PRODUCTION

I began production in January this year and I actually began production before I had planned. My production schedule says I wanted to start animating by February and although I only bested myself by one week it was a whole extra week on production I wasn't planning on having. When I was still intending to make a stop motion film I was actually expecting to fall behind schedule as I had yet to build puppets and things. However changing to a hand drawn meant that I could just begin production from that point on.

I decided against making a more up to date animatic as I thought that when I began animating I would likely just want to go the whole hog anyway. As Dissonance is a slow and thoughtful film there would likely be little difference between a detailed animatic and a final animation.

During production I decided to make sure all the animation was complete before I did anything else. That way if the film was incomplete for the hand in at least the narrative was completed and the line work was solid. Then going forward I coloured a few scenes, delighted a few others and created 5 or 6 edits for my composer and sound designer before completing the colouring work.

SCENE 001

I already mentioned that production lead to changes but in this post I'm going to talk about the changes in greater depth than I did before, starting with the first scene because not only is that chronologically the best option but it is also where most of the changes happened.

Moving from animatic to full animation made the initial opening sequence somewhat confusing. It was paced to quickly for the audience to understand how Lute came to land on a the planet he inhabits for the rest of the film. To help this make sense I restructured the opening shots quite severely. Which is actually how a few of the opening sequence animatics came to be. I considered a few variations on a few key elements. As you'll have seen in my animatic Dissonance originally began straight into the ship. However after thinking on it for a while I decided to add an establishing shot. This shot put the planet into shot an the crash into perspective. The audience no longer wonder how he came to be on a planet because we can now see a planet, making it a perfectly plausible outcome.

The other major change for this scene came at the end where Lute actually hits the planet. Originally I had the audience seeing this entire scene from Lute's perspective but that incarnation relied heavily on an understanding of what was happening to him. Realising that I was clouded by my own understanding of the story, I looked into some other ways to portray this sequence. It was a toss up between watching the music box cascade of into space from Lute's POV and then nothing or watching him land from another perspective. In the end I decided to use a little bit of both. This meant that not only did we now understand how Lute came to be abandoned on a tiny planet but we also realise that he has lost his music box completely.

By this point I am much happier with the first scene, I was happy that it made sense, even if it was far from my original intention for the scene. I had originally intended for it to be as confusing for the audience as for Lute, but I understand that it was necessary to give the audience just a bit more information than Lute had. So while this scene is now completely different from my original intention for it (admittedly it took me time to adjust to it) I am now confident in it's fidelity, execution and composition.

TITLE SEQUENCE

This project has really made me realise how much of a typography snob I am. It took me a few days just to sort a decent opening sequence. In the animatic the title just came in bold. It was a direct cut to white text on a black background. I hadn't given it much thought until Alan pointed out that it is intact very important to the feel of the film. I had intended to think about it just not as early as I found myself thinking about it.

I think I had been avoiding thinking about it because I do love type and typeface as well as a nicely animated title sequence. So I was trying to avoid letting it encompass my thinking for a while.

But I knew that a sleekly animated, after effects title sequence was not what was called for here. I knew it needed to be bold but soft and fairly. Yes this is a film set in space, but it is not a film about space. It's a film about sentimentality and holding on to things that keep you sane. So I ignored that part of me that wanted to go big.

I knew to keep it bold I needed capital letters but I also knew that I didn't want harsh and strong/solid feeling letters. I wanted round and elegant. Lute is all round, he has no hard edges and no straight lines so I thought the title should mimic him. However Alan thought I should try lower case because those letters are inherently soft so I gave it a go. But I just couldn't bring myself to like them.

The other idea I gave a go was to try incorporating the title into its surroundings. I knew it was a bit cliched when I made it but sometimes you have to give into a cliche. Sometimes they're expectations for a reason. But it just looked so wrong. The title was too long for the size of the planet and to make the planet fit I had to severely reduce it's size. That isn't something I ever want to do because it ruins the illusion of a tiny planet.

In the end I gave in and created my own type face. One that pulled together several elements that I needed.

SCENE 002

Scene two is another scene that I edited quite a lot. It was one of the first sequences I worked on when I began production so by the time I got to the end of animating, I'd gained some perspective on it. I now saw it as a bit of an opportunity to put into practice what I had learnt throughout the film process.

