Looking Into Sound For My Animatic

Recently we have been learning about the process of producing foley for animation. Foley is the term for sound effects which are added after a piece has been filmed... so in the case of animation, just sound effects in general. Having learned a bit more about the process of capturing and editing sound for animation - for example, the difference between particular microphones and how to use software such as Adobe Audition to EQ sounds and add effects such as noise removal and reverb - I began to draw up a list of the sounds that my animatic will require:

A basic break down of the different sounds required for my animatic

And here are my thoughts as to how I will go about producing some of the more obscure sound effects I need:

• Wind: a) blowing and/or whistling into a microphone with reverb added in editing
• Wood creaking: record a creaky door/door handle and change recording pitch or speed as necessary
• Bird wings flapping: put an umbrella up and down
• Whale blow hole: record a tap for the sound of water being sprayed out of blow hole, with a pop sound effect added to the end for when the hut emerges
• Hut crashing back down: record a kick drum, slow down and add a lot of reverb

I will record these sound effects over the next few days and add them to my animatic; once this is done, I will be ready to begin work on my fully animated piece!

My Final Animatic

This is the final production animatic for my animation. As you can see, I have made use of the background art I posted some time ago on this blog; I feel this worked really well in terms of conveying exactly the type of atmosphere I wanted in each scene, as opposed to focusing more on the foreground, as animatics often do. I discussed why it would be beneficial to apply a greater focus than usual on the backgrounds for my animation in my blog post about environment design.

I'm really pleased with the way this animatic turned out. As I mentioned when I posted my initial animatic, timing was something I put a lot of concentration into for this piece, as my initial animatic had a somewhat rushed feel to it as a result of many shots not being on screen for long enough. With my final animatic, however, I feel the timing is spot on. 

The next step now is to look into producing some sound-effects for the animatic, before going on to fully animate a ten-to-twenty second segment of my piece. I am currently torn between two segments I want to animate: I will either animate the scene in which the bird lands on the hut, causing it to fall off the cliff; or I will animate the scene where the hut is swallowed by the whale and is blasted back to where it was. I will make a final decision on this once I have completed my sound effect work for the piece.

The Hut: Fleshing Out My Design

Earlier on in my blog I made a post explaining the various choices I had been contemplating with regard to the design of my hut. One of the key design choices I faced was whether or not to make the hut's features resemble human features, and whether or not I would animate these features if I chose to go through with this idea, or if they would remain static.

Below are my fleshed-out designs for the hut as it will appear in my animation...more or less. While these images show the hut with a relatively high level of detail, I imagine the design used in my finished animation will be simpler in terms of texture and line style, simply to make it easier and faster to draw, thus making the animation process smoother and making the 2D drawn animation technique more technically viable.

I have simply included the image on the left for the purpose of showing how the hut looks on its own, without any of the signs to embellish it; in this image it is easier to read the 'face' of the hut, with the windows representing eyes, and the wooden beam below the windows representing a mouth. In my previous post about the design of the hut, I discussed subtlety. With this design I feel I have stuck a good balance between personality and subtlety; the face isn't distracting or perhaps even overtly noticeable, yet it still portrays a characteristic absence of mind and the hut's disinterest in the world around it. As such, when the signs are added, a juxtaposition occurs between the owner's extreme desire for his adventure holidays to be as exciting and awesome-sounding as possible, and the dreary, desolate atmosphere surrounding his hut.

Experimenting With Hut Designs

Today I have been experimenting with potential designs for the hut in my animation. Given that the hut essentially plays the role of the main character in my animation, it is imperative that the design is as appealing to as broad a demographic as possible and conveys the personality and mood necessary to tell my story in an entertaining and engaging way.

In earlier posts, I had a basic look into the general form the hut might take. This was primarily inspired by imagery gathered through my early mood-boards:

Left: An image from one of my initial mood-boards
Right: A sketch I produced showing my interpretation of the hut as it could look in an animation

Over the past few days I have been considering how I could take this idea forward towards a design that could actually be used in my animation. Here are some developmental pieces I produced in order to test various ideas and concepts I had regarding the potential design:

An early piece of development art for the hut

The above design is the first piece in which I experimented with using elements of the hut's design to express emotions and give the building a slightly more human appearance, helping the audience to connect on an emotional level with the hut as a character.

