Georgina Hammond
Animator
Major Project - 11 Second Club
The Major Project begins by venturing in to more abstract responses to a text by revisiting the language of the edit and montage theory (using mood-board/beat-boards); as well as experimenting with different forms of sound, including diagetic sound, narration and music. The Major Project then continues with more literal interpretations of a text through applying conventional narrative genre and structure to story-boarding. The final outcome may include any number of processes, and may also involve cross-disciplinary collaboration – resulting in anything from a pitch for an animation series, to a series of GIFs, an installation or immersive experience.
After some deliberation I chose to complete another 11 Second club challenge. The video below is one of my animatics for this project brief. Beyond that is then all the processes I undertook to get to my final result.
The Brief
The key outcome for this project is Lip Syncing to sound, to achieve this result I had to engage in a series of preproduction exercises for choreographing character animation with sound, leading up to 2D drawn animation/cut out stop motion/3D animation. To complete this brief I went back to the '11 Second Club' website in search of a sound clip that I wanted to work to. The below sound clip and transcript was taken from the film, Creed (2015);
Voice One: "D'ya think we should do something about the er... B-O-D-Y-S"
Voice Two: "What you spellin' man, bodies?"
Voice Three: "B-O-D-I-E-S
I will also be using the 11 second club to look at examples of weight, timing, anticipation, gesture, squash and stretch, wild frames, limited animation and subtlety and try to take some of these examples and examples of other artists in to my own work.
Observations - Mood-board and sketches
Epping Forest - Epping Forest is a former royal forest, a 5,900 acre area of ancient woodland between Epping in the north and Wanstead in the south, straddling the border between Greater London and Essex. It contains areas of woodland, grassland, heath, rivers, bogs and ponds, and its elevation and thin gravelly soil. As this location is close to where I live and fits with the narrative I thought it would be perfect to take a look around, get some photos and sketches and get some ideas for a layout.
Squirrels - I've decided that squirrels would be the best animals to characterise, they fit in to the forest/woods scene and there's tons of them at Epping Forest
Mood-board - Below is a mood-board of images I took while doing observations. The images show the location and characters I want to portray but also show the colour tones I would like to use; deep oranges and browns with a strong green colour. With wanting the oranges in the background I think it'll be best to use the grey squirrel as the character style apposed to the red squirrel or there will be a lot of orange!
Observation sketches - Below are two sketches; observation of Epping Forest as an idea of an initial layout design and observations of squirrels in the forest to get an idea of their form and movements.
Production Schedule
Storyboard
Initial Layout Design
Below is the first layout design that I came up with, at first I was really pleased with the layout, the colours were the perfect tones, the design fitted The Fibonacci spiral which I thought instantly made it pleasing to look at, I thought I had made a great start. However, just as I was completing the final touches, I realised its a great image but not suitable for an animation, I hadn't left enough ground space for the characters to move around and be animated and I think I actually did too much detail, on reflection the background should have been simpler, with less lines. I still feel this is one of my best layout concepts but as just an image, not as a background to an animation.
Layout Design - Influenced by Michael Dudok de Wit
Michael Dudok de Wit is an animator, director and illustrator. His most well-known film Father and Daughter (2000) won an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, the Grand Prix at Annecy, and dozens of other major awards. It was this film which influenced the style of my second layout design. I liked his style of bold water-colours/ink on textured backgrounds. It's a different style of detail, its not fine lines and intricate details but its simple forms that stand out and allow the viewers minds to make up the finer details.
The image on the left is my layout design, on the right is a scene from Father and Daughter. i really like the simplistic feel and again think this is a great layout as an image but I don't feel it would fit with the lip-sync animation I'm working towards. I do however think it would work brilliantly as a short clip of squirrels running around with light music and forest sounds - something I would like to try out in the future.