This second half of this scene relied rather heavily on sound because this is a scene where Lute panics, realising he's stuck on a planet. To do this and still remain true to my aim to be a bit more realistic with the sound design and with how an astronaut would really behave in space I made this sequence take place inside Lute's helmet. That being the only way we could hear Lute breath.

The difference between the first time I made this scene and the second are that the first time I was allowing the sound to do all of the work. I had Lute look forward and blink and all the significance came from the sound design. However, the second time I animate this sequence I realised the camera had a lot of power to help make the scene make sense. So I animated it and by doing that I allowed the audience to see through Lute's POV and feel his emotions much better because we see his reaction as well.

It was much more work than the initial animation however I feel that it very much paid off. As my team have been working on the sound and the score they have been remarking how much they love that scene. So I am now very proud of it.

Interestingly though, in the final weeks of production I taught myself how to create a 3D environment in Adobe After Effects and animate a camera I created in after effects itself. It allowed me to place a view finding node that would always be the focus of your camera and composition. Then I could move the camera instead of every element in the composition. While if I could change this scene again I might give that a try because it would very likely have been much easier than the laborious way I did create this scene, I am very proud of the way this scene turned out. There's a real sense of panic to seeing it this way through his eyes.

SCENE 003

Scene 003 is probably the largest scene. It's really a toss up between it and scene 004 which is also a fairly lengthy scene. This middle section is the slowest of the sections and is where we really begin to feel Lute's frustration and defeat. If I'm honest this scene just took time in production, It was mostly made in photoshop and minor effects were added in after effects. When I first looked at this scene I realised it was pretty much two larger cut up scenes. Once I had animated both of them the scene was most of the way together.

That just left a lot of composition editing. When I storyboarded this scene I storyboarded Lute in the middle a lot. At the storyboard stage I put him in the middle a lot because he was the most important thing in the scene. But throughout the process of making this film I have watched sooo many Lynda tutorials to know that the middle is not necessarily there the most important part of the image goes. There are multiple ways to lead the eye through an image.

Lute will always command the most attention on screen because your eye is foremost drawn to contrast. He is white against a mostly dark background so most of the time our eye will be on him. Other than that the eye finds thirds most pleasing. If the focus of the scene is on the the left third it is an open story still. If it is on the other third it could be considered to be closed off, unwilling to take in new information or completed. I applied a lot of these principles to this scene during production.

SCENE 004

As I mentioned above scene 4 is the scene that I taught myself 3D space to master. Similarly to scene 002 though, I had a version of this scene created before, and once again I returned to it to improve on the original edit.

I was really happy with the final shot of this sequence. In fact I am very pleased with the whole scene! but here I'm only going to talk about the production of the last 3 shots.

The above shot is an edit of the first of the 3 shots I'm going to talk about in this last section. It's worth mentioning because all the animation takes place within an after effects mask placed across lute's visor.

To do this I simply pulled a final PNG of the image into after effects, as well as a PNG of the visor on a separate layer. I then positioned them perfectly over one another and used the stand alone visor to mask out the areas of the background I did not want, containing the background image within the visor itself. To make it look realistic I then reversed the section of background footage that crossed across the visor to make it really look like a reflection. At the end I added a vignette to the edges of the visor so you could still see that this was a round and dark surface that was reflecting another image.

This is also the first scene I overlaid with a particle effect. I taught myself how to create dust particles using after effects particle systems II, from the above tutorial. I really enjoyed learning to make them and I toggled them for a lot of the editing process. I felt like they added a lot of additional movement to the otherwise sparse world Lute was in. They were especially useful when I decided against using and framing elements to guide the eye around. If I had used them they would have filled more of the space in the scene. I made that decision because when I though about the long shots, where you see the planet, I came to realise that there really was nothing else on it and I also came to realise that I had done that very deliberately. There is a very deliberate lack of things in Lute's immediate surroundings. All the interesting things. The things that are colourful and that sparkle and glitter and move, are far out into the distance and he can't reach them. I deliberately emphasised his vast loneliness.

I'm really only going to talk about this shot very briefly because if I go into too much detail you won't have to see the film and that's not good. Haha. So without telling you too much I will explain why this scene is being mentioned.

