27.5.2021

 

Team Gilliam - Project 2 - Pirates 

For this project we were tasked in creating a short film using cut outs animation and it had to have a good 5 to 10 seconds of lip sync.
This meant that timing was very thing in this project.  

Testing various methods of moving the mouth since everyone knew going in that lip sync was a big part in this project.

Some quick ideas I drew down on some A4 paper. We all agreed to use the Wellerman song since it had become extremely popular on TikTok. It's not actually a song about pirates however, but rather it's a song that has it's origins in whaling trade with the original sea shanty coming from New Zealand.

My interpretation of the song than a more realistic style looking up real life whaling methods and crew uniforms. Yet somehow the final product is actually I lot darker than my version has it deals with madness and obsession. 

This was my version of a story board. It never got finished but both me and Rosemary ended up with a similar story anyways.

As Rosemary was sketching out the final design I trying to image what it would look like as a puppet by cutting up some scrap tracing paper. It was mostly done to pass the time in all honestly.

I did a lot of the lip sync. In order to get the timing right I imported the sound file into Toon Boom and worked on getting the lip sync down and once I was happy with what I had I transferred the information down on the given timing chart.

I actually took some advice from another blog after I found the lips were moving faster than I thought they should. 

I similar thing was said is Richard Williams book but I still think it's amazing how much information there is out there for younger animators.

https://photoccpy.tumblr.com/post/165146399829/the-lip-sync-tutorial-they-dont-give-you

I also looked into phonics and looked at examples of people trying to pronounce each phonic sound as reference materials. This video was the my primary reference has he goes every possible sound in the English language.

I also designed all the background you see in the final product. 

While most of the team were more used to working digitally I can barely wrap my head around After Effects. which is probably why nothing looks quite right after exporting my work.

However, I could apply my knowledge of fine art into designing the backgrounds so what you'll see below was I image I copied of a real life ship which I use to test various materials on. I used Paint, pencils, pastels and watercolour pencils. Watercolour pencils won out just because I could work really fast with them and it looks like something out of a children's book.

How I like to use watercolour pencils is that I would block in the colours on textures and then tidy everything up with a wet paint brush. I have tried dipping the pencil directly into the water but I often just ended up with soggy pencils.

I helped cut out and colour the boarders around some of the puppets but that was more of a group task.

I think around this point I was starting to get frustrated with being behind schedule and a lack of ay clear pipeline. which I said on the group chat without really thinking about my team mates. I took some time away from the computer after everyone said they felt hurt about what I said. 

I think working with a team can be quite hard for me sometimes as I can get stressed over people how many simply work differently to me or even just the most pointless of things and I think that's something I'll need to work on if I end up working within this industry or even just for getting through in life.

I am not sure how I'll achieve that but for now I am just going keep that sort of thing between me and a close group of friends until I can figure out a better strategy for those sorts of the thoughts and feelings.

The whale ended up with a chip in it tail in the final film after my hand slipped whilst colouring in the edges of the paper. This whale has bee through some hard times.

I made a The End piece at the last minute. Asked my team if it would be ok to put it into the final animation and they said yes.

Me and David. B had issues with exporting the film as the first 170 or so frames ended up missing. We tried everything such as different film qualities or file formants but it turns out that the whole thing was my fault. Since everyone else's files were on the desktop I thought I would be easier to find ours if I moved ours onto the desktop too.

the only problem was our file was green and everyone else's was black didn't think too much of it at the time however it turns out that I didn't move the project but the X1 file which is where all the higher quality images used for exporting are sorted. 
The solution to the problem really was a simple as copying and pasting the missing files into the new folder. 

The final version of the film can be found on the team blog https://teamgilliamsunderland.blogspot.com/