Collaborative Practice: Week 4 - Storyboard and Monoprint

I made a mock up storyboard for our Fur for Animals brief because we have not have any designs just yet except for Galuh's king character. So, since I thought the original story for the Emperor's New Clothes was quite similar to Disney's Robin Hood I have decided to use the film as a reference to draw the characters and premises. When I started watching the movie, the title sequence is similar to what we want our animation to look like, just like a theatrical play which characters will be running across the sets and simple panning movements by shifting the background vertically and/or horizontally. 

Galuh's king character

The mock up storyboard will be used to inform the logistic planning for the cut out animation because it translates what we have been imagining how the animation will be so far. I realised that the storyboarding process was crucial, so I did put in the extra work to make it clear and readable by my other group mates. We had encountered a bit of a problem after I have given them the storyboard because they had some difficulties understanding the camera movements, so I proposed to them that I will make an animatic from of this mock up storyboard and any other assets we have for next week in addition to the storyboard. I realised how the systematic production process will come handy if I will be working with people who does not study animation. 

Right now, the storyboard is still a bit vague in terms of telling the story because there are some bits and bobs missing in the last scene. It was the part when the camera zoomed into the fur coat, and the animals are seeing themselves being cut up into parts and stitched up to make the king's fur coat. I think once we have got the design and put them together in the animatic, the story will become much clearer.

The illustrators took a revenge on me after I seemingly puzzled them with the storyboard. Yes! They took me to the print room to do mono prints. Fortunately, I found the process therapeutic and not as dry as me trying to explain the storyboard to them, but ultimately we all learned new things this week. 

As a note to future self, I will document the process of mono printing in this post.

Start off by gathering materials: oil spray for cleaning the roller, sticky ink and palette knife.

Clean the roller once again until there is no ink on it before making applying the ink that we want to use onto the table. 

Apply the ink that we will be using onto a small area on the table using the roller.

We need to apply powder on top of the ink that will be used for monotype so that not all the ink will stain onto our paper unless we were putting pressure on top of it.

Put the positive or negative on the acetate sheets. To explain it simply, if we cut things out from a paper,  the positive is the pieces that we cut out from the piece of paper, while the negative is what remains on the piece of paper.

Preparing the positives on the acetate sheets

After the preparation is done, we can just roll the roller onto the area of ink that we have, and apply it by rolling the roller onto an acetate sheet. Every time we start on a fresh sheet of acetate, more ink have to be applied on the roller. 

Also, we can reuse the acetate sheets and get different outcome of mono prints. Galuh told me that there are formulas that applies if we want to make different kind of mono prints, but it takes experimentation to get it right. However, for this session, I can only rely on the possibility of happy accidents to make some good mono prints.

Black ink rolled on acetate sheet

Immediately after rolling the black ink, put a piece of paper on top of the inked acetate sheet, sandwich them into the press appliance and roll them over. The result on the paper will be magical. Monoprint is a good process to get different variation of textures for animation assets.

My first mono print result

As for monotype, the process is more straightforward and mark making skills will affect the result. Basically, put a piece of paper on top of the powdered ink, and started drawing on top of the paper with hard media like graphite crayon, pen or pencils. The idea is that the outcome will be on the side of the paper in contact with the inked surface.

Alicja showing me how to mono type

The process is not restricted to monotype and mono print. Experimenting more with the medium and mixing the techniques is helpful to come up with more variation of prints. This one is an acetate sheets scratched with the corner of of a smaller acetate sheet, and the positives were laid on top of it. Instead of doing the usual mono print process, Alicja did not apply another ink on top of them and straight away press the template on a sheet of paper.

Having the remaining ink from the acetate pressed on a sheet of paper gives off a faint colour with a lot of grainy texture.

After the mono print is all done, we should let all of them dry for a day.

Washing up is a little bit nasty since we have to wipe off the ink from the roller and the acetate sheets with oil. It takes a good 10 minutes for me to clean up all the black ink from my fingernails.