EXTENDED: Critical Evaluation

The lifting tower project seemed like a bit of a throwaway brief to me initially and I don't think me or Ewan really poured much heart and soul into the ideas, but we came up with some pretty decent short clips. Sadly I was in bed with a hot water bottle and a cup of lemsip the night they were actually projected, so I never got to see them in action.

It was really great to create the projection visuals for Garde Dog, and to see them projected behind and over the top of the band during their set at Wharf Chambers. The animation itself was based around very basic loops superimposed over dog videos, all in lurid bright colours, which worked perfectly when projected. I was very happy with the outcome, and it was nice that Cinnamon, the group putting the event on, got in contact with the Beefy Squarms collective out of the blue about working with them.
This year's batch of YCN and D&AD briefs were far less inspiring than the previous set in which I had found it quite hard to decide which projects to work on. Action On Hearing Loss did not immediately jump out at me, but actually I think I managed to find a smart and simple outcome to the brief, albeit executed in a quite clinical and dull way due to my quick turnaround of the project, wanting to get started on my work with Brenda.

None out of my YCN, Lifting Tower, or Garde Dog animations really stretched me technically - all of which were made entirely on Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects. But for Loop-de-Loop "Myth" I decided to use paper cutout stop motion for the first time in years, (not counting my ident in first year which used much more basic puppets and was far simpler to execute.) The puppet I made was an assembly of 16 individual pieces of car (including two different 'states' for each hand). Often, because of the way all the tiny limbs were laid over the top of each other it was easier to take the whole puppet apart and re-pose him from the feet upwards rather than try and move one or two pieces without disturbing the rest. It really tested my patience as an animator used to having an undo button. Altogether I actually really enjoyed the challenge, and for a week's work, it is maybe one of my favourite creations.

Working with Brenda again on our final project was a joy. We have a really good working relationship, with space to play and experiment, and a confidence in each others ability to get work done to a high standard. We also share lots of ideas in politics and philosophy, and about art in general so there was a level of trust when tackling some of the more sensitive or subjective elements in our project that we were coming at things from the same angle. Aesthetically I allowed Brenda to set the tone of the animation - the collage style that much of the film is based on is something that she has more experience of working in than I do, but from a technical point of view (if not necessarily an artistic one) I was able to keep pace with her, and I think the film does work as a contiguous whole even though we worked on individual scenes independently. There was always input, advice and suggestion when we needed it, or when a scene was nearly done and ready for tweaking. Despite our annoyance when Walter, the music student we were meant to work with, ending up being a total tool, I actually really enjoyed the process of building up the soundtrack with relevant samples and sound effects. It is clearly the work of someone who doesn't really know what they are doing - and if I'd had more time I would have made the effort to clean up the muddier clips and prepare our samples properly in Audition before adding them to the Logic project. The only real negative I have about not collaborating with someone for the audio is that we had intended to have a back and forth sort of relationship, in which the sound would affect what we animated, and vice versa - which probably would have tied in the audio and visuals more tightly. What ended up happening is that by the time we ended up cutting all ties with Walter the vast majority of the animation was done, and it seemed to make more sense to get it all finished and then focus on making the soundtrack.

EXTENDED: Completed!

Yesterday Brenda and I decided we were satisfied with the soundtrack that we had made, which means that the film is complete!

We now need to decide how best to display it at the exhibition. Ben suggested having it printed onto 16mm film and projecting it, but when me and Brenda looked into it it doesn't seem practical;
Firstly, we couldnt find anywhere in Britain that still offers that service, which would mean having to get the reel shipped to us from a studio overseas and in order to have it ready for the show we will probably have to pay through the teeth for express shipping.
Secondly, due to how little in demand this service is it would cost us over £100 each, plus shipping costs, which seems like an unaffordable extravagance really.

EXTENDED: Music progress

Our soundtrack is really coming together. I have been in the soundbooth for a few days now hacking away at the newsreel clips and public service announcements that we had collected for Walter. Brenda has been doing a really good job of finding relevant samples for me to use at the same time as her other jobs so there is a lot for me to work with, and the film is still coming together.

EXTENDED: Musical Difficulties

After a month and a half since we briefed Walter, the LCOM student who wanted to work on our project, we still haven't received any work. He is also becoming increasingly difficult to contact as he takes days or weeks to respond to emails and messages.

As Plan B I decided to begin working on the soundtrack last week, but as a non-musician it was slow going and in a days work only managed to produce about 6 seconds of not very good audio.

I don't know how much fault lies with me and Brenda, as we were slow to begin sending him work, or how much is him being totally incommunicative, but this is the first time I have ever experienced such a lack of contact when collaborating with someone - especially someone who expressed so much interest in the project right from the start, and has repeatedly tried to convince us to keep them onboard, despite not outwardly seeming like he can be bothered.

Sisyphus finally accepted

Sisyphus made it onto Loopdeloop!

EXTENDED: Zine

We finally got round to printing our zines in the flesh (despite setbacks).
There is something really nice about the quality of screen-printing, which makes each copy unique. I also think our choices of inks and card stock worked really nicely too. It was good to get in the print studio and away from computers for a bit.

