Words about animation, photography, art, creativity, football + occasional ramblings from other life stuff • See my work here: floramartyr.com • Contact email: dotdotdashdotuk@yahoo.com • Hyperlinks in RED
As the title would suggest, I have now completed a full run through of my animatic*! After many iterations, I may add. The film currently runs almost eight minutes in length, so although once I have filmed all the footage it’s likely to vary, it still gives me a good idea early on of how much animation and backgrounds I’ll be looking to produce and therefore the length of time it might take. Which is always nice to know!
*if you’re reading this and are unsure what an animatic is, it is essentially a moving storyboard. So in the most basic form, you would draw all your storyboard panels as usual, then put them in the timeline in an editing software and adjust the duration of each panel to mirror how long that frame might take to play out if it was actually a moving film. Then add any scratch dialogue/ SFX/ temp music to give more of a sense of the final animation and then you’re good to go! If you want to find out more info or delve deeper into this, then there’s a ton of resources online such as this video (this whole series is excellent by the way)!
The animatic took a lot longer than I thought it might- though doesn’t everything animation related?! And it wasn’t quite as smooth a process as I’d have hoped, but I feel it’s been such a wonderful tool in shaping the story for my film, I don’t regret doing it. Or at least not for this short (a feature I expect will be a different kettle of fish). It has given me a much more accurate idea of how the story works visually, rather than any storyboard or script I have ever written. It’s probably because I can see (in the crudest way possible) the film play out like I’m actually watching it and because of that, it makes it clearer to see which sections are working, which sections aren’t and what needs more work. It also allows others who I’m asking for feedback to see it visually too, meaning the feedback received is likely to be more accurate/ relevant.
When I made my previous short film, I went the more traditional way in terms of numerous script drafts, followed by a storyboard and then into filming it. Once I pieced it together in the edit as per my storyboard/ script, I realised that the story didn’t quite translate as I had intended on the page. This resulted in me spending a significant amount of time in the edit essentially crafting a new story from the footage I had. Well, not completely ‘new’ as the core elements were there, but it wasn’t the film I had scripted either. This meant loads of footage went unused, so that time spent filming those scenes could have shifted to spending more time on the scenes I did use and not having to rush towards the end of shoot day 2 when the light was fading. But you live and you learn and nothing good ever comes easy.
Whereas for this one, I used the animatic as part of the script writing process. I’m a much more visual person, so I felt this way of shaping my story suited me better. And I feel a lot more confident going into the shoot of this one, that I already know it will work as a story and I’ll be shooting only the scenes I’ll be using. Of course a few things will change- it’s rare for things not to at each stage of the filmmaking process, but I feel relatively confident that it will work well once shot.
I’m now in the scary ‘waiting for feedback’ stage of the process. I have sent my animatic to a few people whom I trust and value the opinions of to see if the story makes sense to anyone who isn’t me and see if anyone has any notes/ thoughts I have not considered. Once I have all the feedback, I will decide what/ if to make changes, especially if a certain note keeps cropping up in numerous responses. I might do another post on the feedback aspect of creating the short, as I feel it’s an important part of the filmmaking process. So stay tuned for that!
I am still not going to be revealing the synopsis just yet (sorry!), but I will give you the title: ‘I Wish I Was There’. So you can use your imagination of what it could be about… I’ll stick a few panels below as well.
Remember in my last post I said I had been working on a super secret embroidery/ animation project? OK, well, I have finally finished it! Ta-da!
A 21 frame embroidery/ animation/ skateboarding mashup. So basically all of my favourite things combined into one 2 second clip. Was it worth it? Well kind of…
I must admit, I felt the result was a little anticlimactic or at least on having immediately finished it. I think because I had spent so long creating the piece, I thought I’d be super ‘wowed’ by it on completion, but for some reason it fell a little flat. Though that is often a quite common feeling after any big project (or at least in my experience): like when it’s done, a random all-singing all-dancing fanfare isn’t going to suddenly appear and you’re not going to get your favourite producer calling you up out the blue asking if you want funding for a feature film (though one can dream). In reality, you’ve just finished a piece of work and then the day just carries on!
