Hidden Stories: Finished Film Reflection

Now that the animation is at last complete I have time to write a bit about it!
So - here I have written about my work process and my thoughts, as well as what I think was successful about the film, what was not so, and what I have learned from this project overall. (I've also added some screen-caps from the final film - just so you know what I am referring too in the text. For a synopsis of the story, just in case you have forgotten, check back to my post with the animatic!)


The most challenging scenes first...

Once the storyboard and animatic were done and it was time to start animating, I was advised to tackle some of the more challenging and experimental scenes first. This was definitely a good idea as it gave me plenty of time at the start to experiment and get those scenes right, rather than rushing them at the end when I was eager to finish. They were also some of the most fun scenes to animate...

The first scene I tackled was the "war" scene - the dreamy, peaceful flashback that is interrupted destructively by the war literally marching over the hill. For this I tried something new to me; a mix of Adobe Photoshop and Flash animation together. I wanted to create a fiery glow that would look menacing and very bold against the greyscale scene, so for this I used tools available in Photoshop (and not in Flash) to create an orange/red hue, as well as plumes of smoke. I then brought this into Flash and animated on top of these scenes with a shadow of artillery and aircraft.
This created a look I had been hoping for luckily, so I feel this was a successful scene, and I gained from practicing more with Photoshop animation and combining the programs.

The next most challenging scene was the horse's walk cycle. I looked at Muybridge's photographs and a useful illustration from a book about horses:

I watched lots of videos of horses walking - slow motion videos were especially helpful! This then gave me more of an idea of the actual motion and the animal itself.

I wanted to express the breed of horse too; the horse in my story is a heavy farm horse. When the hooves hit the ground the animation needed to emphasis the weight of the horse and he should not move too quickly or swiftly. I am pleased with the horse walking scene, but I don't think you can really get a strong idea of the weight and character of the horse from this animation unfortunately. The scene was just too short, and looking back, I wish I had made this scene longer. Saying that however, this is probably the scene with the most frames in it and took a long time to complete!

The Flashback Scene:

When I decided to use Flash, I knew that the animation would be in colour and I wanted the flashback to be in black and white. The main reason - this would clearly define the present and the past/memory. Another reason is because this would give the memory an 'old/in the past' feel to it, like an old B&W war film or the photographs you would associate with WWII (such as those in the image below, again from a book on horses).

So to colour the scenes in black and white was again a new experiment! I looked briefly to B&W films, and in particular at the new Disney short 'Paperman'  - for the tonal contrasts and shades particularly.

When looking at Paperman, I was also inspired by the line used in the character's designs. The character's outlines are often broken and spaced which make the character look much more alive and moving. I tried to incorporate this style of line in my animation as well, particularly as I was using Flash and this would maybe help give the animation more of a 'natural' hand-drawn flow rather than a digital look. Although I do not think it is very obvious in my finished animation, I did try to incorporate this more sketch-like style when drawing the frames, or at least it was in my mind when I was drawing them!

My animation process and bringing the film together:

So, all the animation was made in Flash..

1. I started with a quick sketch in Flash to get the movement I wanted, then on a new layer drew neater frames over the top (deleting the underlying sketch later). This took a little more time but the sketch could be drawn up very quickly and was very helpful! 
2. Once all the outlines were done I coloured in all the scenes then added the backgrounds which I painted in Photoshop and brought into Flash. 
3. When the animation was finally done, I pulled all the scenes together into 4 "acts" which I made into Flash movies. These 4 Acts I brought into Adobe Premiere Pro and put them together with sound, music and credits (and some effects added, such as camera panning) and made it into the final, finished film. Using Premiere Pro to this extent was something new to me. It allowed me to put into practice the information I had learned from the technical tutorials we had. There was quite a bit of trial and error till I got the film working and got a good quality movie file in the appropriate format! But it was a great learning process and I now understand Premiere Pro much better.

Adding the music and sounds was fun also, as I could play around with where and which sound effects to put in and what music would suit which scenes. I had originally wanted to add sound affects such as foot prints and horse hooves, but I didn't think this really worked without a larger range of sound effects as well, it just sounded a bit odd. With more time (if I had thought about sound effects earlier on in the project!) I could have made my own sound effects that may have been more suitable. 

So instead I just used music as the overall sound in the film (from Kevin MacLeod's website, incompetech.com), and had 'war' sounds for the war scenes which worked well as it interrupted the music and stood out as the only sort of sound effect in the film. 

