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Stage 3 AUB blog

final project work

My stage 3 Blog - PUNNET

This is an animation project developed during second lockdown in 2021, if you are looking for what brought me to this point you can look back at my stage 1 and 2 blogs also on this site. The Word document on the right here tells you about my thoughts and the creative process of beginning this project.

This blog is where I will record my plans, thoughts, reflection, evaluation and creative process towards my final project.

My final project has grown out of a collaboration that started during stage 2 with another student on the animation specialism - if we're honest he's more of an illustrator and concept artist and I'm more of a film maker but we are both into animation as well together.

Since starting in September 2020 and being able to explore and better understand many aspects of the creative progress as I’ve developed through feedback and self-evaluation, I have kept my blog and now find it really useful to go back and look at my thinking at various stages on projects and the use of research to inform my choices as I go along. Following animation and not film was a difficult decision as I'm still not decided as to which specialism to focus on but I’ve found the animation specialism really helpful and has allowed me to play more with images without the limitations of live action. This has also suited the context of working in lockdown. In my final project I want to create something that demonstrates what I have learnt and also experienced during the global pandemic context using knowledge and research my short film will successfully explore isolation which could apply in many contexts and is not 'Deep Space' specific, is anything it is more about Loneliness in any context.

Getting started

some of the early sketches of the inside of his space capsule were experimental while looking for a style. I enjoyed animating the various panels of images in the capsule but it is very slow work due to the amount of work on each yellow section

Communist art PPT

Soviet art was one idea I got interested in but in the end thought it didnt work in the wider context as the idea moved twoards the dating sims the two things didnt work style wise.

Experiments with space images

The project is about isolation which is demonstrated by a central character who is in deep space alone orbiting a planet elsewhere in the universe. He has been left there by some accident or force beyond his control. This context gives the sense of disconnect that is necessary, it could just as easily be on a desert island or lost at sea. Many people have been isolated by the pandemic in their homes and although they were safe and well fed, emotionally they have been operating in a void without physical contact or social interaction apart from through a screen.

My research is going to be about the effects this has on humans, partly by reading studies on the effects of long term isolation but also by surveying a wide demographic of a wide range of ages I will then be able to see how my target age group of 18 – 30 felt about 'being locked down and how lockdown has effected them. I will then be able to use this research to inform the script or directly input to the internal dialogue my character has with himself and also with the voices in his head.

I will also study other films (not just in space) that use this kind of isolation to chart individuals journey through this kind of isolation I would like to use ‘real’ voices of people that I gather by recording peoples answers to how they felt in lockdown during the pandemic. The audience will not know if the voices are real or imagined in the narrative and this will give me the opportunity to explore the effects of interactions with the outside world and the likely effects on someone who is missing out on vital life experiences and growing older without the normal context. I will constantly evaluate the direction of this character’s journey as it coincides with a real life return to more normality in the world and may also change my perception of the stillness of isolation.

Urban space ideas.... things are still quite open at the moment.

I have worked collaboratively on the early stages of this project I hope to use this as a springboard for me not to complete the project solo but to carry on discussing and developing the idea from my discussions with my collaborator. The strength of our collaboration has been his visual arts skills combined with my story telling and editing. I will keep a record of how this changes in my blog. I think my research into the psychology may well be led into the area of how the character will emerge from the endless space isolation and what difficulties he might have. The end user context is going to be online on platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo and I will share and invite comment on this as a piece for other people between 18 and 30 who will all have had the similar life experience recently where they were unable to move forward or socialize or develop as much as they would had there been no pandemic. These end users will be the kind of audience who like many of my age group are familiar with Japanese cartoons, games and sims.

There is also the possibility that a game spin off could be an actual sim.

Style and form

I am going to draw on the style and format of Japanese dating Sims as a way of representing the central characters predicament. Alone in space and lonely he engages ( in his head or in reality - we don't know) with the kind of dating simulators popular in Japan. This gives me the style of the text box dialogue the tree of death choice systems and the Anime style drawings that typify these programs.

Preproduction

My thought at this stage is to use the device of the dating Sim ( and the style and format) to demonstrate what the character is thinking and which dimension of his imagination he is is at any one time. Possibly all the text boxes could be in Japanese which will make the character even more cut off.

