November 16 - 20 2020 - Week 9 GIF project
I have decided to try and follow the specialism of animation for stage 2. As I've said before I don't know which way to go but after discussing with my tutors it seems like a good idea to use this time to explore animation more and find out if its for me. If I don't try I wont know.
My worries are that every thing I read suggests its more about drawing and due to the subjects I've studied until now I haven't done much drawing recently apart from some story boards and what I did in stage 1 to explore ideas.
I am afraid that everyone who takes animation will be more art focussed than me and that as I've mostly focussed on narrative film or music video type work until now that i could feel like i could be in the wrong place. but if I don't try I won't know.
I have a zoom meeting with Rob and tell him I'll go ahead with animation. Lucy is my new tutor.
Late November 2020
I start to attend workshops and start to get to know others on the animation pathway.
Many of the lectures and workshops could be applicable to both pathways so it still gives me options and I think both routes still interest me for different reasons
Workshops-
Storyboarding
It was a lecture about why we storyboard and what a storyboard can do followed by a practical workshop. We practiced putting our ideas into story boards both in groups and on our own.
Because I have done previous work on storyboarding during my creative media studies last year I knew more about storyboarding but it still helped me to focus more on this as a vital part of planning my work. I am not so great at planning forward and tend to let work develop over time but for collaborative projects it is really important to be able to communicate your ideas clearly and storyboarding is one way of doing this.
Key takeaway - my storytelling objective is to communicate the beats of the scenario in my composition.
Film language comprises all the techniques and complexities involved in photographing the ‘look’ of the film (i.e the varying size of the shot, style of the edit, the camera arrangements).Drawing is the basis for all the visual arts. Drawing allows artists to visualise, communicate concepts, and prepare designs for production. It is a necessary skill. ( from the workshop notes)
Walk cycles
This workshop got us to look at what a walk cycle is and why it is so important to an animator. I found this really interesting as it helped me to break down animal (mostly human) movement in my head which I hadn’t done before. It also showed me how to think more closely about the visual effects and what the eye sees and the brain interprets filling the gaps between frames or drawings. After the workshop I looked it up and found this website where the author describes it and this helped me reinforce the learning in the workshop.
This is a key bit which I want to include here to help me remember it and use it in my own work. I put the text in a different colour to show this is not my work but is part of my research.
A walk cycle can be described by four distinct poses:
CONTACT, RECOIL, PASSING and HIGH-POINT.
These four poses and a handful of inbetween drawings constitute a walk cycle. The single most important frame of the four is the contact pose. Once you draw it you have already determined 80% of the rest of your walk. If you make a mistake on your contact pose, it can be very difficult to correct later on. Therefore: pay close attention now and save yourself a world of pain.
Walk cycle here? - (left in bournemouth)
Workshop - Bean bag drawing activity
I enjoyed this workshop where we experimented with expressing emotions through drawing beanbags in different positions. This seemed relevant to me because I like the way animation draws emotion from an object just by a tweak to body or object language.
It was a face to face session that I really benefited from because other people on the animation pathway were more visual artists and by watching them draw I could learn from them. Although my finished work didn’t achieve what I wanted it made me think about how to animate and express emotion.
This is a really good example of why I wanted to try animation was to learn from others ideas and to play physically with things in a studio context. This was one of my best days at AUB so far and makes me think I've chosen the right pathway. I enjoyed bouncing ideas with other students and looking at their work and getting feedback on mine, even if it was a bit rubbish because I cant draw as well as some of them.
Many of my drawings from this workshop are in a sketch book in my room in Bournemouth and I cant access them but here is one I took a picture of. My drawings are less certain and more abstract than other students. I enjoyed letting the pencil marks drift a bit to make the form.
There were more than this work from the day in the drawing workshop but they are in my sketch book in halls. we did one drawing for each emotion. Happy • Sad • Angry • Anxious • Worried • Euphoric • Surprised • Depressed • Sick • Confused.
I think this suited my way of working as i think about gesture, facial expression and body language a lot This one was to represent the emotion of being anxious.
