Ellie Bowen Animation Journal

  Whilst I was making my projects, I was watching a lot of Avatar during my breaks. I ended up finishing the whole series last week and I am so upset I've never gotten round to watching it sooner. Even though it's aimed at kids, I found it so gripping, funny, imaginative and well-thoughtout and I'm happy to say it's one of my favourite shows I've ever watched. It has a bit of a slow start, but as you go through the seasons you see clear character development, interesting arcs, and the writers being allowed to be more mature with the content we were seeing without it being edgy or unpleasant. Some shots are so beautiful, and the way it's animated sets the mood completely. There's goofy frames that use animation to stretch the character's limits and get laughs, and there's times where you feel very calm because they're using soft visuals to enhance the serenity of the shot. It's a show I've been left feeling empty after finishing it, becaus...

 

  This was my final scene to make, and after I'd done it I recorded some sound effects to drop into animate. I recorded them with audacity using a headset and my boyfriend's voice, so the audio was a bit noisy. I did a quick noise correction and they were fine, however, and it's a relatively easy software to use. I finally compiled all my films into premiere and found some royalty free spooky music, after listening to some tracks. The one I wanted on the Adobe store was unavailable, however, so I had to look elsewhere. I also couldn't figure out why I couldn't fade out music on premiere so I took my track back into audacity to do it manually and from there I had my final film.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYWZYUrEs30  

  This was mostly tweaking and working with what I already had to make it look a bit nicer. I was smoothing out the animation and trying to drag it away from the animatic feel, and also had a few problems with having done stuff all on the same layer, but I felt it didn't take much away from the film premise to have little errors.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71dVUN6z8kQ I moved onto the next 3D scene, too, but I had all along had issue with doing hands because his hands were just shapes, they didn't have clear enough values to grab a doorknob, and wouldn't be able to move subtley like I'd want them to anyway, so I eventually just stuck with drawing them, which I'm hoping isn't too confusing. I sort of like the see-through hands, too, they sort of add to this mysterious feeling, the questioning of who is this figure and why is he there. Is he disappearing? Who knows.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npGG4QcmRQM

  Because I'm not confident with animation or modelling with Maya, and Mike, myself and Maya R. got pretty busy in the past few weeks, I ended up just posing my model and taking screenshots for still images to animate over in the film. It's like a mix between an animatic and animation, which I think was a strong alternative to making something that's a lot more clunky and unrecognisable. Not to mention, I was still confused about cameras in Maya, and he didn't have any facial features so I think the course of action I took was the best one with the time and materials I had. It was actually a lot of fun to animate over the 3D, and I think the mix is a nice addition to the brief. It brings the two worlds together without having the character interact which I believe was a good twist to have in the end.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EV04Pt4Ks8  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg7Axod4I3w

  Simple process, didn't really run into much trouble. I wanted to have it like the door knob scene, but it's her eyes, so it's a nice cut away to further push the scary mood. I didn't originally think of it like that, but Alan suggested it and I thought it was a good artsy shot to enrich my film.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IikDTsfeABc

  This is me going over my first scene with the character I choose instead of the guidelines. Obviously, I messed up earlier with make such a big basic person, so instead of tracing over him, I just used him as a reference for the pacing and expressions, and had my actual character be the right size and in another new colour to not get confused. I also coloured her in a solid colour on a new layer to hide what would be behind her, so she's no longer just lines and is a solid character.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTedeUi1T3I  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZuWK_Tb7VM

  I had such a clear idea in my head how I wanted this part of our film to look, that I simply just had to sit down and do it. Once I'd found my rythmn, I was well on my way and just needed to keep on it. I had a short break because I was staring at screens, but overall I felt comfortable and happy with how I'd worked, especially considering I was so worried about letting my team down seeing as I was the only animator in the group. After this I sent it off to the group members to add on filters and fit it into the final film.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWqKVSWeEeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLWDidd8Wfg

  I didn't have many issues throughout this process. I really struggled tweening the long alien arms, because so far I had  solely used frame by frame, but I perservered and played about (got a bit frustrated) and eventually got it. Not exactly right, because the brush is on 70% opacity which meant I had a bit of a darker overlap at the shoulders, but it's not noticable in the inverted version anyway. I am incredibly proud of the speech going into the ear scene, it's the smoothest animation I've got to date and it moves exactly how I pictured it. I ended up going a bit off-storyboard because I felt I made the story board too slow for the amount of talking and how slow the person spoke which is why I improvised some nice extras to fill the visuals up with.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Mz0qZNBpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv8pgOqacQQ

  This was just me sitting down and working. Just after I'd made this, Mike figured out what the issue with the textured brush was, I hadn't been drawing as fills, so it was lagging my software massively, but it wasn't as much of an issue to me anymore because I used a different approach. Working with the fluid brush, I could still get the sketchy, fluid look I was after, and it didn't raise the issues that the paintbrush had. I used onion skinning and scrubbing through the audio, which I had to learn to do on the internet because I couldn't figure out how to have it play at the same time as me working. I liked my one-line approach, and felt it fit the mood, and eventually I knew it was going to be inverted so I was using a sort of cartoony, loose reference when I showed my group mates what I was being inspired by.   Below is my process.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3b14u7LUCw

  This is the storyboard for my animated portion of the documentary. I listened along to the interview from the person who wished to remain anonymous, and drew out each new scene as they were speaking so I could play back the audio and work along with the storyboard and sound when I started animating.  

