animation festival reserach

I have been looking into animation festivals in general to get an understanding of whats out there and how I should prepare

The festival I particularly wanted to send my film to is pictoplasm in Berlin as this is one that represents a lot of work from my favourite animators.

Fortunately one thing I noticed is that a lot of the festivals don't actually ask for premiere status which is great as I would like to publish my film in the near future.

What I noticed about most festival websites is they pretty much always have 16:9 screen shots or posters for films rather than the normal portrait paper dimensions.

I would also like to try submit my film not just to animation festivals but also web based sources such as short of the week, so I can make a push to get more publicity on my film.

what I plan on redoing

After submission I plan to go back into the animation and reanimate or change the edit of some scenes to make the film the best it can be without the given time restrictions.

-the turning on the tap scene I want to further animate the hand with more articulate fingers and also increase the amount of time the tap vibrates to make a better gag.

-The first scene outside I want to properly animate the yellow character instead of blurring out as a lot of people have been unclear what is going on in this scene

-I plan to do the same in the next scene with the yellow character but also possibly add an extra gag where they turn and wave enticing the main character

-The close up of the face sizzling I want to animate sizzle lines and animate facial movements

-The big pan I need to fix the end loop on the legs

-after the character jumps and lands for the second time they have a reaction shot after seeing the yellow guy I want to animate them getting up and reacting more.

-I want to change the timings of the main character getting kicked in the face, falling to the floor and blacking out as the pacing is slightly off.

-I want to change the effects on top of the live action scene make it as god like but maybe a bit more clear.

-the entire last section needs either fully animating or further animation added to what is there.

Long shot performance

During this animation I was often careful with the use of long shots as I knew they can often be a lot more time consuming to animate because you have to animate the entire character because all of them is in shot. There were shots however that needed to be long shots to help tell the story. These shots in the end prooved to be some of the best shots in the film in my opinion. I felt these were the best shots because I managed to get across good performance in these shots compared to others.

Since the entire body is in the shot it gave me more to play with in getting the character across such as moving the legs at different paces to get across that the character is scared.

In this shot I really wanted to take advantage of it being a quite shot. I wanted time for the viewer to breath after an odd LAV section they would have just watched. Having it a long shot meant I could emphasise the character being a bit lost and use the whole body to get this confusion but nonchalance across.

Creating worded ephemera

For study task 5 I had to create some worded ephemera to go a long side my film for press reasons. I feel I often struggle with these things as I have a habit of underselling my own work and also keep my bios/synopsis ect very brief as i like cutting to the point however for this kind of things embellishment is important to sell a film to get people to actually watch it.

My Synopsis of the film:

A messy degenerate who has marooned himself in a desert shack finds himself thirsty after a mischievous yellow creature steals his one source of water forcing him to chase it across a weird land in pursuit of a quenching relief. 

This is a slightly embellished version of the synopsis and is purely about the plot another version describes the plot but also the film itself:

Thirsty is a colourful and silly 2D animated short film which plays homage to classic cartoons like spongebob squarepants whilst gaining stylistic influence from a range of illustrators and designers. Thirsty is about a messy degenerate who has marooned himself in a desert shack and finds himself extremely thirsty after a mischievous yellow creature steals his one source of water, forcing him to chase them across a weird land in pursuit of a quenching relief. 

My personal Bio:

Oscar Barany is an animator and visual artist from London graduating from BA(Hons) Animation at leeds college of art. He makes Animations, Live visuals for Musicians and Interactive art. He predominantly uses characterful 2D animations across platforms and enjoys pushing the boundaries of where his animated characters can go. Over the last two years he has working with a wide range of clients from Musicians to Museums across the UK as well as developing his own independent practice. See other work at http://ozbox.tv

go over my footage after the final crit

It was good to once again see my footage on a projector rather than on a screen I got to see how the footage looked in its proper context as well as allowing me to step away from it. Although there was not much feedback during the crit the fact I was forced to render it off meant I could keep watching my footage without it being in premiere which can be distracting. 