EXTENDED: Archive footage

We are trawling through archive.org finding footage from old news-reels, public information films and advertising. The footage we find can be rotoscoped over, cut up and manipulated to form part of the montage/collage effect.

I am also looking through some of the better videos to find audio samples which might help Walter with the soundtrack.

EXTENDED: Music

On Monday we met with Walter from LCOM, to discuss the project and see if he is up for doing some music/sound design for us. He seemed quite keen and interested in the project, but has a lot on, so may not be able to see it all the way through.

We have shared with him some artists whose music we like the sound of, as well as a series of animations which show either a similar style of audio or visuals to what we are aiming for.

Hopefully the film will end up like some bastard child of Ballard and these videos:

https://vimeo.com/album/4797567

EXTENDED - The Atrocity Exhibition, my Zine pages

My 5 pages for the zine are complete. They each loosely correspond to a section or a couple of sections from the book. Brenda is also making a 4 images, one of which is a double page spread.

YCN - Action on Hearing Loss

I submitted my YCN videos today. Overall I am pleased, although I think the concept is stronger than my outcome, and definitely could have been expanded upon. Partly this is because I had other projects on the go at the same time and didn't allow myself much time to work on it.

Ideally I would have extended the concept into a series of posters as well, as I think that the slogan 'real life doesn't have subtitles' has a lot of scope.

YCN - Action On Hearing Loss from Tom Hallgarten on Vimeo.

YCN - Action On Hearing Loss

The three subjects I have chosen to animate are a telephone, a train and a canon. I think they show a good range of something most people only see on television (a canon), something commonly seen (a train), and something completely mundane and everyday which you take for granted (the telephone).

The range shows how the series could be expanded upon into a longer series of videos or poster campaigns.

The videos have a bold aesthetic, using the Action On Hearing Loss brand colours.

Sisyphus completed

A Sisyphean Struggle from Tom Hallgarten on Vimeo.

My film is complete and submitted to Loop De Loop!

Sisyphus

My Sisyphus animation is done. It was by far the fiddliest animation I think I have ever made, as the character puppet was made up of 14 separate bits of paper!!

Annoyingly I forgot to put a black background down before I began animating. In the real Greek pottery the characters are either black with orange lines or orange with black lines, but they are always in contrast to the background colour. Because I forgot to put some black paper down before I animated it, Sisyphus is now the same colour as the background. I tried to rotobrush the background out in After Effects but it was too frustrating.

On Monday my friend is going to record some grunting sounds for me.

YCN - Action On Hearing Loss

My concept for the hearing loss brief is a very simple one, but it can be expanded across many iterations, and is ideal for a social media campaign.

A series of short videos show loud things happening; e.g a train or an ambulance rushing past, a rock concert, or fans at a football match. The video will be silent, and have a subtitle explaining the sound in the style of the audio description subtitles on TV, which are very direct and simple "loud train noises" or "crowd cheering". Then the tagline at the end of the video will be 'Real life doesn't have subtitles'

EXTENDED - The Atrocity Exhibition, MUSIC

I have been speaking with one of the students from LCOM about doing some music/sound design for the project. He initially seemed keen but cancelled our first meeting because of illness and hasn't been in contact since.

The logistical issues we face with getting somebody else to score the film are these;

1. We haven't even decided our animation workflow yet! We probably won't end up with a standard animatic to give him, as the film is going to be structured by 'themes' rather than scenes and won't necessarily have a traditional arc.
2. We will probably end up doing quite an intense back-and-forth workflow with the composer as we might end up animating to the sound just as much as they compose to the video....
3. We want to feel that the person doing our sound is familiar with the ideas and concepts in the book, but we obviously can't force anyone to read the original text.

If it comes down to it I am happy to make a stab at the sound myself, and Brenda is also up for doing some field recording, gathering audio-assets etc. Realistically this would solve all three major issues in one go, so apart from the fact that neither of us have very much sound experience, it does seem like the ideal solution.

Loop De Loop - Myth

February's theme for LoopDeLoop is 'Myth'

My initial thoughts jumed straight to the Greek myths that I used to read as a kid, and I thought about picking one or more of Heracles' 12 labours. The drawing style used on ancient Greek pottery is very distinctive, and actually quite cartoony, so I settled on that for a style.

As I was doodling Heracles and some of the monsters he fought I looked up and saw Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus on my bookshelf, and remembered the story of King Sisyphus who pissed off Zeus and was sent to the cruel punishment section of hell, cursed to roll a boulder up a hill forever. The story seemed a perfect fit, as just when Sisyphus gets to the top of the hill his boulder inevitably rolls down, thereby looping infinitely!

I would like to revisit using cutout animation.

EXTENDED - The Atrocity Exhibition

We have chosen to make a zine for our artbook, which we are planning on riso-printing or screen printing.  We have each gone through the book and decided on a handful of sections which we think have interesting visual or thematic contents which we would like to add to the film.