Layout Design - Influenced by Nicolas de Crécy and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Nicolas de Crécy is a French artist, cartoonist, and comic book writer. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is also a French artist, painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator. Looking through both of their works is what influenced my third layout design. The first image below is Sortie de boite de nuit by de Crécy, what I really liked about this work (many of his others too) is the element he wants to stand out most is in white, its simple by shouts out 'look at me' and i thought that would work perfect with my layouts, having important elements just in white. The next two images are by Toulouse-Lautrec, I love the sold, bold colours he uses, there's minimal details but the image is strong, I also like how he uses solid black for the items in the background giving his images layers and depth.
Taking de Crécy's and Toulouse-Lautrec's styles on board I decided to mix them together and came up with the following layout design.
Layout Design - Influenced by Walt Disney
Before building the world famous, The Walt Disney Company, Walt Disney had his very first production company, Laugh-O-Gram. It was during the peak of Laugh-O-Gram's success that Disney, along with Ub Iwerks, Rollin Hamilton, Hugh Harmon and Friz Freleng came up with the animated short series Alice in Cartoonland. The style of Alice in Cartton land is an animated layout and characters, however the main character Alice is a live action character, overlaid into the animation using Cel.
To the right is a short clip from one of the Alice in Cartoon lade episodes. I really like the style of live action mixed with animation and thought it could be great to try. However I wanted to change it up a little bit and decided that instead of a live action character I would have a live action background with animated characters. Having the video in a stop-motion style, created frame by frame in photoshop
Below is a simple animatic using the 11 second clip from the 11 second club and fitting my characters and some movements of the top of the live background. I used this to see if the style of animation would work, to give me an idea of how the movements and characters actions fitted with the sounds and also give me an idea of the key points in the sound clip and animation.
Character Designs
When it came to character designs I decided to make different characters for each layout. Using the same character for each layout simply wouldn't work, each layout uses a different style and technique and the characters needed to be fitting to that.
The first character design below is my original character design, created before I had even decided to create the other backgrounds. My first character is in more of a cartoon/Disney/Pixar style, initially made to fit into my original background which i then decided to not use, however his style will also fit into my third layout design in the Nicolas De Crecy and Toulouse Lautrec style.
The second character design below is for the layout in the Walt Disney style. Using Disney's early years style of roughly sketched, its also in a less cartoon style and the character looks older.
The third character design is for the layout in the Micheal Dudok de Wit style. The character is in a solid, minimal detail and grey colours style to fit the background and its also easy to edit to give it a watercolour/ink style to fit in with the background.
Two-Sheet
Conclusion
At the start of this project I was really excited to get going, I really enjoyed the 11 Second Club brief last year and that's why I wanted to do it again. It took me a while to find the sound clip that I wanted to work to but once I had picked one, the ideas were flowing instantly. Straight away I knew I wanted to work with animals in the forest. I had drawn forest/wood's type scenes before so I already had ideas on how to design the forest but I hadn't drawn squirrels before so my first task was to go and observe! I spent two days (not entirely, I did go home!) wandering around Epping Forest observing and taking photos of the forest and squirrels; taking notes of the colours, how the light went through the trees, how the colours have changed between winter and spring, the colours of the squirrels, how they move, how they eat, how they interact with each other.
Although the aim of this project was to create an 11 second animation to a professional level, due to personal circumstances, it became evident that my intended final outcome wouldn't be plausible. It was at this point I decided that what I really wanted to focus on with this project was the layout and character design. My key interest in animation is layout design and I wanted to use this project to show my skills, my ability to adapt layouts depending on the theme and my ability to design characters based on the scene they need to be set in.
I may not have finished the task I set out to do with the final project, but I have been able to showcase my skills and ability and focused my time working on the aspects that I want to move forward with as a career. Overall, I am really pleased with my work, I feel I have created layout designs and character designs to the best of my current ability (it will get better!) and although I haven't finished this project in time for my final hand in, it wont be left there, I plan on working on this, finishing the full animation and event creating different styles based on the same 11 second sound clip.