Lipsync part 2

Posted on 3rd March 2023 by Eleonora Di Massimo

Here is my outcome for the second lipsync exercise. I’m not sure why, but I was doubting myself throughout the whole process for this one. I think because the audio already existed paired with visuals, so my main concern was to avoid copying the video I was using. Even when shooting my own reference, I couldn’t come out with a scenario that didn’t involve a character driving, so I tried to approach the scene from a different perspective.

It took me a while to get the initial acting working, as I was afraid I was putting a lot of unnecessary movement, and after a couple of feedback, that was my initial issue. I then tried to focus mainly on head movement and expression, given that this time i had a human character I thought I could definitely push facial expressions more.

When it came to drawing the mouth shapes i tried to exaggerate those to a point where in some frames I wanted the mouth to kind of move around in an unnatural way. Because i only did it on a couple of frames and it matching a certain sound, the result isn’t too bad, but sometimes I think it looks a little bit odd.

Overall, I’ve learnt that is not always good to have a lot of movement from a character when given a very short audio, and as long as the initial acting works, I just need to trust that the rest of the in-betweens will work too.

I’ve also realised I need to once again work on anatomy. I’ve got more familiar with human face features after the facial expression exercise, and I think I was able to keep it fairly consistent throughout the frames (having a grid to follow really helped). The bit i’m not too happy about is the torso and the shoulders in particular. i think to improve there’s no way around practicing observational drawings. Life drawing is great but the model is never clothed, and I really need to start being familiar with how clothes fold over our bodies. I’m not proud of he hands either, but if I was to clean this up, I would probably draw them once or twice so that they keep their shape, as in this case, they are staying still.

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Michel Fuzellier’s Animation Sequence

Posted on 27th February 2023 by Eleonora Di Massimo

I have always hesitated between illustration and animated films, and dedicated long periods of my professional life to one or the other, which are two sides of the same passion: to tell stories through drawings

Michel Fuzellier

When I was researching the topic for my presentation, I really wanted to talk about some of the animators who worked on one of my famous childhood film ‘ La Gabbianella e il Gatto‘ (1997), but I was having a hard time finding who worked on a specific sequence I had in mind. I’ve only recently been able to find out more about the artist behind this quite experimental scene (considering the style of the animated feature as a whole).

The sequence is able to stand out as a whole because it loosely follows the lyrics of the song that is paired with it. It sort of works as a recap of the main event of the film that far. The song, “Il Canto di Kengah” (The Song of Kengah) is a kind of goodbye letter the seagull leaves to her chick, hoping that “true friends” will take care of it until it learns how to fly.

It starts with a very simple and sometimes child-like animation of seagulls flying free. Despite the style, we are able to perceive the sense of freedom, content and carefreeness of the seagull mother. The style then moves on to be more graphic and sharp edged as it aims to describe when the seagull gets trapped by oil: being a film addressed to children, the visuals of the film are always child friendly, possibly trying to avoid creating any accidental trauma to the young audience. Fuzellier’s visuals are able to go a little bit deeper representing the horror of an oil spillage in a very abstract but successful way. He uses a limited palette of white, black and purple for this particular scene, and the imagery goes a little bit wild, with a lot of undefined shapes apart from the struggling seagull, and we can also distinguish a hand reaching out for help and a tentacle that embraces the sort of black hole engulfing the sea bird, until it all turns into an egg. From that the tone goes back to be quite mellow and cute, and we see the main cat protagonist interacting with the little seagull chick and accepting it by cuddling it. This works as a hint of what will later happen in the film.

The great thing about the the sequence is the way is approached compared to the rest of the art direction. Fuzellier himself was mainly responsible for the film’s art direction and layouts. He has an incredible illustration style with a very loose watercolour technique reflected in some of the pre-production work for this film, and at the time, he was not a particularly known animator. His interpretation of the song sequence allows us to step back and reflect on the lyrics a little bit more. If a certain character was animated singing the song, the effect would have been completely different.

There’s another similar sequence in the film where the cats attempt to ask the help of a human (a child) through her dream, and this is the only instance where the cat taboo can be broken (talk face to face with a human). So in this case, the sequence works as an in-between world where the child can plainly talk to cats and promises to help them.

I have come to really love and appreciate these intermissions, and I love when different styles are mixed together even in an animated feature. I appreciate it even more when the sequences are hand drawn or painted traditionally to break the convention with the digital 2D look. It really makes me want to try it myself, even though a sudden change of style may not work as well in a short film.

