Disaster

Self Negotiated

Pre-booked the puppet animation studio at college - set up on Tuesday, took a few hours to arrange everything, sort the lighting out and with the aid of Sam became familiar with the software for shooting. Tried a couple of little bits of animation and realised the puppet needs better anchoring so it won't shift whilst I manipulate it. Wednesday morning I glued pins to the end of a few legs and then attempted to make the crab 'walk' It is an age since I have tried stop-motion and no surprise that the movements between frames were too big making for a very cumbersome, lightening quick result. Back into the studio Friday with the aim to make a definite improvement on my earlier efforts and to hopefully produce at least 3-4 seconds of walking. You tube has been a handy resource to view crab movement - very complicated with 6 limbs moving simultaneously. Initially before even setting up and making the puppet I had grand plans to animate the crab and another character interacting with each other-but due to the complexity I thought it would be bette to focus initially on making it walk. However, a few frames into attempting this goal, disaster struck and all of a sudden one of the legs felt a bit strange, looser and then just fell off onto the set. Brilliant, just what I need! As rubbish as it is it did remind me of trips to the beach where you occasionally see random singular dried out limbs of crabs laying in the sand. 'Art' imitating life (albeit in a rather 10p way) With circumstances being beyond my control, the Friday shoot was called off at the first hurdle. Thoughts of different forms of animation for my final project are now in my mind. I'm not sure if stop-motion is for me. It does require an enormous amount of patience and incredible care (I forgot the joys of bashing into the cameras tripod or knocking the puppet with your elbow for instance) but saying that it is fun and satisfying once you have a nice result (but not in this case). I have the studio booked for next week, so this weekend I will see if I can salvage the puppet. Sam advised me on different techniques for wiring the puppet, so I'll give that a go.

So, all that's left to do is re-animate, finish the storyboard, make an animatic and the 'Very Old Man With Enormous Wings in 30 Seconds' film. 

Had a look at a couple of good websites (here and here) with hints and tips for building armatures for puppets. Next time I will twist wire together, making for a stronger longer-lasting result (hopefully)

Sound Design

Did some re-recording with Catherine on Thursday and spent the rest of the afternoon choping up my sounds and putting them in the relevant areas of the film. Still alot to do and the presentation deadline is looming up incredibly quickly! I got a bit sidetracked as I was attempting to record some background music for the start of the film with my stylophone plugged into the mixing desk. Didn't sound too pleasant and I doubt I'll use it. I need to borow recording equipment and gather some 'pub' atmospheric sound. Booked in next week so hopefully I can see that to completion.

Web Design

This was going well but have hit some bumps in the road over the last couple of days. After a tutorial with Sean (showing me once again how to apply Mp3s to a site) I then took this knowledge home an proceed to do it all completely wrong! So I then spent 6 hours trying to work it out, then tried to finish off 2 empty pages only to find my meticulous deign and hard work was for nothing as when I tested them in the internet browser the text couldn't be read in the 'discography' section of my site. Quite dis-heartening as it took ages, but of course I now know what NOT to do (hopefully).

So a busy weekend all round!

Progress so far....

Web Design

Since last time I sought advice and much needed help from Ella at college and she showed me again  what I had previously been shown, but this time I got it a bit more. Returned to her for help a couple more times and am happy with my progress so far. The website is nearly finished I'd say with the results I'm after. The next 2 missions i have to undertake is how to embed Mp3's and short films  - I have been shown this process but again it's all trial and error! Looking good for deadline and presentation (fingers crossed)

Self Negotiated

Good amount of zero feedback from the people who I asked to read the story - Suzie has mentioned I should draw up a questionairre to give to them, but I fear this may be a waste of time. Anyway, have recently built a crab puppet (crabs feature heavily in the story) and also sought advice from Barry Leith concerning building a very old man with enormous wings puppet. Got a bit of advice, so will act on it! Had plans to set up and animate today, but Sam was busy, so first thing tomorrow will get going with animating. My plan for this is to storyboard it, have some test animations and also produce 'The Very Old man With Enourmous Wings in 30 seconds' for deadline. I also collaborated with fellow musician Simon Sandall (who I play in Goober Patrol with) to start creating some form of a soundtrack for the 'feature'. We came up with a nice steady tune and also an incidental piece of music which I will apply to an aspect of the story which is now (hopefully) going to be a small dance routine in the middle of the tale - to lighten the mood a bit and to be entertaining (also fits in with he themes of Magical Realism) May be hugely ambitious, but we'll see.  Anyway the test puppet animation will help me with the decision of how I'm going to realise the story, be it puppet animation or otherwise.

