Animation Production Diary - Let there be light

Scene Twenty-Seven pencil test without and with background.

Sometimes I think I don't like myself. A short walk cycle? Okay. Turning on a light switch? Okay. All from a birds-eye view? Sheesh. Capturing the angle was very challenging, the original pencils were close but felt slightly off so I needed to transform the frames digitally with skew and perspective. 

But it felt right, having a distance at the end, we have observed and we must not forget that we are observers of an autonomous life. The Melancholic Wife is in her power, she does not need us. 

I asked Sadhbh to make two versions of the background, one with the light turned on, one without. There is a prop to be added as well, a notebook and pen that sit on the table. A gentle zoom into the Melancholic Wife and the notebook will be added in tandem with a fade up to white. Also shadows, I do think I have something against myself!

Scene Twenty-Seven digital inks without and with background.

Animation Production Diary - Dancing Queen

Scene Twenty pencil test and digital ink. My first attempted use of motion blur effect on the Melancholic Wife's arms.

Scene Twenty-One pencil test and digital ink. A cycle of eleven drawings shot on threes.

Animation Production Diary - Of magic dust and doors

Having reached apotheosis through a conquering of the dark the Melancholic Wife is ready to return to the 'unromantic walls of her real life'. But first she'll need a doorway and one dutifully manifests from the dissipating energies of her embracing and dancing with the light. The main task of these two scenes was an exercise in special effects animation. The light effects that create the door and the few small sparkles that enter through it in the following scene were all animated directly in Photoshop, no pencilling involved this time. The animation of the door itself appearing will be done using masks in After Effects as will the animation of the door opening, using the corner pin tool.

Scene Twenty-Three digital inks.

Scene Twenty-Four digital inks and pencil shaded background.

The rendering of the background of Scene Twenty-Four was created by Sadhbh Lawlor over an A3 printed copy of the original inks. Sadhbh has a very strong ability in achieving tonal depth with pencilling and I wanted to pursue this style to create a strong contrast with the simple backgrounds of the dream space. The shading also mirrors the shading of the claws which grab the Melancholic Wife, indicating that though they are imagined, they draw their strength from real experiences.

Animation Production Diary - Grace and Poise

The Melancholic Wife has drawn the white light to herself with the aid of her ghost and now comes the first moment of exploration and play. She perceives the boundaries of her form in a new way, we see her twisting her hand, feeling the glow that surrounds her and its flow through the space she inhabits. We follow the arc of her rising hand until it meets its twin. There the gathering energy pushes them apart and she has to find the determination to control the power within her.

Pencil test.

Final inks.

This scene was heavily influenced by the desire to capture graceful balletic movement, and in part inspired by early reference like the short film Ballet Rotoscope by Masahiko Sato and Euphrates.

Animation Production Diary - Slow it down Scene Eighteen

Scene Eighteen represents something of a breath. There are a sequence of cuts before it between short scenes communicating lots of information and the scenes after it rise up again towards the crescendo of the final dance. So it's a chance to breath, take a metaphorical pause and have a slow moment to contrast with the quick. The Melancholic Wife's arms raise steadily, opening up to her power, opening up to the audience.

Pencil test alongside digital inks.

Animation placed in background. Further animation on the background including the spotlight drawing in, focusing on MW and emanating in a glow around her and a ghost clip will be added in compositing.

Animation Production Diary - Short but nevertheless important

There are a few scenes dotted through the animatic that could be described as very short and scenes five and six would fall under that category, comprising a total of three seconds all together. Scene five is a simple step into the 'ghost room' and scene six follows it up with a short glance up from our protagonist as she spots the ghosts.

While short they are important, scene six bridges the story from the frantic run that preceded it to the more serene atmosphere of the 'ghost room'. I felt it important to have her step even once, rather than just have a more easily completed hold, to represent the dissipation of energy from the mad dash.

One small step for the Melancholic Wife...

The glance upwards then has to communicate an emotional shift, I wanted to portray a graceful arc to her movement and emphasise the flow of her hair to preface the floating light tone of the dancing ghosts who are about to appear on screen. I learned the importance here of not underestimating any scene no matter the length and its potential to keep a story continuum on track.

This scene is also the first and only real close-up of the character so I really wanted to communicate her poise and character as much as possible.

Animation Production Diary - Setting the Stage

In scene twelve our protagonist has just been swallowed wholly by the blackness and wakes to find herself under the harsh glare of a spotlight. The scene begins with us looking straight down on her as the spotlight comes on, it then tilts to bring her closer to us almost like serving her up on a plate.

Animation Production Diary - They need to look like lady hands

The action in scene ten involves a close up of the Melancholic Wife reaching up to try and bring a ghost with her as she is being pulled down. The ghost represents a positive memory of her teenage self, an instance not weighted down by the same troubles as her adult self, and the effort to carry it with her into the darkness is an attempt to accept this positive aspect fully into herself. As such I feel the movement needs to be gentle, soft and kind. She is not grabbing the ghost, she moves to embrace it and ask for her help.

For reference I took a video of my own hands but of course they need to look like a woman's hands so the theme of this scene was softness all round.