Each one of these sections will also be a page in our zine.

EXTENDED: 1960S and 70s inspiration

The Atrocity Exhibition was published in 1970, because of this we are trying to achieve a retro look with stock photos and footage from the 60s and earlier. Some of the main themes of the book include automobiles and automobile accidents, cold war paranoia, media saturation, and the main character's increasing mental illness. Many pop-culture and political figures crop up repeatedly throughout the story including Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy & Jackie O.

We have decided to go with a video-collage sort of style, inspired in part by the collages of Robert Rauschenberg and Ray Johnson. This way we can mix up stock imagery and footage with hand drawn or painted animation.

EXTENDED: Statement of Intent

The Atrocity Exhibition, written by J.G Ballard, and first published in 1970, is an experimental novel which deals with a wide array of 20th Century subject matter. Many of the book's themes, including media-saturation, political propaganda, and consumerism, are subjects that we have discussed in COP sessions throughout the last three years, and much of the language used in the book is rich in visual metaphor. Because of this we were drawn to the novel as a starting point for our film and our intention is to mimic the post-modern narrative structure of the story by focusing on the themes and concepts within the story, rather than depicting specific scenes or attempting to tell a single coherent storyline. We intend to take an abstract and experimental approach to the visuals, blending archive imagery and footage with our own animation to build up a layered montage of scenes related to key themes from the book. The themes we have identified, which will be broken up into loose "movements" within the film are:

1. Landscapes/Geometries/AnatomiesAs the main character in the book, Travis, slips slowly into psychosis he begins to mix mathematical or scientific language into his descriptions of his daily activities and the people he interacts with. This is a rich vein of visual metaphor which we would like to tap into.

2. Media Saturation
Travis has an obsession with the pop culture icons of the mid 20th Century, and the increase in consumerism and celebrity culture. Much of Ballard's work touches on the power of advertising and mass media which came about during the mid-20th Century.

3. Automobile Fetish
Parts of The Atrocity Exhibition foreshadow Ballard's most famous book, Crash, in which people feel sexual gratification whilst viewing images of car crashes and car crash victims.


4. Apocalypse/World War III
Travis' psychosis eventually becomes a fixation upon war and disaster, reflecting the paranoia of the Cold War during which the book was written. He begins conducting mass re-enactments of public disasters such as the kennedy assassination, remodelling them through his own personal experience of the events.

The finished article may not necessarily be recognisable as an interpretation of Ballard's text, but considering the abstract, montage writing style of the book it seems appropriate that the messages and content of the film will only be revealed to the viewer as part of a whole contiguous piece.

I am looking forward to working with Brenda again, after last year's success working with Rosie on Noelline's Flood for Applied. Brenda and I have very similar views on politics, philosophy and art - many of which are reflected in The Atrocity Exhibition. On top of this Brenda has a drive to experiment and try new methods and techniques, which is not only in line with the experimental mode of the novel, but will also push me to produce more interesting work.

EXTENDED - The Atrocity Exhibition

Me and Brenda have decided to work on a (probably very loose) adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard. I have read and enjoyed lots of Ballard's work before but never read this one.

The book is based around a central character who is slipping further and further into psychosis, and the text is broken up into separate segments which can be read in any order. The main character, whose name changes throughout the book, continuously uses mathematical or geographical language to describe human physiology, and vice versa, and the book has a really lovely visual quality to the writing.

We are planning on doing a quite experimental film, with collage, digital cutout and a kind of abstract/ambient soundscape.

Lifting Tower: Mario

Me and Ewan worked together making the Santa/Mario crossover. I made the characters and Ewan did all the backgrounds. On top of the Tetris and Pacman clips that I made, Ewan has done a Space Invaders one too, so we now have four separate clips that can be shown in order or dispersed throughout everyone else's work.

Lifting Tower - PACMAN

The Pacman animation was equally as easy to complete as Tetris (maybe I will just make pixel art from now on (joke)), in retrospect it actually doesn't have that 8Bit look like the Tetris one and Ewan's Space Invaders have, because I used proper round corners in all the Illustrator shapes, and also I didn't animate the movement in the same jerky way, but I think it will probably look fine when it is projected.

Complaints with Vimeo

As of October 2017 Vimeo Basic accounts can no longer see the very basic statistics that were once on offer to those who didn't have a paid-for account. It is the latest in a long list of features Vimeo has been stripping away from its basic users, in order to force people to subscribe to premium accounts.

Vimeo once had a reputation as a classier cousin to Youtube or Dailymotion, a home for creatives which "puts video first" as their slogan states. By slowly stripping away functionality from non-paid for users they are showing themselves to be just another profit hungry corporation - and the atmosphere of a well curated site run specifically for creatives begins to look like hollow elitism from a site that has barely a thirtieth of the number of users as Youtube.

Lifting tower - Tetris

Today I finished the entire Tetris animation.
The individual blocks were made in Adobe Illustrator and animated in After Effects. AE keyframing is perfect for this sort of animation as it is deliberately jerky and movement is done in mathematical steps.

