4th Year Film - "Eich Bhana" Animation and Post-Production

Well, it has been a very busy semester! First of all, I finally gave the film a title - "Eich Bhana" which means "white horses" (as in the crest of a wave) in Scottish Gaelic.

So, here is a break down of what I've been up to in the last 4 months...

Animation

I threw myself fully into the animation in January  and animated pretty intensely until the start of April. The time that I spent honing the story and animatic in the pre-production phases of semester 1 proved to be a good base to organise the production and help it run smoothly. I tried to edit and colour as I went along also, but most of the time was devoted to animating and long days in front of the lightbox. The hand-drawn animation is the heart of the film. The two characters needed to be brought to life and tell the story through their movement and actions. I also wanted them to be likeable and for the audience to emphasize with their journey.

While animating, the film evolved and scenes were cut out and changed. This was partly due to time-constraints but also because these changes felt right. There were scenes and shots in the animatic that, when it came to animating, seemed unnecessary for telling the story. The time-consuming nature of hand-drawn made me strip the story back to it's heart - which was a good thing and I am much happier with the result.

Overall, I really enjoyed working in hand-drawn again and on a longer project! I really like the pencil drawn/sketched look of the frames and the smooth movement that can be achieved. There was a lot of hours spent in front of the lightbox, drawing all day, and using up mountains of paper, but I feel it is worth it for the final result. The longer I animated, the better my animation became and the faster and more efficient I worked. If there were time, I would have liked to have gone back and remade some of the scenes (particularly the first scenes I animated last semester), but generally I am happy with how it turned out.

*(some photos of all the frames to follow soon!)


Creating the Setting

Once all the animation was done, it was time to focus on creating the environment for my characters to inhabit. The wild west coast setting has been an integral part of my film since the beginning. I wanted the environment to be like a character in itself alongside the man and horse. The landscape in the film is fictional and created by myself but strongly based on real places. Before starting on the final background art, I spent some time sketching the location to get the right look and give me a sense of how the characters will move around it. I had a good idea in my head of how I wanted the landscape to feature in the film and what it needed to be like - so the next step was just to get it down on paper.

  

Along with visualizing the semi-fictional landscape, I needed to figure out exactly how the croft house would look and some of the props such as the horse harness and brass (brooch). The current design for the brass is based on a real artifact I found in a small museum on Orkney.