Our Group Sea Project

This is our group's finished Sea Project animation.
I think it's turned out as we originally set out to do although I feel if we had more time we could have perhaps made some of the sequences a bit less jerky but in terms of the fact that the whole idea was to experience teamwork, I think we worked well.
 The main focus of this project for our group was to work away from the literal and interpret the story using metaphorical imagery to explain the main points. We wanted to use a medium we were all familiar with as well as a medium that had the ability to give us subtle brush strokes to portray a sensitive story. We also exploited our strengths by dividing our roles into what each of us were best at in order to achieve a greater success as the abstract nature of our idea meant we were being more experimental with watercolour techniques. However because watercolour is an easy and reversible medium there was more freedom to experiment and still undo sections that perhaps didn’t fit with the colour scheme. It’s also a widely used medium that all of us had used on numerous occasions.

P.S. Please excuse the bad quality in some sections. It was the only way to get the video on here. The high quality version was too much for poor Blogger.

 

 

Final Horse films for the Sea Project

These are the horse hooves that will be trampling the the two characters in the final animation.

 

Side on view of the horse stampede

 

 

Side on close up view of one of the horses.

 

 

In the end, although their was time and effort put into the front shot of the horses, they have been removed from the final film. The characters have been placed off centre facing left so in order for the audience to realise that the horses are heading for them, the horses would need to be off centre facing right. We're only putting into practice what we have learnt in cinematography and that is the eye line needs to meet so naturally we are creating the confrontation.

Horses with watercolour

Horses final

Final sequence of horses for the sea project. I still have to superimpose actual watercolour spray over the top of the animation to keep in style with the rest of the film but other than that the sequence is complete. I'll do the spray by painting on white paper than using the magic wand tool in photoshop I can remove the white sections of paper.

40 frames down, 42 to go.

40 frames down, 42 to go. This is roughly half of the animation for the sea project.

I've taken what I learnt about cel shading and the animation I created from that of the horses and moved it into the production stage of the project. But it's gone a step further and instead of leaving it at a rendered Maya stage, the frames have been taken across to Photoshop for more detailed artwork to be placed on top. It gives the horses a more textured quality and ties in better with our group's watercolour style with the strokes giving the horses a 'watery' effect.

I did originally want to paint over every frame but I know from past experiences that doing so would make the horses and the waves seem like they were flickering. It wouldn't look attractive and it wouldn't be easy to watch so I've reduced the number of frames by animating on 2's. The movement is still fluid but the flickering won't be as erratic.

 

Horses before Photoshop details added.

 

 

 

 

After Photoshop.

 

 

 

First half of the animation.

 

Sea Project- colour test

I batch rendered the two horses I animated in maya so I got a picture for every frame instead of a movie file. This is so I can go into Photoshop and add paint effects such as longer manes and water splashes. Being able to use Maya in such a way allows me to be more expressive with the brush strokes in Photoshop and I can individually alter each image without worrying about the placement of the horses. There's also the fact that I've saved myself a lot of animating time due to the software's ability to put the in-between animation in for me. I can therefore put more time into the artistic side of the project instead of focusing most of it on the technical movements.

Below is the first frame- here I just experimented with colours. More horses will join the two in this one and now that I've already got the movement in Maya it's just a case of altering the movement of the heads so they don't all look the same in the final shot.

Cel Shading in Maya

As this is a complex sequence to have to animate with their being so many horses I thought I'd try looking for an alternative that makes creating 2D horses easier than just painting every frame individually. Fortunately with my interest in Japanese animation and keeping up with the latest animations to grace our world, I am already keeping track of a new film produced by Production I.G. called 009 re:cyborg. It's a 3D reboot of the old T.V. series Cyborg 009.  Although it's yet to be released on DVD I've looked at trailers and I've seen the process they went through to create a 2D animation which was originally built in 3D.




Below is the link for how they re-created the animation.

009 re:cyborg re-animation

I then used the process they used to flatten the maya horses I had done to make a 2D sequence.

 

I still need to make some adjustments such as the shadows and perhaps an outline to give a better suggestion of 2D. At the moment I can still see that the horses were once 3D.

