A Biiiig Update

I've been putting off showing any of my animation because I want it to be seen finished... HOWEVER for the sake of next weeks crit I'm going to have to upload the whole unfinished thing sooner or later. With that in mind I thought I'd show my latest sketchbook pages, a screenshot of my workspace in Flash and a gif of one of the scenes I'm using.

When it's time to show the animation it will no doubt be noticed that I've strategically never shown my little blue mans feet to avoid annoying walk cycles!

Sound effects...

I've made around 15 seconds of hand drawn animation (also using a couple of 'tweens' on slow moving objects such as clouds) and so I thought I'd stop for a second to think about applying sound effects.

As far as I can tell, if I wish a sound to overlap into multiple scenes then the scenes in question will have to sit on the same time line rather than on individual scene tabs. That is certainly something to consider when applying ambient sound effects to scenes.

I'm very fortunate to have access to a large sound library that comes as part of a package with some music recording software that I've used for many years so for the most part I shouldn't have to record my own sounds but if I do then Mixcraft will make that easy.

I found a video on youtube that shows how to add audio files to flash files so this will be helpful to keep on the blog to refer back to as and when necessary.

It's pretty basic but that's what I need at this level.

I think once it comes to more complicated sounds that have to be synced with movements then I'll need some additional help but for now this tutorial will help me with my title scene and again once I have to apply an entire audio track.

Title scene

I'll try not to post every single scene that I do on here as a GIF but I'm pretty pleased that I'm getting a fairly decent grasp of flash now.
This will be my opening titles. I'll be adding sounds of birds and stuff to it when it's finalised and perhaps a fade in but then I want the scene to just jump straight into the house to see our character lying in bed.
I really hope this all works out!

A couple more rough tests

So this is your standard, extremely fast walk cycle, it would have a lot more frames in it normally but because  I wanted it to look smooth I made it super fast.

Underneath is just a little splodge test of sorts that I did because I probably won't use the walk cycle for my monster. I wanted to show a weird way of moving around so this was just a little test. Stupid, but fun!

Eureka!

Ok so the other day I was sketching out some really crappy character ideas based on the fact that most of my animation is gonna be hand drawn into flash so it had to be simple. As you can see below, none of them were really going anywhere.

So I did this for awhile and after my learning agreement consultation I decided that the animation had to have more appeal. I told David that most animations have appeal by incorporating comedy into the mix. So I thought about that for a little while and started roughing out my first scene (after the title scene) which you can see below in the form of a never ending GIF of doom.

This took me a LONG time, but I am essentially learning as I'm going so I didn't mind. Also I'm ahead of schedule so any animation I do this week and next is extra bonus points (that I've assigned myself because I can do that).

So I had roughly 14 seconds of pretty boring animation but I was still racking my brain for this extra comedic appeal factor. And that's where it hit me. Why does it need to be a depressed MAN? Why can't it be an animal? Hell, why can't it be a monster or an alien?! This instantly invigorated me and I had to text my girlfriend Kayleigh straight away to ask if this was a good decision. She asked me some questions and I quickly justified them all in a similar way to this: Working with monsters will free me up from complicated human animation that will need to look a certain way, it will allow me to create an abstract sort of world which will make it more interesting to watch, it will generally appear more comical AND FINALLY it will actually help add subtlety to the theme of the animation. A man being depressed is all well and good but a monster being depressed can carry the exact same message but in a much more visually appealing way.

Well, that's what I think. So now I'm working on simplistic monster ideas. I want them to be sort of malleable because I want them to have strange fluid, morphing-like characteristics. I have an especially disturbing idea in mind for the visiting the DR scene that just wouldn't work if you weren't a squishy sort of monster thing. Anyway, below are my first sketches.

Flash...

I was messing around with the idea of doing hand drawn frame by frame animation today and so I ended up in Flash, hopelessly trying to figure out how that would work. I think it might take faaarrr too long to try and do it this way for my story but it was fun to do anyway.

Initial script in relation to Todorov's theory

Glass half empty: Script.

Equilibrium

The man is lying in bed with his eyes open. The curtains are letting light shine through. He is waiting for his alarm to go off. There are pleasant sounds of birds (and perhaps the occasional vehicle driving by). There is an empty bottle of vodka next to his bed.

The alarm goes off a few times while he stares at the ceiling, almost motionless. He slowly reaches over to turn it off and then depressing music starts to play over the top of the animation from this point on.

He showers in silence, head hanging as the water hits him. He dries himself off in the bedroom and takes a brief moment to look into a mirror. He stares blankly at himself and then his head lowers.

His toast pops up from the toaster and he begins to butter it (with Vitalite, bitches). He is dressed by now. He eats it while sat at a table on his own.

He applies toothpaste to his brush and brushes his teeth, looking despondently at his reflection.

He puts on his coat and begins walking to the bus stop. He catches the bus and finds a place to sit on his own where he stares out of the window until he arrives at the destination. His heart races at every stop, dreading that he’ll have somebody sit next to him, while at the same time wondering why nobody does sit there, is something wrong with him?

