La Maison En Petits Cubes

A friend of mine linked me this film and it's a PERFECT source of inspiration - everything I'm trying to do but done well: flashbacks, montage, loss of loved ones etc etc etc and there's even the bit where the old man pours two glasses of wine! Actually, thinking more about things this is what I've been aiming for (but obviously this film is a much longer format than what I'm doing) so hopefully now that I've watched this I can fix my entire animatic. Here's to being hopeful!

Film by Kunio Kato

Thank you Oliver Sin :)

Animatic 2

I should've done this LOOOONG ago - I can see a lot of the areas where the images aren't communicating very well now that I have looked more carefully at the storyboard and timed out the images. I have fixed the beginning quite a lot from its initial storyboard sketch (which you can see has been re-drawn) and the later two thirds of the animatic haven't been amended yet you expect to see more improvements (hopefully!) There's barely any sound but try to imagine a nice bit of piano music :)

The story is still lacking a bit...I guess I'm being rather literal with my narrative and there's not much hidden symbolism but for some reason my brain just isn't thinking that way right now. Maybe once I sort out the animatic I can start adding layers of meanings to my film.

In-betweened

I couldn't get the right feel for the action in the previous post so I added a few in-betweens to smooth out the action and feel a bit happier about this animation test. There's obviously still room for improvement...and to be fair there's isn't that much difference between this revised test and the one on my previous post!

Here I slowed the action down a bit and added a slight pause when the woman realises he's putting a coat on her. I think I prefer the longer pause from the last test. At least I'm learning! :)

Another ROUGH test

I don't really know why this took me as long as it did :S and I know I have a LOT of timing issues to sort out with this. I'll add a few more in-betweens then re-linetest it again - hopefully I'll be able to adjust the timing a bit better!

I've imagined this scene a couple of times in my head to put into the last section of my story (which hadn't been storyboarded!) and it seemed a suitable action to try out for another animation test involving the touch of a loved one. What is shown here is the ghost character reminiscing about the time when he was alive - just another one of those moments when the couple were happy.

The storyboard is almost complete - Once I sort out a rough idea for the ending I'll go back through the whole thing and adjust the scenes then time them out in an animatic. Need to get a move ON! This whole animation test thing is starting to work, [although I don't want my film to revolve around the theme of romance/love too much] I feel like I can use the moments when the ghost tries to touch his fiancée to enhance his own absence and the loneliness of the woman.

A VERY quick animation test

During my tutorial yesterday I was set the task of making an animation test of the tender touch of a loved one (something along those lines). In my film I want to include bits where the ghost tries to touch his fiancée but instead creates a gentle gust of wind. For the animation test I chose to animate one such situation where the ghost goes to touch the woman's hair (maybe flashback to show it's a habit that he had when he was alive) but a breeze comes and blows the hair back.

As you can see, my skills are barely coming out of hibernation - it's meant to be very rough so the movements aren't quite there yet but I tried to show how the ghost's hand slows down upon "touching" the woman's face and I made the movements of the fingers very subtle. It's not too successful but I don't think I made a good choice of action to animate for this task.

The purpose of this test to get myself in the right frame of mind to explore the emotions and sensitivity between two people who have loved and lost. It was supposed to help inspire my film but I don't really feel any different. I'll continue making such tests in the meantime to get back into the flow of animation. I am rather rusty but it's fun to pick it up again and realise how much I still enjoy it :)

At the moment I'm most happy with my most recent storyboard - if I just storyboard the last section then time the images out in an animatic then maybe I'll be able to find a way of communicating what I want more clearly.

Storyboards versions 3 and 4...FAIL!

I'm working rather slowly at the moment, for some reason I can't get into the habit of just drawing things. I used to be good at that...now I just picture everything in my head and write a lot things down without any visual work. Where has my inner artist gone!?

I realise now that...personally I'm bad at communicating to other people...I get misunderstood a lot and that's reflecting in my work as well - NOT GOOD! Here's two separate incomplete storyboards that I've been working on that haven't passed my tutor's approval :( I see all the faults and I understand what I need to do but strangely, I'm unable to apply the right changes to make my own film good.

Version 3.0 (with all the afterlife malarkey at the beginning!) - discarded!

Version 4.0

This most recent version of my story takes us back to my animatic from a few weeks back (yes, I have gone full circle back in time!) but I'm much happier with how the story develops in this. However, my tutor had trouble understanding some parts...either I iron out those kinks or I have to re-think the entire story again. I don't want to change things too drastically because that's what has been holding me back all this time and slowing down my progress...