Workshop – Life drawing
I had never done this before but I really enjoyed it. Most other students had studied art to A level and had done lots of drawing classes including using live models etc but I hadn’t so it took a little getting used to but again like the bean bag one I really enjoyed the work and found it really made me think. It was more useful and creative for me then other work that I had done at A level or at GCSE and this is definitely a direction I enjoy.
GIF project Week 9 16.11.20 - 20-11.20
For this we have 3 weeks to produce an animated GIF which will be a hand drawn animated character over about 48 frames. I learnt about frame rate for this and began to understand more about how many frames are needed to create how much real time footage. I looked at some of my favourite animation work that I was familiar with and also studied the work of other animators and the history of animation in order to understand how it has developed overtime and been influenced by different technology as it changed. My research can be found here.
The character I developed was a worm. My first images of it were fierce but as I developed if further I realised that having all the detail of its teeth and mouth was going to make it much harder to animate effectively for the gif.
My sketch of the worm character
i tried a few things out with the worm before simplifying it
The final worm had to be simple - it was more about his movements than his detailed fangs or curled tail.
Researching my GIF movement
So I started to make the drawing simpler and developed back ground images as well. My first challenge after deciding on the look of the worm was to think about its movement. To do this I researched worm films online and looked at nature videos. Below are some links I found useful and why.
· The under the microscope images of worm moving and some of these links are really helpful when looking at how worm moves
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZHTerOJYMA - film about earth worms with lots of worm facts. Not useful for movement.
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pf_Bufgvdc - a worm under a microscope good for observing its movements. In this film you can see how it moves clearly. The sections of its body and how it compresses its body up during each movement.
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Texxu3p7I8 – worm movement not under microscope
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2DBLBejpLM - good simple explanation of science behind worm movements
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bIQLPTR7BM – first few seconds only shows drawn animation of worm coming up through soil
The more I studied the real worms’ movements the more I realized that I was going to be making my worm less naturalistic and more ‘cartoonlike’ so maybe it could move more like a snake or how I imagine a worm moving if it didn’t slither through soil and leaves but had more of a journey in mind.
I received good feedback from my peers who really helped me with the drawing aspects.
I started to work on the background which I wanted to be of a flame pit that the worm has to navigate and get through. I chose this unrealistic setting because not only was my worm more cartoonish the challenge it faced was not a pile of leaf rubbish but a fire pit to jump over.
I was pleased with my rocks background for being simple and yet solid which I did using adobe Premier Pro A difficulty I had with this was opacity levels on the blocks but trial and error solved that eventually. I asked other people what they saw and I found it helpful to hear their thoughts as i can get too wrapped up in little details and lose sight of the bigger picture.
The peer and tutor feedback I got was that with more time it would have been good to see the worm in colour which i agree with but didn't have enough time to do this .
I was particularly pleased with the little curl and skip that the worm has to do to draw up energy to make the jump and then once he's over the other side of the chasm he does a forward roll before continuing on his way. I think this makes him have more character. This gave me a chance to experiment with the 12 principals of animation i had learned about in the animation principles workshop.
I used these 12 principals in the movement of the worm like this
squash and stretch
In order for the worm to move forward without legs it needs to pull its energy forward against natural force and the pull rest of body behind it. I used Squash and stretch to establish the worms trajectory too by making it compress and expand in length as it moves.
Anticipation
This was evident in preparing the worm for his big jump over the fire pit
anticipation - the worm stops and assesses the pit
action - the worm curls itself up like a tightly wound spring and jumps into the air
reaction - the worm makes it to the other other side and gives a little skip of success
Arcs
As I learnt most actions follow arcs and have a slightly curved path as the worms jump certainly did.
Some of the images of the background along the way are here. I started by wanting a cave for the worm to emerge from as well but as I tried different versions of this I realised that the cave meant that the static background didn't have enough space for the eye to get used to the worms movements before he had to jump over the fire pit.
So i removed the cave from the final design giving enough time for the character of the worm to be normal moving along before it has its roll and skip part of the animation.