March 1st 2021

So I have my project idea but its fair to say that I am finding the 'stage 3' deadlines and pressure to stick to my final idea and plan quite tricky. Partly because I find my ideas morph and change as I go along and writing a plan, timeline etc is often out of date by the time I've written it. I know this is a weakness so Im trying to stick to the external deadlines set and also to set my own plans up.

It doesn't help that as well as stage 2 assessment I've got portfolios to send to various courses and also the whole lockdown thing is really getting me down. Not being able to see people and go out makes my brain work slower and i find time passes really quickly without me noticing and suddenly 2 days have passed without any progress. I think this is to do with isolation and lack of external stimulation. Im struggling with exactly what the final product will look like. I am going to try explaining my plan to a range of different people and see if that helps me see what it is more clearly.

This is the script idea I came up with so far.

At the moment we are thinking about what the style should be. i dont want the focus to be too much on the Deep space element of the problem. this is more of a device for the isolation

I'm trying to sort out going back to Bournemouth to the Halls of residence but its hard to work out who is there and getting a covid test, meet deadlines and rules about travel during a pandemic plus find time to talk to Leo each day about what we are doing.

March 6th - RESEARCH - Primary sources

Im putting together a survey so that I can research peoples feelings about lockdown and isolation. What I want to do is get people to record two separate sentences about lockdown and isolation on their phones and send them to me so I can edit them together. This doubles up as research and a possible soundtrack for parts of my film where he is hearing voices.

Update on this

After trying this with a few people I realised that the method was going to obstruct the outcomes, by this I mean that by asking for verbal recorded contributions less people were comfortable with the technology. also I think the fact that people wouldn't be anonymous because their comments were linked to them by their voices they were less willing to be honest. I abandoned the recording idea and moved to a written question and answer and promised anonymity.

Instead of the recordings of jumbled words being edited together I copied the entire answers texts which i had typed up into one document and fed that text into the wordcloud generators - see below.

Primary Research project

As my project is about isolation and some of my secondary research is about the effects of isolation on the brain and the psychological effects.

I thought I should counter it with some primary research to find out how isolation effected people during lockdown. I asked people to record themselves finishing these sentences on whatsapp and send them to me.

I missed seeing people during lockdown because….
I found myself doing more
When I got bored in lockdown I …..
Lockdown made me feel ….
Anything else?

I recorded the responses in a table. I sent it to about 60 people and got 45 responses.

I asked people to keep each answer to less than ten words.

I was going to use the recordings but then I realised it effected what they said so I told them recording wouldn’t be used an it would be anonymous.

The process I used to gather the above primary research was to Whatsap the questions to a range of different contacts. Not everyone responded. I then gathered the survey outcomes into a table in which I included the demographic of the person and the answers they gave. When looking at the outcomes I found it interesting that people mostly focussed on what they were missing and probably the very oldest and the youngest were missing the most, some of those between 25 and 60 were not missing going to work or commuting very much and took up other things to fill their time. The young particularly my age group felt as if they were missing out on key experiences.

This is the outcomes of the survey presented in a table.

Research into the effects of isolation on the human brain and how film makers have used this in a variety of contexts - SECONDARY SOURCES

I found there was a lot of psychological research around people mental health during and after isolation. From isolation on desert islands, in prison cells, deep space, in log cabins up mountains or dramas where a person is cut off from the rest of society it is clear that isolation psychosis is both real and something that fascinates us.

There are many film examples such as Moon, Gravity, Alien etc where deep space and being cut off is the setting for the drama. Desert island stories like Robinson Crusoe or Castaway also tell the stories of a solitary journey into some kind of madness.

In Moon (2009) for example

Sam (played by Sam Rockwell) is getting close to the end of his current job in space, which means that for three years he’s been in total solitude, his only companion an artificially intelligent computer named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) that moves its robot arms around the base, and has a tiny screen where it communicates. (The tiny screen communications is something i see as important when you only have one character)

Sam’s live satellite feed to Earth hasn’t worked for a while, meaning his only viewings of his wife back home are through prerecorded messages. Isolation is clearly taking its toll on Sam’s mind, because he begins seeing things: He glimpses strange footage of himself on a TV monitor. The messages from his wife seem to contain abrupt edits. And worst of all, he sees a girl who isn’t there.