During a tutorial today I was told things were too complicated...but I have been simplifying things a LOT already...I guess working on something for so long makes one forget that others don't know the idea. Miscommunication seems to be my forte right now GAH! I feel myself slipping further and further away from my initial message which I still want to get across.

When you are forgotten, you no longer exist - your soul is merely a memory! Rinse and Repeat...

Delays

The animation work is slowly progressing with me running around in circles! More work will be posted soon but first here's a great film I found on Youtube.

The drawings are very simple and inspiring allowing the animation to really shine through. The many methods of transitions are similar to what I initially wanted to use in my film - the main thing here though is that "A quoi ca sert l'amour" condenses a LOT of information and spans a very long internal time frame within 3 minutes. I have a lot to learn from this. If I can get the pacing and scene choices right then I won't have to cut out too much from my story. *fingers crossed*

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

I fished around for a speck of creative thought somewhere in the deep dark abyss that is my mind and came up with a few new ideas to adjust the plot. Most ideas were discarded but I almost took my story down a completely different route [where the message started to change] but then I reverted back to the old track but am starting to shape it up a bit more...

Story so far...

A man dies and is greeted by the ticketman to take him to the afterworld(Heaven? Hell? The destination is irrelevant...the audience just has to know that it's the stage where people are meant to go after death). As he turns to look at his still-alive fiancée for, what he thought would be, the last time he decides to remain in the living world as a ghost hoping to spend the remnants of his life as he did before...when he was still alive. The ticketman rips up his ticket to show that this decision is irreversible.

Throughout the first part of the film we see a montage of how the fiancée copes with the death of her love by continuing her life as if he was still alive and the ghost does the same thing; convincing himself that as long as he could be beside her he would be happy. However, the ghost is unable to interact with his fiancée - who is unaware of his presence. Time heals all wounds [as they say] and the woman starts to forget about her old love, adjusting back to a normal life alone, as one person.

Being slowly forgotten, the ghost begins to fade away and tries his best to affect the physical surroundings around them to bring memories of him back to her. Alas, his efforts are in vain because the woman moves on to a new love, forgetting her old love completely. In despair, the ghost can do nothing but stand by and watch his love with another man as he himself disappears from the world, no one thinking if him, no one remembering his existence.

The end?

I'm still not sure if I should include an ending where the woman sees something that suddenly reminds her of her old fiancé which brings the ghost back into existence. I added this ending to the previous animatic because I felt the ending was too...blah! But with the revised story I feel that if I pace everything correctly I can end it at the disappearance of the ghost.

It's a shame that my film is turning into somewhat of a romantic tragedy, I wanted to stay away from a "love story" but it just turned out this way! I guess my reasoning for choosing such a relationship between the two characters is because [in my opinion] this kind of love is replaceable (HARSH!) and there is no such thing as "The One" - everyone, given enough time, can love more than one person :). I sound like a bitter woman but it's just what I believe haha!

People Tell me I don't have enough pictures...

...so here's a selection of images from my animatic that I really like and might not keep because I'm applying some (by some I mean A LOT OF) changes to the story.

and then I tried to apply some colour to an image but it didn't really work out...I think I'll got for a slightly less watercolour-esque style but I'm not sure on this decision just yet...

As advised by Leonie I watched Ghost(1990) - it's not a great film but it was useful to gain a better understanding of what is widely accepted in terms of conventional qualities of a ghost. There are similarities with my own film but the messages are different.

I'm at a confusing stage now...in the beginning I was told I was too literal and cliché...but if I have to create a conventionally accepted ghost then I have to be cliché...not that I mind that at all since I wanted to make a more visually spectacular piece than an overly sophisticated bit of story-telling. I'm not gifted in "great ideas" at the moment. I should work on that!

The Man Who Planted Trees

After a very brief talk with Leonie she suggested I watch this film for some inspiration. I almost cried watching this ;_; I wonder if I'll be able to animate some of those really complex shots and scene changes. I will try...I hope D:

Watch The Man Who Planted Trees in Animation | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Thoughts and Feedback on the animatic...