Garde Dog Visuals

Beefy Squarms were approached by Cinnamon Collective, and asked to produce some visuals for a night of live music at Wharf Chambers. They had paired us with Leeds band Garde Dog and wanted some video material to be projected on a loop during the set.

We decided to each produce an individual section which would be played in sequence.
Cinnamon's logo for the event was a kind of colourful, glitch arty letter C. I am not really a fan of glitch art or the "VHS" kind of look that lots of people are using recently, but the highly saturated colour scheme seemed to fit in with the band's psych-funk sort of style, so I chose to replicate that style slightly.

Cinnamon Logo

My idea was to find copyright-free or creative commons footage of dogs, preferably scary looking ones, and animate short loops over the top of the clips.
It was quite hard to find exactly the sort of footage I wanted, but through a number of stock libraries and vimeo's creative commons section I managed to find a minutes worth of footage.
The actual animation I did was very basic, mostly just big icons in the centre of the screen with some line boil, or short simple loops. The most complicated part was the walk cycle of the doberman type dog, on a 3/4 angle to the viewer but even that was only 6 frames long.

Lifting tower project - 8 Bit Ideas

Me and Ewan decided to work together on the lifting tower brief. Whilst brainstorming we focused on the specific requirements that Jimmy had mentioned during the briefing.

1. The projection must be in 4:3 ratio and standard definition.
2. The projections will be shown on a dark background, so bright colours must be used.

Right off the bat we decided on an old school video game theme, as it would mean using bright block colours and simple shapes. We decided on four games:

• Tetris
• Space invaders
• Pacman
• Supermario Bros.

Each one will be "christmas-ified" in different ways, for example the Tetris blocks will be designed like wrapped gifts, and Pacman will be white with a hat and carrot nose like a snowman.

Applied animation: Evaluation

This module offered an opportunity to try something I hadn't done yet on the course, a really big and ambitious animation project within a team, and whilst I was initially not happy with the mandatory nature of it, we quickly decided on a topic that all three of us were interested in and excited about working on and this made me feel more happy about being put in groups. I differed from the Responsive collaboration in that all three of us this time round were animators, and would be working on a purely animation project rather than the mixed-platform approach we took in Responsive which allowed everyone's individual skills to be utilised separately.

The three of us quickly made good working relationships, which I think was helped by the fact that we all three were personally interested in the subject of sustainability and climate change. Originally we had discussed focusing on the issue of fracking, and were planning on conducting interviews with anti-fracking activists and campaigners to create a sort of vox-pop style documentary. At the time I was looking forward to making this sort of film, but I think we all had worries about making it original and having it stand out from the many hundreds of vox-pop and talking-head kind of animations out there. For this reason we were very excited when Devi Lockwood offered us the use of her collection of climate change stories, and the opportunity for us to create a really poetic documentary from a first-hand account of climate issues.

Initially we couldn't decide on which story we liked best from our shortlist, and so I came up with the idea of each of us picking one and then producing storyboards to pitch it to the group. At the time we all thought that was a smart idea, but actually when it came down to it I think the process of going through and creating storyboards kind of bonded us each to the story we had chosen, even if it wasn't particularly our favourite beforehand. This just made it seem a little bit harder to decide out of the three as it felt like we were competing with each other, and nobody wanted to concede. Eventually we settled on Noelline's story and Rosie's storyboards. I think there could have been some more hurt feelings after we had to have this discussion but luckily by this time we were all on board with the project and just wanted to make the best film we could.

Once that was settled we divided up roles and made a Gantt chart, but actually I don't think any of us looked at it again after we had made it. What we hadn't anticipated was that because of the aesthetic we had decided on, with a mix of real and digital watercolours, the animation process was going to be quite piecemeal until near the very end when compositing could begin. I began putting the pitch-bible together whilst Rosie and Brenda began on key frames and backgrounds, respectively, but again the pitch-bible was going to be something that was worked on and tweaked throughout the course of the project as more and more artwork became available.

For lots of this module I felt like I wasn't able to give my full attention to it, in part due to having a very big and ambitious collaborative project going on in Responsive, and when that had finished I turned my attention to finishing my COP submission. Also for a while at the beginning of production I felt like I wasn't having much influence or impact on the project. The visual style was very much Brenda's, and the storyboards had remained virtually unchanged from Rosie's very first thumbnails.

Similarly to Responsive, I found myself spending 11 or 12 hours in the studio practically every day, and working efficiently but still feeling like I wasn't putting a dent in the work I had left to do. I also completely neglected to blog what I was doing each week, but realistically with 60+ hours per week dedicated to actually doing the work I really couldn't be bothered to spend any more time talking about said work (not having access to a computer when college is shut also helps.)

I was surprised to find out I quite enjoy the task of inbetweening - just put on some music and it becomes a kind of automatic action - and getting into the kind of work-trance that is required for that sort of repetitive stuff is quite easy for me. I think to some degree I did resign myself to just doing the menial labour of the project and letting Brenda and Rosie really run the show, but then later on I took control of compositing and adding After Effects animation and visual effects, and I felt like I had finally really contributed to the production.

