Woman of the Moon - Animation and Editing

I'm not going to talk about the animation in great depth because I feel as though what I have made really speaks for itself I'm just going to broadly talk about how I approached it and show you a few clips of things as I was working them out.

With the animation I really wanted to allow myself to enjoy the process and edit as necessary to get the finished product that I wanted. I really wanted to be happy with the movement. So I gave myself the time to figure out the correct arcs, adjust the secondary motions and overlapping motions and really show off my skills to the best of my abilities. I think it's one of the reasons I'm so pleased with the film in the end. I considered everything while I was making it and tried my hardest to get out of cutting corners for speeds sake. I was far more likely to remove an entire scene to save time then to compromise on the quality of the animation.

Initially I'd like to talk about a few things I learned from past experiences about designing shots and how thinking ahead of the shot this time, to what I wanted it to look like in the end, really helped me cut down my workload and streamlined my pipeline.

In the images below you'll be able to some of the larger shots as they were in photoshop. I learned that the best way to create zooms, pans and dolly's to keep all the quality is to make the document large enough to accommodate the changes. So I made the documents bigger than they often needed to be. This did more for my pipeline than just make the camera movements easier though. With the scene immediately below it allowed me to think about the entire run cycle and not just what was on screen.

Initially I wasnt animating the full run cycle and as a result Mona looked weightless and weird for the first few passes. It was then that I decided to really think about how the shot should be ANIMATED and not how it was going to be seen on screen. That's where I devised the boxes. Each of these project files has sets of black and red dashed lines on them. The black lines are the total aspect ration of the screen. While the red dashed lines are action safe, a bit like a book margin or bleed on printed documents this is the area that would always be safely within the boundaries of any theatre screen. Anything outside the black box wont be seen on any screen. For this film I needed 2 of these since the aspect ration changes twice during the film. So there is both a 1440x1080 set of frames and a 1920x1080 set.

When it came to working out this run cycle being able to see what was offscreen while animating was hugely helpful. I could line up her feet correctly and focus less on trying to line imaginary points up with one another. I could then focus on secondary actions like hair bounces, breathing and blinking, which really helped make this sequence one of my favourites in the film.

Down here we have a couple of examples of how I used these framing overlays to help me figure out camera movements before the files were put into after effects.

This shot is from the final scene of the film - scene 06 or phase 06 if you will, where the camera is used to show the change in Mona's priorities. During the shot she is standing facing the moon, which then drops to the bottom of the image to the horizon line as the camera pan's down to the image below.

Measuring out the full length of the shot to make sure it worked before animating it or committing to anything was such a smart plan. In the past I would have just animated it and then get caught out finding that the shot wasn't tall enough to incorporate the dolly I wanted.

The other interesting thing about this shot is that it is from the final scene where the aspect ratio changes from 1440 to 1080 over the course of most of the scene. Because of this it was helpful having both aspect ratios on the screen so I could see how the shot would fit into both aspect ratios.

And finally something similar happened with this scene where the camera followed an action down into another part of Mona and Ingrids house. Being able to identify what was on screen when was very helful and being able to move the framing layer meant that I could see how much of the arm needed drawn and coloured each frame.

All in all giving myself a defined screen area but then working outside of it was an incredibly helpful part of the animation process. Something I'm glad I've learnt and will be using a lot in the future.

SHOT BREAKDOWN

After the storyboards were complete I broke them down into shots so that I could get more fluid actions.

The interesting thing you'll notice here is that a lot of this changed from this version to the finished version of the film.

VISUAL REFERENCES

The next thing I did with my film was to record visual references so that I could capture some of the more subtle nuances of the character performances.... I can laugh about it now...

Yeah, sorry about that. One thing I did learn is that I need acting lessons. I am so stiff and uncomfortable in front of a camera. In reality though it wasnt helpful, so in a way it was... it didnt help me by letting me copy my own movement and capture the nuance of my own performance but it did help me realise that I needed to ham up certain parts of the film for it's intentions to land because subtlety wasnt going to convey everything I needed all the time. So while I lost a whole day to recording things that were of no us to me in the end, it did help shape the film so it was helpful.