The roll where the worm sums up his energy for the big jump makes the audience relate more to the worms problem and solution action which is central to the gif as previously mentioned this utilises anticipation. As Lisa Hassell says in her article The ultimate guide to GIF design (in Netmag August 29th 2018 https://www.creativebloq.com/advice/the-ultimate-guide-to-gif-design)
A GIF can capture a mood or convey a message in seconds. ....A good GIF can be playful and full of dynamism, or it can be slow and smooth; whatever describes the feeling behind the moving images. The key is to understand what makes an eye-catching GIF and create a language that fits the mood of the message.
Although there is no big life changing message in this GIF the character comes through of a persevering worm!
Creating the fire was most straight forward and I used help and tips online.
The last stage was to combine the background pathway the fire and then to add the worm.
The worms expressions change as he approaches the fire
Taking flight! The arc i mentioned earlier.
Through the fire - note the teeth are still there and add to the worms character but don't dominate it.
Final GIF.
Week 9, 10, 11 - feedback and reflection
The peer feedback I got was that the worm may have been more effective if it was coloured in but generally people liked it.
I liked the fact it was achievable without too much tech or too many files too combine. The lack of sound made me focus on the images and the lack of editing made me concentrate more on what could be achieved within simple parameters.
If i was splitting the project work into Pre-production, Production and Post-production - i would put the research into movement of a worm and the initial sketches into pre-production, the design of the three key elements - the rocks, the fire and the worm character would be the production and the the post production was putting them all together and making it loop.
Out of the project review I better understood what i had learnt and how id applied in which gave me a sense of achievement but I did feel that Im at a disadvantage with my drawing skills over the other students. I know i need to not worry about this and just get on with my own ideas but is difficult when comparing work at peer reviews.
At this stage if I ask myself what i want to get out of the animation pathway it would be to improve drawing skills ( many of the other animators are from more of a drawing and painting background and my work has largely been lens based until now. I didnt do art GCSE I did photography, graphics and media.
Id lie to think im ready to create a longer piece of animation but am finding the technical limitations quite difficult of not having access to studio or technical support with my work. I have had to be more independent which is a good thing but does make it quite hard to be ambitious.
I found making the GIF relatively straight forward and a really useful way of breaking down the skills for more complicated animation.
I would like to get more technical skills with the various software and I'm still very drawn to stop motion but i really think i need face to face help with this and a good well lit environment to work in and my concern is that with only one day a week in the studio i wont get much done. I also like to create music videos and this might be more practical given the limited access to facilities during Covid 19.
Stop motion is the next project but I am worried where i can set up my models and get sufficient lighting when i will have little or no access to equipment especially.
Week 11 - stopmotion project - metamorphosis
I started with the What does metamorphosis mean to me?
The dictionary says a change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one
I think it also means to me about changing from one physical state to another so for example in humans going through puberty. As a young man I have seen my face change dramatically in the last 8 years and although i know it happens to everyone i still find it disturbing. for me particularly people always say they don't recognise me because I've changed so much - I've metamorphosed into someone physically different but still feel like im on a journey.
I found this writing my personal statement for UCAS too because there is part of me that still likes to play and explore using creativity to solve problems and express myself and then theres another voice in my head which wants to make what i say sound more knowledgeable and less childlike.
I really liked the Morphing workshop we did and liked sculpting from life and felt like a i achieved a lot. I have enjoyed both the life drawing and the sculpting from life and it is a bit depressing that all the face to face work is going to stop because of lockdown. The news is full of Covid 19 news and several people i know have tested positive so we are all going home sooner than planned.
Some of the images from the workshop. I found it really helpful thinking about how the sculpting of key features brings the clay to life. Cheekbones and jaw line here show what i meant about boy to man feature changes.
changing the set of the eyes and making them further apart gives the face a different strength - it makes the character weaker for some reason.
