Before I mentioned that I wanted to do a serious, deep storyline with theme of loneliness, but I have decided to scrap the idea all together. All the ideas I came up for it were weak and it meant that if I wanted to add on any more animations then they had to be serious as well, otherwise it'd seem out of place and the audience might not grasp that it's a completely different short.
Another serious story I wanted to put in was about the army. Over the Easter break I was at a friend's barbecue and he and his friend were having an argument with another one of my friends who wanted to join the army, my two arguing friends both having been in the army. One of them was against him joining the army and the other was for him to join, and it sparked an interesting debate, all while I was just picturing them both as little shoulder angels and a variety of other things which would have been great to make into an animation. They revealed some shocking events, such as one of them having to kill someone with a frozen water bottle, and I'd heard similar stories before involving beating someone to a pulp only to discover it's the wrong person.
Unfortunately, there were several things which made this impractical to animate. Since my internet, voice acting friends are rather young and voice acting communities are rather obsessed with high pitched, animé voices, I had no audio for my characters and I couldn't get the original two to talk into my microphone as I moved back to Maidstone, 200 miles away. We all were quite drunk at the time so recalling the conversation proved quite difficult, and while I tried to jot as much down as possible on my phone, I only managed to record a few words. Maybe I can make an animation about this in the future, with more time to tell the story rather than a minute I've left for my shorts in this project.
My previous blog entry should have said that I intended to keep the animation down to one or two minutes, as not many people browsing a show would have a long attention span to watch a five minute animation. Instead, I created multiple short animations. This meant that I didn't have abruptly finish an animation half way through simply because I ran of time, instead I can just make as many as the time allows and because they're short, I don't run the risk of having to cut it short. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I was unable to produce as many animations as I wanted, with the level of detail I wanted. In the end I managed to make two, rather simple animations, about one and a half minutes each. Even though I didn't make as much as I wanted, I'm still happy with what I've produced, though I can see a lot of things I could have done to improve them and at least my viewers won't get bored and leave, they'll leave wanting more.
My story ideas are almost always just quickly outlined in notepad, then I flesh out the story more in storyboards, this produces a different style of story. Most cartoon studios use this method, whereas sitcom writers would use a written script. The focus is directed more to the visuals rather than the words by using this method. The initial script can be found here: http://pastebin.com/9vMCA6Fa and you can see how rough it is. Afterwards I started on making a rough animatic you can see here: http://files.myfrogbag.com/4nynwo/storyboard.swf . Unfortunately I fell into the trap of animating more than necessary and wasting time so I quickly stopped and tried a different method.
Since my animations revolve around the "two heads talking" style of cartoon, which is often a side effect of bad writing in webcomics, I had to put a lot more focus into the words. I created a series of rough notes on different stories and then expanded the ones I liked into scripts. Half way through the one I would use for my second animation, I realized that the dialogue was dragging on for too long and shortened it to the time frame I gave myself. Shortening the dialogue did make the script more confusing but it certainly made it a lot more entertaining. I realized I wouldn't have time to make all of these scripts into shorts so I merged some to create stronger single scripts. The BELIEFS story was first created and then merged with the MARIJUANA story to create the first short. I didn't want to preach on about the health effects of marijuana, but instead I wanted to poke fun at how creative authors often make those who oppose their beliefs overly crazy and have the main character, who supports their beliefs, to be calm and level headed, while making strawman, or otherwise poor arguments. You can see the scripts here: http://pastebin.com/ksA9fjQu .
Audio is my main weak point. Before I would often use music from the Newgrounds audio library and edit them a bit in audacity, but I didn't want to be constrained by the music since I have a limited amount to choose from, and even more limited amount which are of any decent quality. Instead, I opted to have no music, and instead focus entirely on the dialogue.
The first animation is voiced entirely by my internet friend from the flash animation group, the Clock Crew. He is called Femi John-Baptiste, but his real name is English Clock. His range of vocal talents meant I didn't need to have to voice actors for the different characters, and I made sure to use two separate visual styles for each character to make them distinct. He did, however, take a bit too much of artistic liberty with his lines. He did make them more entertaining, but he also lost a bit of the point I was trying to make. This could have been solved if I directed him more at the time, and this is something I should make sure to do in the future. I've heard Femi's many vocal talents in other movies before, so I knew he would be great for my short.
The second animation is voiced by myself and my friend Simon Bridgland. Unfortunately I did not have the same high-end equipment that my Femi did, in fact I had rather poor equipment, an old phone and tiny microphone to be precise. Fortunately, I had planned to overcome this by having the characters be malfunctioning robots, which sort of goes together well with the plot. I used the microphone I had at home to record my lines and left a 30 second silence at the end so I could capture a noise profile and remove it. The microphone made my voice sound quite quiet and smooth, which was perfect for my character. The other character was a tough guy, so it had more noise and interference, it sound rough and loud, perfect. I had to use my phone for the second character since it was the only piece of technology I had which would allow me to record at University, but it was good for the character. My previous animation, "Trains are Dicks", which you can watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA5hA-BuLaI , was also voiced by him, so I knew that he was suitable for the role, although I had a better phone to record him on then.
You can see how the main character looks more like a real person sticking their head through a hole in the wall to appear over a puppet body, as what happens in some puppet children shows, and the second character, who is made to have the personality of a puppet, is entirely a puppet. One little oversight was that the puppet character uses telekinesis on his bottle of generic alcohol. This was overlooked by me because this is the norm in the Clock Crew, where clock characters don't generally have hands and just have objects they're holding float in the air, I should have given him an arm.