In my 4 years as an undergrad here at ECA I have afforded myself very few opportunities to work directly with sound. I've made films where I've worked to the score first and I've had films where we've scored it afterwards all known as non-diegetic sound but I have never worked with dialogue or sound (also known as diegetic sound) that needed to be thought about before beginning the animation. Im'm glad I got the chance to before the end of my undergrad. Even though I made some decisions early on in the game to avoid having to do a lot of sound work. Things like you never see Lute's face or that he's only ever going to hum. But in these particular cases it was critical that the music and the visuals lined up in perfect sync.

It took about three goes between the composer and I to match this perfectly. He wrote the music and I mapped the animation then for some reason the timeline moved around a bit and we had to move things around to fit again but eventually it all came together and worked amazingly!

Now let us get something straight before we continue. I love this scene. I put a lot of time into it and I love the way it progresses. It's a perfect final scene for this film. However, that does not excuse it's behaviour. It has been the bane of my existence this last week. It has an error in it and even now as I type (this is the 10th may btw not the 17th April, that's just the date I began making this post on) I am still trying to solve. But I will get to that in due course.

Previously in this post I mentioned how I had taught myself to use 3D space and a 3D camera during the production of this scene. That's because I may have gotten a little carried away with the whole Lynda tutorial thing and wanted to see if they could teach my a way to get a smoother dolly (for those reading this who are not one of my tutors a dolly is a camera movement where the whole camera is moved away to create a pull back in focus.) on this shot. From the beginning I ha aimed to make sure that this 2D film about space really felt like it had depth and space. Duh. So the movements of the camera through the perceived space were important elements to me.

The first time I animated this I animated every element. Most of them had their scale animated so it looked as though they were getting further away from the camera. That paired with a slight movement to the right hand side of the screen made the first camera pan I did for this scene. But it wasn't as simple as putting the same key frames on each element. Each element had to be key framed individually and that kind of non consistent animating doesn't make for a smooth looking pan. When there's slight variations in elements like that it can look good, if you stager them right. (That's the difference between a dolly and a zoom) but if you don't it just looks messy.

That's what lead me to a Lynda tutorial to find me a more elegant solution to my dollying issue. I found a brilliant one and started learning the ins and outs of 3D layers and how they interact with each other. The difference between this scene and all the previous scenes is when I edit these scenes a whole 3rd dimension worth of editable, keyframable elements. As well as now being able to use and animate camera rigs and lighting rigs. To make this scene I layered all the elements up to the places and distances from one another that made sense to the scene then I added a camera+view finding node. That meant that no matter how I animated the camera I could tell it where to focus. It was incredibly helpful for this scene as I told it where Lute was in the scene and how I wanted him framed in in the first shot and then I moved the whole camera along back and keyframe it further along the timeline. When I was finished I had done far less work and had a far smoother dolly.

But here's where life got tricky. As far as I could tell from inside the project file, this sequence should have been fine. Everything came in when it should, went out when it should, all was well. But here I am now. less than two days till the hand in and I have a sequence that for no conceivable reason drops around 20 frames worth of 4 out of 10 assets in the composition. They reappear after those 20 frames, without any explanation. I've been trying to find out the issue for about 2 days now with the help of our very patient and supportive technician. We think we may have come up with a solution now. Unfortunately it's been a process of trial and error for the last two days. One that not only failed a number of times because of the issue at hand but one that has failed because of issues in other adobe softwares that we were utilising to try and help.

For example. My Adobe media encoder appears to be forcing a resolution far inferior to that with which it was asked to produce. Very unhelpful. We managed to get the dropped frames back using it but the quality was severely degraded. So that wasn't an option. Then we rendered the entire composition out into tiff files (which is what we had the media encoder output them as that solved the initial issue) hoping to fix the issue. However when I came in this morning, my beautiful, high resolution, lossless files were still missing frames. Back to the drawing board.

We wondered if it was possibly because there was one 2d element in the 3D element space that was causing havoc with the render. Nope. We thought it was the missing stars crossing another 3D elements path and sliding behind them. Nope. Jared thought it was the alpha channelling... Nope! I thought briefly about crying under the desk... But eventually last night at about 11pm I figured it out! It was a buggy video file! woohoo! mission accomplished!

Then the security team kicked me out of here at half 2 when I was trying to export the audio.

Anyway that was production! It's all over and I've got a perfect master copy of the film now. I couldn't be happier!