Early on in the project I decided to have radio broadcasts from WWII in the background to help set the scene. So I have some brief radio clips at the very start, which I think worked well also. The website 'Internet Archive' was suggested to me for this; so I listened to quite a few Churchill speeches and broadcasts then tried out various ones with the animation till I found two that suited the film best.

So - what went well and not so well? And what would I change or add to the animation? 

• Overall I am pleased with the look of the animation. The style was realistic enough for my liking but not too difficult to draw up quickly. I'm glad I choose to use Adobe Flash, as it meant I could colour the scenes and make the flashback B&W and put in backgrounds easily and relatively quickly (I think using Flash overall was slightly quicker than doing the animation traditionally hand-drawn). It was also good to experiment and practice a bit more with Flash - as I have not used it for a few years. With more time I would have liked to have gone back and put more frames into some of the scenes to make the movement flow better, and to extend the animation overall and have less pauses on still frames. Flash can look a little less smooth and natural to traditional animation I think, but I think it is just a matter of how much time you put in and how many frames you draw. 
• I am most happy with the animation of the horse; the horse was interesting and fun to animate. I am probably least happy with my human character's animation due to his facial appearance being not particularly constant and quite variable throughout the film. I found it difficult to maintain a constant facial appearance. The flashback was the first part of the film I animated, and I think you can see that the human character's appearance is quite changeable unfortunately. The closest animation to my original idea and sketches for the PoW is the opening scene. While animating I drew up more sketches of this character (image below) to help me achieve a more constant appearance while animating, and this helped, but I should have drawn more sketches like this before animating and spent time earlier on getting a stronger understanding of how my character should look. Saying that, I also wished I had done a little more work on their clothing. Other than the German uniform, I did little research into clothing of the time- and it would have just been nice to have given the child and the soldier's flashback-self a more detailed, historically correct attire.

• I am happy with the transition scene into the flashback/memory, although like I said earlier, I wish I had made the horse's walk a little longer. Overall, the flashback is my favourite part, as it was the most fun to create and experiment with. Again, with more time, I would love to add a bit more detail to the war scene!
• If I had more time again I would also liked to have added some one-tonal shading to some of the scenes - not all of them, possibly the flashback, or the scenes where the soldier is sitting under the tree. This would have added some extra form to the character in these certain scenes, and just a bit more interest and variety to the animation. 
• I also rushed the backgrounds in the last scene a bit, so I would have liked to have developed them and made them a bit nicer and more of a finished location. (The location is a street, as the soldier leaves the PoW camp, and in the background in the green area is the camp he has just left - but I don't think that is obvious!) This was one of the things I left till quite late, which I now realise was a mistake. I think I should have created the backgrounds closer to the beginning, so I could create exactly the locations I wanted, and then I would have more of a sense of place for putting my characters into the locations as well. 

What have I learned from this project?

• Timing! I have learnt much about timing myself and how long things take to make. We had to think about many more things on this project other than the animation also, eg - a decent narrative, storyboards, sound, music, backgrounds, putting everything together - and it all needs a sufficient amount of time. I was quite organised and set myself deadlines but really had no idea of how long things would actually take to do and of course it always took much longer than I expected. Meeting the original deadline would have been a bit of a struggle! I now have a better idea of timing and how long everything takes to do. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking you have loads of time ahead of you then it quickly passes by!! So hopefully I will know better for next time, how long I should dedicate to each aspect of the film.
• Like I have mentioned already, I learnt much more about the Adobe programs Flash and Premiere Pro (and Photoshop animation, which I had not really tried before).
• I learnt a lot about storyboarding also thanks to the handy post-it-notes and advice! I found the post-it-notes brilliant for the storyboarding, and I could stick them on my wall and change them about. I also scrapped a lot in the storyboarding stage and changed the ending of the story about 3 or 4 times!

Overall I have definitely learnt a huge amount over the course of this project, that I will then apply to future projects, whether my animation was successful or not. Of course it was not without stress and frustration, but in general I found it a lot of fun and enjoyed every stage of creating the film from the initial story research to the pre-production. There are loads of things I would love to add to it and improve on (especially now after the Mark Andrews lecture and his tips on visual storytelling - I am now eager to experiment with this new knowledge and apply it to my work!!), but overall I am quite happy with the result, and am satisfied with what I have learnt from this project. It was worth the time and effort definitely! 

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I also just realised that, strangely, I never actually posted an image of the toy horse the film is based on. So here it is! It was really great to make a film about an actual object - it made making the film that little bit more interesting I think, and now I have become quite attached to this toy... 

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Here is my finished animation - I think it is probably ok to let you all see it now! The password to watch the video is "clash":

https://vimeo.com/64105838