Somethings I noticed as well as other pointed out to me were:

The edit of the animation sometimes did not quite flow. This mostly happened in the first section were there are a lot of cutes between the two characters predominantly for action and reaction. It was mentioned which I agree with that the cuts a bit laboured and each scene holds a little too long. I think this was in reaction to what I was doing at the start of this project which was cutting from some shots too quickly. I’ve realised I have a habit of just applying the same solution to everything rather than objectively 

I need to go back an reanimate sections. Although I was happy with the delivery of gags and most of the scene some were animated in a ways to save a bit of time to get the film ready for submission or things I missed out to do in scenes have been added yet. It is unlikely I will be able to do this for submission but I want this film to be the best it possibly can. I obviously want to keep to some deadline I can't keep editing the film forever but I do want to clean things up if they are letting the overall quality of the animation drop. I also want to take this opportunity when I do go back into scenes is to reinforce or create new gags if I can. For instance one suggested to me was to have the yellow character wave back when running across the desert which I'd planned to reanimate since it had been done quickly in after effects.

The sound design as Ive said before needs revisiting but the interim sound design is still too quite.

Other than this I am so far very happy with my film. 

creting an an art book

Here is an issue of my art book. I have edited edited the book a little since and want to add more to the final version. It was good to learn a new skill, I'd not used Indesign before, its a useful skill to posses. I definitely need to revisit the design of the book but it outlines the preproduction of my film quite well.

creating a trailer

Creating a trailer for Thirsty was a very enjoyable process and was something completely new for me as I'd never made a trailer before. I wanted a trailer that really pumped people up to watch the film and to carry through the silly irreverent vibe of the film. I thought about going the route of most trailers which somewhat outline the plot of a film but the plot for my film is very minimal and to me thats not the selling point of the film. Something that I had been focussing on was creating lots of silly and differentiating faces of the main character across the film. I figured this would be a great thing to show off to the audience. 

When thinking about how to show off the faces of the film I went back to the point of wanting to pump up audiences to make them excited to see the film so I decided to go for a classic thriller style cut which I thought would add comedic value to the trailer. Although normally trailers seem to stick to their own genre so the audience know what they are watching straight away the exaggerated cartoon style of my film is so polar to a thriller that I figured it would work and be pretty funny at the same time. 

So far reactions to the trailer have been great the mash up of comedy juxtaposed with a thriller cut seem to make people laugh a lot whilst also pumping them up to watch my film.

Here is an extra silly cut of a trailer mostly for personal use rather than release. (The ultimate film trailer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Creating a final poster

Creating a poster for my film was a really enjoyable task and thanks to creating an art book was a fairly straight forward process. I looked at a lot of posters for Animated shorts, Animated features and feature films to help inform what I made. What I found which is fairly obvious is that they were all incredibly different and there did not seem to be a set of rules on how to lay out a poster. Obviously the title need to be a big focus of the poster but it also needs to advertise the film. Like the trailer it needed to capture the essence of the film to help sell it. I reused the cover image for my art book which was a silly illustration for the two main characters. I then retextured it to give it more depth and to darken it a bit so the text would stand out more. I used the title from the film to keep continuity in the design plus I felt the hand rendered drip text fit well. I redrew the text in a much larger size so it still looked nice and crisp. 

I might need to add more to the poster and I might also update the strap line at the top after I get a bit more feedback on the poster however I am currently very happy with it. 

Early design:

Here is the final poster design for my film:

I also created an alternate 16:9 card for the film using a background design and the same text. I did this as I noticed a lot of websites like to display this format rather that the traditional paper size poster for print. I may need to add more text/info to this poster.

Seeing footage on the big screen

We all submitted our films in progress to have them projected in the lecture hall. This was a great opportunity to see how my film looked on the big screen. Other that a few informal crits in the studio I hadn’t really taken the time to watch my progress in this context. It was great to see my film  on a proper screen and since it was projected so big you couldn’t hide any mistakes. One big thing I leant were my audio levels on my sound design were completely wrong everything was far too quite so I'll need to revisit my levels. A talk from Steve reinforced how important sound is for film and said often a down fall of a student film is the sound. 

After this crit I asked Steve for further feedback as he curates manchester animation festival his insight is one of the best since I want to submit my film to festivals. The feedback was very positive which was great other than removing a gag involving the animators survival kit which I have amended and to sort out the foley. 

This crit also did reinforce how much more I needed to do on the film for the final submission but I will just pick up the pace on it.

struggling with sound

Typically like I have done with every animation I left sound a bit too late and did not give it nearly as much thought as I should have. Although I had planned plenty of time to do sound the project fell a little behind schedule so when push comes to shove its the sound that got left by the wayside.

