Perspective drawing is a part of technical drawings which is quite familiar to me because of my background in product design. But when it comes to learning, even though it is something that Is familiar to us, there is a high chance of us to get a new understanding and information regarding the subject. For example, it was a new information for me that there are more than three-point perspective! Which makes me super excited in experimenting with the four, five, and six-point perspective later in the future. It may seem tedious, but I think it would be a great options when it comes to scene creation or ideation.
One thing that I love to do in my free time is recreating a scene that is appealing to me personally. My goal is to make this a daily exercise in the future. Because I believe that this activity helps me improve in my understanding of colour and composition. I noticed that the more I do this, the easier it gets for me in distinguishing colours and its relationship with another colours, lights, and shadow. For example, if I were to create a blue mood/scenery, I would use green as yellow because of their interaction. Before, I would have to do more manipulation because in my mind, the colour is still yellow. Also, this exercise helped me to push myself to pay attention to details, which I believe is important in working on animation and even beyond that. Other than the technical, I also got to familiarise myself with creating composition, my goal is also to learn how different director approach compositions and visual representation of their scene.
For the simulated work experience, I got the chance to work with Trina (Siyu Tian) for her final project. My role in this project was to make Character expressions sheet, poses, and the background visual plan. For the character poses, the direction was to explore the character’s poses from different angle or perspective. I did several poses based on the script that was given to me and got to play around the angle of how we see the character.
For the expressions I also did several based of the script. And I was also directed to create some neutral poses for reference.
The next task is to create Background plan for the animation. For this work, I have to create four views in total (two views of the cartel or basement and two more for the classroom). As I write this post, I have only managed to create three of the four views.
In creating the basement, I was referring to the visual reference that was given by Trina, especially in terms of mood and colour. The mood that the scene was trying to bring is dark and creepy, hence the strong contrast of colour and lighting was used, specifically blue and red colours are used to brings out the mood. Other than the two views/angles of the perspective, I also detailed the door that will be an important object that the character tried to reach in the scene.
For the classroom scene, the direction is to make a contrasting mood from the basement. In drawing the classroom, I was facing a challenge in the more technical side, because I have to draw many chairs and desk and it’s been a long time since I attempt doing perspective drawing. Personally I am not quite satisfied with how the drawing turns out because I think I was overwhelmed while doing it and not focusing much on details. So if I have the time I want to revise the classroom drawing and finish the other view.
In my approach to adding props and objects in the scene, I refer to the background of this story, of how this story is about a character in a dream and in a real-life. So I tried to create subtle hints of how interconnected both of the world are. For example, I added broken chairs to the basement scene because there are chairs in the classroom, or the red flower in the classroom as a bridge to the red alarm and lighting of the basement. Overall, I was so excited about doing this project! I still feel like I can do more in my work if I have more time. In specific to my role in this project, I am grateful that I got the chance to do especially the background because growing up I saw many concept art book and how they included the concept of background as part of the world building, and now I got the chance to try and do it myself. Professionally, I think this project helped prepare me to other industry role besides the animating itself, which widen my grasp of understanding of the industry.
In this term, we got to learn three more of the animation exercises, which are body acting, facial acting, and lip-synch.
The first exercise that we do is body acting exercise. For this exercise, I was animating a lovely character, Shaheen, which was made by Renad. The first challenge while doing this exercise was how to make the decision of what the character is doing and how the movement will be like. As an overthinker, I feel like sometimes deciding on something took the longest part of the doing itself. So, for this exercise I tried not to choreograph the movement too much while I filmed myself for the reference and just go with the plot. I remember the final movement is referred based on a take where I accidentally knock over my electric kettle. Which create a genuine mood change to animate.
The next exercise is facial acting exercise. In this exercise I animated a character receiving a call. The mood change that is happening in this animatic is bored-flustered-angry. I realised while filming this that I got super panicky when I filmed that resulted in too much movement for many of my reference video. I was glad that I am able to decide what part of movement to cut and make the movement clearer. But maybe I do need more acting lessons to make sure I do a good reference.
The last exercise that we did in this term is Lip-synch exercise. Which consisted of two exercises. The first one, I got to animate a character with the voice of my classmate, Vivi. And the second one is an animation with the voice from old Vine video. In this exercise (especially the first one) I tried to experiment with my TV Paint workspace. While doing the first exercise, I tried to separate all body parts layer, because my mind suddenly just thought that maybe it was a good idea (It was not). It resulted in a very messy workflow and tiresome revisions, so I decided to redo everything. In the second try, I only separate the layers into three (mouth, body, hair) so I could work much neater than the first try. In the second exercise, I still separate the layers into too many layers, but because it was only 6 second, I didn’t get as overwhelmed as I felt on the first one when doing the revisions. So, the simpler, the better. For the character’s movement itself, again, I think I haven’t successfully animated a natural acting for my character.
First Version of Lip synch Exercise 1Second Version of Lip Synch Exercise 1Lip Synch Exercise 2
For me personally, all three exercises were really challenging, and I think I especially struggle with the acting part. I feel like when it comes to the technicality, I notice improvement in my grasp of understanding and creating the animation, but I still think my animation tend to look stiff when it comes to how they move. But overall, I still enjoyed every process. As stressful as the process was, to see how every frames you drew move as a whole animation was always worth it, and it gave you reason to move forward and keep learning.