Looking back, I am aware that the storyboard was horribly rushed so there's many many faults with the story. Each time I watch the animatic I like it less and less which suggests I should apply some drastic changes...yet again! So it's back to the old drawing board. I'm now stuck thinking about how I can change this story slightly to add more excitement and drama or whether I should scrap the idea completely and start anew. Things are rather tough, I've focussed too hard on the message that I forgot to make an enjoyable short story but I'm afraid that if I just worked on a story it'll lack an underlying message (which the tutors have been critical about a lot...)

Feedback

In short, my animatic is boring and confusing :) - it wasn't quite worded that way by my tutors but I agree with them because that's how I felt the more the watched it :(

Confusing

The confusing side is due to the interaction between the two characters. From the beginning of the film the male character is a ghost so he is dead and I wanted some interaction with the woman as a way of showing the influence the guy has on her even after death. The woman's acknowledgement of the ghost's presence is meant to be my way of suggesting to the audience that the ghost may be an image she conjured up as a coping mechanism for the loss of her fiancé. It all makes sense in my head but I that's because I know what I'm trying to do but to a first time viewer it'll make no sense.

Boring

The boring side is that the pacing doesn't change throughout the film. I have been thinking about Michael Dudok de Wit's "Father and Daughter" whilst storyboarding because, in my opinion, the pacing in that film remains quite the same throughout the film but that film had a goal...the audience watches on to see if the girl ever meets her father again. What my film lacks is a goal, an imbalance that the audience would want to see reach balance again but I'm troubled over how to do this. Either I keep tweaking the film to make it more exciting or I start afresh with a completely new story. only time will tell...and time is running out!

And more problems...

...who's point of view are we seeing this film from? Generally there should be a primary focus on one of the characters but it doesn't come across in the film. I want the audience to sympathise with the ghost - to support the fact that he doesn't want to disappear from the world. All this thinking is confusing me and I'm feeling like I'm losing sense of my message.

Animatic

After taking the feedback from my tutors concerning my initial storyboard, I re-drew a second storyboard with a completely new "plot". After completing this storyboard I re-drew each board again directly on the computer whilst applying a few changes and adding a few more frames to extend the ending.





I really created a bit too much work for myself to make the first animatic - first the pencil-sketched storyboard then re-drawn storyboard sketches in open Canvas and THEN I re-traced the lines in Painter IX...I assumed we needed an adequately polished-looking animatic but we didn't...oh well, at least I got a vague bit of practise for the drawing style I want to develop. It's still not quite there...and time is running out...EEK!

So Here's the ACTUAL Idea...

Essentially, my idea has remained the same throughout the time we've been given from conception to animatic - that the soul is a memory of a person's life/existence.


At first, I had an idea of a story where a man dies of a horrific violent attack/accident - this was an excuse to surprise the audience straight away with a strong visual impact that isn't censored. As the story progresses, the man sees the aftermath of his death: his funeral, widow and grief-stricken parents. I wanted to signify his memory being lost through the deaths of those who knew him when he was alive and at the time I felt really conscious when I discussed this idea because it felt like I was going overboard with deaths -it was like I had an obsession with killing people...(basically I was going to make the mother die of grief, the father takes his own life after being left alone and then the widow dies of old age.)


Here's a rough storyboard I did after I panicked from hearing the announcement that we had 3 weeks to make an animatic (from 3 weeks ago!). It was horribly rushed and I realise now that I only did it to satisfy a deadline, there wasn't much thought put into the events of the film...(and the drawings are very bad but that's how I draw when I'm rushed and uninspired!)

Obviously, this isn't very good at all! I went to see my tutors and the feedback was generally the same - telling me that there's no drama. My film was a "so what?" film...and even now I don't fully understand what they meant by that term and I think after presenting my animatic...the tutors still consider my film to be a "so what?" film! Also, it was VERY literall...not that I mind literal films but I wanted to be more suggestive for this film to show a more sophisticated style of narrative...


More later!


EDIT: Oh yes, forgot to mention the storyboard above isn't finished. I took so long to make such a poor storyboard and by the time my arranged tutorials came round I still hadn't completed it! Afterwards, I knew I had to scrap the storyboard completely and make a new one so there was no reason to complete it.

Sudden discovery in the Middle of the Night...

It was 3am...ish and I was a bit stumped for visual inspiration so I started looking through the old old archives of the Drawn! website and came across this:





This film, "Le Papillon" by Antoine Antin and Jenny Rakotomamonjy, has many parallels with my current film idea. Now, I had never seen this film before now so am in no way influenced by its story or visual style...it's just a bit spooky eh? Not that animating with watercolour and Chinese brush lines hasn't been done before...


