Continuing on from last semester, I worked further on the story and animatic for a while before beginning to animate - I wanted the narrative to be the main drive in this film.
The main change was altering the ending slightly so it was a a more definite conclusion; Darren back in the zoo with his own Edinburgh penguins, and with a nod back to their Antarctic roots. Following advice from the last semester's crit also, I tried to make the transition from Darren's dissaproval of the whalers to teaching them clearer. So I made one more animatic before starting the animation! (Password = penguin. Bet you didn't see that one coming)
The Man Who Lives in the Zoo - Animatic from Ali MacPherson on Vimeo.
Development & Research:
To achieve the look I was hoping for, I undertook a bit of research and spent more time designing the characters and the environments. I loved working with an Antarctic location - South Georgia Island (which can be seen in the photos below, and is where Edinburgh Zoo's penguins originally came from) seemed like an perfect location for an animated story to me! Antarctic landscapes, rusting abandoned ships, deserted of people - animals now living in the human ruins as if we were hardly there...
(Photos by wildlife photographer Anthony Smith:
http://travel.anthonysmithphotography.com/?page_id=907 )
While animating, I referenced videos of penguins frequently to achieve the right movement (I even tried walking like a penguin myself a few times!). I wanted the penguins to be charismatic and appealing characters, as well as be very much real penguins - I'm hoping the audience could watch the film and just from the movement alone know that these are penguins.
Before animating I also made a colour key/script. The frames were to be coloured digitally and I wanted the colour to be very vibrant and lively - but with a natural scheme of blues, greens, greys and browns. The key actually helped a lot when coming to colour the scenes and deciding on how to assign colour to the characters and props. It was also a good exercise to test out possible Photoshop brushes I could use in the final film. I wanted this film to have less solid, blocky colours and bold lines (like many of my previous digital films) and more of a sketchy 'natural' look, resembling traditional mediums.
Making the Film:
I was very keen on this film being animated traditionally with mountains of paper, pencils and the lightbox. After finishing the Ungaretti film, I had less time than I had originally wanted for animating this film - but still enough to get the animation done and have some wiggle room if anything went wrong! So I spent about 3-4 weeks animating (and colouring the frames as I went along).
I've really enjoyed being able to spend time working in traditional or 'classical' animation techniques, and I love the pencil drawn quality of the frames. If time allowed, I would certainly like to make this my main method of working and has given me a lot of ideas for how I want to work on my final year film.
I also spent as much time as I could allow planning each animated scene - the layout, movement, keyframes. Although winging it can be fun and work well sometimes, prior planning proved extremely helpful in this case and usually made for better animation! The scenes which didn't work out as well as I hoped were usually those I hadn't had time to plan out properly. The walk cycles of Darren and a penguin proved the most challenging.
I have also been working with composer Luci Holland who has created some amazing music for the film! Working with a composer has been a new experience for me. The music became an integral part of the planning and an inspiring part of the filmmaking process. I love how the music and animation have influenced each other and suggested new ways to look at the narrative. Luci has been great to work with and her music enhances the film so much! You can listen to the teaser here: https://soundcloud.com/luci-holland/zoo-teaser/s-SOoKx
Although the film is not quite finished, the majority of work is done and all that is left now is colouring a few more scenes and adding the background art.
Here is the current film draft (password = zoo):
The Man Who Lives in the Zoo - Film Draft from Ali MacPherson on Vimeo.
Reflections on the film so far:
I have really enjoyed working on this film! I am glad I spend a good chunk of time planning out the story and rearranging the animatic till I felt it was right. Spending time designing the characters and 'look' of the film was also important to me. Although you could probably keep doing this forever, it was good to put more thought into these initial development stages - I think the film benefited from this overall. This helped achieve the visual look of the film and keep it close to my original hopes.
As for the narrative, it's difficult to step away from the film and look at it with fresh eyes, but I hope the story is understandable and enjoyable to the audience!
This project gave me a good grasp on a traditional/'classical' 2D workflow also. As I mentioned earlier, this is a technique I am keen to continue with for 4th year.
Some more time for animating would have been good as towards the end I had to rush scenes a bit - a few scenes have very little movement or are without any animation at all. I planned to do these scenes last, as they would be ok without any actual movement, but I still would have liked to have had more animation in them.
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| All the frames for this film! |
Now I have just to finishing the colouring and backgrounds, ready to be screened at the zoo this Saturday (9th May)!
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