Collaborative Practice: Week 6 - Finishing up Assets and Animating

We have finished most of the primary assets and we are ready to start animating the first two scenes. Before I did it with my two other group mates, I did an animation tryout for the first two scenes to get used to the stopmotion cutout animation style. The animating style that I am going for is influenced by Jan Svankmajer's Et Cetera which I had recently watched. So, the puppet's limbs will be cut out into pieces and stuck up together with blue tack to make it move-able. I'd like to show the process of making the puppet of the elephant and the tank, but I forgot to take a picture of them.

I have encountered a major problem with the camera because it gives off this blurry image of the rendered frame, although it looks perfect on the animation mode in Dragon Frame. I asked Tom who have done some cutout animation in the past whether he has ever encountered the same problem before, and he said no. But he helped me to solve the problem by changing the camera's settings. Apparently, the depth of fields in the camera is set to a low number, and he explained that to get a crisper image it has to be set on a higher number. So, I set the depth of field to F 6.3 and got the brightness that I wanted it to be when the shutter speed is at 1/80.

Another problem is that the camera captures what is beyond the preview on the animation mode. However, this was quite a straight forward problem to solve. A day after my first day animating the fireworks scene with a zoomed in preview on animation mode, Alicja figured out that the preview is on 170% which is why the camera is not capturing what is on preview. It was dead simple, but I just think too far sometimes when it comes to softwares!

BIG TROUBLE !!!

Although cut out animation requires a lot of planning, I feel that it requires me to think imaginatively on the spot for the movements as well. More often than not, the plan that was prepared nicely might not always work for the actual thing. For instance, the storyboard that I made barely helped in informing the movements made by the paper cutouts. The fireworks was my first go for cutout animation. The string at the start of the fireworks animation was not planned at all. It was just something that I found laying in the studio and decide to use spontaneously. Another problem was the castle not being big enough for the panning scene and I thought of making parts of the building rise in order to give more space for the castle interior on the next scene. I was intrigued by the process of overcoming the limitation of the cutout medium and working around the problem to make the animation work. I feel more creative doing this than when I do hand-drawn or 3D CGI animation.

I did the next scene with Alicja, although we scraped off the first take of this scene because the room arrangement does not feel right. Our initial plan is to make the queen walk from left to right to come and inspect closely the fur coat. However, making the queen walk takes up more frames that what we have planned for. We rearrange the room so that the queen does not have to approach the two swindlers. Instead, they are the ones who approach the queen and introduce her to the fur coat.

Another question is 'How will the two swindlers put on the queen's coat?'. In normal animation, the big nosed swindler should walk towards the queen and put on the coat onto her. However, it is impossible to do it in a flat animation set because it will ruin the composition at some point when the three characters will overcrowd in the middle of the screen space. So, in order to avoid that, I thought that it will be nice to make the coat just being thrown by the big-nosed guy and perfectly land on the queen's body.