Eventually he gets off at his stop and people seem to be walking right at him, he always feels that he has to move for them, like he is invisible.

He arrives at his office block and spends the day typing away in silence, never talking to anybody. He wonders whether people are making fun of him behind his back.

Fast forward to going home and he catches the bus and goes through the same fear cycle that he had on his way there. Eventually he arrives at home and makes chips and beans for dinner. He then slumps in front of the television with some alcohol. He also has his laptop open and is forever looking at the notification bit. He gets a notification but it’s something mundane like a facebook update or something along those lines. This drives him to drink heavier.

He stumbles to the bathroom where he clumsily brushes his teeth with his head down. He looks in the mirror and becomes frustrated with himself. Perhaps he even punches the mirror and recoils in pain. He then decides that tomorrow morning he is going to call the Drs. He collapses in bed and we fade out on that image.

The next day he calls the doctors before going to work and writes down an appointment time. The rest of his day goes as usual but we speed through it slightly faster with slight variations to the original day we see. For instance, the weather may change and he is wearing a different tie.

Disruption

This is the Doctor day. The man is lying in bed with his eyes open. The curtains are letting light shine through. He is waiting for his alarm to go off. There are pleasant sounds of birds (and perhaps the occasional vehicle driving by).

The alarm goes off a few times while he stares at the ceiling, almost motionless. He slowly reaches over to turn it off and then depressing music starts to play over the top of the animation from this point on.

He showers in silence, head hanging as the water hits him. He dries himself off in the bedroom and takes a brief moment to look into a mirror. He stares blankly at himself and then his head lowers.

His toast pops up from the toaster and he begins to butter it (with Vitalite, bitches). He is dressed by now. He eats it while sat at a table on his own. As he eats, he looks down at a piece of paper that he has. It says Dr Barnette (or some other name to be later confirmed) and a time, 10.35.

He applies toothpaste to his toothbrush and begins to brush his teeth. After he has finished he notices that he has gotten some on his top. He responds with a sigh or another lowering of the head (or eyebrows to depict his unhappiness).

He puts on his coat and closes the door behind him. He starts walking to the bus stop and it starts to rain. It gets heavy and he gets splashed by a car driving through a puddle.

When the bus arrives the rain begins to stop. After he has paid he tries to find a place to sit but almost everybody has put a bag next to them on the bus. He sits reluctantly towards the back of the bus where a couple of kids are sat. They whisper to each other and make him nervous. He occasionally glances and tries to forget them but he can’t. He stares out of the window and gets all hot and sweaty.

He arrives in town and heads to the doctors. On the way people seem to be walking at him and he is forever moving out of their way.

When he arrives at the doctors he is sat in the waiting room. He glances to the clock which shows the time to be later than his appointment (which will be reinforced by looking back at his small piece of paper). Eventually, ten minutes late, he is called in.

He sits slumped in the Dr’s office. The Dr appears uninterested and irritated at the mention of a patient who is permanently unhappy. He offers the man a prescription and the man leaves feeling worse than ever.

He stands in his bathroom looking at himself and takes two of the pills. His evening then follows the same routine except he doesn’t drink.

One week later?

He struggles to awaken for once and his expression has changed from unhappy to emotionless and tired. He takes his pills with his breakfast. He does everything that he does in the equilibrium but at a much slower pace with less panic but with a real sense of overwhelming apathy and takes his pills in the evening with dinner too.

Recognition

He begins to realise that this hasn’t helped him; it’s only put him in groggy state where he feels absolutely nothing. That morning before he takes his pills he looks at them and decides to leave them alone. He wants to go back to the original equilibrium because feeling anything is better than feeling nothing at all.

New equilibrium

His routine has returned to normal except now he drinks either a bigger bottle or drinks two bottles. This could be interchangeable with cans but it’s more likely that he will have chosen a beverage of choice and stuck with that.

Additional notes

·         -In order to make the drinking more poignant, it’s possible that he won’t be drinking at all at in the initial equilibrium and that the antidepressants and lack of help have actually pushed him into an even greater state of depression.

·       -  I’m currently undecided on whether the final equilibrium should be a state of suicide.

·         If suicide DOES occur, then it’s important that we don’t see it and that we only see preparations for it. For example, tying a rope or researching methods of suicide on the internet.

·      -  Remember to incorporate idiosyncrasies to the character’s actions depending on what he is doing – for example, when he is looking at his social media website, he might type something out to talk to somebody but then deletes it for fear of seeming stupid or being ignored.

·     -   It’s very important to show that the Dr’s attitude is a massive contributing factor in this extended depression. I want it to seem like the Dr was in a rush to get him out of his hair and the easiest method would have been writing him a prescription rather than all the additional help that could occur.

Inspiration...

Just happened across this through Illustration Friday's website.

Inspiration

I just found a great little animation about depression. It really starts to work about a third of the way through.