Me Me Me Me Me

Shameless tool that I am.

Looking back over recent entries, it's dawned on me just how much of a sickeningly egotistical celebration of my film's reception this blog has become. I'm an utter tool. Thinly veiled as a resource for festival information, all these updates really say is 'look how great I am'. How tempting must it be to just track me down, backhand me, then sneer with disgust as I gaze at the floor, knowing I've done wrong.
The only logical thing at this point if I want to salvage the measliest scrap of humility would be to delete all the offending entries and lay off the self-congratulatory bullshit in the future.
I'm not gonna do that. I'm just saying it'd be the right thing to do.
Fuck being modest. I'm going to milk 'House Guest' until it's droopy, wrinkled and all dried-up. Come December it'll hopefully be out on DVD and the festival season will be done and dusted anyway.In the meantime, I'm well into production on my third film (my second, 'Ground Running', still inhabiting a sort of limbo while I decide on the best way to go about re-editing it). The film I'm currently working on is autobiographical, though it will hopefully offset my onanistic praise by depicting me as a morbidly obese sexual inadequate. But, y'know, in a cute way. This is an extension of a ten-second animation I produced for a competition that never happened due to a number of irreconcilable technical issues - the number being 'one' and the issue being that the guy with the projector got baked and never showed up on the night.As ten seconds wasn't really enough time to cram the story in, it consequently came off as a bit of a clusterfuck. I put together an overly-ambitious pitch for a ten-minute film that would detail a number of regrettably slapstick sexual encounters, usually ending in irreparable physical and emotional damage. While pursuing that film without funding isn't a feasible proposition given its length, I'm opting to produce a short that falls somewhere in the middle.
As it stands, the plan is to have a three-to-five minute animation elaborating on the story in the ten-second version, incorporating dialogue, foley, music and all the other stuff that makes a film watchable.
I also want the overall look of the film to be a tad more polished than that of 'House Guest'. I've identified three main factors that should help in this regard.
1. Better animationThe film has very little dialogue, the action mainly playing out while I narrate offscreen. As such there will be a lot more 'full' animation shots, as with 'Ground Running'.

2. Thinner linesIn abandoning my beloved Berol Color Fines for proper, art-store, extra-fine drawing pens, the visual quality takes on a more professional look, especially when scaled-down and in motion.

3. More love for the backgroundsWhile the background designs for 'House Guest' were knocked out at a pretty fast rate (there being call for about a hundred of them), I'm taking more time to draw detailed and textured backgrounds. A little bit more time in Photoshop takes a lot of sterility out of the finished shot.
On that note, let's end with a couple of said background designs, because I can't think of something funny or clever to write that'll wrap this up.

The Ol' Compin' Grounds

Well, it's all coming gradually together. I've slogged through the arduous labour of scripwriting, trudged through the septic waters of storyboarding, lapped up the murky mildew of layouts and background design, scratched at the itchy scabbiness of the colouring process and after all those questionable metaphors I'm now able to comp it all together! Well, not all, but a fair old chunk at least.
This process takes all the required elements and layers them, using the same principles of traditional cel animation. To prepare a sequence, first of all the layers need to be prepared in Photoshop. This way I can establish which elements of the eventual animated image will remain inanimate, and give each animation layer a name and number for ease of reference. This makes it that much easier to simply bring in the layer you want for the frame you're working on when it comes to the actual animation process. Said process takes place using After Effects, which is also an Adobe application and is consequently hugely compatible with Photoshop. Once the .psd file is imported into the new comp, most scenes are made up of the following:
Background - this obviously just sits in the...background...looking pretty and such.
Background animation - occasionally elements of the background move, such as flapping curtains, rainfall, moving clouds etc. Usually this animation will be comped together with the still background image before any character animation begins to avoid clutter, with the exception of certain shots; for example, if someone is standing in the rain then the rainfall layer needs to appear in front of the character, and so it remains separate.
Character(s) - for a large number of shots I'm using limited animation, in the style of those mass-produced Hanna-Barbera cartoons such as The Flinstones or Yogi Bear. In these shots there will inevitably be elements of the character that stay as one still image, ordinarily the torso.
Character animation - these are, as you can probably guess, the other elements of the character that actually move, such as lip-sync, facial expressions/head movement, arm/leg movement, walk-cycles blah blah blah.
Lighting/colour correction - this will usually be an effects layer that, when appropriate, strengthens or mutes the overall colour scheme so that the characters stand out sufficiently from the backgrounds. Lighting effects (for the sake of atmosphere) can also be added in Photoshop and then reimported into After Effects.
So with the process cackhandedly explained, I can show you the fruits of my toil! The animation itself is going to be constantly tweaked (for the better, one hopes) until the film is done and so I've decided to instead show off some stills of the comp results, comparing them to the storyboard visuals. Indulge that voyeur in you and have a cheeky peek:



Why, simply delectable, I'm sure you'll agree. Maybe sometime soon I'll be able to show some of the little buggers in motion.