Altogether I am really proud of the outcome of this project. The animation itself is finished to a pretty high standard, and visually it has a strong style due to a combination of the watercolour aesthetic we chose and Brenda's really beautiful character designs. But more than just this, I think as a group we really researched and planned the project in a way which I haven't really done so far and it has resulted in what is probably a much more rounded and complete piece of work than I have often achieved before.

Crit Presentation 2

Crit Presentation 1

Noelline's Flood - Press Pack

Sustainability Award Submission

Applied: Dividing out roles

Since the interim crit we have tweaked our Gantt chart, and divvied up different roles. I wrote the copy for the pitch bible whilst Rosie and Brenda prepared assets such as the concept art and pre-production imagery. The pitch bible will be an ongoing process which will be completed as we go along the production schedule.

It was decided that the most important thing for a consistent visual feel to the piece is the watercolour painted backgrounds. As Rosie and Brenda's styles differ wildly and I am an unexperienced painter, we chose Brenda to paint all the background for the video. The brush pack that Rosie prepared for us will allow us all to chip in with the digital painting, which - for two reasons - will not be so jarring as if the backgrounds were jointly painted.
Firstly, because the character colours will be animated, and therefore always in motion, it will be more difficult to notice any stylistic differences that may occur between the three of us.
Secondly, due to the nature of digital painting, graphics tablets, the limits of the brush pack, and a simplified and restricted colour palette, our individual styles are likely to be less distinct from each other than they would be if we were attempting to paint with natural media.

Rosie has been given the role of animating keys, which I will then in-between, and Brenda is going to paint backgrounds. Once Brenda is finished with the painting she will join either me or Rosie, depending on which one of us looks like they need most help. This will hopefully free me up to begin on compositing the various scenes.

Applied: Animatic

Here is our animatic for Noeline's story. Rosie cut the audio down from its original length but was careful not manipulate Noeline's words.

Whilst quite fiddly, it wasn't difficult to make the animatic, as the timings of each shot were mostly dictated to us by the pace that Noeline delivers her story.

Applied: Rosie's media tests

We decided quite early on that we wanted to use watercolours in the animation for two main reasons. Firstly that they would add a lovely hazy wet feel to a story which revolves around water, rain and flooding. Secondly that Noeline is recounting a story that happened nearly 80 years ago - and that hazy feel will also add to the idea of the story being a distant and foggy memory.

Whilst I was getting on with the storyboards and animatic, and Brenda was designing characters and creating their style sheets, it was Rosie's task to test out different media so we could decide how to actually go about creating frames. It was decided that painting in Photoshop using special watercolour brushes would be the quickest and most efficient way to animate whilst retaining the look we want. Rosie has prepared a list of the best brushes she found in her tests.

Applied: Storyboards

Here are our storyboards for Noeline's story about the flood. I am turning these into an animatic synced with the voice recording.

Applied: Storyboards

Today we met to show each other our storyboards and to decide on a narrative to follow.
Below are my quick thumbnails - very roughly timed to my transcription of the recording of David talking about the squashed frogs on Alabama highways.

After making an animatic from my thumbnails we all got together to watch the three animatics. We still couldn't decide on which to choose but eventually decided against Brenda's story because the quality of the audio recording was just not good enough - even though it was probably the best story. We drew up a list of pros and cons for mine and Rosie's stories, and eventually chose Rosie's because of the quality of the recording, and of the narration itself. Rosie has shared her storyboards with us and me and Brenda are going to look over them together and feed back any changes or tweaks we would like to see.

Applied: Knostrop Visit

We thought it would be a nice idea to visit the waste water treatment plant in Knostrop, South Leeds where all the fracking waste water from the UK is sent to be processed. The idea was to get more primary research, to collect photographs and make some drawings etc. but when we got to the entrance (after a half an hour walk into the middle of nowhere) multiple signs told us trespassers would be prosecuted. We expected not to be able to snoop around the whole site, but unfortunately because it was surrounded by trees and muddy lakes visibility of the plant was incredibly limited.

Applied: Devi's recordings

Over the weekend Devi sent us a Dropbox folder with the recordings we were interested in after our chat. After we each listened to the recordings the three of us came together to identify ones which we all agreed would be nice to animate, or had a strong climate change/sustainability message. Out of the six that I really liked, Brenda and Rosie were also interested in three or four of them.

The best story that we all liked was a man talking about the experience of farmers whose land and water was being contaminated by chemicals as a result of fracking. This story was exactly what we were looking for from the start, since we started out with fracking as the area of "sustainability" that we were interested in pursuing. Unfortunately this recording was made at a music festival, and try as we might it was impossible to remove the background noise to any usable point without completely distorting the voice.