Sound Design

So far so good, got my clip, got it on the computer machine, so that's the basics. Have a plan to record some atmospheric pub/bar sounds, but think I can re-produce this in the studio. Recorded Foley today with Catherine, hopefully it turned out o.k. More to do Thursday (as well as animate-oh dear, double booked myself) The mixing is gong to be a different matter. Constantly aware and studying animation sound, sound on films/adverts. Good to be this aware of what's going on, just a bit annoying. I hope I don't ruin all of that for myself like I did with music! 

Also joined another band. A folk band called The Tanktops. It's a folk band doing folk versions of punk songs and folk versions of folk songs. Our best song is 'sex and violins' (so far) I'm playing uklele (sort of) and bye bye bass and normal guitar, the uklele is what it's all about! We'll be playing a harvest festival near YOU soon!

Technical troubles and other such fun

Sound Design

After much watching, I've settled with a nice animation entitles 'The Wooden Leg'(1994) by Darren Doherty and Nick smith. Not on YouTube so no link I'm afraid (an animation only YouTube would be handy...) Anyway, trying to convert it into an editable format for the best part of 2 days and it's proving a complete mission. Working out mpeg code breakers and whatnot is quite boring and time wasting (when time is of the essence currently) So I have the clip, but not in an editable format. That's frustrating. However I have studied it and worked out what to do with it.

Web Design

Of course this was never going to be easy. Started literally at the beginning again, printed off 'how-to' notes for Dreamweaver from the internet, which proved useless, so did the maximum that I'm able to do with this project (ie. notalot) Laid out the pages (in Flash) I intend to use for the site and all I need o do now is 'simply' link them together so it's a working website. We'll see! A shame I cannot design this more in the way I want, but with the time and my lack of knowledge I'll have to make do with what I can do really.

Self Negotiated

With my battles with computers and their 'fantastic' 'straight forward' software, I have neglected this project and may have to cancel my booking of the puppet D.A.R. due to the simple fact that I have no puppet to test animate. What a nightmare and a big panic. In hindsight, I wish I had all of this taken care of over Christmas and not concerntrated so much on the collaborative project. I'm also sure I have missed a tutorial concerning this project too which isn't much good either. Sort of walking in the dark with this one and hope I can find some kind of direction with it soon as time is running out. Thinking I should've stretched this MA over 2 years as I seem to be unable to fit it all in -3 projects, 2 days a week job, 2 active bands, not to mention a somewhat neglected private/social life. Ho-hum, 'onwards and upwards'. It doesn't help when talking to fellow students about their stuff and seeing their progress it makes me panic with my somewhat lack of progress. Safe to say it's time to write a new timetable.

February and time is running out

Self Negotiated Project

Continuing with character design- also working on the storyboard. Haven't made a puppet yet, hopefully I will construct something by the end of the week. I have printed out copies of the story and given them to so far 4 different people to see what their thoughts and ideas would be if they were to adapt the story and what media they would use. I am yet undecided as to if I will use stop-motion and puppets or hand draw frames due to the amount of characters (however if I built many puppets it maybe less work in the long run)

Sound Design

Eventually allocated a clip for the presentation a great animation entitled 'Home Road Movies'(2000) by Roger Bradbrook. The sound design in the short film fits with the image perfectly, very well though out and varied. The film is made with computer animation, photographic images and moving image. In a nutshell it's a real life story of a shy and awkward father who desperatly wants the family car to make him a better parent. Set in the 70's, the soundtrack reflects this period and the son is the narrator of the tale. Unfortunatly it's not on YouTube so no link I'm afraid, but it's on The Best Of The British Animation Awards 4 dvd.The other examples of sound design from the others were all good, each quite different. I trawled through lots and lots of short film before I made the choice I settled on, in hindsight a great exercise in itself as I watched tons of animation that I probably wouldn't have. Same again now as I try to decide which short piece of animation I will record my own soundtrack on for the imminent presentation. I've been going through the British Animation awards dvds and the Stash dvds. Found a great film which I may pick a scene from 'Flat World'(1998) by Daniel Greaves. Great mix of media and fantastic ideas throughout the very funny story. Here's some of it. The cat is brilliant.

