LIAF – movingpic

24th November 202024th November 2020

Storyboarding workshop part 1

During summer holidays, I took several online courses, masterclasses and workshops to keep myself busy. One of them was a Storyboard one-day workshop from Aardman Studio.

Because the whole unprecedented situation in the country Aardamn moved all their courses online with all kind of classes available form time to time, from stop-motion to model and puppet making.

Since over the pre-production stage on our team project for LIAF, I worked a lot with storyboards; therefore, I decided to take this additional class to get more about this discipline. I wanted to know more about how it works in the real studio and how different it is from my own experience so far and to learn something new about storyboarding.

The course was taught by Sam Horton. He is an artist who behind such projects as Morph from Aardman, Go Jetters Blue Zoo, Denis and Gnasher Unleashed Jellyfish Pictures, and many more.

In view of the course only one day long, the schedule was very intensive.

Over the first part of the day, Sam introduced himself, he gave us overall about his experience, about projects he worked. Then we got a chance to introduce ourselves- all participants were from different backgrounds, with various drawing skills and with little or no experience in storyboarding at all. After that was a bit thrilling moment- evaluation of pre-course homework 🙂 (I will get back to it later).

Shortly after that, Sam Horton gave us behind the scenes in storyboarding from script to pitch to finished work. He provided a lot of tip and tricks like acting and exaggeration are the best friend of the artist, and perspective lines help enormously for staging and camera placement. More than that, you should always ask for references. And one, that I found really important, test your board on your friends or co-workers. It will help you to make changes before actual viewing with directors and get a better critique of your work.

Right after lunch, we were divided into teams of four and worked on a given script to produce a storyboard. The script was for one of the Morph episodes, and each team had 30 minutes only for work.

I would say it was challenging. Firstly, if you are not familiar with this cartoon, you might not know who are the characters and how they look like. For instance, we had Chas and The Very Small Creatures. So, we googled to find about them. Secondly, for no-English speakers, some specific names of objects were new. Like particular brands of cookies and specific kind of fireworks were mentioned in our script.

When we got back into one zoom-room, each team presented their work and Sam gave some constructive critique and comments. That was the most comical part of the day because we used funny noises while pitching our storyboards. Also, we watched the original episodes for every script to see how close we were with our boards. That was great.

We finished the workshop with a Q&A session and contacts exchanging.

Well, in general, I would say that as a one-day class, it was great and we got a lot of comprehensive information about storyboarding as a profession, about necessary skills and how-does-it-work. I also realised how much I still need to learn and improve my skills enough to work as a storyboarder artist.

To be continued …

15th November 202015th November 2020

Personal contribution to the group project.

By the spring, I was teamed with Hsin (the director and initials idea’s author) and Limbo to work on a film ‘Jumping to the Unknown‘.

The film will represent the Abstract Showcase of the upcoming London International Film Festival (27 November- 6 December).

The produced animation is a combination of two traditional technics: stop-motion and digitally drawn 2D frame by frame.

In the beginning, I would like to divide the work experience on the film into two parts: the first one is pre-production, that happened during the spring, right before the summer holidays. The second part, post-production got around the month from October to November.

By and large, over the first part of the production, we had a lot of meetings and discussions about and around the story. It was a lot of teamwork, where each of us commits to the inquiries about the narrative itself and about the technical part of our future film. We tried to predict what kind of challenges we will meet and how to avoid them by meticulously schedule each step.

Besides all that, I worked on visual content for the project. For this reason, I had plenty of conversations with our director Hsin about what worlds look like, what the difference between birds, how we are going to show it understandably so that it will not leave any doubts. I draw images which then use to produce storyboards as well as a presentation for the client.

Because of the strictly limited time of the final trailer, that should be no more than 1 min; the story changes drastically throughout the pre-production stage. The crucial point was to make it shorter, while do not lose the initial idea. Therefore, I draw and redraw a lot of pictures, either making minor changes or draw whole sequences from scratch. After every meeting with either client or course leads or invited industry professional, there was a lot of work and adjustments to make.

I found that throughout the pre-production step, it is quite crucial to make clear visuals and present the story in the right way and be confident about technical nuances to avoid future misunderstanding with the clients.