One day when he is working on a technical problem, his hallucinations distract him, leading to an accident. Cut to the medical centre , where Sam is waking up, good as new. His bosses back on Earth confine him to base, but Sam defies orders and heads out to the lunar surface, where he discovers a crashed rover. Inside is one lone occupant, near death, who looks and sounds exactly like him, and also believes himself to be Sam Bell.

cognition

cognitive decline

hippocampus

learning and memory

loneliness

mental health

neuroscience

prefrontal cortex

social distancing

social isolation

This is the research I did on how extreme isolation warps the mind

Castaway (Zemeckis - 2000)

Castway charts the journey of the central character after he is marooned on a desert island, the film tells the story of his gradual decline as he survives the harsh conditions but craves human contact and eventually creates a friend from a volleyball that rushes up that he calls Wilson.

I made Cast Away because I wanted to examine the concept of four years of hopelessness, in which you have none of the requirements for living — food, water, shelter, fire and company. (Tom Hanks 20170

Moodboard Isolation

Storyline developments March 8th

I'm working on submission of my proposal for this project and felt i needed to update the storyline in relation to some changes. Today I attended a seminar on writing up proposal. I am realising I need to document all my changes.

How the storyline is developing in response to new ideas and feedback from peers through tutorials.

Gender and representation thoughts - evaluating the idea of the central characters views

So issues of gender have come up especially in relation to the dating and possible objectification of the other characters in the head of the 'astronaut' ( Im calling the main character this now as it is ungendered).

Anime and Manga and generally Japanese culture could be perceived as reasonably sexist which is a reflection of the society.

Of course, this affects Japanese entertainment: Japanese writers write from a Japanese perspective about things that happen most often in Japan, and even when that isn’t true the author’s Japanese culture will still be their biggest influencers. Understanding this helped me to reflect on my own practice and to understand that we are all the products of the society, tribes or families that we grow up in. That is why feedback is so important because if you only ever show your work to people like you then you will never understand a wider perspective,

There is a low-key sexism in most anime and manga that probably isn’t perceived as such by its regular users (but jumps at anyone not familiar with the genre) and that one might not even notice at first glance. It’s difficult to precisely explain what this looks like. I am starting to think about it in relation the character of the nurse as all the manga and anime nurses I can find are very reflective of the male gaze ( the way men see something) and because men have more power in society as a male artist I have to be more aware of this stuff. This becomes more confused for me in relation to my project as if the central character, astronaut, is having sexualised fantasies about nurses because astronaut has been locked in a space for decades he is not so much influenced by society around him and more his memories and if they are sexist in their origin then it would be unreal for me to make them more modern and less objectifying. I could turn it on its head and make the nurses male but I would still be objectifying them so is that any better? Here are some of the manga and Anime images I've researched.

Gender and male bias in Anime in general

I think by choosing to base the work on Japanese dating sims there was no way to avoid the sexism and obvious male bias of Anime and Manga, just working on the images has made me more aware of the perspective the work comes from and the fact that largely it is a teenage boy market it is aimed at.

Hopefully in terms of my work - context is everything and the more discerning audience will see that it is the only way to tell the story within the chosen frame work and the less discerning or the ones who have consumed a heavy diet of Manga and Anime in the past will see something different in this story and think about the portrayal of the non gendered central character. This leads me onto explore more about the Japanese Dating Sim.

I have done some research into the genre and this is here.

Japanese Dating games as a genre

Dating sims, or romance simulation games (恋愛シミュレーションゲーム, ren'ai shimyurēshon gēmu), are a sub genre of romantic video games.

Capturable = what dating sims are called in Japan

In Japan, dating sim characters are referred to as "capturable" — whether that means you capture hearts or bodies depends on the game story and style.

Dating sims often have a lot of dialogue either spoken or written as a subtitle giving the feel of a comic or a graphic novel and they are often set against a time barrier by which things must be completed.

I see this as a great opportunity with an animation to play with the moving animated image and use the moving text box to convey narrative for Punnet.

Usually the player must befriend and carefully build and maintain a relationship with one or more characters. The gameplay is largely dependent on data and statistics. The player is trying to improve their personal stats by achieving this quickly in the time. They can be combined with other genres such as role play games eg Sakura Wars and Persona.