Hands

Ghost

Both together

Animation Production Diary - STOMP

A full introduction into the alternate reality of the dream space embodied in a large foot.

Animation Production Diary - The wind in her hair

Scene twenty two of the film,  the calm after the pyrotechnic storm was another scene I choose to tackle early. The Melancholic Wife's torso is stationary for the most part so it represented an opportunity to focus on animating a wave, a fundamental animation principle, in her hair. The flow of the movement is also a first exploration of animation timing for the film. I was able to achieve a balanced flow in the animatic and it is my hope and intention to carry this over as much as possible into the animated movement.

Animation Production Diary - Pulling the rug out from under

I decided early on to try and complete scene three from the animatic to inked stage ready for comping. I thought that this would support me to understood the process from start to finish as much as possible before beginning full production. The scene is about twenty seconds long as well so would represent a fair chunk of completed work. It also contains aspects of background, animation and pre-compositing.

The animation I'm sharing below is the follow up to the carpet growth, two arms reach across and pull the grown carpet up. In animating it my pre-occupation was to communicate the tension in the carpet as it's pulled up, the carpet fights back against the force of the hands until finally being ripped wholesale from the screen.

Artistic Influences - Paul Pope

Another artist who has been an influence on the direction of my work is the Paul Pope, an American comic artist. I love his use of line weight in brush work to convey movement, tone and emotion. His work has an inherent kinetic energy.

Artistic Influences - Jean Giraud

As an illustrator I have had a few influences on my style and it will be interesting to see how this translates from still imagery to images in motion.

I am a big fan of the French artist Jean Giraud, aka Moebius. The aspects which I like to draw from his work include a real sense of weight and volume communicated in an expressive manner; attention to detail; and a potent sense of otherworldliness.

Animation Production Diary - How does your carpet grow?

Early on I identified for myself that Scene Two could be a quick gain in terms of production. It contained some tricky transitions too which would be good to solve early. One of those transitions is the growing of a carpet from a full black screen. I had the idea to create one instance of a carpet fibre growth then multiply it to produce a full floor.

 First Test

 Second Test - More fibres

Third test - ready to be multiplied in after effects.

Background inspiration

One of my favourite production design styles was employed on the Disney feature 101 Dalmatians. I really admire the sketchy line work that they used and the blocks of colour overlapping the outlines of objects. For me it contributed hugely to the sense of energy in the film and I hope that my backgrounds can be as effective in communicating, in this instance, a sense of otherworldliness to high energy to calm.

Animation Production Diary - First Scene

I have decided to animate my film using the traditional frame by frame method. I am hand pencilling most of the scenes because I really want to portray as graceful a feel as possible to the animation and this is the best way that I know how to. I will then be inking the pencils digitally in Photoshop. With the more complex scenes like the dancing scenes I will really want to nail down the keys through to breakdowns and in-betweens as much as possible in pencils before scanning in to ink. But with some of the more straightforward basic storytelling scenes I've found that just roughing the keys and breakdowns then scanning them in for inking can work and will help to economise the process. I realise that the method I've chosen is a labour intensive approach so I am consistently looking for ways to speed up the process while not compromising on the quality I want to maintain.


This is the first piece of animation I've produced for the film. It's for scene twelve, the spotlight coming on.

Clawing Hands

In the middle conflict of my film, my protagonist is pulled down into darkness by grasping hands. The inspiration for this comes from many places. First I'd have to mention The Black Cauldron’s villain, The Horned King. The Black Cauldron was the first animated film I went to see in the cinema and myself and my family enjoyed it so much we stayed in our seats for the next showing! It was the villains clawed hands which really stuck out for me as sinister.

I also have to reference the boiler man character from Spirited Away, Kamaji, with his extremely long arms which stretch across the boiler room. I think the idea of outsized limbs really contribute to the creation of an other worldly feel. I also took inspiration from this device for the arms pulling up the carpet in scene three of the film.

Peter McVerry Trust Logo

For the end of the film we decided to transition to the Trust's logo from the previous scene's frame arrangement.

We decided to stay in keeping with the paper aesthetic of the film so I recreated the logo using the digital paper effects applied previously to the page layouts.

Final scene layout

One of the decisions we came to as a group was to create the final scene entirely in cut out with minimal digital elements. Emotionally and aesthetically this felt like a strong tone to end on. Stop motion animation of Dwayne's real paper hands picking up a real image of his daughter and it being placed on a real background depicting a wall of pictures in his new home. It felt more authentic to portray this in a tangible way. I used the wallpaper from the autumn scene internal frame and cut a series of frames to overall depict a house silhouette which would transition into the Peter McVerry Trust house logo. I added a small oval frame above the door with a photo of the key from the front of the album. The images in the other frames are the only digital element in the scene.

Book footage background

It was important to choose a neutral background which wouldn't distract from the action taking place in the book. So white was the natural choice but it was also important to retain a sense of connection stylistically with the rest of the look of the elements. So I chose one of the patterned papers we had found. I feel that this supports the action while also bearing a good relationship with an underlying nature theme that has emerged due to the elegant fibres in the paper.

In order to maintain the lighting from the book footage I used a difference blending option on a light blue layer over the background. I then placed an image of the scanned textured paper over that in a dependent layer.