PART ONE: Special Effects

After so very long, I finally get caught up on my backlog of experimental log entries. I'm sorry Martin!

Okay, let's get this thing started!!

"Outside/Inside"
an experimental animation
by Tim Carpenter
for ANIM 323

The Project:
Originally, this project was meant to experiment with special effects animation (rain, fire, etc). This is something that isn't covered in any course curriculum at Emily Carr, so I thought I would take advantage of this course's open-ended format to explore special effects, specifically so that I can help the lovely Miss Bochon with her grad film, which is fairly special effects-heavy.

So, originally, the first project assigned for this course was designed to do exactly that. Martin gave me a basic starting point to give the project some direction; make a short animation using two basic colors. I kind of shaped that to suit my goals, and interpreted that into two palettes instead of two colors. The basic storyboard I planned out had a shot of a rainy street, which would pan over to a house. The shot would dissolve into an interior shot, which would be full of warm colors, and a raging fire. I began by working on simple tests for rain and fire. I had a lot of help from a book that Martin lent me, called Timing for Animation. It mostly had cheesy, cartoony advice, but the effects animation section was really helpful at the beginning, before I had gotten my feet wet.

The Rainy Street: I started by drawing the background, and then went straight to the rain. It turns out that rain can be very easy to do, but it's kind of hard to do right. In other words, it's easy to animate straight lines falling, but it's hard to disguise the fact that it's a cycle without a load of unnecessary work. When I first tested the rain, it looked okay, but it looked very flat. I decided to make a second cycle, composite it behind the first rain layer, and blur it a bit to give it some depth.

It looked better, but still wasn't convincing me. I decided to try to put little rain drop splashes in the puddles. To do this, I plotted out where all of the splashes would be on one sheet of paper. Then, I numbered each splash from 1-6. The number of the splash was the frame that that splash started animating on (it was a six-frame cycle, and each splash took five frames to disappear). Now the rain looked a lot better, but a keen eye could still see the splashing cycle.

Here is the final rain test!

I decided to log everything I learned away, and move on to the next test.

Making Fire: The fire was much, much harder. Fire is probably the most frustrating thing I have ever animated. Although fire looks very random and chaotic, there is a subtle logic to it, in which eddies of air create pockets in the fire and rise up. it sounds simple, but at the same time the fire is constantly growing, shrinking, and morphing. It's a huge headache, and I didn't last as long with the fire as I did with the rain. I ended up with two version of my fire cycle, one at 15fps and one at 24fps. I tend to prefer the 15fps version, but I'm still undecided.


And that's the end of part one. I learned a lot, but now it was time to really start the project!