Gradual depreciation from something real and from life towards a more grotesque creature
I also did collaborated with the rest of my group in the sound workshop we did. We did our own voices for a sequence of animation. Its not very good but it did highlight how important the voice overs are and why you need great actors to express real feeling through the characters. You also need a good script!
Research for stop motion analysing film collaboratively
Concept for Stopframe
Metamorphosis short stop frame animation idea
My stop frame project is going to be a creature that resembles a large mouth made from plasticene. The mouth has is obviously moulded and mouldable which gives a feeling of potential change which is what I like about working with clay.
The mouth opens and consumes two brightly coloured characters who are a bit like caterpillas. One is bright yellow and the other is bright green. The sound track is of a very noisy eater swallowing a large amount of food and then retching and brining it back up again which plays as the 2 characters are regurgitated to form a blue and yellow and green swirled one person. They are now one. They grow wings and fly.
I expect to use premiere pro to edit sound and image together.
I discovered that
•Using Claymation stopframe technique is time consuming and slow but there are many digital editing effects that can help speed this process up now. Tweening to get the computer to create the images in between keyframes is one option. Also making the frame speed slower so that each image is displayed for longer or shorter depending on the pace and effect you want to create.
•I discovered that your model, if of a person or animal, needs to have easily moving limbs that can be moved little by little. This limits the shape and design of your original character. Apart from making your character a moving blob there is little that can be done to change this. It also needs to be able to balance while you take the shots or the whole model can fall over and either change shape or mess up the scene around it.
•The models being made of soft plasticene must be handled very carefully to avoid distorting them. In fact, to achieve good results, you should usually wear clean gloves to avoid transferring dirt from their hands onto the clay I frequently had to remove fingerprints and tool marks from handling before shooting a frame. There is also something nice and home-made, childs toy -like about seeing finger prints etc. So this becomes about the overall aesthetic
•The lighting has to stay the same unless you want a kind of flashing light effect in the background. Shooting in natural light is therefore not really an option because the daylight is constantly changing in quality. Electric light is much better because it stays constant but you do therefore have to make sure that your electric light source stays in the same place or the shadows move.
•When I use a Smear animation technique and have movement within one frame and then extend the playback of that frame I can also create a useful effect that doesn’t take as long but also could look more natural and have less continuity errors. I will experiment with that next.
•Based on everything I have found out while experimenting with the different 3D animation techniques, I know now that claymation has its limitations in terms of what you can achieve but it still creates for me the most aesthetically pleasing results and is enjoyed by my target audience of people my age and also younger people and children. I have learnt that the various techniques you can apply during digital animation do give you more freedom and arguably when I became more proficient at them I may find this method more rewarding.
•Being able to use greenscreen of chroma keying is a very useful technique that can be applied in live footage or animation and was very useful for me in shooting the scenes with the asteroid. if I had had to do that more traditionally with stopframe and animate the background at the same time as the object it would have taken me even longer than it did.
•Instead of making a plasticine model do a step by step of an action frame by frame, with an Animation Smear I want to make the illusion of motion in a single frame, or a short run of frames, placed in between typical keyframes. This “blur” creates the sensation of a sudden burst of speed that gives the animation a sense of pace and action that careful keyframe animation doesn’t quite match. If I do it well the audience shouldn’t even notice the difference.
December 11th I was ok but moving back home and London went into Tier 4 and so i couldnt do much. I carried on going to classes and lectures, planning and trying to shoot my stop frame and talking to others on the course. I didn't have the right lighting or camera set up - doing it on my phone was really difficult. The tripod kept moving (I tried lots of things like plasticene on its feet etc) and the remote control wouldn't work properly but worst was the lighting which was impossible to keep constant.
I shot about 90 frames here are some
Add images here
This is how it felt.
December 18th 2020
Add to this i was expected to choose which Uni and which degree, everyone was hassling to make me make a choice but how could i know what I wanted to do when i had barely started animation. I wrote my UCAS statement but i didnt know which discipline to focus on.
Then Christmas happened and soon very quickly the new lockdown was announced and it didn't look like id be going back to Bournemouth very soon.
