CA 09's Animation Jam

Week 17 and 18... Animation Jam. Two rough weeks where we in groups of 3 should make a 30 second long movie (credits and title doesn't count). It wasn't the whole school with foreign directors that was making movies this time, but just my class supervised by Julia Bracegirdle. This meant alot of work and alot of discussion in the group about everything from overall plot to the placement of flowers. So it was great when the movie was done! I was in group with Stine Frandsen and Adam Boklund and we made the movie "The Slughter."

Julia had made some bags from which we should pick the stylistic theme, an emotion and a random word. We ended up with the theme, "Disney 1928-1932 combined with Gary Baseman," the emotion "fear" and the random word "wig." Gary Baseman is a modern artist which can't quite be explained, but his pictures can be seen here: http://garybaseman.com/
Disney from 1928-1932 is basically all the black and white shorts with Mickey Mouse.
We choose to let the Disney shorts be the inspiration for the animation, while the style of the design was taken entirely from Gary Baseman. These choices enabled us to focus on funny animations and interesting background compositions rather than realism, in other words it gave us alot of creative freedom.
We all worked on the characterdesign. I made these sketches:

After discussing the different ideas for the design we devided the characters, so that Adam made the final design for the old lady, Stine made the designs for the slugs and I made the design for the final monster.
As for the animation then I animated, cleaned and coloured the slug's running scene, the scene were it dodges salt and the final monster scene.
Otherwise I had fun making the style for the backgrounds. We had devided the backgrounds into tinyworld backgrounds, medium world backgrounds and huge world backgrounds (Though the last one was just a sky with clouds). I made the very first background in the movie, and the mediumworld background with the floating trees and the windmills. I also made a good part of the simple bacgrounds that was just colour.


The final film:

Slughter from Stine Agerskov Frandsen on Vimeo.

Layout Class With Lawrence

Week 16 was layout week with Lawrence, which primary consisted of good theory about composition and staging, less interesting practical studio rules for numbering cameramovements and backgrounds and ofcourse different assignments.

First assignment was to make a layout for the first act and scene of Hamlet. We needed to have the three guards and the dead king's ghost in the picture, and the style was to be realistic like Pinocchio, but we had otherwise rather free hands. Good shading and toning was essential.


Second assignment focused on camera movement: We should make the backgrounds and overlays for a Yogi Bear sequence already storyboarded. A zoom and a pan:

Yogi Bear Zoom from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Yogi Bear Pan from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

In the week's final assignment we were given rather free hands stylistically and settingwise. The title for the assignment was "Escape on rooftops," and it should both contain cameramovements and great layout. In pair of two we should make a little sequence of four backgrounds where a rough character should be escaping on rooftops. I teamed up with Bo. We got rather inventive with the style and setting. The escape was to be in a middleage-like city, but were the houses was build upon one another so that there would be different social lives at the different levels, with bridges and catwalks. So the rich people would live in the top. At the centre of the city there would be a giant castle, somewhat shaped like a big tree with small branches sticking out. I made these two backgrounds:

The sequence ended up like this:

Escape On Rooftops from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Dancing Hippos and Flying Mountaineers

In week 14 the Danish animator Christian Kuntz came to teach us dance animation for the week. After spending weeks trying to make animation with uneven and interesting pace, and lots of overlapping actions - having to animate strictly within a beat that should be hit with the movement was a challenge.
I choose the hippo from Fantasia and the beginning of the Michael Jackson song "Smooth Criminal." I once worked on a musictheater where we put up the stage for a so-called "Michael Jackson" ballet. I thought it was weird back then, but now that I've tried to make a hippo dance ballet to one of his songs, I can kinda see the idea.

Dance of the Hippo from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Ten seconds of animation was taking things a bit too far, so not everything is animated.

Christian Kuntz is a part of the four-man company "framebender," you can see some of their stuff here: http://www.framebender.dk/

In order to expand our capacities to make our own films, we spend week 15 being introduced to the editing program Adobe Aftereffects having Henrik B Clausen as a teacher. We did some small exercises and finally got the assignment to create something that moves really fast. Out of these two pictures:
http://www.canadasmountains.com/Java/columbola_pano.jpg
http://dhpersonal.com/images/desktops/2009-07-08pano.jpg
and photoshop and aftereffects I made this:

Untitled from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

TVPaint animation with Fabian

After the winterbreak in week 7 our lighttables and pencils were exchanged with computerscreens and tablets, so that we may animate on computer - still in 2D, we draw in the program TVPaint.
It fell upon the shoulders of Fabian Erlinghauser to introduce us to the program and more advanced animation during week 8 to 12. Fabian has among things supervised the animation in the Oscar nominated 2D feature "The Secret of Kells." I think Fabian left a really good impression on the class, and it seems we left quite a good impression on him aswell!

Week 8 was a relaxed getting-to-know-the-program week. I made a bunch of animations, some of the more interesting was these two:

Untitled from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Hogarth Take from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

The last upper animation was a so-called "take," with Hogarth from "The Iron Giant."

The assignment for week 9 was to let our character of choice be tempted by a valuable item, ponder upon wether he should take it, but leave it in the end. I learned a lot that week - mostly by my mistakes! I choose Roger from 101 Dalmations. While the initial key poses I did were fine, having Roger freeze into them killed the acting and made him look more like a posing model.

Untitled from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

So I went into week 10 determined to make something better than the Roger animation. The assignment was a setting where our character was sitting alone on a date, realising that she is not going to come! I choose Bernard as my character:

Bernard's Miserable Date from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Its a few too many things that's happening, but I think the animation is much more lively than the week before.