  This time I was working on my next scene for the drawn part of the film. I was doing the door handles rustling on the little girl's side and it would cut to her eyes that were fearful, a mirroring image of the door handle scene. This time I used tweening instead of redrawing it, because a doorknob is a stiff, solid object, so I didn't want the fluid effect that the frame by frame offered, and I wanted a more uniform motion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cuoyDsnDD8

  This was my first proper sit down with Animate to start working on my animation. I drew out the background and values, and started adding in the character. I left off the bedsheets and pillow around the character because I assumed they'd be affected a lot by the movement of the character. Also, used a much different colour for the character to see what was happening. This was meant to be a guideline for me to draw my character design over, but for some reason I'd done an adult sized guide for a character that was meant to be a child, which was quite a big mistake.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFh6omwg2Wc

  With my temperamental Adobe Animate, I moved to paper, and using a brush pen and light box, I made this. It was a nice test, and something to fall back on if my Animate didn't get fixed, so I knew I could definitely do my animated portion even if it wasn't how I had originally planned.  

  Sitting with Nat on Teams, I streamed myself starting the first scene I pictured from the interview we'd held. It's my first time using adobe animate, and I used this video to teach me the very basics of the software and how to use the timeline and different tools:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49yK2AfG8kc I liked the textured brush a lot, but it was giving me issues and crashing my program. Each click would result in a black screen for 5-10 seconds and I wasn't able to do anything in this time, so I think I was somehow using up too much memory. I sat with Mike to try to fix it but we couldn't figure out what the issue was first time round so I saw my progress in this style being hindered greatly which was a worry.   The above one is obviously much too fast, so I slowed it down a bit by holding each frame for longer. I kept making films that were 30FPS which is actually a bit fast for me at the minute. My process is found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw7eS...

  Considering the nature of our documentary, we realised that finding interviewees would be challenging. It needed to be clear in our search that the film wasn't any kind of gag, and the participants weren't going to be made fun of, so we had to be both sensitive and have a wide net to try to get people to interact with us. I ended up joining approximately 8 Facebook groups relating to Aliens, abductions, and UFO sightings, all with between 2k-90k members in them and active posters.   Above is the post I wrote out to put in all 8 groups, it had varying degrees of success in the form of responses, with the UK UFO Sightings being the most popular. I had a couple people approach me who were clearly not the sort of person we were looking for, and a lot of sighting images in the comments, but I managed to have a short text interview with a person who believed they were abducted.  Subject: Ok so 2 years ago I went to my friends house to do some homework unfortunately we finishe...

  Above is the word document we collaborated on to pull together all the potential questions for the upcoming interviews. Yellow questions were the ones we were going to use for our second interview with author Malcolm Robinson, who had experience with others and abductions, but no abduction himself. We worked on this over a few days to make sure we could come back to it in case we had an idea pop up a different time, to keep the pressure off coming up with so many questions all at once and those being the final list.

  This time we rigged the model I'd made to use for my film. He was simple and geometric, but I still had issues with putting in joints that connected the wrong way, not clearing transformation histories, and mirroring the controllers and joints. I had to go back several times and delete arms/legs to copy and paste them properly so I didn't have those mistakes in, and towards the end we did Paint Weighting on the legs because, since they were so close together, when one moved it would pull the other with it, which pulled the skin in weird and unnatural directions.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Rf64XCFu1o

 Next session was working with setting up joints and controllers in a simple limb. We used an arm, and placed joints at the cut edges of the model. This allowed it to bend like it's one object. Having controllers allowed all the joints to link together in a chain that moved in a convincing motion, but I ended up having some problems with remembering to clear history which kept giving me stress when I couldn't figure out why it was looking wrong.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhLxvIS5kEg

This was the first session working with animation in Maya. I pretty much had my hand held all the way through this process because it was so finnicky and had incredibly specific steps. Working with the timeline and tangents was fun, and made the ball seem as though it had proper gravity as it sped up, slowed down, and bounced off things, but I'm not the most confident I'll be able to animate a whole character yet. This was just sort of an introduction to the basics and trying to see if I'm able to get the grips with how things should look and what I can do to manipulate movement.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToAgNv2UNVM  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09Jdm0_XFK0  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2bwS7_Yels