Jan 7 Life Drawing Workshop
Jan 4th National Lockdown announced.
January 11th emailed Lucy and Rob to say Id lost my way on the stopframe project and wasn't getting anywhere and Rob said to start again with next project which was a great relief. The next project is called the Words project and has a very open brief so I can play with film or animation. I still wont be getting the face to face teaching or studio time I hoped for but that was no ones fault so I felt glad to start over again with the new project.
WORDS project launch 13th January
So this project feels like a fresh start and i have enjoyed this session which was really about letting us experiment with a set of words and use those words to see what ideas they spark.
these are the words and here are some of the ideas and strands of ideas that i started in the session and then afterwards played with.
January 16th
Choosing a word
Futures - Home - Path - Values - Light - Here & Now - Growth -
I am being asked to be inventive and resourceful and use a creative process to move ideas away from initial ideas from clichés, to establish a project and to conclude the project suitably.
I assembled a phot sketch book for each of the words during the workshop.
During the workshop I started to focus on 'path' and this gives me an idea for a short film about my year ....from 18th birthday - end of feb 2020 until end of feb 2021. I started doing this and found the idea limiting and not creative but lead me more towards documentary which didnt feel right for the project.
New idea
I think i can shoot and make a short narrative film during lockdown. The short film will be aimed at an audience of 18-25 year olds and will be funny, serious and help distract from lockdown. I would post it on Youtube and let people know on social media why they should watch it.
The idea is that a young man gets an idea to search for gold - his gold. he leaves his basketball court and searches on the estate for the pathway to his 'gold' - the gold is actually a pair of trainers. I will montage this together with found footage of martial arts and of mystic types finding a higher pathway through life. The aim is to show that the trivial or materialistic aims of my central character contrasted with the higher aims of the men searching for inner truth and equilibrium. I will shoot the footage on my phone and do various SFX in premier pro and photoshop. music will be important to the piece for setting the mood and also contrasting and juxtopositioning the two worlds against each other and deriving meaning via the edit. The sound of the ball bouncing whilst the central character plays on the baseball court sets up the initial rhythm for the edit.
January 18th
I shot the video with 2 actors/friends over a couple of days. shooting on my phone was not a great experience but got the shots i thought i needed.
I have started to edit the footage and design a soundtrack - i need copyright free music and this is challenging. I cant find the right music for free.
I have all the footage for this film and when i can get on a computer that i can use premier pro properly on I will edit it again ( for about the 4th time).
January 25th
I edited solidly for 3 days in Premier pro. My process was this - upload the footage and save to my PC, assemble the found footage also save as files, choose various bits of music.
The edit went alright although the more i worked on the footage the more i realised its limitations but i persevered to get it done. I am pleased to be getting something finished.
January 26th
Technical issues again
When i logged on today I opened up my edit and since y last save somehow the edits i have done have lost their pathway to the original files. When i play back my nearly finished final edit i get loads of sequences of file not found type screens even though they were there before. I am frustrated and angry. I spend a lot of time trying to get technical support - the issue seems to be that my PC is only running Windows 7 and Premier Pro is not supported on Windows 7 anymore. (I used to use it fine).
This is made worse by the fact that my files default to C drive where there is virtually no spare space. If i try and save them to an external hard drive i lose the edit that i spent so long on.
I want to install windows 10 so that PRro will work properly and not keeping losing the links but i cant because of not enough space on drive where files are.
I re-edit several times but every time i save to export the files become lost again. Ive tried using the locate function in PPRO but it doesnt find all the files and technical support cant help because PPro is unsupported.
I feel really frustrated and am also getting more anxious about looming deadlines and whether the work is good enough or if i should be focussing more on animation. Here are some screen shots of the process I went through.
You can see below that the images, sound and music were all put together and then certain files would just disappear again.
The red box with media offline in it became like a recurring nightmare. every time i saved work it came back having lost whatever i had just put in the edit.
The sequence below was the part of the story where the 'gold' is found i did this using XXX in post production to achieve the aim of getting 'the gold' ( trainers) our of the grit box.
