Hi. I’m Reeve, and I’m a Contemporary Media Practice student who took the Transmedia Animation path, which ultimately led me to joining this fine group. Despite learning quite a bit in the preceding lectures in the Animation pathway prior to joining this group, most of that learning went on to inform my now tossed idea I presented at the presentation-whatever day many weeks ago, and didn’t have much impact on how I went on to approach my work in this project, so there isn’t much I have to say in that regard, aside from little pieces here and there when relevant.
Anyways, I joined this group as I took interest in the (initial) subject matter relating to Jimi Hendrix, how parrots ended up growing a population in London, and plans to create a somewhat psychedelic animation. Eventually, ideas changed and evolved, now mainly focused the difference in how children and adults “use” their imaginations, and the idea changed to us interviewing a child and adult on how they believe parrots ended up in London, which kept the essence of the original idea but invigorated it with a new approach, which I also liked.
I took the role of one of two animators for the project, where we would inter-splice animated sequences based on what the interviewees say into the interviews themselves. My animation experience is actually somewhat limited, so I was bit nervous in regards to joining a group as an animator, since my decision in joining the Animation pathway mainly boiled down to “why not? It’ll be something new”. Sometime during the pathway, we were given a workshop where we were introduced to Dragonframe; an application that allowed one to do frame by frame animations by connecting a camera to the host computer(, and in the case of hand drawn animations, the camera would be set up in a sort of vertical rig that holds the camera up while pointing it straight down,) and then taking individual pictures of your subject. You can rearrange, delete, and extend frames, toy around with aspect ratios, and all that stuff. It seemed pretty professional. Anyways, during this workshop, I got pretty ambitious and decided to make an animation based on an album cover I liked; Drama by Yes. I drew up a multi-layered background, and even drew and cut out several drawings of a cat which would make up a new frame of animation. In the end, the ambition of the animation far out weighed my abilities, and I only ended up animating one out of three cats (plus two birds), and the end result, being less than 5 seconds long, took like 3 hours. Comparison between my animation and the original cover below.
After joining the group, animation-wise, there wasn’t much myself or Lizzie could do, as the animations were meant to be based off of the interviews and were going to be animated around them, and we couldn’t do that until the interviews were filmed, so the entire group had all focused our efforts onto the interviews. During our first meet up as a group, we managed to book out the Uni’s green screen room as our filming room of choice over the weekend (though we ended up using it over the following weekend, due to scheduling and “casting” issues that set us back). We chose the Green Screen room because we saw that there could be great potential in widening the “expanse” (?) of our animations, as well as the green screen allowing for more ease with integrating animations with live-action visuals. We then discussed who the interview subjects would be, which proved to be much more difficult. Some of our group members managed to talk to one of their tutors about considering both her and her child being the interview subjects, and she was fine with her child, Robin, being a subject, but not herself, so we went to search for another interview subject over the next week, and we ended up getting Animation tutor Stephen to be the adult subject and we filmed him on our next opportunity in the room, the next Monday after our Saturday filming with Robin. Michael (who is handling sound) and myself booked out 3 cameras for 3 directional shooting, as well as the 3 tripods needed for the cameras. Michael had sorted out the needed sound equipment, including Zoom mics, Boom mics, clip mics, and so on.
When it came to doing the interview with Robin, we had to make a number of precautions and decisions around our subject. Since we were working with a 4 year old who hadn’t met any of us prior, we had to make sure the environment was as un-intimidating as possible. We refrained from using the clip mic, and other issues prevented the Boom mic from working, much to Michael’s dismay, though it may have been for the best, as having that thing looming over her head for the entire interview may have been a tad uncomfortable for Robin. We ended up just sticking with a simple Zoom mic, left upright beside the “interview chair”, and we hoped that she’d be fine with 3 cameras pointed at her. She was a tad shy when she first came in, understandably, and she tended to stick rather close to her mother. We kinda rushed into shooting perhaps a little too quickly, as by the time our interview started, Robin had not grown completely comfortable in our company and was noticeably quiet for much of the early interview, though she eventually warmed up to us and became much more open, though she did continue to stick close to her mother (who was sitting on the floor beside the chair and Zoom mic, just off camera), often completely getting off of her chair to do so, which meant we had to either completely reposition the cameras to get her back in sight, or we just left her as is off screen as a disembodied voice. Robin seemed to not have been paying attention to the 3 cameras pointing at her, and she moved around the area like there was nothing there at all, which was fine if it meant she was happy, though it did render some footage pretty useless. She also seemed to forget that there was a microphone just beside her mother, as Robin ended up repeatedly walking into it, (much to Michael’s dismay, yet again), but again, as long as Robin was happy, we were content to work around these problems. In the end, things worked out pretty well. We got a number of imaginative responses from Robin, and despite some technical and physical mishaps with equipment, the sound and video came out mostly well and we have plenty of material to edit and animate around.