Another nice tale was from a man, now living in Australia, who was originally from Alabama. He spoke about how his neighbourhood used to get infested with toads who liked to eat the swarms of flies and crickets attracted to the electric lights. On returning home after a 15 year absence he was shocked to see no more toads - which he related to a drastic change in the climate. He also mentioned having worked for a wind-energy company, who found their plans for a farm in California scuppered by Bob Hope's wife who didn't like the look of the turbines and used their connections to have the project binned.

We have agreed that, in order to decide on a story we will each pick one, make storyboards for it, and then reconvene. We can then look at the three storyboards, and decide on which one we want to continue to develop. I picked the toads story, Rosie picked a story about an old lady whose town flooded when she was a child, and Brenda chose the fracking story discussed above. Brenda's challenge is to find some way of making the background noise seem less intrusive.

--

We are taking a trip to Knostrop on Thursday, to a chemical processing plant which is used by fracking companies to dispose of their waste water. We plan on getting a few drawings and photographs, which may come in handy if we decide at some point to move our project back to a more fracking based approach. Also on Thursday we will share our storyboards with each other.

Applied: Meeting with Devi

Last night we went out for a pizza with Devi and discussed her project, and the stories she has collected. She suggested that instead of her narrating a story to us she would be able to give us one of her field recordings to use. This is really great news as it means we will be animating somebody's first-hand experience of climate change related issues.

During our chat we went through Devi's field notes on each of the recordings she made, and highlighted some which sounded interesting and suitable for our project. Devi is going to send us the recordings and hopefully we will be able to find something to use as the basis of our animation.

Applied: Devi Lockwood

We went to Preston New Road, near Blackpool where there is a new Fracking drill site which currently has a pretty much permanent protest camped outside its gates. We got some great photos of the signs, which we are thinking of incorporating into an animation as they are so bold and striking.

Yesterday, Rosie made it to a Frack Free Leeds meeting, and got speaking to a poet and journalist called Devi Lockwood. Devi cycled round the world collecting people's first hand stories of the impact of climate change. we are meeting with her again tonight (Tuesday 7th) to speak to her further, and hopefully to collect a story or two to animate if Devi is up for it.

This would be a really nice opportunity to make a narrative led documentary, on a an issue that is still quite removed from people's everyday lives in the UK (for the time being), but has very powerful and immediate effects for people in poorer parts of the world.

We are also continuing to look at protest camps and occupations which we might be able to visit in order to build up a body of stories, opinions and alternatives from people living in areas which will be affected by fracking.

Applied: Sustainability

I have teamed up with Brenda and Rosie for the applied documentary brief, and we have decided to choose sustainability as our theme and focus specifically on fracking. There are lots of infographic-y type animations out there which visualise the process of fracking, and explain the possible side effects, but few of these actually stated whether or not fracking was a good idea or not, preferring to stay neutral. For example:

As a group we all agreed that fracking is not a sustainable or worthwhile process to engage in. Not only does it have detrimental effects on the land and the lives of people living in the areas surrounding drilling sites, but the continued use of fossil fuels as an energy source is a hole we cannot dig ourselves out of.

The biggest and most obvious example of the evils of fracking is Flint, Michigan in the USA, in which fracking for shale gas has resulted in the contamination of drinking water supplies which has led to in an increase in the levels of lead and other toxic substances in the blood of schoolchildren, and a higher likelihood of a variety of cancers and birth defects. In rural communities there have been sharp increases in livestock infertility, deformed young and mortality rates.

Aside from these side effects - which are admittedly easy to ignore if you are an energy company executive living in a mansion on Bishop's Avenue, or an MP in the Westminster bubble -the introduction of shale gas into the UK energy infrastructure will increase carbon emissions by 11%, when our government has already "committed" to reducing emissions. The UK's climate Change Act of 2008 set specific targets for reduction in emissions by 2050 which will be completely unattainable if we introduce fracking into the energy industry.

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We have decided to take a slightly different tack to the video shown above. We thought that it would be interesting to try a vox-pop style documentary, in which we discussed with people their ideas for alternatives and for improving our current carbon output.

From the top of my head I think it would be interesting to talk to somebody from Leeds University physics department, who I know are currently researching improvements in the storage and release of solar energy. As well as this there are a number of anti-fracking organisations in and around Yorkshire who may have spokespeople that would like to speak to us. Rosie suggested a visit to Blackpool as there is a lot of fracking activity in that area, along with a lot of people attempting to block this action.

Character and Narrative - Limitations in Aesthetics

As far as I can tell the one true limitation of hand drawn animation is the ability (or lack of) to portray realistic depth within a shot. This limitation is based on the fact that, even when utilising parallax effects, it is nearly impossible to achieve a truly three-dimensional looking space in the same way that CGI can. With CG animation the lighting and shading effects alongside imitation lens and motion blurs can give an effect of the third dimension that is almost as real as if it were live action film. In contrast to this, while not technically impossible, it is beyond the reach of any human being to draw and animate a scene that could closely imitate reality in the way 3D animation can.
I see this as the main limitation for traditional animation, and is one of the reasons 3D and digital animation has so many more uses - particularly for 3D which can now be seamlessly edited into live action footage, or used to create entire scenes and backdrops for actors to be placed in. Compare this to the look of Space Jam which while obviously very cartoony and unrealistic, still wasn't able to make Michael Jordan look like he was actually a pat of the scene, rather than just plonked on top of a hand drawn animation.

