Week 11

Here is the video for the Week 11 progress.

Female Voice for Therapist

This week was important in fitting a voice for the character of the therapist. A female voice was needed to create a consoling nature to help the main character. This statement needed to be simple yet powerful and effective.

Here I decided that the perfect line would be,
"Don't Worry, Everything is going to be alright"

The voice actress manages to convey an emotion of sympathy for the main character and seems like she is genuinely fitting the role well.

I will add my chosen clip to the week 11 animation playblast.

User Testing Week 11

Here is some new user testing based on week 11 feedback

What is your degree of program?

·         Bachelor degree on Mechanical Engineering

What do you think the story is about?

·         In my opinion, the story is about a man suffering from depression. As he is walking on an icy surface and every step he takes, it just cracks. This is a metaphor for the struggles in his life and the difficulty upon taking a decision, fearing that it will be a wrong decision. After the cracking, the protagonist ran away, in this case the cracking symbolises the problems and struggles of his life. He was unable to face his problems by running away until he could, which is represented by the water. The water can also being seen as suicide as the man glanced at it and was not able to do it for any longer, shook his head. The facial expression of the man illustrates sadness and loneliness and the body language demonstrates his despair.

Comments on the characters and the environment

·         The main character’s design is simple but effective to transmit the message of the story. The variety of facial expressions are mostly accurate to transmit the message and the feeling of the protagonist. The body language is correctly used to convey the purpose of the video. The environment choice is optimal for the story, as the cold environment shows the feeling of the character and the usage of the cracks on the icy surface to show the struggles and the decisions is a brilliant idea.

Overall timing and pacing of the story

·         The animation is short and its simplicity allows it to effectively transmit meaningful messages to the audience. Every part of the animation is well planned and it has a purpose. The pace of the story is rather fast and powerful so that it grabs the audience’s attention throughout the clip.

Do you feel the message is conveyed clearly?

·         Depending on the audience, it could lead to some misinterpretations as I believe in the end that the video was about OCD however, I interpreted it as about depression because an animated clip, different people have different approaches towards it.

Other comments and feedback

·         Overall the video is very well presented, it raises awareness to a lot of the social problems that the teenagers and undergraduates have nowadays and this messages transmits a powerful message in order to help the people with those problems. 

I am very proud of this feedback as it has managed to hit a lot of the points that I have been aiming for in this project. The message seems to have been conveyed completely, this person having not been told the topic of the animation before viewing it but still picking up on the underlying metaphors. It does seem to be able to work with depression and anxiety as a whole rather than just OCD. Maybe that means that it is adaptable to other anxiety problems and therefore has more global appeal and scope for mental health awareness.

Anticipation of the ice cracking

"Give credit to the viewer."

The viewer knows the shot almost immediately but when a shot is too long and it takes too much time for a character to pick up the gist of the plot point then it can feel arduous and lengthy to the viewer. One such instance where this had become a problem was in the ice cracking segment. As the ice begins to crack, the character stays perfectly still and doesn't move bar a few seconds later when he looks down and then slowly looks back upwards before finally committing to the run. This is far too long and according to user testing, especially from my supervisor that when walking on ice, a person tends to drop down and react suddenly when ice cracks. The character would have his arms outstretched and be looking to keep his balance especially with a character as nervous as this one. 



    https://canadasafetycouncil.org/sites/default/files/tips_for_walking_on_ice_-_boston.com__2.png

Fixing the fall

One element of the animation that was a serious issue was the way that the character falls when the ice begins to shake. Taking some time for research and user feedback has been beneficial as I was able to take the shot and smooth it out, allowing for the character to impact with the ground a lot smoother and sooner. This works much better than before as the viewer can see that there is in fact gravity to the animation instead of the previous weeks falls having far too much of a pause before the transitioning drop comes into play.

Camera issues

The next step is improving camera angles and shots. The supervisor for this project mentioned that the animation needs to give credit to the viewer and not always point out the obvious. So, I have focused a lot on cinematography this week, trying to avoid zooming in and out on the characters too much in order to tell the story. Staging is important in animation and that goes as far as the position of the camera as well. Some of the shots such as the drawn pull back to birdseye shot at the 1:18 mark of the week ten playblast were daunting so I cut it out altogether in favour of a more solid still shot which looks much better in comparison. 


Before

After

Research for animation

The jerky head movements that help to highlight the emotions that the character is feeling in this animation needed to be improved on. Looking at arcs and follow through, I went back to the animations that I had watched and learned about in my first year and went back through the twelve principles of animation in order to better understand and create more anxiety in areas such as anticipation which will be hugely important to this anxious/nervous character animation.