I absolutely adore the simplicity of the drawings! The animation is smooth and beautiful too...now I'm fired up to do the same!


Before I go here's a another film suggested to me by one of my tutors Leonie Sharrock.





Another French animation called "Signes de Vie" by Arnaud Demuynck and AGAIN, it uses some brush lines and touches on the topic of death. I can't help feeling a bit negative about having such similarities to two (and possibly more) films...it's not like anyone is original nowadays but I don't want to be compared too much or have people think that I'm just copying another one's film. If I am optimistic though, I'd like to think my film's really quite different too! :P

The Initial Idea...

For the pitch I didn't have much work prepared so I just outlined the general idea I had, the message behind the film and showed some work from the Illustrator Mirko Hanák. 

Hanák's work is GORGEOUS, I love how free the brush strokes are and how the lines are carefully chosen to create a sense of movement and form without looking overworked. It reminded me very much of some Chinese brush painting styles and sumi-e but with a distinct European flavour. It's tough being Asian...with all my Asian influences I sometimes feel like I'm becoming a cliché and IDEALLY I'd love to be able to represent the British animation industry...but I'll work on that in time :)


In short, the film will be about a man who dies right at the beginning of the film and throughout the film we see him fade as people start forgetting about him until finally, he is completely forgotten and he disappears. Sounds simple...and the message I wanted to convey is there...but that's where the simplicity seems to end for me! I've had the most troubling time trying to develop a story for this...even now at the current stage of my storyboard I feel like it's lacking excitement...hopefully I'll get some feedback to help me on the day of the animatic presentation.


Fingers crossed I'll get it done on time. luckily, it's like a draft animatic so I have time to fix it and make it look prettier :D As for the visuals, I'm stumped...I want to animate in a similar style to Hanák but with a slightly more refined edge...I'll post what I come up with eventually...

After a long wait...there's some progress?

At university we had to prepare an initial pitch for the third week of term...funnily enough I did NOT have an idea for a long time! It is rather difficult to find the inspiration and even when inspiration hits you it's difficult to choose something suitable for the 3-minute film format...


Of course, I was stuck in this phase of having NO ideas but with too many at the same time. This was going to be a film that I'll be working on for the entire academic year - so it must sustain my dedication and interest until the final deadline! Alas, for two weeks and five days I still could not dig out a standalone idea until one cloudy day...(it may have been sunny but it's been a while since then...)


Well, it was actually an evening but I was thinking about death (as you do...) and I had all these thoughts about why we have religion and why there's so many overlapping cultural beliefs about aspects of an afterlife. Then it struck me. I had always found it strange that people believed in souls - all these ideas that even if you bring back someone's body [through cloning] you cannot bring back their soul. As another example, twins are genetically the same person - I always suggested that cousins born from twin mothers/fathers are actually half sisters/brothers but that's another story altogether! Even if twins are the same person in body, they are different people in the mind. Which leads to another thought...


I find an uncanny resemblance between our brains and a computer (ironic that in Chinese a computer in literal translation is "electronic brain"). Like a computer's HDD our brains store memory. In the heat they can grow slow and sluggish, too much new information may require removal of old information to create space. We have short term memory like RAM, doing too much at once may cause us to "crash" and staying "on" for too long can cause all sorts of problems. Hard knocks may delete our memory entirely (or partially...) but I'll end the analogy here since I've gone majorly off-topic. The main thing I wanted to explore was, objectively thinking, our soul is just a memory - or rather, a collection of our own memories mixed with the memories that other people have of us. The things we experienced, how we behave, our personalities and things that define who we are - almost like a proof of our existence.


To conclude, two days before my pitch I decided I wanted to make a film that made people think about what a soul really is. One day before the pitch, it became a film that told people our existence relies on us being remembered and once we are forgotten, we no longer exist.

Hello!

So I've had this blogspot account for AGES but never really found anything to put on here...I'm stuck on what to do really. It has been two weeks since my third year at University started, along with my purchase of a new tablet (Intuos4 WOOH!) and a blank sketchbook I feel this is a good opportunity to start documenting any progress I make in terms of my work :D

I have another blog over on Tumblr (I like it because I could use MY NAME in the URL) but blogspot is also very nice to use. Maybe I'll update both with the same content? Hmm...I should at least start customising this page and make it look pretty. Apologies for offending anyone's eyes.

Now, must find some inspiration *wooosh*