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Life Drawing in Term 2

Posted on 18th February 2023 by Eleonora Di Massimo

I’m continuing with life drawing classes and although I enjoy them and can definitely see them helping me with the anatomy knowledge in animation exercises, I have good days and bad ones.

I used to think it was quite normal and sometimes, and I know that putting pressure on the outcome is the worst way to approach a session, but I started to notice what is the key (at least in my case) to have a good session. If I spend few ours working on an assignment, and so draw quite a lot, I am then less rusty when I take the class in the evening. It might also because I’m consequently less precious about the final outcome and just try to get the pose down as quick as I can, which after all is what gesture drawing is.

A “bad session” for me would be struggling through the initial 30 sec poses, which I am never happy with anyway in terms of results. My struggle would be to get down the correct pose with the right proportions: I can see my drawing getting small, the big and small again, but it doesn’t get easier to draw after the first few drawings. With the time increase, I find it easier to then move into one and then two minutes, the latter allowing me enough time to draw all the essential (head, torso, legs, arm, hands and feet). During bad days though, when the time comes for the 2 minutes poses, I would have accumulated a lot of frustration and my concentration would be gone. The second round after the break is slightly better but still not good enough.

I think the plan is to always have some drawings done before the session starts in the evening, whether that means work on assignments or just do observational drawings or personal one. I understand that this is not a guarantee that my drawings will always come out as intended, but it will definitely give me an insight and prove my theory either right or wrong, and I can take it from there.

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Lipsync part 1

Posted on 9th February 2023 by Eleonora Di Massimo

Here is my first attempt at the lipsync exercise with some minor changes after a first feedback.

Once again, the thumbnails really helped me with the key frames stage and I tried to pair those to the audio as best as I could. I struggled with keeping the character relatively still and, when in-betweening, I was worried there would be too much movement, which I was told to avoid for such a short audio clip.

Generally speaking, I can see it flows quite well but i had lots of issues keeping the character on model. I didn’t spend too much time refining the character before jumping into the animation and I was also basing it on a classmate’s dog whose reference picture I was provided with. Initially i didn’t consider that the mouth shapes for a dog would be different from a human, because of how we move our lips when talking. Creating a sort of chart on the side really helped, but I later realised some of the shape needed reworking. Sounds like “L” and “N’ were easier to convey in a profile view, as that would give me more space to draw the tongue without looking weird all together.

When adding the mouth shapes in I also learnt to slightly move the head up and down following the the audio track where some sounds where pronounced with more emphasis.

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Facial expressions exercise

Posted on 7th February 2023 by Eleonora Di Massimo

Here is my result for the facial expressions exercise.

Taking more time to focus on the thumbnails really helped me to relieve some of the pressure I face when drawings key frames, because unless the animation is a cycle, I’m never too sure whether a certain drawing would be strong enough as a key pose.

Generally speaking, I am happy with the result, but going forward there are some aspects I need to pay attention to. To start with, body proportions: when drawing the key frames I didn’t realise how much the proportions of the head and the arms where changing, and only got to realise once the majority of the inbetweens were done. I need to find a way to keep the character consistent in size as well, as that is more or less a problem in all of my acting exercises.

Another thing I need to improve is human anatomy. Life drawing classes are helping immensely and have taken part of the block I had whenever i was a approaching drawing a human figure, but there are parts such as the head and the hands that i tend to draw less or to simplify way too much. Particularly with the head, I was made conscious that I have drawn the features (eyes, mouth and nose) with different proportions in a lot of frames, and that might be a problem when the audience tries to read a certain expression.

Doing more studies of hands and faces will help me with it, because it would be hard to rely just on life drawing sessions alone given how short the poses are.

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Thoughts on The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse

Posted on 24th January 2023 by Eleonora Di Massimo

I was able to finally watch this beautifully animated film and the aspect I was interested the most was how the animal characters would be portrayed and animated.

Having animated few different animals during my previous years at university, I’m always fascinated by the approach every single studio or animator takes to bring the character to life. Generally speaking, I know that sometimes a good level of anthropomorphism is required for the audience to engage with an animal we might not necessarily be familiar with in terms of body language. In my work I’ve tried to opt more for realism when depicting animal emotions but I found I was not necessarily giving them the attributes specific for a certain species. For instance, my graduation project was about a couple of foxes and at the time my research mainly involved sounds and the anatomy, but was unable to observe foxes at a close distance, and that affected the overall performance.