 

                                      Brown Bag Films  

                                   Published on 24 Jan 2017

Text on screen: Font search

The character having his thoughts appear on screen for the week ten portion of the animation was suggested to me by an animation peer and so I decided to test it out and showed it to the supervisor. His response was one that suggested the text could work better with the addition of the dialogue from before but that it would need to be blended better with the overall musical elements of the animation. I plan to look at the font and speed of the animation of the words and add elements based on that.

Here is an interesting document that I read about the science of fonts and how different fonts can make people have different feelings. It breaks down the layout of a document, something that could be easily transferred to a cinematography point of view. It will serve as a valuable piece of information for my post production research.

https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/03/31/science-behind-fonts-make-feel/

Lengthening the beginning shot

As suggested, the opening shot was too fast and jerky in the week ten animation. Because of this, for week eleven, I have lengthened the shot, adding a few more subtle movements and making the camera move into the character as part of a transitioning pan shot before taking the next shot. Also as suggested by my supervisor, I cut the shots between the character walking and the title logo appearing.

Here is the clip as of currently with the fixed elements. I am still not so sure about the fade to black segment before the titles but I will discuss it further with my supervisor. As for the lengthening of the opening shot, it definitely looks better as it works nicer with the music, flowing well into the story without the viewer being stuck watching something daunting straight off.

Emotional impact of the story feedback

Based on user feedback, the character seems to now be able to grab the viewer's sympathy over the course of the animation. The audience have given positive feedback on the emotional impact of the story.

I sent this question to ten students based on the week ten animation. They are registered on a variety of courses

"How do the story and character's actions affect your feelings towards the character?"

Here are the responses

1. I find the story to be a very sad one and I feel that the animation makes you feel sorry for the character.

2.  The story is sad and the character looks like he is struggling to cope.

3. The character has some very nice movements and as the ice chases him, I felt myself wanting to know about the character more and eager to know his safety

4. I thought that the character worked well as it enhanced my interest of the cartoon.

5. The snowfall added to the danger set up in the animation led me to feel bad about the guy.

6. I worried that the character would fall through the ice but i felt like the character needed more jerky head movements.

7. The movements are good and so I felt the realism of the character. This made me think about his actions more deeply and I could tell what was going on in his mind.

8. The bit where he sits down and covers his head really affected me and made me sad. The opening though was a bit confusing emotionally.

9. The end of the animation has a huge shock factor that builds on the already dramatic animation where you want the character to survive.

10. The story works as a piece. The character moves in a very anxious way and so as a viewer, I feel that he is unsettled and that makes me want to see him feel better about himself.     


Based on this feedback, the very important aspect of engaging an audience seems to have worked in this animation. The characters' actions and neurotic nature have had an affect on the emotions of the viewers. From this feedback, I also had some issues that I think would be best to fix in order to produce better work. These issues were also mentioned in earlier feedback and by my supervisor. The first of these is this, "The opening though was a bit confusing emotionally." This works on the basis that the opening is confusing, maybe even too fast or daunting in it's camera movements. Based on this, something that my supervisor also said, I plan to slow the opening movement and fit it better to the drama of the music. Secondly is the feedback, "I felt like the character needed more jerky head movements." This relates to the anxious nature of the character. From this, It is clear that the character does not yet move and convey anxiety as well as I had hoped. I will focus on this too in the week eleven process.   

Week 11: Fixing the crack

This week I worked on fixing some of the smaller elements of my animation, based on my supervisor's feedback. The first element that I needed to work on was the size and angle of the cracks that appeared in the birds eye view shot. Based on sketches that my supervisor showed me and I roughly replicated. The angle of the cracks wasn't working in a "T" style pose. Following the issue, it would have been better according to the supervisor to make the cracks more pyramidal in the shot. Making the necessary adjustments took some time but the process looked better. It was also a good choice to manipulate the crack that runs towards the character a bit more and make it wider so that the point is clearer and the character and crack can be seen better in the render.



Before and after sketches.

 Here we can see the before and after crack with snow simulation added.

Looking at it, the variety of the second improved crack looks more naturally asymmetrical and therefore adds more to the aesthetic look of the animation as a whole. Moving on from this, I plan to look more at the other issues that were found in my animation, both from a technical and a storytelling point of view. 

Week Ten Progress

Based on feedback from various user testers and my lecturer, here is my week 10 progress showing amended elements from the previous week. I have added more expressions and movements to the characters as well as fixed some elements of the ice cracking, sound effects and overall emotional impact and appeal of the characters.

Ice shot forward or backwards?

A look at the camera shot suggested to me by my supervisor. If the ice moves forward with the camera then it could add more suspense rather than the camera following the ice from back to front which it is currently. I looked at these two ice related movements and decided to speak to my supervisor some more about it because I really enjoy the movement of the camera in it's current state.