I have included these pictures to show the process i went through, the problems and to explain why this didn't finish as a piece of work. Throughout it all my lockdown frustration is that if i had access to studios and tech support and was able to shoot properly my work would have been so different. I know the idea is to see the limitation as a creative positive but this is not coming easily to me. I like to bounce ideas of people.
Beginning of February I have hit a brick wall with this project and I have nothing really to show for Words project again. I'm starting over. I discuss my frustration with a new friend from the animation course, Leo, and we start throwing some ideas around.....
My Words project - take 2 - FUTURES - February 2021
Wasn’t feeling at all inspired and had no desire to work on anything, however come february and all of a sudden there is a drive to start and finish a project
If I’m to show my thought process I would have to refer to a series of messages as this is how the idea was formed
(bold is me)
“lets start a love quadrilateral”
“Lets start a cubilateral relationships”
“Were we cheat on astral projections of our future selves”
“Thats like an excellent idea”
“that will be my animation”
“Would make for a cool dating sim”
“non-Eucludian love”
“Euclidian is like geometry that follows our rules of space time”
“Non Eucludian is weird space time shit”
“Yo no cap”
“I actually wanna do this”
“As a videogame”
“Make this dating sim?”
“Yes”
“Joint venture”
“We could make the illustrations”
“Yes”
“Its actually a very good idea”
“I cld tell u got urself thinking”
“And that in turn got me thinking”
“YO”
“one of the words for the words project is future”
“Ive done next to nothing”
“Wanna do it?”
“As like a”
“group project?”
“YES”
“If that works then ofc”
“All i have is ideas on a page”
“Which is less than u”
“Same really just mine are drawings i made whilst waiting for my tacobell”
“If it works as a 2 man mission then thats classy”
“Yeah we dont have to make an acuall full game, just some mock concpet screens”
“and some short animation bits”
“a lil video gameplay”
“Yeah simple animation loops”
“Like characters blinking”
“We can discuss it via call”
So in a discord call a couple days later we started assigning ourselves and each other jobs, I was to be tasked with the whole story (and its boarding), writing, the editing and about a third of the artwork as Leo would take the artwork , such as concept art, the backgrounds, the 3D and whatever else comes up from my ideas.
At some point we found ourselves not knowing what our story was actually about or how it would go despite being an interesting idea, so I decided to scrap the basis of it being a time travel type game but still keep the idea of it being a dating simulator with a psychological touch, and in our couple of days before we had this call I had been watching Charlie Kauffman’s films in an existential stupor and in a film of his released last year called “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is an old lonely man who fabricates a version of the world where he has a girlfriend and is a younger man, where many subtle clues are littered throughout that what you’re watching is all in the man’s head.
Although I thought the film was thoroughly unenjoyable, when tasked by both myself and Leo to rethink what the basis of our game would be, I came up with this, after about a minute of laughable nothing ideas: “a man or woman is on a spaceship or space station, somewhere in space, and they’re all alone, and they have been here for ages so they are very lonely and so they imagine people to date and talk to these imaginary people” which was surprisingly plausible and then we both started running with this one instead instantly dropping the other idea and never mentioning it again.
Not only was this new idea far more fun to think about, but it also still worked with the word Future as the premise is that Earth is now uninhabitable due to human negligence. It works as a humorous oxymoronic subversion of a dating simulator game which is typically not based around a mentally ill person’s loneliness and imagination (in space).
I’d constantly shoot ideas at Leo and he’d shoot them back, culminating in more and more development for the premise;
The character manifests their emotions and thoughts into physical form, and manifestations are the object of conversation and potential relationships for the main character. The character always wears a space suit because we don’t know if they are male or female, and neither do they and they don’t want to know the answer; they have forgotten what humans look like.
This grants us more creative freedom to make the manifestations into whatever gender and shape we want them to be.
The character starts off the game by intentionally turning off the power in the spaceship so that its pitch black, making it easier for their brain with all its mental dysfunctionality to create people to talk to in the darkness, as if the lights were on it wouldn’t be possible (drawing on sleep paralysis slightly), plus the darkness could make it monochromatic to accentuate the emotions through the one colour we give them.
This will be a virtual world that can appeal to the online gamer audience. It will be in Youtube and will grow with its users and be responsive to the audience participation.
All these ideas were created with the primary focus being able to make a story that could work as best as possible with its art. We also decided to make the art pixel art as I only have a mouse and pixel art is quite simple to make with a mouse, and both of us had a program called Aseprite and Leo had a very impressive pixel art resume. It then fell to us to start creating, and neither of us really knew what to do first, so I created a list on the 4th of feb https://docs.google.com/document/d/15j_7HpSxBduJAXeQt1JvLaAFqQ1F98z1P_cV_CMeEQI/edito try and help us decide on which emotions we were going to make the character interact with as we knew there was nowhere near enough time to do more than a couple (which might be even less than a couple given the fact that it’s the 19th now and we haven't started on these rooms yet).
I started to play about with Aseprite, with the idea that I would make loneliness.
I thought that the head on this character was slightly too cartoony and decided it didn’t convey loneliness as well as i’d hoped, but the pale blue and pose of the character would do just fine
So I redid it with a far sadder, humanoid head. This helps the audience to relate more and is more effective. Once i added the movement it achieved what i wanted for it. The movement makes it look like its rocking itself for comfort.
Something Leo had mentioned a couple of days earlier was the niche group of people who would draw Garfield with pixel art in a variety of different gruesome ways, labelling it as “Gorefield”.
This became quite inspirational to me as it was this which gave me the utility for monochrome which was the basis for the idea of having the game be dark to allow for this art style, but in addition to this something that fascinated me was the way in that they would animate the sprites. They would draw the picture once, then select parts of the sprite and move them independently from the rest of the image. I thought this was a very unique way to animate something without drawing any part of it more than once. So I thought of an idea that could possibly work with this animation style that I could realistically do.
I thought shame would be a good emotion to make manifest, so I came up with the idea of a locked box with something trying to get out, and the person who is ashamed of whatever is in the box sitting on top of it, not letting it escape, head in hands. So, save for the frames that the arms move upwards with the knees, none of it was redrawn, all of it was shifted with the select tool. This is also the first instance of me using layers on Aseprite, as you can see that the torso, arms and head are all behind the box layer-wise whilst the box is in front and in front of that, the legs. I did this because I wanted the secondary motion , having the chest move, then the body a frame afterwards, then the feet.
Shame Gif
I also hadn’t realised I didn’t shade the person on top so I shaded him in to see what could have been.. woops
I also made them green because i thought of green for shame for some reason to keep it green monochrome
Later on, Leo and i discussed the why factor for why this person was in space and harkened back to when i spitballed that they were looking to terraform other planets to make them habitable as a throwaway idea. We develop this idea into
there was a terraforming machine/reactor onboard, but it malfunctioned/exploded and now the ship is teeming with vegetation and broken, aimlessly floating through space.
This in turn gave us the idea that the only way our character has been surviving is by living off the mushrooms on the ship, which without making it solely & immaturely about someone on a psilocybic bender, gives another reason as to our character’s madness.
Psilocybe (/ˌsaɪloʊˈsaɪbi/ SY-loh-SY-bee) is a genus of gilled mushrooms, growing worldwide, in the family Hymenogastraceae. Most or nearly all species contain the psychedelic compounds Psilocybin, psilocin and baeocystin.
The primary idea though was that the vegetation on a spaceship idea works very well for art as it would illustrate the stark contrast between futuristic technology and an overgrowth of nature. It also does well to show that a lot of time has passed which is a vital part of the story. A great unintentional inspiration that Leo and I discovered we share is the game Portal 2, in which you are the lone human in a futuristic testing facility filled with sentient robots, however the facility is in disrepair since the first game’s end, and this means that there is tons of debris in the halls of the facility as well as a complete overgrowth of natu
I mentioned the linework of these two (incredible) pieces of concept art reminded me of a single-issued comic from 2011 https://www.thinkwithportals.com/comic/#10 to which Leo said that he loved that comic and that he loved Portal 2 to which i said the same not even considering how similar our idea is with Portal 2’s (lonely, only human in a decrepit broken future setting overgrown by nature through time with schizophrenic scrawlings all over the wall…)
our wall texture
Portal 2's wall texture
The Russian font to the right of Leo’s texture is one of the subtle indicators of an idea that doesn’t play a massive part in the story so it’s quite easy to miss.