The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse’s animal representation works extremely well for the story line. Even though they are quite stylised and make the audience always aware of the fact that they are drawn, they are animated in an almost hyper realistic way, except for the Mole. The realism is broken only when some of the animals intimately interact with the boy, such as when the Fox puts his paw on the Boy’s knee to comfort him. There’s a scene when the Boy, the Mole and the Fox first meet the Horse and he starts playing with them in the most horse like manner, which is beautiful to watch but also very clear emotion wise, even though people may not be familiar with horse behaviour.

The illustrations found in the original book rely heavily on body language to convey emotions: we often see the Horse nuzzling the Boy when reassuring him and when displaying affection, and looking down towards the Mole and the Fox with his ears forward when listening to them. I love how these details have been adapted into the cinematic version. I almost thought that the lipsync was unnecessary and that the dialogue didn’t need to be animated. Animating a lipsync on a horse must have been challenging: I remember reading about Dreamworks Spirit’s director explaining the choice of having no taking horses in the film as they couldn’t link facial expressions and mouth movements together, so he opted for the eyes and body language to convey the characters’ emotions. In this film, we almost see the opposite: there’re no eyebrows or detailed eyes to portray emotions, so a lot is conveyed through dialogue and body language. The lipsync is minimal, and in some scenes it was hard to actually see the mouth movements.

A reference was used for the scene where the Horse starts to play with the Boy
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Body Acting

Posted on 17th January 2023 by Eleonora Di Massimo

These are the first few key frames and break downs for my body acting exercise. I think the hardest part is not to get carried away with too much action. Whenever I was trying to shoot the reference for this piece I would have ended up with 40 plus seconds of footage, so it took me few attempts to narrow it down to around 15.

I was going to use the thumbnails to create the key frames and then I got carried away with some different ideas for the action, which I hope will work anyway. It was also hard to reference the video I shoot as my character is a dog, so I constantly have to check the given turnaround to see that I’m not giving the character really long arms. I’ve noticed it’s really really easy to go off scale and I can already see the character getting smaller compared to the initial frame, so I’ll probably need to have the first frame as a background for comparison.

I’m slowly learning the importance of drawing really strong poses for the key frames and exaggerating the drawings to make the action extremely clear to the audience, as subtlety is not necessarily read correctly all the time.

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Quadruped Cycle

Posted on 1st December 2022 by Eleonora Di Massimo

Here is my first version of a horse walk. I tried to break it down and animating the skeleton first as I knew the anatomy was going to be challenging and it helped immensely.

The hard part was figuring out the skeleton in relation to the actual reference. I think the shoulders don’t work as well as I would like them to, and I also need to adjust the size of the neck, as right now it looks more of a draft horse, but the rest of the anatomy doesn’t match.

I’m happy with the way the hooves land on the ground but I’m not too sure about when they rise from the ground, as it seems like they are awkwardly slide, but I’m not sure whether and extra frame will solve the issue.

In terms of research, I mainly followed Richard Williams’s guide on animating horses plus another short guide which mainly focused on key frames, and which has helped me understanding anatomy a little bit more. This was also a great help when it came to understanding the shape of the front legs when they stretch out prior to the contact position.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/491173903092405144/
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Mood Walk in progress

Posted on 1st December 2022 by Eleonora Di Massimo

For my mood walk I’ve decided to have a child character going from a sad state onto a happy one after seeing a kitten.

The initial sad walk took me quite a bit to get, especially when it came to the arms: at first they were swinging to much as I thought that keeping them still would make the character look stiff, but the more I acted it out, the more I realised my shoulders were just bouncing up and down with the rest of my upper body.

I have just put down key frames for the second part of the walk and I’m happy with the initial transition but will seek feedback for the run. I’m afraid the action will be interpreted wrong and the audience will think the child is scared rather than excited. I am beginning to understand the importance of exaggeration and trying to apply to this particular exercise.

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Push exercise

Posted on 24th November 2022 by Eleonora Di Massimo

Here is my second try at the push exercise. I started this on paper and eventually move on to TVPaint so that i could test the animation straight away. The traditionally drawn key poses helped me focus more on the movement. I had already a rough idea of what I wanted to go for after the stop motion tryout, but I soon found that it was harder to convey the exaggeration on paper.

I also had to rework the timing quite a lot and I might have come to a good point, although I’m still struggling with how the torso and the head moves when the feet are sliding on the ground. I have acted the movement out several times to help me understand the dynamic of the body, but i think my problem is that the proportions of the torso change progressively and gets out of model.

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