Here is how it looks currently

   

Test Render

Here is a render of one frame of my animation, in order to get a taste of the overall look of the animation. I noticed that the mountains do look snowy and that works very well but the ice still needs to be a little bit more reflective and look more like frosted glass. The HDRI snowy scene sky works well though and certainly adds to the overall feel of the animation.

The first time that I rendered this frame it took just two minutes but the snow simulation nparticles were not showing up in the Arnold render view. I did some research and found that setting an FX Instancer would work. Following this, I rerendered the same frame and saw that the render took over three hours and still didn't produce snow. I need to work more on figuring out the snow on anything to do with the render view. The three hour render is below and thankfully it contains very little noise and the lighting and texturing shows very well.

Next up is fixing the later shots.
   

sounds and music

I looked some more at sound and music to add to the overall feel of the animation. The score can be very important to developing the audience's emotions and understanding of the piece.

Here are some links to sounds that I felt would benefit the animation.

First of all, we have the sounds associated with ice cracking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JirLXTvgTD8

This one would work very nicely for the subtle part of the animation when the character first cracks the ice on the foot closeup.

Here is another one full of ice cracking sounds that could work for the longer cracking 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18069W2TbUI


dramatic music for the run list so far. I am working through these to decide what works the best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE4PKjbzZmI

The music that starts from the 4:33 mark works well as I used it in the test animation for week 9's playblast. This worked well and was very dramatic.


Here is the reference for the heavy breathing used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSyIGm7dNb4  by Distorted Room, published 2 Dec 2013 "Heavy breathing Man sound- Man Breath sound effect ver.1"

I had originally attempted to get in touch with some composers who could create music for students. My supervisor gave me links to these people's emails but sadly there was an issue where most of them either didn't reply, didn't have time or resources or didn't know who my supervisor was. So, in this case I had to look further into just referencing music.
One thing that my supervisor suggested was a friend of his who may be able to get involved for composing. If this comes through, I may be able to change the audio to something better.

Meanwhile, the spoken audio that I recorded for the animation was not as good as I had hoped and didn't fit very well. I showed the animation to a friend who suggested the thoughts appear on screen as words in post production. I actually really like this idea and it adds a lot to the scene rather than making it disjointed based on the sudden change from instrumental to dialogue.

fixing elements, Ice Crack anticipation

In order to build anticipation, I followed the advice from my supervisor and animated the crack moving towards the character as he runs away. This definitely adds to the suspense of the scene and allows for the audience to gain a shock factor from seeing the character in a life or death situation. Hopefully from this dramatic addition that feeds nicely into the sliding shot that follows, I will be able to create more interest and emotion within the animation. I created this shot similarly to the previous one by using clusters and vertex manipulation to create the feel of cracking ice.

Week 9 user feedback with Audio

What is your degree program?

Digital Media: Animation

What do you think the story is about?

At first I thought it was about a traveller getting stuck on the ice in the artic. Then I realized it was illustrative of someone dealing with OCD or ANXIETY.

Comments on the characters and environment

The character’s poses have nice silhouettes at times, but the model doesn’t really lend to the expressions of the animation. The environment is recognizable but lacking in visual interest.

Overall timing and pacing of the story?

Timing was pretty good, there was a shock-factor at the end of the story. As for pacing, there are some opportunities to use overlapping action to make the animation seem less robotic.

Do you feel the message is conveyed clearly?

I understood the meaning pretty well and I felt emotionally connected to the character. 

Week 9 progress

Here is the week 9 progress playblast. As of now, I have finished all of the scenes in the animation and from here plan to go back and fix small details and issues based on the various forms of feedback that I found throughout this process. In this version, I added some sound and music that currently is just placeholder music. The speech will stay as is for now unless feedback from user testing says otherwise.

I DO NOT OWN THE MUSIC IN THIS VIDEO and will reference it as such in the event that I use any of it for my final rendered animation.

some more feedback user testing

What do you think the story is about?

A meltdown caused by OCD

Comments on the characters and environment

The character is very easy to follow and you can kind of get a sense for what emotions he's going through while having this meltdown.

Overall timing and pacing of the story?

Timing and pacing of the story were both very well thought out and planned perfectly

Do you feel the message is conveyed clearly?

Yes I do.

Update on task list

Feedback on week 9 progress

What is your degree program?

Interactive systems and Video Games Design

What do you think the story is about?

OCD Awareness

Comments on the characters and environment

The environments and characters are not at the highest standard but the simulation of snow is shown brilliantly as the contrast of colours also work very well with the tone of the scene. A standout piece of modelling would be the hood and the eyes as they work very smoothly with the animation and look great.

Overall timing and pacing of the story?

