'Bear' Update 21/8

This week was another really positive and productive week- woop woop!! The motivation is still extremely strong (if not stronger), with the end in sight. It always feels weird approaching this stage of the project and thinking, wow, it’s actually going to be finished soon. Having put so much work into something in an intense way for a fair chunk of time, reaching this stage of any project comes with mixed feelings and emotions. Predominately excitement (for it to be finished and also my next project), but also senses of anxiety, disbelief (that I’ve managed to get it to where it is) relief and sadness (due to not wanting to part with it) are just some of the things I’m experiencing. I’m honestly feeling mainly excited for it to be finished, but because I’ve enjoyed it for the majority of the time and grown quite attached to it, it’s actually a little bittersweet because I kind of don’t want it to end either. But then that emotion goes out the window as soon as I think about what I’m going to do next! Did somebody say feature film? Yes they did and that somebody was me.

Reflections out the way, let’s talk about the more tangible things related to the project: what have I done this week?

Short answer: a LOT.

Long answer: amongst starting the sound design, fine tuning the edit and finishing off the last few backgrounds, I filmed (and almost finished animating) the ‘scene with the other character’ in. I’m aware that sounds extremely cryptic, but I don’t want to give too much away at this point!

Due to having learnt a lot about rotoscoping during the process of this project (wasn’t sure that could be possible due to having spent the last 11 years of my life practising this medium), there were some things I wished I had done in the first instance when I filmed the bulk of the footage way back in February. It was mainly due to drawing the face- I found the eyebrows and the lips hard to pick out for a lot of shots, so this time round I asked my wonderful actress Anthea Carpenter-Procter for her scene if she could wear a contrasting lipstick colour to her face, so when I’m animating, the lips are easy to pick out. I should have also done this for the eyebrows- but for next time, I’ll know. Luckily she had quite dark eyebrows, so it didn’t pose too much of a problem. Her scene is quite dialogue heavy, so animating the lips was something I definitely didn’t want to be struggling over, so asking her to wear a lipstick was a good move and something I’ll carry into all my future projects.

For these shots, I also used a Canon DSLR to shoot it on, rather than the Blackmagic which was used to film all the footage in February. I found the colours and the contrast on the Canon to be sharper and more saturated, unlike the washed out feel of the Blackmagic. Again, this made the image easier to rotoscope and I feel going forward, shooting with a Canon would be my preferred choice. I love that because this is the biggest project of my own I have worked on to date, I have found out a lot about a medium I felt I knew so well. When working on something long-form like this, you inevitably learn more than animating short, five or so second test pieces. When you animate something short, there are a lot of things you can gloss over about the quality of footage you use, because there’s only a relatively small amount of frames to create. But on something bigger, those things which may have been slightly irksome on a small project are completely exacerbated and end up being quite frustrating throughout. Perhaps I’ll do more of a detailed post about this at some point- the things I’ve learned when shooting for rotoscoping maybe. But without trying not to repeat myself or anything I’ve already written about. We’ll see.

But, I have been recording some kind of ‘making of’ time lapse videos at each stage of the animation process, so I think instead of doing a post about it on here, I’ll make a short ‘behind the scenes’ type video/ vlog thing once I’ve finished everything. As maybe a video like that would help people understand the medium better, so they can create their own rotoscope animations. Basically anything to get more people on board with the medium!! So look out for that. Also writing it on here so I can be held accountable if I don’t act on it!

I think that’s it for this week. Next week it might be finished? You’ll be some of the first to know anyway! Below is a still from one of the new shots. I actually shot it in the spare room in my house and the microphone is pretty much front and centre- but hey, that’s the beauty of rotoscoping.