The term "dating sim" is also sometimes used incorrectly in English as a generic term for romance-driven games

in Japanese (恋愛ゲーム, ren'ai games), especially romantic stories.

Most of the games can be played many times with differing outcomes. They have tools or functions such as being able to skip text, multiple save slots, quick save features. You can also rewind in some of them which gives players a chance to experiment with different outcomes.

There is also a version of this genre aimed at women. This is what Wikipedia says about Otome

'An otome game (乙女ゲーム, otome gēmu, literally "maiden game"), is a story-based video game that is targeted towards women. Generally one of the goals, besides the main plot goal, is to develop a romantic relationship primarily between the female player character and one of several traditionally male characters. This genre is most established in Japan, and is mostly made up of visual novels and simulation games; particularly dating sims and life simulation games.

Playing with narrative and the game genre in Punnet'

Although personally Im not really interested in playing games like this for real I do like the way it plays with the narrative so that you can work backwards from the outcome to find out the beginning. Each different partner or play can result in a different outcome.

In terms of the narrative in Punnet – it is almost as though you could join it at any point in the story as because you don’t know where reality starts and finishes so the astronaut is playing the game which ends in the blue screen of death but like in most games can then be restarted from further back in the story. This the essence of Punnet as it starts and loops and comes back again, much as the astronaut’s days and nights must be with nothing different to stimulate and change them. Much as isolation is when what happens is a kind of brain fog caused by lack of stimulation and change, this seems to lead humans to a psychotic state where they imagine to take the place of the lack of real things.

My game video storyline - how it runs now

The main character who is ambiguously gendered is alone in the cockpit of their ship and has been for what could be decades, their loneliness is unbearable but their insanity allows them to completely immerse themselves in a Anime Japanese dating simulator on their computer which they play over and over and over again to interact / socialise (even if they aren't real or speak the same language) Earth is in a bad way due to humans now and our spaceship is one of many ships that have been sent off to terraform other planets.

Their insanity is somewhat due to the psilocybin mushrooms that grow on the ship because of the vegetation reactor. The vegetation reactor exploded/malfunctioned on the ship and killed everyone else onboard, made the ship immobile/broken and uninhabitable save for one room which is where the protagonist just sits.

They drink their mushroom blend (tea) as a way of escapism and have broken all mirrors and wear a helmet and spacesuit so that they don't even know what they look like or what sex they are.

They then get up from their chair saying "im feeling extroverted" after drinking tea and having the game bluescreen

They open up the pressurised door that would lead them into the rest of the ship and this is where the character gets sucked out into space and slowly dies

However we dont know this has happened and neither does the main character because of 1) mushrooms 2) oxygen deprivation to the brain 3 dimethyltriptamine being released because they are dying

So the game carries on as our character essentially lives their fantasy of going through the ship and finding a lot of new and different people to talk to (and date since they only play a dating simulator and visualise everything through this lens)

until they come to terms with something and then only at the very end we see what's actually happened and it just shows them being dead in space

and so our intro scene foreshadows this with the dating sim character in a hospital bed contemplating and staring out the window but a girl enters then more and more girls enter until the game does the blue screen of death

so its like he distracts himself with girls / boys (ambiguously gendered) but ultimately it leads him to death

March 15th

Problem solving

Ironically given that the main character blue screens at the end i started to encounter huge problems with space on my hard drive. Files that I had saved in premier pro disappeared and became unlinked in my edits. I sort tech help and was told it was because i was still using Windows 7 and Ppro is no longer supported. So the solution was install Windows ten.

Then i didnt have enough space left to install windows ten and yet no one could find what was taking up the space on my C drive. I went around in circles. I kept trying to edit in Windows 7 as deadlines and tutorials were coming but it kept losing files.

In the end I had to take a risk and reset to factory settings and then when there was space install windows 10. Once i did this I lost various connections to other edited work but had managed to save the key files in the cloud.

Storyboard

How to frame and present the text boxes

The text boxes have been through a number of redesigns before I was completely happy with them.

As mentioned before I stared with an idea a bit like a graphic novel with text in boxes and possible speech bubbles for actual speech.

So i looked at lots of different styles of text boxes in a range of media...

My thinking behind putting the text in the dating sim part of the film into Japanese is that the astronaut doesn't need to understand, being as distanced as he is from real life in his space bubble, watching this is as mystifying as watching something in Japanese.