Even though I had a quite distinguish role in the first part of creating the film, I would say that overall, it felt more like a team effort.

However, in contrast to the first stage of production, the next step was an absolutely different experience.

For this part, our director decided not to distribute roles between us (a stop-motion animator, an editor, 2D animator, colourist, etc.), but sections of the film instead. So, each team member got his own part to work on from the very beginning until the sequence is absolutely finished. I got the first 10 seconds of animation.

We got much artistic freedom, however, were provided with comprehensive instructions about what kind of actions Hsin would love to see.

Firstly, when we got access to the studio, I helped Hsin to set up the shooting space, by installing a camera, lights and computer for animating our stop-motion backgrounds. We shoot fist sequence in two days. For the first day, it was a lot of experimenting, cutting paper, pros and cons about which method will be more comfortable and faster.

Following, I worked in Photoshop, editing all images for my sequence, by removing unnecessary shadows and adjusting colours and lights.

The next step was animation. Firstly, the background itself. I used our animatic with sounds to roughly time whole clip. I manipulated with images in Photoshop to add some additional frames to make more smooth flight of the platform without the necessity to go to the studio to shoot additional images.

When I was happy with the result, I started working with the main character, the Red Bird.

While on the Red Bird animation, I got approval from the first pass, conversely, it took me a couple of tries to get the right movements for White Birds. I even made a test animation for how they are going to appear on the platform.

And finally, COLOURING stage: we got a colouring palette and list of tools that we should use from the director, so it was a straightforward work.

In the end, I want to add that in spite of it was a challenging project in point of time, however also a great experience. Nevertheless, for sure, a real pleasure to work with Hsin and Limbo.

4th June 20204th June 2020

LIAF Pitch

Recently everyone in our class got a chance to propose an idea for the short stings for this year LIAF (London International Film Festival). This is a part of the Unit 2 Team Project. That means after presentations the invited jury will select several works, and we will be divided into teams to make the film.

Stings are the short animated films which are screened several times before every competition programs of the festival and online in social media and LIAF webpage. They like short representations, intros, for the festival programs. They are approximately in 30-45 seconds length in a broad range of styles, animation techniques and genres.

Overall, there are 8 screening programs:

The Abstract Showcase
From Absurd to Zany
Playing with Emotion
Being Human
Into the Dark
Animated Documentaries
Looking for Answers
Long Shots

Also, it was essential to watch all presented works during the pitching, since we should select several projects which we would like to work on later.

So, I proceed with the idea for the Into The Dark.

Synopsis

There are dark hours on Earth when different scenarios and stories happen, and various characters live their lives.

The narrative takes place during the late-night hour in a back alley of the city or town. It is a narrow part of the street that is hidden away from the prying eyes, with trash bags in the corners and dark green containers, a ‘missing’ poster on the side of the container, a labyrinth of tubes deck the walls of the buildings and only one blinking light ray in the middle of all it. The unrecognised sounds surround this place, scratchy noises, the electric flickering of the lamp.

There something that attracts a rat to this place. It smells it and trying to find the source. Finally, it sees the thing in the middle of the light spot. It is the murder of crows. There, inside that pale of bodies and feathers is something that rat smells. And it jumps, another jump, and run straight to the centre of the birds.

But these birds always aware always on the look-out. One of the birds rises above and make a deafening sound to warn everyone. And right before the rat reaches them, they disappeared.

The scene opens up with an upper view in the middle of the light we see the peace of a hand in the paddle of blood. This is a source that attracts all these night creatures to this tiny dark alley in the middle of the night. The rat grabs this hand and dragged it into the safety of shadows.

The end.

It supposed to be made by using TV Paint and/or After Effects. Since I thought that most of my classmates familiar with this two software perfectly. I simplified the style of animals and exterior, and made everything with sharp angles without curves to provide unpleasant feeling to scenes. Also, acoustic sounds and music should add the mood and scary atmosphere to the story.

Unfortunately, the story did not get through the draw. It seems to me that the narrative is too simple and basic without any strong points for the festival LIAF level. Additionally, I see that main style frame with the rat and the poster did not play because of the mistake in the composition and lighting of the scene.