The first animation was rushed because I wanted to cram as many animations into the short amount of time I had, and because I wanted to quickly get back to where I was before I had lost my work. When I got to the second animation, I calmed down and took my time with the animation, wanting to push quality over quantity. Funny that it's usually the other way round. In the second animation I wanted to exploit the blue/orange contrast which is prevalent in every movie poster, and is even central to the popular game, Portal and it's sequel, so I created an orange robot and a blue robot. The explanation I received on why this colour combination is so successful is that orange is supposed to represent youthful energy and blue is supposed to represent a cool, relaxation, and I assigned those two descriptions to the personalities of my two characters. The orange robot is a very tough, energetic, aggressive character, whereas the blue robot is smooth, and relaxed.
The two robots were a lot of fun to animate, the blue one being the most fun since his face was a very simple cartoon face on a blank background, and I could do anything with it. I tried to make the faces simultaneously as robotic and as human as possible. The blue robot's face transform into different animations, rather than stretch itself like a human face, but the expressions are still as human as you can get, and every so often there is a little glitch to remind you he's a robot head in a trash bin. Blue's face was the greatest because it meant I had an even greater range of emotion than I could show on an actual human face, although I feel I missed some opportunities with it, for example, I could have increased the amount of glitches when he expresses anger. Orange's face is a lot more stiff and mechanical, and there isn't anything to express emotion in the mouth, which is where a lot of expressions are based around. Instead, I focused on his eyes, the most expressive part, and gave him a little bit of a, "tail" from his broken spine. Orange was given retro eyes to fit in with his personality, to be more rough and older than blue, and it looks pretty cool too. Due to time limitations I simply created a series of eye animations which I would reuse throughout the story. First I created a grid where the pixels could be placed, then I filled in each appropriate square, in each frame. It's rather simple but still slightly more complicated than actually working at a lower resolution, which is a lot harder to do in Flash, so I had to cheat.
There were a few little easter eggs I sneaked into the shorts. In the first one there is a green elephant which appears, but when it's projected it will be shown in the window, so it's very easy to miss, it appears when the drunk puppet tries to say, "irrelevant". A second easter egg is that the famous BSOD, Blue Screen Of Death, shows up on the orange robot's eye screen. I felt that people are generally familiar with the BSOD and it's colour, so just seeing white text on a blue background is enough for people to know that an error has occurred.
Initially I was going to act in front of the projector as a show of technical prowess and amaze the audience, but I changed the format so it would fit in better with the show format. I had to create something which could be shown for weeks, and so I created a series of looping animations.
Right now, I am taking a huge risk, because I have been unable to actually test the projection mapping part out. The only time I had with the projector was a couple of hours before the Easter break so I could create a quick map, which was unfinished by the time the cleaners came in, and then animate on top of it at home, 200 miles away. In the future I should definitely work to make myself more aware of time limits and work closer to self-set deadlines. Tomorrow is the day this is going to get marked and hopefully I won't have any software or hardware issues, but to make sure, I've exported the animation into a variety of formats, several different versions of flash, burnt it to a DVD and uploaded it to Youtube, as well as making sure I have several different installed for several different versions of flash on the memory stick.
The internet is really not very helpful, I've learnt. When I started this blog, it was because I wanted to receive constant feedback from peers, unfortunately my peers seem to not be very responsive. This could be due to me not marketing my blog well, but I focused much more on the actual project. I had also tried to get criticism from other University students as well as friends and family, but I received little more than, "it's good".
Another thing I should have done was added developer code to my flash movie while I was making it. Really I should have this pre-written which I can then just copy and paste into future movies, which I do, but it's just buried in a pile of my old flash files. The developer code is just a simple check for a keystroke, if it's detected then it goes to a pre-determined point in the movie, this is so I don't have to keep watching the beginning before I get to the bit I want to preview. This wasn't high on my priorities since it was a rather short animation and I could preview most things straight in Flash, as I only used graphic symbols and not movie clip symbols, which do not show the animation contained within them until you export as a SWF, which you can skip around on.
Thanks to this project, I have actually learnt a few new techniques. One such technique is redrawing the same lines repeatedly over again in multiple frames and then create a shape tween between them. In a lot of my animations, and other animations, the same picture is drawn over and over again to make it look alive, and not a still picture, even though it's not moving. Creating a shape tween between these similar frames creates a sort of, "wibbly wobbly" look which is hard to describe, if you watch my animation, the final text and Blue's idle face uses this technique. This technique becomes a lot harder to do with complicated shapes, especially with multiple colours, since shape tweening is quite temperamental and will go completely nuts if the two frame's shapes' points aren't close enough, or the same number, or a variety of other things.
Flash is absolutely terrible at exporting video I've discovered. Trying to export a raw AVI file is pretty much a terrible idea as it just stops trying after 4GB and half of what it did spit out turns out to be a horribly glitchy video with the wrong colours and will only work on one specific media player. The MOV format is much better to export uncompressed video with, but it's limited to how good the computer is. If you have a lot of ram you can export it using memory, this will produce high frame-rate video, often to appear as the exact same as it appears in Flash. If you don't have enough RAM, you have to do a hard drive export, which can often insert small freezes where your computer struggles to render sections if you have too many effects or even vectors. The main trouble maker is the bitmap effects which were recently introduced, such as blur and glow, which often hugely bring down the frame rate, on even a powerful computer. There are a few ways you can optimize it, one way of losslessly optimizing heavy vector shapes is to cache them as a bitmap, so it will render as pixels, rather than calculating each point. Before people would have to export their vectors and import them back, but Flash now takes care of this with just one checkbox.
That's about it, at least all I can think of at 4AM, and I still have plenty more work to do. Besides a last bit of writing, the only thing I have left to do is get to University tomorrow and set everything up and hope that everything works, or I can at least get it to work before 5PM.
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