After over a year of working on my fellows project, I am pleased to say that it is finally finished. And, thank god it is. I've spent hundreds of hours working on the four minute film, struggling with crashing programs, unsaved work, and a multitude of setbacks, not to mention completing it all during COVID, the most motivation draining time of my life. I finished the film a couple weeks ago, just before I left for college at St. Andrews. I recently entered it in many film festivals across the globe with the help of my Dad. Last week, Paris Film Festivals announced its nominees, and my film was awarded Honorable Mention. In the upcoming weeks, I am excited to see how my film does in other film festivals. Here's the link to the finished film if you'd like to watch it. And thanks to everyone who supported me throughout its making.
0 Comments
My Fellows Project was not really affected by COVID. Since I didn't have to get interviews or much help outside of my mentors, the pandemic was not that much of a hinderance to the progress of my animation. All of the tools I needed to make the project I already owned and what I needed to learn did not have to be taught in person, but could be found on Youtube. I actually think in some cases COVID may have helped the progress, since with all of the cancelled sports and virtual schooling I had a lot more time to work on my project which I definitely needed. However, I did find that it was difficult to keep motivated with my project and even school because of COVID.
I have begun to collect resources on coloring techniques and tutorials for Photoshop animations. This video I found goes in depth in coloring animations and describes the process of coloring for an entire scene. I plan on following this procedure that he has laid out. This would begin with selecting a color pallet which I plan to be neutral color, a lot like this colors used in this animation. Then I will go through each scene and completely color the first frame of each scene to see if the colors work well together and match.
The line art section of my fellows project is taking a lot longer than I anticipated. These last few scenes happen to be the most difficult to draw. They have rotating bodies which is difficult to animate and to make long realistic and keep proportions the same. So, drawing these frames takes up a large chunk of time. It is difficult to keep being motivated throughout these scenes as the receptive frames take a lot longer than usual and are quite boring to draw.
Most linearts have been completed I have only about 30 seconds worth of animations left to complete most of which are about half-way done. The few scenes that got messed up during the importing and rendering have been fixed and have not made it into this render because it takes so long to render. Gaps between liners have been filled. The final lineart render should be up by mid-February. Because there is no color each layer is see-through and can make it confusing to view. The audio also did not render correctly, but it has not changed from the previous edit.
I have begun compiling the linear scenes that I have finished. I have about 15 completed scenes equating to about 2 minutes of content out of the total four minutes, so about halfway done with the black and white version. The coloring should take a much shorter amount of time. One struggle I have been having is the processor on my computer is not the fastest and rendering and working in Premiere and the timeline feature in Photoshop is very slow and the programs often crash or I loose progress.
Now that the animatic is done, the long and receptive process of filling in frames begins. There is not much change going to happen within the next couple of weeks just because the process is long. Nonetheless my goals for December are to complete at least ten scenes in linear and learn how to color animation in a way that is the most efficient for my project.
This month I have been working on learning the animation software. Mostly the coloring and video composition apps. I did a test run for coloring and line work this past week and I filmed the process in a vlog style journal. For my test run of coloring frames of animation I decided to test a scene that I had recently completed and was full of many different colors. It turns out that coloring may be a lot easier with this extension (AnimeDessin) I recently added to Photoshop. Since this was a test, I made a rough background and chose bright colors. It is likely that that color palette will change to become less bright and more accurate to the colors and the fish and the corals. I am also deciding whether I wan to keep the outlines or just have color blocks. But that is a question for later. Either way it seems coloring may be a lot easier than I thought it would be and may take less time than I had expected.
During the meeting, I showed what I had accomplished throughout August and September, displaying a couple examples of finished line-art animations that just need color. We also discussed a timeline for the project to be finished. By the end of December we decided that I should be done the animation, color, and sound effect portion of the animation, leaving translation and subtitles for spring.
|
AuthorI am a student at Severn who would like to understand the process of writing and animating a short film. This opportunity combines both my love for drawing, animating, and writing. The film explores my experience of living on a boat for two years. Archives
September 2021
Categories |