During this project I really discovered that sound is really quite a weakness for me. I take a very long time to do sound and I really don't understand how to use it well. The main weakness for me is understanding a stylistic approach to sound design. Gauging how "wacky" to make sound for a cartoon compared to how realistic to make sound design is something I find difficult. This is definitely something I want to improve as sound design is always a really important part of a project.

Although I want to improve my skills in sound design I want to take this film to festivals and generally would like to see it do well. For that reason I want to get someone else to create the final sound design for the film. I will continue to work on creating sound in the interim but I will continue to search for someone to create sound for this film at a later date.

changing running sequence for a better edit

This animation has really taught me a lot about the power and importance of editing. One scene that seemed to work in the animatic did not translate at all into the final animation. The scene is the main character running towards the yellow character (They really need names) and after the shot of the main character running the camera zoomed in on the yellow character. When put into practice this looked rubbish. I decided to change the scenes edit but wanted to keep the overall scene so I went for cutting between the two characters zooming in with each cut to build up tension to the final gag of the scene where the main character gets kicked in the face. This worked so much better and I think I would have figured this out much sooner if I had done a better animatic with more movement in it. 

New edited scene

live action sequence

Part of my film is a hybrid of live action and animation. Fortunately I've used this process a few times so I knew what would work in this scenario in terms of compositing. I decided to make life much easier to make sure all the shots of the main character were either mid shots or over the shoulder so I wouldn't need to ground them.

When it came to filming I wanted it all to be as easy as possible and then sort out everything else in post so I could get nice clean recordings and focus on directing. These scene involves two guys on a sofa outside who are made to seem like godly figures. From past projects I new the after effects plugin trapcode: Lux would be great to get this effect and also playing with the colours of the scene I could create a somewhat dreamlike feel to the scene.

Filming on the day was met with a few challenges most of which were to do with the location. I was filming outside so the hardest thing was recording the sound. I was using an external sound recorder but it was a particularly windy day and hyde park is a particularly noisy part of Leeds. FortunatelyOllie came up with a good solution for the wind by suggesting I use some kind of barrier to protect me so I lined up all the wheely bins by the location to create a barrier which allowed me to get nice clean audio.
I was happy with the final recordings and got a lot of similar takes to make sure. Some feedback said I should dial back the shine in the final version and use some other techniques to create an angelic appearance so the footage is a bit more clear. I plan to do this but still want to keep it very dream like/ridiculous.

Camera test checking good angles from the shot

Style frame

Wheel-y hard work

exaggeration in animation

This animation was really to try and help me push my animation skills so I wanted to utilise the fact I was creating a predominantly frame by frame animation. This animation was also relying heavily on visual gags so it was important that the animation helped carry them. This was an opportunity to really push exaggerated movements through my animation that I hadn't really done previously. 

Something I had not really done before in animation was the use of stretch frames. They're really good to exaggerate a movement especially in this "cartoony" way. I read the section in the animators survival kit and tried to take not of the use of stretch frames in other animations. One that particularly inspired me was a quick animation test from an animator at Animade. (https://www.instagram.com/p/BSwCXH0Bx6g/?taken-by=animadetv&hl=en)

Another thing was being conscious of animating motion blur to help exaggerate a movement. Normally it's just something I try to add in post but I wanted to be fully in control of how the motion blur looks and its timed as you can get a more appropriate look doing it properly with cel. 

Overall I've tried to exaggerate movements where appropriate to really try and flex some animation skills.

Here are two shots were I tried to push a bit of extra exaggeration in my animation featuring stretch frame, blur and stretchy limbs. 

slap timing

I recently animated a scene where the main character is slapped by a floating hand. I thought this would be a very straight forward thing to animate but I was something did not look right with all my attempts as the timing was all wrong. I could not figure out what was wrong so I asked a tutor. I was told about a rule of hits in animation about not actually showing the hit. The problem with the way I was animating the scene is the hit looked too laboured because there was too much emphasis on the connection between hand and face. I completely redid the whole scene changing the timings so there isn't actually a frame that lands on the slap.

This is a really useful tip to remember which I can carry through to other scenes that contain impacts in this animation.