Final live action filming (hopefully)

It's been a busy and stressful week, although looking at these pleasant photos you'd never guess....

These are some reference and behind the scenes snippets from my 2 days of filming. I hope to god this is all the  filming i'll need to do, but i'll have to wait and see! Carrying make-shift equipment around a forest all day is tiring, and although I couldn't have hoped for a better team or weather - the scorching sun sometimes made for fast changing light and high contrast in shots where we didn't need it...  Working with friends and Kira the wolf stand-in was fun but working with a disobedient apple was not so much fun!

At the moment i'm putting together a rough cut of the footage we gathered and the animation i have so far, and trying out some masking, 2D tracking and 3D tracking. I hope that this will speed up the final editing process as it will throw up any problems i'm having sooner rather than later and force me to solve them or look for ways around them rather than just letting them be for lack of time.

At the moment the rough cut looks to be nearly 5 minutes long! That's nearly twice the length of my animatic. I know that we were sometimes over-generous with time when shooting scenes i had roughly timed in my animatic, I see no immediate problem in leaving sections that are empty of characters longer than i estimated as it makes almost no difference to my work load. I will have to be careful not to leave some shots over long and empty though for fear of boring the audience- Birdemic style....

Adam and I are planning to edit the colours and light across the chosen shots in the coming days, this will hopefully help to tie very differently lit scenes together and express the chosen moods of my film a little better.

 Kira and Wendy being scale references

 Kira filming some rough and tumble to help me animate my pup caught in a snare (she was having fun, don't worry)

 Turns out: Kira likes apples

Kerri and Kira being references

 ^Photos by Adam Morrow

Kira being a jet pack

^Photo by Wendy Wang

The decision of how to colour my characters is drawing close. I decided to hold off making  the final call on colour palettes until i saw what the final plates would look like, and now that will have to wait until post colour correcting. I have had a little play around though and am keen for feedback.

Numbers 1 and 2 also have a coloured lines version. Numbers 3, 4, 5 and 6  only have a black outline version. As you can see, i already have a fairly solid idea that i'd like the colours on Anna to include some sort of red for her scarf, blue/ green for her skirt and neutral for her top.

I was tempted by coloured lines in theory but looking at the comparison with plain black line art against a photo background from our filming days... I am leaning further towards black lines (also for speed and simplicity sake).

The rest of the gang with their puppy companions in my favourite colours...

I will be attempting to put together a rough colour script in the coming days to help me colour correct my footage. Once that is complete and i have some feedback on my character colour choices i can start working out how to best and quickly colour my animated line art!!

Thank you to my filming team:

Adam Morrow- Camera work

Wendy Wang- assistant and photographer

Qi Feng- assistant

Kerri- reference actor, assistant and dog trainer

Kira- reference actor and stick finder

Thank you to colourlovers.com for colour palette inspiration

Script Breakdown and New Schedule

I had a production meeting with myself and took note of: Everything i said i would achieve by this point- completed or not and if so whether it still needs to be completed. The old schedule looked like this: 

Final 2D animatic is complete (recently updated to include 2 new scenes with one old scene that was really annoying me cut. The new scenes are important- they show the 2 main characters together in the same shot as equals seeing each other for the first time and their first cautious exchange)

Live action/ 2d animatic is not complete because final footage is not filmed and will not be by the end of this week. I also think it's far too late for me to be faffing around with animatics.

Designs are complete.

Character sheets are complete.

Final filming and editing are not complete.

Research observation is complete

tests are incomplete (i have written off "set dressing" as i would rather focus on animation not hard core compositing past what is strictly necessary to allow my flat characters to exist in the live action setting) I have not tested any compositing past having a meeting with a member of staff knowledgeable about vfx about specific requirements for my film.

2D animation is not complete.

Based on the new animatic i made up a script breakdown (as detailed as i could manage) which will hopefully help me keep track of my film requirements scene by scene and will help when it comes to filming my live action footage. I have arranged a meeting with Adam Morrow who is leading the live action footage team for this project to discuss how the script breakdown and new schedule is working for him.

 New schedule with updated hierarchy: green means high priority, yellow is medium, red is low. i plan to push for having 62 secs of complete animation by the beginning of July. This way i hope to at least have a film that makes some sense to start putting together a month before deadline.

I have acquired a live action reference actress for my wolf pup character! Her name is Kira and her and her owner Kerri have kindly agreed to accompany us on our filming days. Having footage of Kira for reference will help me scale/ place and animate my wolf pup character.

Research: Existing Animation- Watership Down

Deceptively charming and innocent: Watership Down is pretty brutal,  and attracted my attention in my search for good reference for one of the hardest scenes i will have to animate... my pup becoming trapped by it's paw in a rabbit snare.

I made a sketch of this scene to help me understand the poses and line of action better, and breakdown the things about it that make it disturbing and nail biting...

The pulling away from the snare seems counter- productive but immediately indicates panic and also the animal instinct to flee from danger. This is something i can use for my animation, however, i noticed Bigwig's design changed dramatically while he was trapped- it helped emphasize the danger he was in because he suddenly appeared bloated and withered, unlike his normal strong, sturdy and lean style. I don't think i like the idea of applying this idea too heavily to my own animation, i think the scene will be stressful enough for the audience, and i plan to convey the fear and severity in the situation through the pup's expressions and dramatically changed body language- compared to the beginning of the film.

I plan to also use my reference footage of actors portraying wolves to help convey the wolf's fear and panic, there is a scene in the play where a wolf becomes trapped by it's paw in a hunter's trap:

 "The Last Wolf of Scotland" also has representations of protection, defiance, and fear- similar to Watership Down which will be useful when animating both human and wolf characters in my film. Hopefully all of these visual aids will help me create identifiable character performance.

Defiance and protection...

WD:

LWS:

 FOTW:

 Fear...

WD:

LWS:

FOTW:

Acting Reference for Wolf characters

I filmed a run through of an original play a friend of mine wrote, directed and performed in called "The Last Wolf of Scotland". All the actors wore minimal costumes and makeup and used their body language, mannerisms, voices and expressions to convincingly act as a pack of wolves. 

This is the beginning section of the play:

After reading in Nancy Beiman's book Animated Performance, about animated animals having human characteristics in order to create more empathy with the human audience i was keen to arrange for actors to portray my wolf characters so that i could use their expressions in particular as reference when animating my wolves, hopefully this will produce a more emotionally engaging animated performance.

Although these actors were performing a play unconnected with my film i found it very useful as many themes are similar- and this way i had not directed their performance in anyway- it was not how i had imagined it but how they had created it using their own methods.

I asked the actors a few questions after filming the performance and their answers as well as the results gained from the film data will be put towards the research for my conference paper about the authorship of animated characters.

My next step will be blocking my animation and using the human expressions directly corresponding in this footage to help me create empathy for my animal characters from the audience (Beiman, N. 2010)

Credits:

 Acting: Koren Dumbleton, Eilidh Albert-Recht, Sam Bruton, William Edwards, Joonas Schroderus, Rachael Doran, Nicole Watson, Olivia Quick,  James McMaster

Director/Writer:

Koren Dumbleton

Film:

Adam Morrow