We also recently had a sound workshop, showing us around the workings of the not-so-straight forward Logic sound program (which program IS straight forward on first use?) Good fun and we recorded some good Foley sounds. I bet it won't be as 'easy' when it comes to the 'real thing'!

Web-Design

After a whirlwind session showing us the 'basics' of Flash, it's now up to us to construct a website either in Dreamweaver or Flash. Personally I prefer the freedom which Flash affords with the design process and interactivity - but I prefer the simpler technique for building pages and linking them together in Dreamweaver. I have designed 80% of the pages and since that want to re-design the whole thing and have my website read like a scrapbook, where the visitor literally reads the site like a book. A good example to show what I'm on about can be seen here.

However, due to recent problems I will scrap that idea as it's getting incredibly ahead of myself. For the past 3 days on and off and for the last 10 hours I have been trying (and completly failing) to build the most basic of sites in Dreamweaver, which didn't work out at all. Then I moved onto Flash with the thoughts that I'll be learning from my mistakes and well, that's a wrong assumption! No luck at all and very frustrating with this computer nearly flying out the window! Stupidly I believed this would be straight forward, but I don't think that after literally ONE brisk run through each of these programs that one is aptly equipped to pull off a website using either programs. Hopefully I'll laugh at these initial teething problems (and it's not through lack of trying) There's millions of websites about for some of the most pointless things, it surely can't be THAT difficult(!?!) Lots of questions for my tutorial Wednesday afternoon. I've also been looking at websites all over the net and a particularly nice piece of design is here. A good straight forward personal animation website.

Private Work

I have been asked to produce 2 music videos for a friends band called 'Bonzer'. Quite exciting as both videos are for inclusion on an upcoming release (cd tracks on one side of the disc and dvd on the other) Looks like it will have a worldwide release too. For one of the tracks 'Oddball' I've edited together a whole load of train clips from a cine film from the 40's and it goes really well with the track. Unfortunatly since I had this idea I was exposed to The Chemical Brothers train video by M.Gondry in which very similar sound/image synching is used. Recently whilst I was in Japan I filmed every underground journey I took, even the whole of a Bullet train journey from Tokyo to Nagoya plus trains all over the place. I may use this footage for that track but not sure if I'll have the time to completly edit something from scratch. The second video is my BA film 'The Mouse, The Bird and The Sausage' (as requested by 'Bonzer') and I've really edited it down (still keeping the narrative structure) it fits pretty well with 4 good points of synchresis. Rough edit to follow.

I've also been asked to edit footage of an interview of movie 'hardman' Danny Dyer (star of Human Traffic and many other films) for local publication The Student Pocket Guide. It was a 2 camera shoot and the finished article will be on the website in all its glory. Hopefully more work will come from this as the owner of the magazine wants to go more in this direction. I have been associated with this magazine or over a year now contributing band interviews and designing layouts or the last 6 issues. Check out the website here.

Stuttgart, Germany

Back in Deutchland but there's no rest 'round these parts....


Self Negotiated Project
Been sketching and painting bits and pieces for 'The Very Old man With Enormous Wings' (which from now on I shall refer to as 'Old Man') very confused as to how I shall actually 'do' it. There are so many characters pertinent to the story that it may be too much to create if I am building upwards of 10 puppets. Ideally I would like to keep my initial aim that it's a puppet animation as I would like to see the visual of the wings in motion so-to-speak. I'm not sure if it would work visually if I could build a puppet for the central character and draw the rest. I have also been story boarding and have achieved around an eigth of the tale. I am researching the place in which G.G.Marquez was born - Aracataca, a small town in Columbia for ideas for the backgrounds and settings (also with a colour palette in mind). Yesterday afternoon was spent walking around a cemetary in Wagen, Stuttgart taking photos of angels, in particular their wings for visual references. Alot of work to be done and I hope I don't have to shorten the story to achive my goals within the time set.

