consisted mostly of replacing Premiere camera moves with After Effects ones to add some easing, particularly to the zoom-out of the crowd at the end and the pan-up of the prince after the coffin fades away. The only other fix to the editing was adding a second, identical layer of people to the shot of the prince addressing the crowd. In the original version, the blur filter used meant that you could see through the crowd's heads and see the prince's feet, but duplicating the image 'beefed up' the blurred image so that it was more believably opaque. The rest of the fixes consisted of alterations to the artwork. The side-on view of the prince had some minor changes to make it look better (smoother linework on the arm, tilting the collar so it wasn't so awkwardly vertical), and the second close-up of the prince sitting on the bed was completely overhauled. When I was originally making the art, I was making up a lot of the details on the fly. I was so wrapped up in making sure the proportions and perspective were decent that I didn't keep track of what the prince was wearing. It was only in later pieces, after I'd done that close-up, that I decided on a pretty standard regal look, which in the end just manifested as puffy shoulder-pads in some shots and a collar. Although I always knew the continuity from the princely shirt to the rather modern-looking t-shirt in that shot was poor, I didn't have time to go back and fix it. Although it took several tries to get it to look right, I managed to get a good shape for the collar, and from my experience fixing the arm in the side-on shot I was able to get a better look for the arm outline too.
In the end, although I may not have the giddy enthusiasm for the piece that I did before the screening, I'm still happy and proud of it. It works well as a standalone piece and is a good sign of progress on my part. I'd never even attempted human figures before, and even if they are just minimalist (even by my standards) silhouettes that only look decent most of the time and wonky at others (if I had a lot more time and willpower, I'd completely redo the front-on shot of the prince from scratch, and would seriously rework the front-on shot of the king, because both are a bit poor), they still represent a big step forward to me. They may not seem like much, but as Obi-Wan Kenobi once said, "you've taken the first step into a much larger world".
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Martin, G. Tutorial: Make a Planet. [online] Available from: http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/making_a_planet.html [Accessed on 1st December 2013, at 16:20]
Cartoon Hangover, (2013). Bee and PuppyCat [online video]. 6th August 2013. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOG_UtLxh58 [Accessed on 21st October 2013, at 01:16]
Big Finish, (2003) Doctor Who: Scherzo. England: Big Finish
Watts, A., (2013). The Big Picture Re-Visualised. [online video]. 31st October 2013. Available from: https://vimeo.com/78286435 [Accessed on 7th November 2013, at 10:32]
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