Responsive - 11 Second club, November Competition

So during the month of November i made the attempt to enter the 11 second club this month. The 11 second club is all about using a sound clip and creating an animaiton from it. This month the sound clip was from star wars:

"Are you offering me a job?"

"Would be nice to ya. Doesn't pay much."

"You're offering me a job."

"I'm thinking about it."

From this i had to come up with a good way to represent it. A lot of my classmates and people i knew were going down the comedy route but I don't really have much of a funny bone for coming up with jokes and all the ideas i was coming up with were dull or copied from my classmates. The main one i came up with was a business man offering a job to a homeless woman. This was a very dull, back and forth, rough idea that didn't hold much to it. So instead of going down the comedy route i went to the other side of the spectrum. Depressing. Melancholic. Dark.

I also wrote down my time stamp with all the separate frames and which frame they will be on.

Going down the dark route i developed an idea of medical, human experimentation. So this man is offering this woman a job to become a human experiment, unknowingly. But i cant add any extra sound so i had to come up with visual context. i looked into the nazis as they took human experimentation to the extreme. By using them as a catalyst i could use style motifs of that era (1940's). I knew i couldn't put any of the nazi insignia but i decided to imply it.

The shots of the aniamtion had her hanging over her bed with the scientist leering above her and as she questions his offer he turns away so that he can smirk to reveal his true intentions, before turning back round with an innocent expression this, however, still takes the woman aback.

I started to design my characters based on the styles found in books that entailed styles of that era. For the design of the woman i wanted to give her not a stocky build but not an hour glass figure as she was a german woman and the general stereo type for a german woman is strong. Even though she followed this stereo type i wanted to make her appear vunerable so her build is very small and fragile but her clothes will make her appear a lot bulkier to appear demure.

The initial sketch on the far left was copied from my mood board and from there i started to refine and simplify her design to something more flexible. I wanted to avoid doing the stereotypical petite round head that women are often drawn as in animation so through the development she became more elongated and long. This really gave her a visual character that I found appealing. Also while choosing the clothes i thought about what my grandmothers wear, heavy cardigans and baggy clothing that hides the figure so i designed the dress she wears to hang in every section, this would also mean a lot of secondary action.

For the scientist i Made use of the reference from the mood board again as the there was a photo of a solider interacting with a man in a lab coat. The design of the scientist had to be stern but approachable so that when he is facing the woman he is kind and passive to the suggestion but asserts a form of dominance over her to make her feel inclined to think she can gain a sense of security under his authority. His face and shape also had to be able to switch to a more sinister vibe when his face was shadowed so his face has more lines in it to get these crueler expressions across as well as make him appear older.

Because i had already established a style with the womans design i stuck to it with the scientist. While the woman was more curved and rounded with softer shapes, the scientist was more square and imposing of a figure. I was really happy with the strong differences between the two characters because it got across their personalities that were required in the story.

The world was a dark and grungey hospital room that i was struggling to draw out as the perspective kept on getting screwed up.

So i went back to my reference on my mood board and continued to redraw the same scene multiple times over on thumbnails, gradually adding more detail and designs, including light and shadows. 

Using these refined images i put together my animatic to the sound to gather the timing that each scene would take place on screen.

Once i begun animating i did the rough movement of the characters hand drawn as it is the most effective way for me to understand movement in animation. Working on 24 fps i was able to portray really smooth and fluid movement that was either effective with speed or subtle in slower movements.

 

A slight flaw to this plan was because the movements were subtle i had a lot of almost still if not static moments in the animation. I want, in the future to practice using multiple layers of paper to animate on, if the method proves faster and more effective for myself.

Once the line tests had been finished i imported them into photoshop to animate them digitally. I thought that animating it digitally would be the best way to quickly animate it and have the static moments stay static, this unfortunately resulted in a rather off animation and movement which became janky with no charm of the traditional animation and the follow through action had become poor.

My other problem was that the competition deadline was five days away when i finally started to animate the digital lines. So with the encroaching deadline i was hurriedly producing a poor quality animation. While i want to follow through and finish the animation it was going to be a poor quality piece and it ate into my other project which had a deadline pressing as well, so i made the decision to drop this animation and competition as all the work was over loading me and effecting me negatively so i had to stop something in order to give myself room to think. On reflection this has come down to my time management as well as the focus on my other module so for future work i need to properly plan out my animations and work flow effectively and ahead of time.