Sound Design
So far no good luck with finding a suitable example to analyse or the presentation on Thursday. so far looked at 'Nightmare Before Christmas' which I remember (although being beautifuly animated) drives me 'round the bend with it's musical aspect. So I've ruled that out and had a look at Watership Down (this being one of my favourite films) but no suitable scenes so far. I have the Quay brothers collection at home and will have a look at those too (even though an example we were shown was from this particular collection).

Web design
Checking out many many websites for research - particular standouts for ease, functionality and interactivity (in a band/art and design context) are -
www.lodger.tv (great!)
www.thetoydolls.com (simple, easy, packed FULL of info)
www.guillemots.com (nice flash interaction - BUT annoying as it's not obvious enough to get around)
www.rosinenburg.de (artists website, nice feel and interaction)
www.indenemy.de (nice design,simple)
www.deep-roots.de (good interaction)
www.gestaltbar.de (bit daft but good)
www.fatwreck.com (label website, simple, much info)

In the past week designed a home page (see above), compressed photos and flyers to a smaller image size for a website I'd like to put together. First thoughts are ideally I'd like to have the band website as html and my personal website in flash for interaction and design purposes. Have to keep them simple too!

Also written out a set timetable for all 3 current projects with realistic guidelines (?) now, just have to stick to it and not go off on tangents all over the place. It's all about the focus!

The New Term Begins.....

So, a little over a week into the new term and it's already a bit panic stations 'round these parts! Handed in my storyboard, animatic and time lapse experiments for the collaborative project; which I was quite pleased about the outcomes (apologies if the previous blog sounded grumpy) The reason for the panic is that on last count it's a full 55 days and a bit until the deadline for 3 different projects. One is the self negotiated project, a web design project and also a Sound design project, details of which to follow. Until then a little feedback info from a tutorial earlier today from Suzie concerning 'The Fox's tail'. It seems I covered the collaborative aspect successfully particularly with Paul's evaluation of the project, so I passed as far as she's concerned. She liked the drawings, animatic and the time lapse experiments. Criticisms were that the storyboard was too literal and too much of it, when a smaller chunk of the story would do. Also my personal evaluation was a bit threadbare. I kind of expected this kind of feedback but was glad to get it handed in so I can think about my self negotiated project which I have neglected all Christmas due to the time consuming aspect of storyboarding 'The Fox's tail'. During the tail end of the tutorial Suzie mentioned an upcoming project where will (in her words) "actually animate something"....between then and now this has played on my mind a bit as I actually haven't animated anything in particular (certainly not of any worth) My initial aims and goals for undertaking this course was to learn how to animate nicely have a solidly constructed sound track, working in conjunction with the animation to produce something superior to my last attempt at having a go at it. So, with her words and the previous incredibly long sentence in mind it's time to bloody animate something...anything...to see if it's actually at all still possible, or, if not time to cut my losses and stop putting it off and return to jolly old Colmans Mustard Factory. All of his brings to mind a 'graffiti in the toilet tale' from a friend; in a U.E.A. toilet he saw these words scrawled 'This is the only place I know what I'm doing!' I know the feeling. Anyway, I'll (literally) dig out an old puppet I made from my BA days and see what I can animate. If it's o.k. I may post the outcome on here, but if it's crap I won't (like my experiments with animating on a white board)