Perhaps it’s a sense of a loss/ emptiness (of finishing the project) juxtaposed with expectation vs result, which is why I felt a little underwhelmed. But also, because it’s not my first embroidered animation, I have something to compare it to and on the whole, I feel the first one I did was much more impactful. Maybe because the previous one was fully hand stitched, whilst this one was only partly hand stitched, part mixed media, so not quite as impressive?
I’m not saying I dislike it, not at all and I am extremely proud of the accomplishment- to hand stitch 21 frames of animation is quite a feat and if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. I think because the sewing is neat, it perhaps looks too ‘clean’ and not ‘hand made’ enough for my liking. Especially when viewed on a phone screen- I feel the detail disappears. You can’t really tell it is sewn unless you play it frame by frame (or watch it on desktop), so it feels like all the hours I spent hand stitching each frame have kind of got lost. And as an animated clip itself (say if it wasn’t sewn), it’s a little straightforward.
I also think the choice of using plain white fabric wasn’t the best for the background- because once scanned in, the texture of the fabric is so blown out. This of course I wasn’t to know going into the project, but perhaps I could have thought ahead and done a scan test of the fabric to see how it might look. Anyway, what good is an experiment such as this if you don’t learn anything from it? I didn’t want to recreate what I did previously because I had already done that, so here I was trying something different, which is (often) always the point of these small clips I make. Perhaps the next one I try will just be stitched outlines- though that might be a short while off, as I’m pretty deep into creating my next narrative short…
Below are a few of the frames before I edited them in post: outlines, hair and shoes were all hand stitched; for the jeans I scanned in some denim and added it in post, the t-shirt and wheels I coloured with gel pens on the fabric and everything else coloured in post and used a ‘multiply’ blend mode, so the texture of the fabric showed through.
Goooood morning! Looks like I skipped the whole of June on here- too busy to blog- I guess that’s a good thing though, right?! So what have I been busy with? Another assistant editor contract, skateboarding, attending Sheffield DocFest, watching films, a few little trips away, watching even more films, watching cricket, continuing my super secret embroidery project as alluded to in this post aaaaand storyboarding my next short film. I’m sure I missed out a few things there, too!
When I don’t have anything specific to blog about- I.e. if I haven’t finished any of the projects I’m working on yet, I don’t tend to do ‘update’ blog posts until after a while (like this), because I find that I don’t have much of value to say if I keep up my blog each week purely for the sake of it. Plus it takes valuable time away from the project(s) in hand. Alongside not wanting to give away too many ‘spoilers’, so when I reveal the project once complete, it will feel fresher. Of course this depends what kind of project it is- I don’t mind giving work in progress updates of my longer form projects such as the short films I make etc.
One of the reasons that I blog (other than to create a record of my creative endeavours) is often in retrospective so I can analyse (I’m a sucker for a good bit of analysis) and reflect on what I have created, in order to develop my creative practice (and my personal growth). If a project is not yet finished, then I don’t like to go into depth on it, because you can’t tell whether you have met your aims or ambitions with said project if it’s not yet complete. I’m sure any creatives reading this will know not to cast judgment on your own work whilst it’s still a work in progress because 99% of the time you will probably hate it! When it’s finished, this percentage will dramatically drop and given even more time/ distance away from the project, it will drop further and you will be able to make more measured and constructive comments about your work. And if you still hate it at this stage, then you can hopefully at the very least have learnt something from it, whether that be about your creative practice or yourself as a person.
But as it’s been a while, I did want to put something on here to say I’m still chipping away at my work- the storyboard is almost finished- well the majority of the panels have been drawn. Then I ‘just’ need to turn it into an animatic. After that stage, I’ll give more of a ‘proper’ blog post/ update about it- whereas this is more of a ‘check in’/ hello-please-dont-forget-that-I-exist post! So maybe expect something else towards the end of this month? I think my embroidery project should be done around that time too, so expect something on that as well. Plus, I have a painting thing in the works too. And maybe will try and squeeze in some more football photography if I find the time, so will post the results on here if I manage to get out with my camera at all. Just a few bits lined up for July then!! I also realised that I haven’t done a deep dive post on here about skateboarding before, so perhaps expect that at some point as well? I feel that would be appropriate being as it occupies 99.9% of my headspace at any one time! So, yeah, lots going on. What are you working on? Anything exciting? Hope so!
Here’s a pic of my hand drawing my storyboard with myself as reference:
