Story
To give us a starting a starting point in the project we looked at the word cloud and collectively picked out words that we were drawn to and look further into their meanings and through this we want our character to go through some sort of transformation that will help them find comfort and confidence in themselves. We also brainstormed the visual ideas we had through a joint Pinterest board which I think definitely helped us get on the same wavelength with our ideas.
Initial Loglines:
‘A small magical creature faces a race against time to save their world and themselves from the rampant decay which is ravaging their surroundings’
This log line was improved to become: ‘A tenacious magical creature sprints on a time crunch to save their withering world and maybe themselves.’
Another: ‘A distressed creature attempts to save their world, as it withers away, using herbs and a magical lake. What happens when they’re dragged into the lake, will they restore their world or will havoc ensue?’
It was improved to become: A distressed creature aimed to save their decaying world through magical means but what happens when nothing is going to plan.’
Our final longline on this day of initial longlines was: ‘As a violent decay ravages their world, Aether must race to save their environment and escape the divine fate which awaits them.’
After getting constant feedback we realised our longline and story were too vague there wasn’t a clear meaning or message to it so we kind of went away for the weekend and tried to come up with new ideas considering ideas like having an environmental message behind our story, or having personal messages about fears or even as my group suggested a trans allegory having the characters transformation be them becoming who they truly feel they are.
Visuals
When considering visuals for our project with a world disintegrating/decaying, we discussed potential ideas based on stuff we had seen before and for Rhianna in particular was reminded of scenes from Coraline and Paranorman we felt something like this could work quite well with the idea of the world decaying and then one last minute moment of magic transforming and healing our character’s surroundings. Even after going through several story developments and changing up our idea to have fog chasing the characters and turning them to stone I think having references definitely helped us in this project as they still apply to the ideas we have and as a group added a clear understanding of where we headed next in our project after the constant editing of our story.
For Aether and Starlight we wanted to make sure their designs didn’t feel too similar so Rhianna experimented with different cape types some spiky some more rounded but we felt that the spiky designs didn’t reflect starlight’s character but we ended up coming to this long triangle poncho/cloak that had arm pockets in the front which I think helped show starlight’s shy body language. There weren’t as many changes to Aether’s design mainly Rhianna experimented with aether’s facial features deciding that aether would not have a mouth because they felt it would be interesting to have a character that could express themselves so well and emotionally without saying anything which I definitely agree with and helped us focus on the characters actions and eyes to tell the story.
We also made references to these scenes and character designs the character design from Soul (2020) and Elemental (2023) for the character designs whereas the Incredibles (2004) scene was inspiration for the fog that would be turning Aether and Starlight to stone and the bamboo scene in Turning Red (2022) is for the forest our story was set in I do think now looking back that it would’ve been more effective for our scene to have some trees in the audience view so show that we are watching from within the forest. Rhianna also said they referenced the show Bee and puppycat and the game Sky: Children of the light when they were designing Starlight and Aether.
A series of colour ways we experimented with, we tried testing out complimentary colours but were finding it hard to have colours that didn’t merge with each other especially as the characters would be interacting with each other.
Rhianna made concept art for the project once we started drawing out storyboard panels to get a sense of how things would look with the colours we chose, it also helped give us the idea of what texture brush we’d use for colouring once we animate. Rhianna had used a procreate brush that we couldn’t properly transfer into photoshop without it changing its settings and ruining the texture so Rhianna instead made their own brush on photoshop to try and replicate the texture as much as possible that way we could also easily be sent the brush and use it on our devices.
Over the winter holidays Esther took charge of the backgrounds constantly coming back to us for feedback on the colours and the depth in the scenes. We went with watercolour because the texture added to this storytelling/fairytale look which was what we were going for with our story. I also think that watercolour backgrounds helped ground the fog texture as that was on paper too and would not stick out too much.
Over the holiday I worked on making the fog texture I used acrylic paint and a print roller at first and just layered the paint gradually with a purple I had mixed using the roller in a palette which made a sharp texture which I think adds to the dangerous character of the fog. But I wanted to try out more where I could fill the page better and not have white gaps so I attempted to put the paint on the paper directly and used a sponge to create circular patterns to imitate cloud smoke shape which gave a chaotic look. I enjoyed putting the paint directly onto the paper and decided to use the roller instead of the sponge to see how the colours mixed and weirdly they did mix but it left the original colours I put as like a layer underneath. Overall the last one was probably my favourite because you can see the blues and reds underneath and it somehow feels ominous but as a group the vote was the first one that was sharper as it gave off more of the dangerous vibe we were going for.
Prepping
When making the storyboard we all kind of discussed what would be happening at each part of the story and then individually drew out how the scene would look to ourselves before sharing twitch each other and deciding which shot we liked best or what could be improved. On the left is our original storyboard that fit more with our original story that involved a transformation using the lake but once we had fixed and developed our story we managed to cut it down to the one on the right it still wasn’t perfect though, going to our tutors for feedback we found that we had a lot of straight ahead scenes of closeups on the face so our shots weren’t very varied so instead we agreed that some of the close up shots would have to be over the shoulder shots because our characters were interacting and even though they wouldn’t be talking their eyes would be communicating the emotion.
Once we were happy with our new shot angles Rhianna kindly offered to draw out the storyboard all in one style so it would be a clear guide for us to follow once we started animating.
For the animatic we started with the early storyboards with our individual drawings but it was quite fast paced and the audio was abrupt and very loud compared to the ambience that it didn’t feel very natural. I tried loaning a zoom h2n recorder to record some foley myself but unfortunately I had issues with the file and accidentally deleted them I was a bit annoyed but it was a new piece of equipment that I hadn’t used before, next time I think I’ll give myself more time to learn how to use the equipment before needing the audio. Despite this I luckily managed to inform the others in my group and instead we found some free audio online for our animatic. Our final animatic was much better as the images were clearer and the pacing was good enough for peers to understand what was happening in each scene and the audio had been brought down so it wouldn’t be as abrupt but still have a contrast to the rest of the audio.
Making
Finally when we were able to start animating we decided to plan out how we were going to divide work, in class we were told that a good way to divide work would be to have someone draw the key frames, someone do the in-betweens and someone to start colouring and then we all help colour which I think seemed fair but I think as a group everyone felt a bit overwhelmed to work that way so instead we resulted to dealing out numbers of scenes per person and made our own deadlines. I decided to print out our story board so that we could cross off the scenes we had done as we go and to motivate us all. When it came to actually animating I didn’t have too many issues blender grease pencil is the software we used and it wasn’t that bad for me it would freeze for a few seconds sometimes but nothing that wasn’t easily fixed or when the camera decided to disappear so that I could only view my work on the 3d setting that I thankfully got help with from Ben and Jess. Those were all mainly software issues for the actual animation I only had a bit of an issue when I had to continue a head turn, I got a bit confused on how I would go about animating it and for some reason it just wasn’t clicking in my head so instead I went to my sketchbook and drew out a cuboid shape head and tried drawing out on paper the different phases of the turn which definitely helped I think initial I was finding it hard to go from drawing a flat face shot of Starlight to then having such a 3d moment with the back of Aether’s head.
Final
Overall I am happy with how our film turned out I thought as a group we worked together really well and quickly even if we had to make changes to our story or our animatic. My favourite part of this short film was the 2d animation against the painted backgrounds and the painted fog I really like the how the simple mix of the textures gave it this fairytale look and gave the fog its own character without having to give it a face. I think if I were to do this project again I would’ve attempted to work on it as we were initially advised having it split onto keyframes, in-betweens and colouring just so that the art style would be more consistent despite how close we got in replicating the design Rhianna created for us. Another thing I would of liked to do if we had more time was to try do some tests of animating the fog against green paper to act as a green screen on the rostrum and layer all the textures I made to create more of a collaged look. I think having to rewrite our story many times took a lot out of us that we rushing a bit into animating but despite this I still think we worked well in our time given and techniques like planning, setting our own deadlines and physically crossing off scenes is something that kept me on track and I will take with me for future projects.