In our Storytelling workshop, there was one activity where we were asked to breakdowns the bones of the story/movie that is familiar to us. Instantly I thought of Annette (2021), a musical movie written by the Sparks Brothers and directed by Leos Carax. Personally, for me, Annette was the most appealing and eclectic (or maybe the weirdest?!) movie that I watched in 2021.
(Spoiler Alert!)
To summarise the story of Annette, the story began with Henry, a stand-up comedian and Ann, an opera singer that fell in love, got married and have a child together named Annette. While Henry’s career spiralled down, Ann’s took off, which resulted in an aggression on Henry’s end. Henry ended up accidentally killed Ann which left Annette with only her father. Later he discovered that Annette has a singing talent like her mother and thus began Annette’s singing career with Henry as her manager. Fast forward, Annette became a worldwide sensation and together with Henry and her mentor, The three of them went touring across the world. One night Henry killed Annette’s mentor because of his jealousy towards him. When the time of Annette’s final show came, Annette refused to sing, instead, she outed to the world that her father was a killer. The ending of the scene was Annette visiting Henry in the prison and how they have a conversation (in this case, a duet) with a brutal/sad/bittersweet open ending(depends of how optimistic you are).
So! What I love the most about this movie was the fact that Annette was a puppet the entirety of the movie except for the ending. I feel like as a movie, the director gave us, the audience, a chance to play along in this movie. When we saw a puppet Annette, it’s easy for us to not take her seriously, and I think that is probably what the director was aiming, for us to forget her as a human being, not unlike how the Adult in the movie sees her, as a means to an end. I feel like this movie is a great example of how the decision about how to tell a story is very important. In my opinion, one of the reason this works well because it is a live action movie, where they casted real people as the character. Maybe it is because we as a human could relate more to other human rather than to an object. When we sees a puppet Annette, which was also barely talk or do anything that hinted of humanity, It’s easy to ignore her existence, especially when there was a lot more real human drama surrounding her. Also, I feel like the writer and director of this movie did a great job in including the audience in the narrative without underestimating the capability of the audience to grasp everything at the end.
Finally, there are a lot of ways we could tell a story, we could spoon-feed the bones of the story to the audience, or we drizzled it in form of riddled words and visuals. As animators, with the capacity of creating and telling those stories, the choice could be in our hand. How the audience react and process what we delivered is another story. This is why I love visual storytelling!
In my learning of facial acting, I came across Facial Action Coding System (FACS) by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen. FACS itself is a system or a tool to measure or recognise facial expressions or movement based on the muscular activity. The breakdowns of these facial changes are called Action Units. I haven’t found access on the complete guidelines book of this system but based on the book “Emotion in The Human Face” edited by Paul Ekman, There are 33 Action Units listed and 11 more descripted as “simply defined Action Units”.
How to read these Action Units:
The scoring of AUs is based on the facial movement of the subject, not necessarily by emotion. In the book itself, the description of each AUs tried to minimize using more subjective terms, such as sad eyes or happy eyes. But using more technical term such as brow lowerer or upper lid raiser, so to learn about the AUs, we need to be familiar with the wording. Another thing is to understand facial muscles and how it works, because some AUs will trigger another AUs to happen at the same time because of the muscular factor. I am intended to find out more about FACS and to gain access to the complete guidelines in order to better my limited understanding about this.
To DO!
While learning about FACS, I have an idea to create an experimental and interactive way of learning these AU’s. My idea is to create set of controllers in 3D Software based on the AUs to help me learn how to differentiate each one. I haven’t got the chance to create this yet! But I will update my experiment when I finally do it. Maybe somewhere in the internet world, there is an access to this 3D approach of learning FACS, but still, I think it would be good for me to start from scratch so I could understand better.
Personally, I think that learning FACs would be beneficial for an animator, because it could specify the more subjective terms of human emotions and facial changes and then use it as a part of communication tool.
As someone who loves a beautiful cinematography composition, I was excited to finally learn how to create a storyboard. In this class, we got to try and do our own storyboard based on a script. Personally, I think my approach in creating a scene composition is more live action oriented, because I watch more live action movie than animated one. I feel like animation would have more possibility in how we treated each scene, so for the future, I must familiarise myself more with many kinds of animated style so I could be more flexible in the ideation of storyboard creation.
In the 3D Pathway this term, we got to learn how to do basic human figure T-Pose and animate it! I feel like because we had the basic understanding of how to animate the character last term, now I got the chance do many experiments in terms of the scenes and movement of the character.
Even though I created my own T-Pose, the character that I animate is Kevin’s rigged character, Paul, because I forgot to save mine, stupendously, as always. So, the first thing that I did was to renamed the character as Obi, because I can. And then for my first animation, I got to animate Obi dancing. For this first exercise, I didn’t actually have a movement reference, but I work pose by pose and keep in my mind to keep the character looked balanced each frame.
The next exercise was lip sync exercise, and I decided to use the Vine sound that I use for the 2D Animation. We learned how to use blend shape to create the mouth movement of the character. In this exercise, I also experimented a lot in the animation scene and decided to create a little photoshoot for Blue Obi.
In both exercises I attempted to render the animation with a simple Arnold’s Skydome Light for the lighting, to make the animation looked finish.
In this term’s life drawing sessions, I tried to apply what I learned previously, like how to use the beans and how to see the figure in three-dimensional approach. I feel like the more I do life drawing, the more I could learn how to prioritise what to draw when it comes to drawing in limited timeframe. I also noticed that the sessions helped me in how I could more easily breakdowns organic shape as primitives to help me build the base of my drawing. So, cheers to more life drawing in the future!