Character and Narrative - Traditional techniques in modern animation

Traditional techniques may be slowly being taken over by modern digital animating techniques but I think there will always be a place for traditional animation as a tool for getting to grips with the basics and solidifying the 12 principles. Even something as simple as animating a pendulum swing, a bouncing ball or a basic walk cycle is an invaluable step in learning the principles before moving on and applying them to a more specialist type of animation. There is no quicker or more accessible form of moving image than the flipbook - possibly the fastest tool an animator has to share an idea or concept, and while I don't think it is strictly necessary for an animator to be able to draw well (especially animators in the CG field) I think traditional techniques such as the line test will not go out of fashion as a quick way of previewing and tweaking with the timing of a shot or scene.

Character and Narrative - Texture in Traditional animation aesthetic

I have noticed a trend in lots of recent digital animation - applying textures to reduce the bland flatness of digitally coloured images. One example of an animation I think utilises this technique well, and for a number of reasons, is Drawing Inspiration directed by Wesley Louis and Tim McCourt. Whilst many background elements are actually painted in watercolour the character and prop animation is drawn and coloured digitally. Not only would these elements look anachronistic against a painted background, but the cartoony style of the characters could easily make it look playful and exciting - unlike the quite morose mood of the piece. The animation focuses on an alcoholic magician, and I think due to the slightly more mature themes portrayed in the film it would have looked weird if the art style used flat colours. It seems like for many animators who want to make films for adults, adding textures is a shorthand aesthetic cue which separates their work from children's cartoons.
In my own work I have used it as an alternative to line boil when a scene looks like it will appear to flat and lifeless, an animated texture can bring a bit of movement.

Another reason I think this trend has come about is due to a much wider movement in art away from digital techniques and towards more analogue or handmade aesthetics. I think this is due to some new snobbery about digital art now that it is so easy and cheap for the general public to create and publish their work. Maybe it is subconscious but I believe society or at least the art world is placing a renewed emphasis on the handmade, and this has resulted in the increased use of simulated paper textures, analogue noise and other overlays to add texture and depth to a flat image.
I used a similar technique during my "The Other Side" animation at level 4 - overlaying scans of old newspapers to break up the boring flat look of the animation.

Cartridge paper texture applied in Drawing Inspiration

Newspaper texture applied in my animation

Character and Narrative - Aesthetics

Traditional animation has possibly the most scope of all animation techniques in terms of aesthetics. Essentially the term "traditional animation" covers all forms of drawn or painted animation, and is therefore open to any style or aesthetic that can be physically produced in a 2D format and photographed. This can range from very simple black and white stick cartoons like the work of Don Hertzfeldt, to the incredible oil-painted production of Loving Vincent in the style of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. Traditional animation might be the most versatile in terms of aesthetics, and compared to the last 25 years or so of mainstream 3D animation the range of different art styles in traditional animation is vast.
When you look through the history of traditional animation the aesthetics are often linked closely to a social or artistic movement of the time. The very early commercially produced animations such as Flesicher Studio's PopEye the Sailor and Betty Boop films strongly resembled, and were often based on, the newspaper cartoon strips of the time. This aesthetic style was later developed on by Warner and Disney in their shorts, and when Snow White was released in 1937, Disney's aesthetic became the go to for fairy tale type stories for the next 30 years. Later in the 60s counterculture style infiltrated animations such as Fritz the Cat, based on Robert Crumb's pulp comic strips, and Yellow Submarine which drew heavily on the hippie movement aesthetic of the work of Milton Glaser and Heinz Edelmann.
These days we have the ability to look back on and borrow from the entire history of animation thanks to the internet and the instant accessibility we now have. This has allowed animators these days to imitate and reference, and broaden the aesthetic possibilities further.

Character and Narrative - Time/Budget Restraints & Limited Animation

30 seconds at 24 frames per second = 720 frames (or 360 on twos), a scary proposition for someone deciding to do traditional animation, especially if you don't like drawing digitally. I decided to use "limited animation" a time and money saving technique used throughout the history of traditionally drawn animation. Limited animation is the term used to describe a form of animation which reuses as many assets as possible, which became possible when animators began using transparent mediums such as celluloid or acetate to create frames which could be layered on top of each other and photographed all at once. The first major change this brought about was that the animators no longer had to draw the background in every single frame. One single background could be photographed below all the animated frames. When Winsor McCay animated Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914 the background was drawn anew in every single frame, compare this to his film The Sinking of the Lusitania produced four years later, which made use of layers of transparent cels layered above oil painted backgrounds.
Thanks to these new technologies it also became possible to animate individual characters separately, again allowing frames to be reused when certain characters weren't moving within a scene. This was later increased to using separate cels for separate moving parts on the same character, a good example of this being the Beatle's Yellow Submarine movie, in which many scenes are entirely static other than a single arm movement or a foot tapping to the music. In fact it was thought by King Features who produced the film that the film would have been impossible to make had they not used such limited animation (at the time of production no studio other than Disney had been able to produce a feature length animation without going bankrupt in the process).
These days with digital production techniques it is very easy to animate separate parts of a scene individually, and in my own production for Telling Tales I used Photoshop to repeat frames throughout the film.
The main issue I see with limited animation is a very flat and lifeless look in scenes in which there is little movement. Some easy tricks to make things look less dull are making static background characters blink every now and then, or producing line boil. "Boiling Line" means a wobbly look applied to outlines, normally by repeating a two or three frame loop which gives the illusion of movement. There are some plugins available for programs like Flash and After Effects which apply line boil to digital animation, but in my production I drew two frames for every still image to keep my character looking alive, and make the car look like it was being vibrated by its engine.

