New Clip (At Last)!

I finished my first full time animation gig on a feature at the beginning of October. Not that I didn’t enjoy the project (I did ENORMOUSLY- it was one of my best work related experiences up to this point), but I was looking forward to it finishing because it meant that I could start work on my own projects again- something I didn’t have an awful lot of time for during the production (I didn’t want to do too much more animating on evenings/ weekends as was cautious about burning out). Despite this, it took me a while to get going with this next piece.

I think it was a mixture of several things, such as firstly it felt a bit pointless/ directionless. Before working on the feature, I had been perfectly content with creating these ‘test’/ portfolio pieces, which I did in aid of enhancing my techniques, developing my style and experimenting with different ways of creating rotoscoped works. Though since stopping the feature (or at least in the first couple of weeks), it just felt pointless, because it felt that I was no longer working towards anything- I had basically achieved what I had always wanted to do up to that point and it felt like, ‘okay so I guess I made it, now what’.

Another reason was, because it felt like I needed to be creating my ‘best work ever’, or that this first piece ‘back’ so to speak needed to be the best thing I’ve made, especially after having worked on a feature. This, of course, put on an enormous amount of unnecessary self inflicted pressure, which also hampered me from carrying through a piece unless I knew it was going to turn out ‘perfect’. After a strict word with myself(!), I decided that this was nonsense and I needed to get back to creating work just for the fun of it, which is why I do what I do in the first place!

I decided to alleviate any pressure and just create a piece of work which I was to finish. Finishing is very important, because it shows you can carry something through. Sometimes I admittedly am not very good at, usually because of the high standards I put on myself, though it’s something I’m working to improve.

I chose a piece of footage which would allow me to experiment on, something which felt quite freeing/ loose and could have some fun with:

I selected this clip of a busy street (from the free stock footage site Pexels) as it ticked all the right boxes. At times, when animating, it did feel a bit of a slog and took a while to work up to working full days again. But suppose I did need a break as I was working super intensely for the best part of the year. It took a fair bit longer than what I would have liked/ hoped. Not that it matters anyway- it’s all arbitrary! 

First, I made a styleframe to test out several styles, but opted for the one with plain block colours as I knew that I’ve not really worked in that manner before (I often use outlines), so knew it would be a great clip to loosen me up with and do something slightly different. I also thought the bright, bold colour blocks would look really effective.

I used the filled stroke tool to block out each section of the character, such as hair, skin, trousers etc, all in my trademark bright colours (I change them to more realistic later- I use colours which contrast well with the footage or I won’t be able to see what I’m doing if the colour I’m using is too similar to the reference). Another way I could have done it would be to use a brush outline and later fill in via CTG. I decided against this, because I most likely would have been tempted to use the outline after all! Plus it would have taken longer.

Before recolouring the characters

Several days, hours of music and podcasts listened later, the first stage of my clip was complete. Yay! It was now time to add the texture. I know I didn’t do this in the initial styleframe, but while I was animating, I thought I wanted to give the clip a little extra something. So decided to liven up the whole thing with some hand-made grain. I just wanted to make it feel a little more ‘busy’. I did this by using one of the brushes under the ‘dirty shadows’ section and created five frames filling the whole screen and then repeated them the length of the clip. I then silhouetted the character out of the grainy footage and used the blend modes and reduced opacity to merge it with the characters. Again, there are plenty of ways to created such an effect, but I decided to do it this way!

I toyed with adding cast shadows and shading, but decided against it as I knew if I kept adding and adding things, I’d never move on from this piece and spend another week or more altering it, taking away time I could spend on another piece. I had already achieved what I wanted to, so why keep adding to it?

For the background, I just kept it super simple, by creating a water colour effect using the water colour brushes in TVPaint. I didn’t want the background to be pure white, but I didn’t want to clutter it either, conscious of not wanting to take the attention away from the characters. After a little trial and error, the water colour style background suited it best.

The whole thing took a whopping 82 hours, which initially sounds a lot, but considering it being a 16 second clip with 12 characters, plus also counting the time it took for me to create the textures and to colour change each character, it was actually a quite quick clip (wow, that’s hard to say out loud) to create.

So, what do I think? I do really like it: I think the colour block characters are very effective and it was definitely the kind of thing I was aiming for. I would say I would have liked a few more characters, but then there’s the whole ‘where do I stop’ thing and I feel for a test piece such as this, I had populated it enough to sort of ‘prove’ my experiment, if you like.

See you in the next one, oh yeah, and here’s the clip: