THE LITTLE GUY

I am glad to announce that it is now done! The Little Guy is done! Of course I still have some tweaking to do, plus perfecting the 3D but overall the finished product is here.

I could not thank you enough for all the people who have helped me through out the process. Everybody from my love ones, my classmates and the technicians and teachers are the ones that got me through this long semester.

To conclude, these are the things I have learned along this process:

- Time: Almost always things take more time than initially estimated. In the future I will definitely make a more solid schedule and try to stick to it, and to give myself more time for errors.

- Planning: What is the story, what are the materials needed, budget, where to shoot etc. A good plan with plan B is how I should work from now on as on many occasions with this project I got lost while working on set and I had no plan B to fall on when things went wrong.

- Be calm: Very simple but actually very difficult. This is probably the biggest quality for an animator is to be patience and to know that animation = time. But of course I do get frustrated, especially when the result of tedious work did not come out as good as expected. I just need to remind myself to be calm and that it's ok to redo things and also to give myself a break once in a while.

- Miscellaneous: There are many little things related to animation and creating stop motion set that learned from this project, and to list a few:

- Don't use flammable material as a set. 

- Don't blare a spot light on the set.

- Low horizon lighting gives an afternoon feel.

- Place a black cloth over a camera to prevent heating up.

- Don't shoot resin under spot light (it gives off horrible fume).

- Tied everything down: camera, lights, set, puppet.

- Organize all files from the beginning; life will be much easier post production.

- Dynamic link and using proxies in AE and Premiere is an awesome work flow.

- Shooting in 4K gives more flexibility in color correcting.

There's a lot more I could write about, some might already be some general things that everybody already know but nevertheless I now know more what to do. I leveled up!

Please stay tune on this blog as I will continue to post about my work next semester and my senior year.

And here it is, The Little Guy. (password: LittleGuy)

The Little Guy from Natty Boonmasiri on Vimeo.

It's a Wrap!

I would like to announce that this past Thursday was my final day for shooting! It was a great/frustrating experience to spend several consecutive hours in a dark (and not so ventilated room), but in the end I learned so much that I'm glad I did it. I had a great time being in my own world and giving life to my puppets, it was though at times when things did not go as I wanted such as unable to get the correct lighting, set caught on fire, incorrect timing and so on, but now I know a lot more what to do and not do in the future. Because this is a research for my grad film, I am glad that I started now and not later as I would not be able to cultivate all the skills and knowledge that I need if I only have a year to do everything.

In one semester this is what I am capable of doing, with more planning I know I can achieve more, better story with better quality of animation.

For now, farewell dear dark room, it's time to move on to editing and sound design for, an official title for my 3rd year experimental animation film, The Little Guy-as I have been calling this character from the beginning and feel that it's actually a good fit for him.

Here are the shots for the dream sequence.

Some of the dreams is done digitally in After Effects, I find that it's another stereoscopic process altogether (an easier one I would like to say because I don't have to built a set or anything), but still the aesthetic is very interesting as there's depth but yet everything looks flat, however with this attribute I played around with the transparency in which create an interesting effects in S3D.

The composition.

Interestingly I did not use After Effects as much as I thought I would. Yes, many of the dream sequences are created digitally but my initial thought of combining 2D and stop motion together did not come through. 

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Also not to forget I could not have come up with all these visuals if I'm not inspired with the arts of the influential animators and artists:

Jan Svankmajer, for his surreal minimal scene. His moody color palette also appeal to me tremendously.

Karel Zeman, his cut outs are extremely detailed and beautiful.

An installation by Sougwen Chung in which she plays with light and projection. 

And experiments of my classmates that show me and continue to fuel me with fresh ideas.

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Readjustings

I would like to pick up some parts that I might have forgotten to mention in my prior posts. For instance I have finished the couch for the little guy, it's made of Styrofoam core with fabric covering. It's very simply assembled by gluing everything together and afterwards I attached a knot underneath so that it can be tied down to the animation board. The coach is not the most sophisticated piece of a furniture and in the future 'i definitely going to measure and calculate for a more realistic set piece. 

Next is the change in the trippy hill scene. Initially the idea is to shine a projection of a video I made on to an animated scene, this method would work perfectly fine but taking the stereoscopic aspect in regards, it doesn't. The reason being that the projection was inconsistent, and because I'm using the cha-cha method for S3D the two eyes became different as you can see below.

Left 

Right

The colors are off between the left and right eye and so once combined the S3D got interfered. To overcome the problem I decided to just not use the projector and instead light the scene with different filters, in which the mystical feel is still there.

Lastly I animated my steel flowers!! The only issue here is that I did not make a big enough scene so I wasn't able to capture that vast landscape feel. In the future I'm hoping to find a studio space that I can leave my set up and create bigger sets. 

Action!

For the past week I was on full animating mode. I start to work with my set and my puppet, learning how to light and compose my shot along the way. I have encountered a few problems with lighting, either I cannot set it up right, too much or too little light and moreover, my set burned...Fortunately it's a part that is no longer needed but this give me a good lesson in considering a more suitable (and non-flammable) material to built my set with. 

I have gotten used to the routine in the puppet room starting with setting up my set, positioning the character, then setting up the IOTA rig and the camera and ending with getting the lights right. In addition to this week I got a good advice to use an app call the IOD Calc Jnr which helps to calculate the IO for my S3D, ensuring that I will get the appropriate difference between my left and right eye that I won't create eyes strain for the audience.

Though things are finally moving, with the end of the term approaching, I am quite certain that I would not be able to finish the film as I have planned on my storyboard, regardless of how much I wanted to. It was a necessity to scrapped away some shots such as my panning shot as I yet learn how to move the camera right and also with my projection on to the hills scene is not working out because the projector flickered which is unsuitable to shoot S3D (the one camera cha-cha technique needs the scene to stay exactly the same which shooting each eye). 

Nevertheless, I am still determine to produce a good work, just only that plan has changed and I will now concentrate more on experimenting with S3D. What I have in mind is to just animate different scenes and playing with the depth of S3D. Eventually by next week I should have enough footage to create a short. So far this is the fruit of my labour.

Moving Forward

This week it is all about finishing the set, with that has been said I do still need one element in order to call the set making process complete-I still need to make a nice couch for my little guy. But by far I have finished the hills for both of my scene, the steel flowers blooming scene and the colorful hills scene. The hills are made of Styrofoam cut with heated wire foam cutter which is a very awesome equipment to create the jaggety, rocky look, I then finished up the texture with gesso to smooth out the foam beady texture. As for the hills for the steel flowers they are just the olden days paper mache. 

The steel aluminum flowers.

The heated foam wire cutter.

The most exciting news of this week is that I finally get to try out the Dragon IOTA rig, thanks to Sean Arden from the Emily Carr S3D Centre. I set up my scene and start practicing lighting, I set up the lights as if there's a sunshine streaming in, with a huge mistake of having two shadows...one point needed to be corrected there. And for the second scene I wanted to create a night ambient, to achieve that I use two light sources: one yellow one from the window and a flood light with blue filter from far away. 

Because I'm not quite familiar and confident in setting up the IOTA rig just yet I didn't try the S3D in other angles apart from the simple frontal shot. But I do want to practice on shooting from different angle anyway so I went ahead, plus I experiment a bit more with light by bouncing the light from the wall through the window to create a chilling icy scifi look. 

The latest experiment I did this week is some more light experiment, in which inspired by Chantal , using projection on the foam hills I did. The projection is create with videos of flowing water I took with added effects on AE, I then projected it frame by frame while animating my set.

It's trippy!

The Right One

Finally the product from my work with the plaster mold is finally out...but it's not what I will be using. Camrose advised me to use silicone rubber for the puppet as it would dry without any problem from my mold (as my plaster did not dry properly). Though not quite a success, I will surely try out more plaster mold puppets as the texture and the appearance can create many interesting results. 

Because the two puppets did not work, I ended up making a third one from sponge and painted with rubber latex. This time the puppet turned out perfect for his purpose; he's flexible, his skin is rubbery and he's light. As the puppet is now done I am moving to set making and simultaneously testing out lighting and convergence for my S3D.

Storyboard (part 2)

Finally I have finished my storyboard! And now I am organizing all the materials that I would need to make each scene. Though frankly, I doubt if I will have the complete film due to time constraint, we have another four weeks to work on this project and at the moment just figuring out how to make a proper puppet alone is quite time consuming. 

At least part two to my little story is done. 

My plan for this weekend is to get as much concept arts done as possible (or needed, at least for me to have a clear visual of what I want). Concept arts is also important for other people to understand what it is I'm trying to do as I do need advice and assistant. 

I have managed to finished the first two memory sequences, in which the rain scene would be mostly compositing in AE and not so much a real S3D shoot; combining just loop stop motion for the rain. 

Another scene is the blooming flower scene, in which I'm making the set out of paper pulp and the flowers out of wire frame and aluminium foil. I have already test out the perspective and shooting in S3D. I'm quite happy with the result, especially that I did the S3D animation without the Dragon Rig (the motor was not working properly), Stephen showed me how to shoot left and right exposure manually in Dragon Frame. 

And here's a scene of him in his loneliness:

Also my effort in making a plaster mold is finally going to pay off! Hopefully...The initial intention in making a rubber latex puppet with expanding foam interior is scrapped away because the arms and legs are just too thin for the material to work. In the end Camrose advice me to make him out of silicone instead, though I am a little scared that the puppet will be too heavy in the head. plus the material is shiny and might not give the appearance I aim for. My plan B for the puppet is to make Martin's Foam Sandwich Method, positioning a wire amature between two sponge and carefully snip around to get the shape that I want and then brush on rubber latex for the skin. This method is more likely to be possible. Stay-tuned and how the little guy will turn out to be! 

Storyboard (part 1)

Originally, I have this idea of making the little guy a chronophobic character, afraid of the passing of time, stuck with his past of beautiful memories and unable to move on to the future.

I really want to make the idea work and able to deliver a narrative driven animation that is infused with experimental techniques. That posed a lot of challenge in terms of coming up with the actual storyboard. So far this is what I have:

Also there are two concept arts that I did in S3D to get some visual idea of how thee scene will came out.

And at this moment I am stuck. Coming up with how the story will progress is actually harder for me than actually making the animation happen, because once I know what I have to do I know I will try to find a way to make it happen. However, if there's nothing to begin with there's no way to move on. 

Initially, I thought that coming up with abstract images would be easy and would easily fit with my memories sequences. Apparently to make random elements play out together in a logical sense is rather difficult. I will have to re-write my storyboard in either as a simple narrative or go full on experimental; my original plan is not going to work due to time constraint.