The interview with Stephen was, expectedly, an easier affair. We set up the cameras in the same places, we got the boom mic working and set up, and as soon as Stephen got there, we were good to go, no easing in needed. We could ask Stephen more straightforward questions than with Robin, and considering he doesn’t have the attention span of a 4 year old, he kept on topic throughout the whole interview, and in the end, the interview was over and done with in a fraction of the time than the first one, and Stephen also gave a rather imaginative response, which was perfect for the contrast for the imaginations of a child and an adult. Both interviews ended up being pretty great, and when we got a rough cut of the two interviews done, I could finally start making a bit of a start on animating, or so I hoped.
Unfortunately, due to impending deadlines in CMP, I couldn’t fully devote myself to doing (m)any animations for long periods of time, only getting few openings in my “schedule” get anything done. During the week long wait before the interviews, I attempted to do a short test animation based on slow-motion footage of parrots flying , and in a short 4-and-a-half hours, I managed to get a 5 second long animation done:
Yeah, that took 4-and-a-half hours. 60-odd hand drawn frames, and a 5 second long end result. I mean, it looks pretty decent, but was it worth the amount of time it took to draw all of that? No. The original plan was to make use of the technique called rotoscoping, where frames of live-action video are drawn to create a smooth and realistic looking and/or moving animation, but doing that isn’t exactly possible in those conditions (as far as I know), so I basicaly ended up using the aforementioned video as reference for the animation, slowing it down and drawing more or less each frame for most of the sequence of the bird flying past the camera, hence ending up with 60+ frames and a very short video. Clearly, this type of animation was not going to be viable for the final animation, as everything would end up taking forever. I didn’t even animate to the actual end of the live-action shot the animation is based on because it took that long. Clearly something had to change when I started doing the proper animations for the video.
Eventually, with my CMP project finished (only last week, mind), I eventually had a somewhat emptier schedule, and I could begin doing some animations. I had chosen to animate the “Stephen” portion of the video, and I initially planned to do a somewhat more “realistic” art style for the more adult oriented part of the video. Seemingly, I hadn’t learned my lesson from last time. Last Thursday, I went to Uni and decided to make a start, beginning with an animation of the birds flying in a circle, preferably being a loop-able animation. Like an idiot, I went back to using Dragonframe, and unlike last time, I didn’t have any video or reference to base the bird movements off of, nor did I plan the animation ahead of time. I just went in and winged it (pun unintended), and unsurprisingly, it look forever. I had 6 realistic looking birds featured in the animation, and it took a long time to draw one bird, let alone 6. Within 3 hours, I only had about 8 frames drawn, and the animation didn’t look particularly great, didn’t have a particularly good flow to it, and the quality of my drawings dropped with each successive frame due to how long it was taking. I gave up on that animation and had a mini-crisis. I was having serious doubts about my animation skills and competence, and feared that I was letting the group down. I then decided to do a complete restart on my animations. I abandoned Dragonframe, I abandoned the realistic art style, and I instead looked to instead doing a digital animation, which is completely unfamiliar territory for me. I spent much of the next day, and the last day of Uni prior to the Christmas break, scouring around the premises looking for a place that allows the borrowing of portable graphics tablets, and eventually, I managed to get a hold of one.
I guess that’s about it for a summary of stuff I did prior to the proper beginning of my animation work, which will be occurring throughout much of the holiday season. Yippee.
London's Parrots: Imagining an Urban Legend 