Character and Narrative - Evaluation

I really struggled to engage with this module, and felt thoroughly unmotivated and disinterested by both the set briefs and my own responses to them. The work I produced for Telling Tales was worse than mediocre - a dull story and visually very uninteresting. I find myself falling back on making work that I find easy to do when I am not interested in the brief or in my own ideas, and Road To Nowhere is an example of feeling like it wasn't possible to play or experiment within the confines of the brief, therefore resulting in a very safe and ultimately uninspired piece of animation.
Normally I find the process of animating much more satisfying than the end product itself, and am not usually worried about the outcome so much as the experience of making the work - but during Character and Narrative I found it a drag even to think about working, and have been more than happy to distract myself with less urgent business for COP or other modules. After the suggestion last year that changing projects to a more interesting idea after getting underway with another one was a waste of time, I spent a long time resisting starting work on a project I was not at all stimulated by, probably wasting more time in the process. I still believe that, as I am a confident and quick animator, my time would be better spent on long consideration of a project before getting underway with the work. I have often felt like there is a pressure or a rush to have settled on a story or project by the end of a briefing session, and I don't think that for me it is conducive to coming up with my best ideas.

In terms of the technical side of the Telling Tales animation, I consider the hand drawn elements to be a step down from work I have produced in the past, in fact there was very little actual animation involved, almost exclusively using line boil to bring life to a flat image. In the one scene in which I attempted to draw multiple frames (when the car drives off into the horizon) the animation is jerky, and the volume and shape of the car seems to warp and shift between frames.
Regardless of this I think that there were some small indications of a more interesting animation lurking under the surface of my Road To Nowhere. Had time constraints not played such a big role in my decisions about what to keep in and what to cut out of the film I would have liked to have seen more use of collage/montage and texture through the scanned elements.
Maybe the single achievement of the production of this piece is a growing familiarity with the intricacies of After Effects. I was able to very quickly transfer my knowledge of other Adobe software, particularly Photoshop, and through the use of adjustment layers, blending modes and effects was able to precisely tweak the look of the film, and to make sure each scene looked the same as the others, despite having been drawn with a range of pens on a range of papers.

I enjoyed playing with the puppet pin tool, mainly due to its speed, although I can't see it being massively useful to me. Similarly DUIK seemed like more effort than it is worth. The time taken to build the puppet in Photoshop, tweak the anchor points and positioning in After Effects and then rig it in DUIK seems excessive considering the limitations of the medium. I think in both cases I would prefer to use cutouts or traditional style animation. Both alternatives would allow me more control and a wider range of possibilities.

Strike A Pose was a fun exercise. I enjoy positioning and posing the puppet in Maya, but not building or rigging. Potentially I would like to try animating in Maya, in collaboration with someone who could provide the rigs. I found MOOM to be a bit of a fiddly character to manipulate, but was pleased with the facial expressions I managed to get out of him, if not so satisfied by the body positions. I found that sometimes looking in a mirror or at reference photos of myself was hard to translate onto MOOM because of the irregular proportions of his body. This is a consideration I will have to bear in mind in the future when modelling or animating in Maya.

In a wider sense I feel like this module compounded my feelings that the way I want to work (still not entirely clear to me) is incompatible with the university set up. I have often felt that the course in general is geared purely towards gaining a job "in the industry", with little to no compensation for those who are interested in animation as an art form (sometimes I forget I am at an "Art School" altogether), and this term has only bolstered those worries. Perhaps I don't want to sit behind a desk pushing a mouse around for Disney or Cartoon Network. Perhaps I don't want to tell tales with a central character and a clear narrative. Perhaps I don't want to write contrived stories which don't interest me just to fulfill the criteria of a brief. Perhaps this course isn't right for me, or I'm not right for the course.

Much soul searching to be done over christmas.

Strike a Pose

I think Moom is a rubbish model as you don't have much control over the legs, and I feel that lots of emotion is displayed through the stance. For example I wanted to turn the knees inwards for a cowering stance to indicate fear, but the knee joints don't have their own controls and only move up and down parallel to the body when controlled by the foot movement.

 

Confusion

 

Pain

Pride

Sadness

Surprise