I then decided to take this idea forward with a more in-depth look into how it could work. Above you can see how I developed the idea of using circular windows as eyes to convey the hut's reaction to its surroundings. I think this idea works very well, is as much as it does lend a subtle human feel to the hut,  however having the expressions change during the animation may be somewhat too abstract and cartoony for the kind of animation I want to produce, which will hopefully be a fairly traditional piece of digital 2D animation. In the illustrative piece above, it can also be noted that from the front, I have subtly attempted to give the hut a similar form to the human face, this will hopefully add to the effect I am trying to achieve.

The idea of having they facial expressions change during the animation strikes me as something that would be more suited to a 3D animation style, where the principles of squash and stretch can be more easily exploited in non-human elements. An example of this is the film 'Monster House', a film which was screened recently as part of the Research and Development for Animation module.

The technique works fantastically in this film, however I would argue that the key reason for this is that Monster House is a horror film and the concept of an inanimate object coming to life can very easily go wrong (or in this case, right) and look very creepy, perhaps due to the uncanny valley effect.

To conclude, I feel the use of human attributes in my design for the hut is a good idea, however I also feel that the more subtly this can be achieved, the better. It is most likely I will simply give the hut a fixed facial expression to convey the general mood of the piece.

Environment Design

Today I spent some time looking into the backgrounds that would be required for my animation. Due to my story's lack of traditional characters, I feel that my use of environment design and backgrounds will contribute strongly to the narrative, as there will be less emphasis on the foreground and more emphasis on the world as a whole.

First of all; I used my initial storyboard (click here to see the blog post about my initial storyboard) to ascertain what environments will be required for my animatic - which, unlike my animation, will feature all of the backgrounds in the story. These are the backgrounds required:

• A long panning shot of a vast grassy area with mountains on the horizon; this is where the hut is originally placed
• The bottom of the cliff; where the hut falls into the sea
• An Antarctic scene, clear in the middle for the hut to float through yet with a piece of land/ice in the foreground to allow the seal somewhere to sit
• A second Antarctic scene; this is where the cliff will be where the hut is eaten by the whale. This scene features a zoom - as such the background had to be designed quite large with this in mind.

I then set about collecting references images and pieces of inspiration from online - primarily using the website 'Pinterest' as an image source. Here are the key images that inspired my background art:

This image ended up being a particularly notable piece of inspiration,  directly influencing the layout for my panning background for scene 1

While this image was captured from a completely different angle to the way the landscape will be portrayed in my animation, it still caught my attention for the similarity of the environment and the amazing autumnal pallet seen in the trees and foliage; this is a colour scheme I would very much like to implement in my final animation.

I loved this image of the Antarctic. The landscape is baron and empty; which is perfect for what I'm trying to convey, however there is a beautiful depth to the photograph, the combination of thick fog and a distant landscape conveys a fantastic feeling of mystery and potential for adventure.

Here I once again wanted to look into how to draw my cliff faces, in addition to this I also wanted to investigate how water looks when it meets with the bottom of a cliff; with waves crashing and frothing against the rock 

Here I once again wanted to investigate how I could represent antarctic waters, without just drawing a big empty landscape. I love the colour in this image, and the way the sky is so cleanly reflected in the water. Once again, the idea of distant shapes and landscapes is a key feature of this type of environment... 

...and continues to be in this image.

More investigation into how waves meet the bottom of a cliff; here I observed the jagged rocks that reach out of the waves at the bottom of the cliff, which I couldn't see in the previous image...

...However upon further inspection they are a fairly common element in such environments

These are the background images I ended up producing:

Above: Long panning shot of Scene 1 background

Above: Scene 2 background

Above: Scene 3 background

Above: Scene 4 background

I am very pleased with the way these pieces turned out. I had initially only intended to produced some quick illustrative pieces to portray the general feel of the environment, however I am confident that these pieces could be used for my animatic, and - with some enhancements including colour as well as some animation for added embellishment (primarily the movement of water and trees) - perhaps even my finished animation. I aim to experiment with the use of colour in these images at a later date.

Written Treatments For My Animation

Below are the written treatments for my animation concept. The purpose of the short treatment is to convey - in as few words as possible - the general essence of what I aim to get across through my animation, whereas the long treatment serves more as a synopsis to illustrate the narrative of the animation.

Short Treatment:

Desolate. Extraordinary. Oblivious.

Long Treatment:

A precariously placed adventure holiday boutique boasts to 'live life on the edge'. However despite the owner's best efforts to make the holiday-hut look as enticing and exciting as possible, customers still remain elusive. This makes for an ironically unremarkable day to day existence for our business owner. One dreary afternoon, while its owner embarks on a routine outing to gather supplies, the hut breaks free; experiencing an epic adventure all of its own. Upon returning, the owner is completely oblivious to the immense voyage that his shop has just undertaken.