Filmhouse Stings - Silly Wizard

My animation for the Filmhouse Stings is going to be about the folk/traditional music band 'Silly Wizard'. The band were Edinburgh-based and I had heard that one of their members attended ECA (although when I researched this, I found out this member only attended art college for a year!). As one of my favourite bands and a pretty influential Scottish traditional band, I thought I would do my animation about them. I realise that Silly Wizard are an older and less well known band for some, not everybody will know of them. But maybe my animation may get some people interested in the band - who knows! It may also  be an interesting fact enough that the band are called Silly Wizard in the first place. That is such a cool and unusual name, I thought that could be fun to work with in an animation!

Research and development:

I had decided early on to do my animation on Silly Wizard, as this was something I was personally interested in. But I also did some more research into ECA music connections and emailed a few people suggested to me by Claire and Jared. From these people I received a lot more interesting information about bands from ECA and bands who had performed in the Wee Red Bar. There were so many great stories - so it's a shame I won't really use them, but it was fascinating, and something to remember for another time!

Settled on Silly Wizard, one of the first things I did was get in touch with the band itself, via their website, to ask if I could use their music in the animation. I wasn't sure if this would be possible, but I  it would be worth a shot, and brilliantly they got back to me and I was indeed granted permission to use some of their music! I listened through many possible tunes, and settled on a fast reel that would be fun to animate too (the first tune in this set, and this can give you a taster of what Silly Wizard sound like if you do not know of them):



Here are some Silly Wizard-ness that inspired me:

I loved the bands fiddle-playing-kilted-wizard character, so I wanted to include this in the animation. I made a few sketches of this character first:

I choose a particular tune that is fast and fun, and started to plan my animation. I wanted the animation to match the music - so rather than having a narrative in this film, I wanted to make the short film a combination between visuals and music, which would be something fun to try and experiment with. I drew up a sort of storyboard idea very quickly:

After advice from Claire, I decided to leave out the musicians with their fiddles and accordions etc, and simply have the dancing wizard and the flowing-animated music bar idea. I think this was a good idea, as it is allowing me to focus on the dancing wizard and making that animation work well.

I then sketched up the storyboards again, a bit more polished, on photoshop. These I brought into Adobe Premier and made an animatic. This was to help me with the timing of the animation with the music particularly - I want the beats of the music to match my wizard-characters movement, so in the final it looks indeed like he is dancing to the music!



To help me further with timing the wizards movement to the music, Claire printed me some dope sheets. I had never worked with a dope sheet before, so this was good and something new. They were a great help with giving me a basic idea of where the beat would be and the characters action - how many frames were needed for each piece of action eg, his dancing, when the character's feet land on the ground. I didn't use the dope sheet strictly, and was more flexible with my drawn frames, but the original plan I laid with the sheet gave me something to work by and base my animating on.


Starting the animation:

The animation I started with was the Silly Wizard title, where I drew on the one sheet and captured the motion with the Rostrum camera. I was hoping with this to have an effect like the title "Silly Wizard" was being written and revealed as the music starts playing. This was a fun experiment, my first time using the Rostrum, and I am pretty pleased with the turnout.

Next I started to animating the dancing wizard - this was going to be a challenge! I consulted William's again in 'The Animators Survival Kit', as well as Muybridge's book on 'The Human Figure in Motion'. I wanted my character to be dancing a bit like a Highland dancer, with lots of bouncing around and movement. So I also watched some videos of Highland dancers to get an idea of the movement, eg:


I drew up what looks like a complicated drawing of how the movement should pan out (I shall mention this is the same character drawn over and over as he moves across the scene, not an army of dancers as some people thought!). I really wanted to get the kilt right also, and have it flowing along with the dancing. The wizard is also dancing on top of a music bar. I wanted the overall animation here to be very lively and flowing, like the music, but still in time with the beat!

I started the animation with a sketch, traced form my original plan, with more frames and detail added. This allowed me to play around with the movement and test it with the music, before inking the final frames.



I would like my finished animation to have a traditional, hand-drawn feel to it - to match the traditional, acoustic music. So I also plan on, time permitting, colouring in the frames with coloured pencils. My original inspiration for this came from the beautiful hand-drawn animation in the animated version of "The Snowman" (and most recently "The Snowman and the Snowdog", or the Irn Bru advert of course which is particularly Scottish and not to mention completely awesome). Of course my animation will not be to this detail or as amazing looking, but that was the style in mind when I decided to create and colour my animation traditionally rather than digitally...