PART FOUR: Speical Effects (again)

After the two month's tangent that was the Outside/Inside project, I finally got back on course with my original focus of study, which was special effects animation. As I said before, I had already been roped into doing all of the special effects for Jordyn Bochon's grad film. It required a lot of reading and testing and frustration. The special effects were essentially broken up into three groups:

Note: I have somehow lost almost all of my movie files for my special effects!! Martin, You'll have to look at the CD I gave you while reading this, I suppose...Sorry!)

Bubbles
Bubbles are, for the most part, pretty easy to animate...at least, the ones that I animated, which were all underwater (I can imagine surface bubbles being much harder). I watched Disney movies to see how they dealt with bubbles. Generally, they appear from anything that moves around or disturbs the water, they rise at a constant rate, and you don't have to keep the shape consistant because they are constantly morphing and changing.

I got tired of drawing little circles pretty quick.

Drips
I did a lot of drips, since raining is a big element of Jordyn's film. I did somewhere between 15-20 drip animations. Some things I learned about drips are: They take about 2-3 frames to fall from the ceiling to the floor, depending on the shot; they take about 4-6 frames for the splash to disappate, unless it's a closer shot that requires more detail; and, it really helps if you have a system worked out. I made a system earlier in the semester for planning drips that helped me animate a drip shot in about 20-30 minutes. Essentially, I would jus decide how many drips would be in the cycle, where they would be, and on what frame of the cycle they would start on. I would make a chart and have it next to me at all times, so I always know what stage every drop is at. It made the process go very, very quickly. Drips aren't hard once you know how to do them!

Fire
Unfortunately, even at the late stage of the semester, I still have not animated much fire (later tonight, I will probably do the rest of the fire animation). Fire is hands-down one of the toughest things I've ever animated. It's very random, but there's still some laws to it that you have to follow in order to make it look right. It's mostly keeping track of eddies of air that create pockets of space in the flames, which the fire kind of wraps around. Fire is definately the least-researched area of this project this semester, so unfortunately I don't know if I can go into much more detail...


Anyway, that's it for my experimental blog, I hope it was at least adequate and slightly informative.

Also, Martin, I'm sorry this all got posted so late!!

PART THREE: Faux 3D

One month later, we're back on the update schedule...




My intention with doing the indoor shot was to have a pan similar to the outside pan, with cross-dissolving watercolor backgrounds. This time I wanted the pan to go a bit slower, and have the colors and sound give off a very warm feeling. It took me a long while to finally design the interior, a lot longer than I thought it would. I had to referenced 'The Art of Howl's Moving Castle' a lot, but it finally got done, and I had a fairly cluttered old cabin. In my original idea, I was going to have an old man in a rocking chair sitting by the window, but I decided to hold off on animating him until I had the background figured out.

When it came time to color the background, I had a lot of trouble deciding exactly how to do it. Even though I had used plenty of watercolor on the earlier backgrounds, I had been using a very omni-directional/ambience light source (outside on a cloudy day) and I now had to deal with a very direct lightsource (a fireplace). Eventually, I decided that maybe I should try to figure out some other course of action...

During one of my meetings with Martin, he gave me the idea of playing with perspective. It was something I had been thinking about since last semester, when I was researching panning backgrounds with shifting angles. I always had trouble trying to get the camera to look like it was moving through 3D space when it was actually moving in 2D space. I deduced that the only way to do it well was to build a kind of pseudo-3D by constructing the faces of each object in the room individually, then putting them together in After Effects and scaling them as the camera shifted, giving the illusion that they were moving in 3D space. It's kind of hard to explain in words, so here's my first test:

First (short) 3d Test

Not perfect, but it's getting somewhere. I dubbed it a sucess and moved on to the rest of the room. Every object was drawn on its own, and the big objects were split into several pieces so they could be stretched and skewed into perspective. Here's a couple of examples of what the actual drawings looked like:













All of my sketches were constructed to create this:

The final version of the inside shot (for now.)

There are still a lot of problems, mainly in the way the objects actually shift in perspective; some shift too fast, some shift in the wrong direction. I realized that because I had not initially designed the shot with this kind of treatment in mind, it was not really suited to demonstrating this pseudo-3d perspective effect very well.

By the time I had reached this point, it was getting late in the game and I did not have time to work on it any further. So, this shot has stayed the way it is. However, this section of the project has got me thinking of possibilities of representing perspective in animation in different ways.

Here is the final version that I gave to Martin!

I added some audio that I thought suited the mood. It's a song by Final Fantasy (the artist, not the video game) called "Many Lives for 49MP".

Tim to move on to the directed project!

PART TWO: Watercolors

In this part of the project, I was still on the same path, and I started working on the backgrounds for the 'Outside' sequence. I decided to try using watercolor washes to paint the backgrounds, which was a bit of a risk, because I had never used watercolors in any context before. But hey, it's an experimental animation course, so why the hell not?

After a ouple of false starts, I got the hang of the washes. I decided to paint two versions of the background and have the two washes dissolve into each other constantly (this was some good advice from Martin). I figure it would make the background look less static, and I wanted it to look like the rain is affecting the background. I also made the decision to paint each part of the outside seperately; the logic there was that if I screwed something up, only one element would have to be re-drawn, rather than the whole thing.

And so it went, and went, and went. The coloring took longer than I thought it would take, probably over a week's worth of afternoons in total. I got it all scanned and composited, with all of the washes fading in and out in constant chain dissolves.

I re-used my rain cycle for earlier for the rain, but I had to make new splashes for the puddles (this time, it was another 5-frame cycle, but on a 8-frame loop, so the cycle would be less noticable). When I composited the rain and the splashes in After Effects, I simply changed their blending mode to Overlay to make them white. Easy!

Here is my initial test.

And here is the final product. (Note: I think the compression screwed up the colors a bit. It's supposed to look more blue and contrasty.)


The outside was finished. Now to tackle the inside...

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!