April 3rd

All the technical problems I had set back my progress quite a bit. They made me quite frustrated because I would frequently have to redo sections of my work that didn’t save or got deleted. This became quite tedious quickly and stunted my motivation. I felt that the more creative I tried to be with the editing, the more I was punished by the lack of a memory space on my laptop.

editing in Premier pro

Backgrounds

Hospital So I decided on the sterile hospital scenes and the surreal atmosphere. Leo came up with these backgrounds for me to use in the edit, the rendering and the creation of the objects took time and care. I have been cutting out different parts of the image of the bed so i can create the effect of perspective and put the various characters in front or behind.

The cockpit view comes to life

This is a relatively harmless version of a happy nurse but still has elements of disney eyes and purple hair and tight fitted uniform

This image is ambiguous and non offensive but maybe not what a person who is having sexualised thoughts would see in a space ship

This nurse is sadder in mood, more buttoned up and less sexualised generally

This Nurse Joy from the Pokemon series, friendly and open and appealing to many without being sexualised

So here by juxta positioning these images together I have demonstrated what reality looks like against fantasy. This does not address the deeper seated issues in society but more holds a mirror up to show the difference in depiction.

Probably even more relevant with the work that nurses and hospital staff have been doing lately.

For the purposes of this work I think it is important to acknowledge that this is one persons fantasy locked away in space not my image of what a nurse should or could look like. Maybe a non Japanese audience will find the images unsettling and if that makes them question and art form they have previously just accepted then thats a good thing. it is just hard to represent what the character would in fact think like whilst not portraying sexist images.

So these are the early drafts of one of the nurses in the work. These characters were drawn by Leo in response to our plans to introduce the nurses in the first scene in the hospital

First pitch plan

Project planner - timeline for PUNNET

Some feedback I got was that the depiction of the nurses maybe misinterpreted so here is my response

From old style comics to modern comics and super hero comic books and low tech games there are many different styles and ways of using the text box to communicate what cant be said in the pictures.

In this old style comic the drawing is in a box outside the image box.

It tells a whole story in prose where the characters say things much more simply. when i was a child i just read the speech bubbles

In this later bananaman comic most of story is told in the pictures and the speech bubbles but short bits of narrative are in the yellow boxes. we can also see a different kind of bubble for sound effects in this.

In this X-men comic aimed at older readers the text takes up much more space in the frame. Thoughts are depicted by bubble joins and speech has a steady curve. There are a lot more conventions established such as a use of capital letters throughout all the styles of comic text bubbles. this one also uses a different backing colour for the narrative

As the comics get more sophisticated and conventions are more established - things can be less colour coded and the audience still understands. A bit like in the way film editing has developed over time so that juxtaposition and montage can be 'read' by the audience.

In Anime because they are japanese it makes it easy to make for other languages becuase all you need to do is change the text.

In this KFC dating sim the conventional amine text string is demonstrated

I looked at all these conventions and the various devices and apps for generating the text.

Click Me

we did some interesting work looking at animators, producers, storyboard artists in our animation specialism groups. E.g.

I enjoyed working this way because we could explore something without worrying and it was ost like being in a class together

Iately with one technical issue after another this was how i felt. Still working at home with only reote tech support was challenging

Developing the hospital visitors

WARNING -Some of the following characters, edits and photos are large files and take a while to load.

Problems

Magic wand tool doesn’t work or the ultra key doesn’t work or the green screen

I put the image in photoshop I manually go around the insides of the shape with the rubber tool and after I have rubbed out the outsides

Then I can use the magic wand tool with 100% tolerance –

It creates perspective so that you can have the characters comes from behind the bed or under or through the door etc.. you can go wild with that….

This is like a virtual game within the film – its what the main character is playing and then it zooms out from that and reveals it was the astronaut playing the game.

The process is drawing made into a GIF or a video. I then use ultra-key to remove the background of the videos so they can be translated onto our display.

Next, I cut the GIF into segments, making sure to isolate the still image so that I can move the character around and position them to my liking onto the background. Once I’m happy with the positioning I layer the animation onto the still image where necessary.

This is done using ‘nesting sequences’ which let you apply effects and edit sequences as a single clip rather than by modifying the multiple clips inside it. I like to tinker around, reversing the animation speed, something which creates a fluid and natural looking looping motion in the video.

