5476 Miles design and progress

As the summer of social solitude and lazy content crawls to its slow, reluctant death, suffocated by a pillow of work and responsibility, you may be left thinking "Terry, where's your latest animation that I've really been looking forward to for all this time?(and what nice imagery you've used there)". Well, ideal person who cares about my animation, I didn't finish it in time because making a 4 minute video made entirely of paper is more work than I had anticipated.

So, after much cutting of paper (and metaphorical wrists) I came very close to being ready to start the animation. Animation, you know, that bit that people think is the slow and boring bit? The bit that would (will) only really involve sliding bits of paper around? It turns out that's the quick and fun bit when doing a paper animation, because that's not the bit where you spend hours or days on a piece only to realise it's a small section of a scene that's in shot for just a couple of seconds.

With that in mind I would say that making an entire 4 minute video out of paper is too much for one person to do in a reasonable amount of time, which is why it's coming up to around a year and a half since I drew up the first storyboard, and although it's looking like it's going to be my greatest creative venture to date; in terms of making entire paper videos this will probably turn out to be the last of any.

Design

So, to show that I have actually been working on it over the summer (and to flesh out this blog a little bit more) I thought I'd go through the design process and the cutting (so much cutting, I actually started to injure my hand from using the craft knife for too long), with lots of pretty pictures.

Cut out lots of tiny bird shapes? Flock off.

Those birds were made by using a hole puncher and then cutting out tiny bird shapes with some nail scissors.

The eyes look a bit funny, so I won't draw attention to them by writing about them in the caption.

So, when designing the bits to cut out I drew a sketch first to work out the size and the separate shapes to cut out then did the cutting by eye, later I discovered tracing paper and traced my sketches and just cut along the lines (genius).

The streetlamp is from an arty night scene.

Yes, that's a cow.

As you can see I didn't always make the cut out exactly like the sketch, using it as a guideline and applying a little artistic license.

 For the flight of the birds, I had 2 different basic wing shapes which would (will) be replaced during animation (see animation test a bit further below).

(Just about) Finished bits

Some finished paper bits.

Heart of butterflies

Balloon scene before I'd finished the balloon.

I told you I'd come up with something for the sea bit (see storyboard post)

To give you an idea of scale, the blue background is an A1 sheet, so there won't be that much in the frame at one time because the base of my animation rostrum is a bit smaller than A3.

Animation tests

I've done a small amount of animation when testing concepts and here they are:

Before I cut the circles from the hole puncher into bird shapes.

Testing some eye movements, a vital and amusing part of the singing in music videos.

1st: each frame is a unique wing piece, 2nd: every other frame is a unique wing piece and the wing is moved slightly on the second frame it appears.

I hope I didn't give too much of a miserable impression because I'm actually really excited to get the result of the finished video because in my opinion it'll be my best yet (and should be after this amount of time) and if not then probably the artiest but certainly the paperiest, unfortunately you'll just have to wait a little bit longer to see it.

(psst... if you click on the pictures you can view a larger version, just so you know...)

In The Woods festival

My animation "Polar Where?" has been selected to screen at a second festival, this one is "In The Woods" festival and is on the 31st of August. They're screening it as part of their "showcase of exciting new talent" in their programme called "cinemagic mushrooms" because apparently talking bears counts as a "psychedelic offering"... they've always seemed pretty normal to me.

Edit: Here's their programme for the festival; Polar Where is down at the bottom.

Encounters Film festival

My film ‘Polar Where?’ has been officially selected to screen in competition at Encounters as part of Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival 2013 at the Watershed and Arnolfini in Bristol (17-22 September 2013). It's also eligible for the Brief/Animated Encounters Grand Prix Award,  Audience Award and the Children’s Jury Award.

I made the film over the Christmas holiday instead of revising for the university January exams, so in some ways this means I can stop feeling guilty about that.

Accidental wizards.

The problem with doing animation as a hobby is that, when I do it, bits of plasticine are often left lying around on my desk; the last time I was trying to revise for exams I accidentally made this wizard.

The red bull is not impressed.

5476 Miles storyboard

This post shows the storyboarding process for the 5476 Miles music video, so you could say it contains spoilers as the music video isn't actually finished yet.
EDIT - which you should watch here first if somehow you haven't seen it yet! (Or to refresh your memory).

Some time in early 2012 I decided to make another music video for my brother (if you haven't seen the others take a look), the song was from his free solo album and the initial idea (sea + title --> starlings) came from the cover art. I decided to make it out of paper partially because it's a type of animation I haven't done before and probably more accurately: the title would look good if it was a paper cut out.

I spent far more time storyboarding on this animation than I ever have on any other animation, judging from the changes I made it makes a huge difference. For those of you who don't think storyboarding or planning for any sort of video is very important: you're wrong. It is.

Imagine if I'd have stopped the storyboarding process here and made this...

This was the first version of the storyboard, initially I was going to make it a mix of paper animation and stop motion (the bit in the nest) but I decided as a style choice it wouldn't really work that well or I would have to be careful to make the transitions, so it wasn't really necessary. The tone of the initial storyboard was lighter, with little Nigels hatching from eggs playing the different guitar parts and a falling into the sea bit that didn't really make much sense. For some reason I then focussed on the story more so the music video makes more sense and is more 'arty' but not as funny. For example I removed the female bird almost completely to more connect the male bird with the Nigel character and lyrics of the song and because apparently I hate imaginary personified birds and want them to suffer crippling heartbreak and loneliness.

Then for a while I had to leave working on this because at the time I felt I wanted good A level grades to get into university to do science instead of animation on the off chance I might want to get a proper job at some point, which meant it had to wait until summer.

After exams I showed an arty friend of mine the storyboard (I sent the above picture, I didn't take it for this blog, no real effort was made in the making of this post; I'm just using it as a way of procrastinating with a small sense of achievement in the time I should be doing more cutting, which I'll get onto in a later post) to see if any of it made sense outside of my own head. The main outcomes from which were; the flying lettering wouldn't work very well, so change it to something... how about a balloon? Yep. Isn't there still a minute left of the song when your storyboard ends? Shhh... And later, a very good suggestion of the way to fill the gap between the flying title and the playing guitar in the corner :

Because who doesn't have a guitarist in their basement?

I made a, greatly altered and close enough to final, digital storyboard to give me an idea of the timings using After Effects, towards the middle I got a little it carried away with it (and using a pen tablet) which was because at the time I was moving house soon and didn't want to start cutting in case stuff was lost/packed/damaged which forced me to have more storyboarding time.

EDIT: I've removed the storyboard video, as it's going to be out soon. You'll just have to be patient.

Uploaded to my general rubbish videos youtube channel

This video contains the most 'spoilers' as it's closest to what will be the final version, so you might want to wait to watch it after the final video is released.

You'll notice there are still gaps in this storyboard which I have since filled with ideas that I had when trying to sleep early in the morning so may only make the most sense when viewed at 1-3am (when else would you want to see a broken 4th wall, heart of butterflies and a song referencing Shakespeare quote?). The sea bit towards the end of the video was where I was running out of ideas and motivation so thought the changing styles might fill the gap be cool or interesting but (at the time of writing but I doubt this will change) instead I'm going to just keep it the same style and actually think of an interesting thing for the sea bit and come up with a pretentious arty explanation with metaphors to justify it.