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.

<valeporun.blogspot.ca>

<moustachefox.tumblr.com>

<lilrenaldresearchanddevelopment.tumblr.com>

<expjc.blogspot.ca>

<azelpha.com>

<alexgibsonanimation.tumblr.com>

<yoohyunbeth92.wordpress.com>

 <thaliaresearchblog.blogspot.ca>

<phoebenezil.wordpress.com>

<kfredericksonexperimental.tumblr.com>

 <www.tumblr.com/blog/ecuadprojects>

 <jamieyano.tumblr.com>

 <kahoyoshida.wordpress.com>

 <mannizhang.blogspot.ca>

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.