At the beginning of our development (a week ago) we were stuck on what the design should be and we started looking at communist art as we thought it could create an interesting style for our game.
A russian typography mood board.
We discussed it in more depth because why would there be a soviet spacecraft with a communist aesthetic in the future, but we worked around it with the premise that this is an alternate reality where the soviets did conquer the whole planet and completely ruined it, sending people out in spacecrafts with tesseracts capable of terraforming new planets.
Over the span of a couple of days, Leo was making doors in 3D as I was making the UI and writing the first scene of the game. The reason for the former is because we thought incorporating a 3D modelled and animated door on a 2d pixel background would be a great use of his 3D skills whilst keeping true to the artstyle, as well as serving to subvert the player’s expectation of how the door would open. Pics here
He called me up in a “eureka” type moment as he told me he had figured out how to render his 3D models in blender so that they would all be pixellated. So the idea is that the background leaves a big black space where the door should be so that when the door is layered over the black space it opens up to reveal the black space.
In order to create a suitable effect to put behind the window of the cockpit, I thought back to my train journey back from Bournemouth on dec 3rd. On this train journey I was using my keyboard’s trackpad to create a basic space animation with stars slowly moving in different directions and fading in and out with the power of layering and tweening, reducing the opacity on almost black lines to dim the stars behind them and leaving the stars in the foreground as the motion tween would move and rotate them around the screen.
Unfortunately this effect was terrible and did not fit the game at all. I tried my hand at redemption by putting it through premiere to pixellate it & use the twirl effect, which sort of worked to some degree. Layering this behind the window looked completely horrible and was an insult to Leo’s amazing background design, so I had to come up with something else.
Luckily this something else was a godsend and I’m not entirely sure what inspired it. I said to Leo after this didn’t work that everything was okay as I had just come up with another idea......
Paint in water. I looked up royalty free videos of paint in water in slow motion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ4_GCr0V8A&t=30s)
and put that through premiere, zooming in on the center, pixellating it and changing the RGB curves on it to be not white and blue, but darkening it so that it was black, green, red and blue. This created a very impressive effect, but for some reason I wasn’t giving up on the idea that I could get the stars to work. I put them into premiere over the new paint effect, used a chroma key on the black in the image and moved the tolerance up to the point where you could see some streaks of black still. I then turned the stars on their side and put a motion tween on them that made them go down along with the paint. I then layered the stars over themselves dozens of times making them fade in and out with the default fade in transition effect. This is the result.
Whilst I was impressed with the result of the ghost lines in the background, the massive low quality snowball like stars were purely awful and Leo was being far too nice to tell me it was the worst thing ever. I then removed everything, put the paint in water effect through curves again to make it more space-y and voila.
When it comes to inspiration for this effect I am confused if it is the grim adventures of billy and Mandy credits (on right) or the void in enter the gungeon (left). Possibly both.
I have encountered the same technical difficulties with files disappearing due to premier pro and Windows 7 not 10 but I have created the following work. Ithink it demonstrates what my ideas are and how I visualise the work but is obvioulsy not a polished finished piece and with the tech i have at home it is simply not possible to get this where i want it to be.
The sound files were particularly effected - I have them but can't add them as they wont stay in place and end up out of synch all the time. Working title is Punnet.
Screenshots of work
The individual animations of each of the separate parts creates the whole, that welcomes the user in and offers a lot to consider
This establishes the online thought recording as the user would see it
as things come in and out of the line of site of the character so do they become visible to the user
a picture into the depth of the thoughts
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