In week 11 it was time to make our characters speak. We could choose between two soundbits, which our animation then should centre around. My character was Sinbad from the dreamworks movie, and the soundbit is the voice of Gandalf:

Foolshope from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Its rather amazing how much more real the animation becomes, once it breaks the silence and actually says something. Again, a bit too many things is happening - and how should anyone know that its supposed to be a cookie jar he is holding?! But I like the animation.

The last week was about monologue, meaning we had to do two characters. I thought I was beginning to get a rather good idea of animation, I just put too many things into them, so I wanted to make something where I only tried to tell one or two things, rather than tree, four or five! I choose Kerchak and Kala from Tarzan:

Wanna toke? from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Four seconds with two characters was a bit much, so the animation is in a bit of an unfinished state. I think its some of the best I've done though, so I might finish it sometime.

All in all, it was five quite good weeks. I learned a lot, especially on the acting part of things.

Finally I will recommend a visit to http://www.cartoonsaloon.ie/ - the place Fabian works. They got some really neat stuff going on with their experimentation of styles, especially the backgrounds in the short "Old Fangs" are very beautiful and not something I've seen before.

Popsickle Add, Midtyear Exam and Animation Jam

In week 4 we had storyboard with Tod Polson (www.todpolsonart.blogspot.com) who has been affiliated with the school for a good amount of years, especiallly helping out at the 3rd year bachelor films.
At first we were to make a 30 second animatic (or 25 since the last 5 should be reserved for a logo) for a Popsickle commercial, based on some work Tod already had done: http://todpolsonart.blogspot.com/2010/02/space-sicle.html
I made mine with Nicholaj and it ended up like this:



We made a another board of mastershots over our characters from "taste," but it seems the drawings is lost for the moment being..

In week 5 we had a midyear test exam, which basically just meant a week of animation without teacher. The assignment was to make a 5 second animation with the pink panther standing up and try to open a door without luck. The background was given to us.

Pink Panther Midyear Exam Animation from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Week 6... Now that was something. The school had a visit from 6 different directors which were to make 2 shorts each, with a group consisting of both the first and second year character animators and computer graphic artists. All the movies can be seen here http://animwork.dk/en/news.asp?AjrDcmntId=451
I was on Pritt Tender's movie. Basically he just threw out some ideas, designs and overall story, and then let us create all the fun and weird stuff that were going to happen and the ending. The two movies were to be connected to one, but otherwise we mostly worked in two groups, both using the first day to come up with things and make a storyboard and then the rest of the week to animate. The movie ended up as this:



I created the last scene. Since us 1st years hadn't been taught Tv Paint at that point, I created my scene on paper and then two second year students cleaned it up in Tv Paint. I think it has a certain charm in rough, so I'll post it as I made it aswell:

Scene 110 from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Basically I thought this should be a contrast to the rest of the movie - a moment of a certain grace coming out of - and into a rather mad and surreal movie. If we've had two weeks I would have made it at least 15 seconds, I think its hard for the viewer to catch all the small ideas that was in it in just 10 seconds.

Week 2 - Character Design

In week 2 we had character Design with Julia Bracegirdle. She put alot of focus on alternative methods of character design, and alternative character designs. The week started out with alot of focus at shapes; hence the first thing we made was shadowplays. This one was made by me, Kenneth, Benny and the intern.



Eventually we got around to creating a set of characters based on the short story "Taste" by Roald Dahl (he also wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). It is a rather curious story, and very well narrated since we received it in sound instead of text. You can read the story in very short format here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste_(short_story) - if you don't want the ending spoiled then just read the two first parts.
While Julia suggested alternative methods to creating the characters, I really just felt like spitting out alot of different suggestions for the characters:

The characters physical appearance was not really described in the story, so we had alot of creative freedom with them - except for Richard Pratts lower lip and noose that was troughoutly and rather funny described when he tasted the wine. It was an easy decision to go for the monstrous Pratt. I think several of the Mikes would have worked, though in the end I thought that the one with big furrows on his forehead would suit Mikes unsecure and worried character best. My initial thoughts on Louise were that she should be the one we could feel sympathy for, since both Mike and Pratt was gambling about her. So the upper-second-from-the-left Louise was my first choice. However after a short discussion with my teacher I decided that I might as well just present all three of them as unsympatic characters, thus enabling me to do whatever I wanted with them. I also played with the idea of giving Louise a sort of smoky form, since she smokes in the story, but it didn't work well enough. The final characters ended like this:

Week 1 and 3 - Clean Up and Inbetweening

In week 1 and 2 the class was split up, one class would have clean up the other character design. We would then switch in week 2. In week 3 We had Inbetweening. I'm gonna talk about the characterdesign week in another (big) post. As for now, I can hardly call the work done in week 1 and 3 my own. Let me explain:
We had Clean Up with Lee Huxley who gave us about 13-14 frames from a short scene from the movie "An American Tale: Fievel Goes West." It was the key frames/breakdowns done by the animator, so we should clean them up - make one consistent line with a technical led pen, following the looser drawing made by the animator. Not very creative, not really my thing.



In the inbetweening week we were lucky to have Uri again. This time we got 11 frames from the movie "Balto" which was to be inbetweened with 13 frames. It was a bit more creative than clean up, but again it can't be called my animation:



We we're alsp supposed to make four poses with the character before the inbetweening:


Its supposed to be: Surprised, the conqueror, fleeing, and in love...