The overall pace of the animation is quite fast with quick camera movements but the animation itself, from the running and stopping holds together at a great timing. A standout piece of animation in terms of timing and delivery would be the stopping of the character when he is running.

Do you feel the message is conveyed clearly?

The message was conveyed in a very effective way and allowed the user to see everything very clearly. At an animation of 1:42 the story is told brilliantly and very effectively as it finds a great balance between both scenes. The story also holds very well to the meaning and wraps things up nicely at the end.

Other comments

Great progress, I would recommend adjusting the initial ice cracking animation done from the top view.

Female character

The next part of my animation involves the big reveal that the character is not really in the Arctic wilderness and that he is in fact just outside a therapy clinic. In order to further highlight this and look more into the concepts of OCD and focus on the help and support message of the animation, I needed to create a second character. I therefore created a female character, both for diversity and because it felt more suited to the role that was needed. This character could be a therapist or spouse to the main character or maybe just a friend. I hope to leave this ambiguous for the audience, as I hope that they make their own assumptions as to who this character is. The message here is not who she is but wht she represents, in this case, help, support, friendliness and guidance. She is there to act as a shoulder for the protagonist and act as a way of helping him. This uncertainty to who she is helps to show the point that we all have people in different forms who can help us in times of despair.

The character was modeled and textured with advanced skeleton being used for the rigging process.

 

Ice scene, Stranded

The next part of my animation that I chose to focus on was the scene in which the character becomes stranded on a block of Ice. I modelled some more ice pieces and tried to capture the character's emotions in this scary time. I tried to incorporate cowering as well as fear. This will be further highlighted through the use of blend shapes to form accurate and suitable facial expressions.

Here is a shot of the scene which includes a watery style texture to display the cold Arctic ocean.

Supervisor Feedback

Based on feedback from my supervisor, I want to write about some of the issues that he found along with the good elements. In doing so, I hope that I can better understand the areas which need improvement. He really liked the timing on the slide part of the animation as well as the step back following the cracking of the ice. This was down to the emotion that the character was successfully conveying. It made it so the supervisor could tell what the character was thinking. In my mind this is strong as it highlights good animation. He hoped so some smaller details to be added. He mentioned about camera angles and how certain smaller movements that were in place really added to the piece. Some angles could have been improved on and I noticed that the framing needs to be slightly lower as the character has not been properly centered in the shot.

     The supervisor talked about building anticipation as the cracks in the ice follow the character rather than just one ice cracking. He also said that the opening part of the animation needs to be clearer as it feels like the character is holding himself for no real reason. I decided that this week I would go back and fix some of those issues as well as continue with the animation process, hopefully getting the animation completed before going back and fixing the smaller details. 

Week 8 animation progress

Here is the playblast so far that I used for user testing.

Ice cracking fixed

I finally managed to crack the ice. At first, I had a lot of issues with the ice cracking, due to problems with booleans. After spending a while talking to my supervisor and reviewing the boolean difference options, I decided to go down a different route. I used multi cut to cut up the surface mesh before creating clusters for the crack edges. Following this, I created an ocean surface under the ice and animated the clusters. This solved the problem and I was finally able to animate the ice.

User testing Week 8

Today I did user testing on four people from the animation and games course in order to improve the progress on my animation. I showed the current progress playblast to them.


User 1 feedback    (Animation course)

 First 830 frames look really good. Timing looks so much better than in previous projects. I can see the thoughts of the character but I feel that the title sequence needs another second.

I also feel more snow would help to set the scene.

Facial expressions look good.

Torso, needs to move more to fit the body though

Impression of characters emotion:  relatively happy and then despair following the cracking of the ice

Ice movement: couldn’t really say but works well

I think you have improved a lot as an animator and modeller.

User 2 feedback   (Graphics for games course)

Flows very well

Weird camera transition at the start needs to be fixed.

Final idea sounds really interesting

Impression of character's emotion: Distressed. Happy for a few seconds. Conveys emotion very well. Maybe add mist or clouds to the scene to help with icy, cold effect.

Exaggerate the arms if you can. Texture to make it colder. Fix some speed of shocked section step back

Looking good overall and timing is really impressive.

User 3 feedback (Interactive systems course)

Timing looks very good. Needs a bit more work with hands but facial expressions seem to convey stress and fear very well. Texturing needs work. Overall seems to be working towards a good grade. A few tiny arm issues to fix.

User 4 feedback (Film production course)

Story flows well so far. Good camera movement but shaky in places, needs work in the area of the hands. Character looks scared. Well staged piece but needs a lot of work on smaller movements. Ice cracks are very well timed but need some more realism. More snow would be nice too.

Based on these results, I plan to edit my animation and conduct more user testing throughout the animation process.   

Animation progress

Here is a playblast of my current progress. First 42 seconds.