Self Negotiated project
The plan for this is to storyboard 'A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings' to build a puppet (with enormous wings) and to animate the puppet as tests for the final project. as mentioned earlier this project has been somewhat neglected, but recently I have started making a little headway. I've storyboarded the first third of the tale and through this it's made me panic a bit. My initial plan was to use puppets for the characters and as I overlooked quite stupidly at the very beginning is that there's quite a number of characters in the tale. Fot the time span as it is I shall adapt the tale into a shorter version, yet even with this in mind the characters are still plentiful! The opening scenes see large numbers of crabs as the focal point ( a solution to this is to maybe make 2 differently designed crabs, animate them separately and many times against a blue screen, then merge them together to increase their numbers on screen. I could try to create the whole thing in a 3d package, but I'm not so familiar with that method and if I didn't get the hang of it, I would have wasted valuable time. Also a first big problem and I'm sure a total nightmare, is that the weather is torrential rain in the opening scenes...that's going to be quite problematic to animate! I've also been thinking about the sound design of the tale, ideally I'd like to have some incidental music (opening and ending, also with an association with the main character) The tale is set in South America, so it would help if I had some traditional music from this area to sonically place the setting to the future viewers - I would like to collaborate with a couple of my musician friends to compose a soundtrack reminiscent of the traditional yet with a contemporary feel (like I mentioned earlier in an ideal world) If I could make a bit of a move with that I think it would be highly enjoyable as much as it is a challenge. I should get my time management down too. After all there's 55 WHOLE days until the deadline!

Sound Design
Was very eager to get this part of the course started and the first session was very enlightening and very enjoyable. Our task for next week is present for 15 minutes an analysis of a soundtrack from an animation. So, in time honoured fashion I got the wrong end of the stick - this evening I hit upon the best piece of sound design (in my eyes) that is, from the 1975 classic 'Jaws' I wrote a whole load of initial notes, a little bit of Internet research, then realised upon reading the course notes, that we should analyse the sound design from an animated film (which makes sense given the name of the course). Gonna check a few film out later (along with the animation, storyboarding and website building)

Web Design Elective
Very chuffed to be doing this part of the course -for years I've wanted to know how to ACTUALLY build a website that you see so many of nowadays. Previous attempts have involved opening Dream weaver many times and looking at the labyrinth of absolute and total confusion, then shutting it down quite promptly and pretending that it never existed in the first place. Well, it's amazing how beneficial it is to actually sit down and be walked through the intricacies of this particular piece of software! The goal is to have actually designed and get together a live website for assessment. I'd like (again ideally) to design and produce a personal website and also a Goober Patrol (band) website that I've been wanting to get together or ages. With the latter in mind I constructed 3 pages for our 'homework' criteria to look at in our session today. We didn't actually have a 'show and tell' with our pages, in fact they weren't shown at all - but got to grips a bit more with the software in the process. I like Dream weaver, yet it seems a bit 'blocky' and websites which use Flash seem more interactive and as 'organic' as is possible on a computer screen. From the research over the last week I have concluded this. The 2 websites I'd like to design are quite different in who they are aimed for, so therefore how they will be designed. One is for Animation and Graphic design so obviously the design should reflect that i'm actually any good at what I'm trying to promote; the second is for a punk band and we all know how discerning music fans are, so the design for this should be in keeping with the band aesthetics and hopefully for people not familiar with the band, draw them in to investigate further. All the staple aspects will be intact, yet I aim to try to make these areas different. I'd like to incorporate interactive areas, but for the main parts (music, video, news) keep it simple. It needs to load up in an instant and hopefully encourage the viewer to spend some time on the site. I have bought the domain names which was quite lucky, so at least that's sorted.

Christmas Holidays drawing

.....was spent mostly drawing and storyboarding 'The Fox's tail' due to time restrictions I had to chop a few bits and pieces from the text,which I feel doesn't affect the narration too much I hope. Had another meeting with the author to show my intial sketches and ideas, I recieved more research material of a woodcut kind to aid with the design and look the story. My time management hasn't been too good, leaving the biggest bits of this project to last- and the usual huge jobs coming from an idea seemingly simple. Nearly every day of the break has required a few hours of drawing. A few technology problems with computer freezes and other joys helped the process! Spent the last day scanning in the images and editing together an animatic of the tale, with a rough soundtrack. Previously before the Christmas break, author Paul Knight recorded the narration for the story which turned out pretty well. Animatic to follow once I've compressed it.