Problem solving

My project has been marred by a string of technical issues which have set back my progress. For example, when I returned to campus, I had to transfer all of my work from my desktop computer in London. I did this by uploading my footage to YouTube and then downloading it again. However, the video was only uploaded with the highest quality being 360P. I couldn’t change this and after being transferred, the video became very low quality. I had to fix this by adding an effect; as the character initially wakes up, this compressed and low quality footage is shown. Then they blink and the image becomes more crisp and clear. I made this a reality by creating a blinking effect, using continuous motion from a first-person point of view to make the edit seem less blatant. Luckily, I still had the assets to make a clear and crisp version of the same image which got compressed. I didn’t use motion tracking shortcuts when I created the blinking effect, I thought it would look more natural if I eyeballed it.

As an example of how complex the edit now is I keep my timeline on the side of the screen because there is so many layers that i have had to change the entire workspace to accommodate.

Most of the scenes in the game demonstration are made now. Generally we draw a majority of the characters and backgrounds. I am in charge of the editing, writing, creative vision and presentation and completion of the project. I also designed the UI and the textboxes and the font which appear throughout the demonstration.

My computer doesn’t have enough memory for all the assets, so it would frequently remove various segments from the edit as I was making it. I thought about incorporating the disappearing segments of footage into the scope of my idea but decided that it didn’t fit with the tone I was trying to set for my storyboard as a whole.

I control the broader creative direction and the editing of the project; For example, I could follow up on images to be created, suggesting a drawing and animation style and helping by tidying up the fine lines. I have helped to make the backgrounds look more dynamic through the use of photoshop which allows me to cut out certain elements and move them around to make it look more 3D.

The storyboard of our project has changed quite drastically from the original proposal . We started this thinking we would make it about a man isolated in space having conversations with the various negative emotions he was experiencing. However, Leo and I quickly realised that the tone of the project didn’t suit our creative strengths. The idea of writing dialogue for such a serious project didn’t appeal to either one of us, so we decided to change the idea and make it more funny and quirky dealing with a lonely person playing a dating simulator. Despite this, the editing style and the fact we wanted to make our project a video game demonstration have remained at the core of our idea.

I had trouble, too, with the nested layers. I have had to spend large amounts of time aligning the animated and stagnant part of an asset. The most troubling part of this is that often the still images have different aspect ratios or rotations than the animated ones and it takes a lot of trial and error to correct that and make a character or object look natural in its animation, having the two sequences match up as flawlessly as possible.

It’s interesting that the theme of ‘technical issues’ exists within the project, as the game crashes in the story. Yet it has persisted as a very real problem for me throughout this project, the paranormal nature of the idea, particularly towards the end, has meant that a lot of editing was required to make it look cohesive and convincing. However, my laptop doesn’t have the technical prowess to pull this off!

Because my computer struggles so much and casually crashes when I attempt to preview a segment of the video, a lot of what you see in the final product will be the first time i see it in motion, as well as the viewer.

Punnet work in progress

Sound design Punnet

Audio update

With sound i cut a split second of audio from a voice (i chose a clip from surfs up) and copy and pasted it dozens of times putting spaces in between of each bit of audio to give it the choppy effect

[23:11]

I employed this method for the dating sim part, but it would change when it zooms out from the screen and enters reality.

Text box layer

UI layer

All objects i had to cut out to give perspective

The characters all spawn in behind this wall

and go through the door.

otherwise it would look like this

By pushing the number of characters to the limit in this scene i was also pushing premier pro to its limit and this naturally leads to the game crashing which is part of the plot.

Collaboration

I can ask Leo to draw something by sending hi the photo of what i need and he draws it

I found a lot of the editing quite repetitive and gruelling, however, when it turns out well I know that the toil was worth it. I particularly like the beginning section of my edit, because I had more time to work on it. I’m more proud of very specific details of the editing and animation, such as the blinking effect which I created near the beginning of the demonstration. In general though, I am quite a perfectionist and I have very high standards, so I’m disappointed that I didn’t have more time and that my project got a bit set back by technical issues.

Evaluation summary

Using a working wall storyboard has helped me to keep on top of tasks and do them in the right order. This is the one i did for the hospital first scene. I put different scenes in different places around my room.