Horse testing in Maya

 

 

 

How to Win the Grand National - How to Win the Grand National

Click below for full documentary

http://youtu.be/xOJyidY2dTQ

More reference footage

I recently watched 'How to win the Grand National' on Channel 4 over Easter and a section in the documentary caught my attention in relation to the horses I'm doing in 2D. I wanted film of horses galloping towards the camera but with enough detail to be able to work from as inspiration. Unfortunately without a gallop track and a smooth riding 4X4 to get good footage I'm out of options although I did get footage of my sister riding (which will be posted soon). But the video shown below shows the motion better. The added bonus is it's in slow motion and I want to emphasise the feeling people sometimes get when everything seems to happen so slowly and yet you are unable to prevent the events that unfold. It's been filmed via my mobile because the video size was too large to download.

 

 

Horse in Motion

One of the hardest tasks for this project is creating the horses charging towards the camera. Not only is there going to be numerous horses that each have to be animated but there's also the challenge of overcoming the fore-shortening of the legs which will be made even harder being more than one animal.

I started by looking at the gallop cycle from a side-on view so the obvious research point was Eadweard Muybridge and his studies of horses in motion.

The most difficult part in animating this cycle is the extension of the leg in frames 5-9. As the hoof moves forward towards the camera, it will increase in size making it look out of proportion to the rest of the body and the leg will look seemingly shorter than the other. The other problem solver is the head moving back and forth as it's almost doing exactly the same as the legs.

I attempted to search through Youtube for further research and looked at animations and live action movements of horses. They wasn't much on there with real horses coming towards the camera but I did find animations which gave me some idea of how it should look.





Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is one of the big influences, mainly because I know there are sequences of horses coming towards the camera.






I took Muybridge's studies of horses in motion and made a gallop cycle in Maya. Right now I'm concentrating only on the legs to understand the fore-shortening.

It would be easy if I was working in 3D because all that's required is placing the camera in the correct place and making the horses move believably. As it's 2D our group is working in, the edges of the paper are my camera and I have to create everything inside that frame myself. 

So once it was 3D I quickly sketched out the key leg poses from the Maya reference to create a 2D cycle. There is still a lot of tweaking that needs to be done to get a fluid movement such as adding more frames but the first attempt doesn't look too bad.

Horse artwork

Our group has opted to use colour to block out everything but the characters. So for example with the horses everything that's in shadow is coloured blue leaving a white shape. I think in doing this, the form is more defined and can be easily be seen from a greater distance. Having more white space as a background would make the forms look messy.

 

 

Below is some inspiration. All it took was an evening flicking through google images.

 

Sea Project Animatic

Here is our group project animatic: First draft

There are two different styles in this animatic because we had two people doing the storyboard.

Shot ideas

For the Sea Project, a section of the animation is potentially going to involve the metaphorical white horse waves and for that I envisioned a cavalry charge. The cavalry charge was a foot-soldier's nightmare as not only were they having to go up against another soldier armed with a sword but they also have to contend with a charging horse which has the capabilitiy of killing a soldier just with its weight and momentum alone.

So to see a dozen or so horses in the form of a wave charging towards the two people in the water is a good way of increasing the fear because naturally when we see a horse running towards us, our reaction is to run away.

Portraying this idea is all in shot design so below I've picked out shots from two films that contain a lot of cavalry charges, Lord of the Rings and War Horse.

Close up: The horse's flared nostrils, mouth frothing and eyes bulging depict the speed we naturally look at the face for emotion.  

Medium shot: Head and chest of horses are all that are seen. Powerful muscles, flared nostrils, heads held high. It's a good shot to suggest a wave.

 

Another close up

 

Legs: Depicting speed, in this case emphasising the fact they are galloping. Could be hard to animate a line of legs though and when we are frightened of something we naturally look at the face. In addition to this with it being a wave, the legs are more likely to be hidden under the wave anyway.

 

 

Long shot to establish the power and danger. A good shot to consider to depict an incoming wave.

 

'They're dangerous at both ends......crafty in the middle'   

 Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows

 

 

The Second test on the first clip was un-finished, this is the completed version.

Sea project test

Our group has opted to do a 2D, almost metaphorical interpretation of the sea, and quite often people relate the waves to white horses galloping into shore. So I started doing some tests of galloping horses from different angles. I used the rotoscope technique but simplified the form down into just line-art.