I did find use of other kinds of visual references though! I'll talk through some of those too

For the scene above where Mona is running around collecting rocks I looked at a number of runcycles with this one being of particular interest:

this is an animated walkcycle by animator Inbal Breda of her space sisters. I used it to breakdown and understand how other walkcycles add personality as before this I have always just animated by the book. and that book was the animators toolkit.

I mapped out where the contact and pass points are, then where the lowest and highest points are and any parts where the characters are off the ground. I watched how each of their hands are animated and how that gives them both different character. I was also interested in their hair movement and how that is influenced by their primary motions.

I was more so interested in the character on the right hand size as she has the same plentiful energy that I wanted to capture in my own scene.

Inbal finished university and went on to work on OK KO for cartoon network and so I know she's good!

THE BREAKDOWN

Once the keys were animated for a scene I timed out to match my animatic and began the breakdowns. Which lead to some decision making moments like, how do i want her eyes and head to move in this scene?

Originally I had planned for this to be a very slow turn of the head, taking in all her surroundings as she turned. But as I worked on it I wasnt so convinced the turn could work like that with the stylised design of the head. It introduced two different speeds to elements of her head. her face was moving round far slower than her hair or chin and that really didnt look right.

Oddly it fit much better to just have her move her head around with more speed and I didnt feel as though I lost any of the contemplative nature I was aiming for with this scene.

once that was thought through I had some people watch it who felt as though her eyes darting about as fast as they did was jarring to the slow pace of the rest of the animation. I did have her eyes moving pretty frantically and I didnt want it to feel as though I was trying to cop out on making her actually look places and consider her surroundings by just having her look around a lot.

So I slowed the eyes down again, limiting the movements to a back and forth about two times. While this seemed like a sever slowing initially by the time it came to clean up/colour I slowed it down once again.

There were actually a number of shots that undertook very similar process to this and I even animated some that were then cut out during on going editing.

These are two shots from the very first scene of the film where I couldn't decide If I wanted her to look back up at the moon briefly before looking down to pick up her camera or if I just wanted her to look straight down. In the beginning I was more fond of having her look back up but as time went on I felt like she didnt look up for long enough or with enough emotion to make it worth keeping that part in. Plus it just looked odd. It was an unusually static and boxy piece of movement and I didnt like it.

As for things I cut out I wont bore you with all of them as a lot of scene 3 was just close up versions or further away shots of the same sequences but here's a few things that were cut completely and the reasoning for them as it segways us nicely into editing.

This one was removed for general lack of need. The pacing for the film wasnt right, the angle wasnt easy and while I really loved the idea of the shot it got really cut due to scene 6's massive re-edit during animation. Initially I was just going to take this scene and make her statically looking over the edge at the crash but as I looked at the next shot to be removed I realised something that meant a lot of scene 06 ended up being re-edited.

When it came to this shot the same thing happened, I realised that Mona could not suddenly jump from being on the edge of the crash to far enough away that she has to run at Ingrid. So for the sake of continuity I cut all these scenes and moved about the remainder to do what was needed. I even masked mona out of one shot in after effects.

This scene originally came right at the every end of the film where we see domestic life for Ingrid and Mona. Mona had just finished setting her new rock down on the mantlepiece of their home and had turned to admire her returned astronaut, who is reading the newspaper but then looks up to meet her gaze. Originally the newspaper was meant to have something on it about her mission to the moon to really drive the point home if you hadnt gotten it yet. But almost everyone felt that newspapers and their consumption was passive aggressive and didnt give off the happy family domestic life thing that I wanted so it was also removed from the film and replaced with Ingrid photographing the new sculpture.

I'm really happy with the animation process as I gave myself the freedom to try out lots of ideas and decide which one was right for the film rather than just animating out of pure need to be finished soon. I'm really proud of how I managed to prioritise enjoyment and process but still manage to complete a film in time for hand in with limited compromises.

VFX

Another new thing I tried out with this film that isnt something I've done before and therefor something I needed to learn was hand drawn VFX. While some of the VFX in the film are not hand drawn, originally I didn't intend to include any hand drawn effects. I had planned to do them all in after effects using the things I had learnt making Oasis last year. However as it got further into development it felt out of character to use after effects for all the VFX work. One part in particular was the smoke that can be seen after the rocket crashes into the ground in the final scene.

With the particular production design I had chosen it would have seemed very out of place to have very realistic smoke bellowing out of the ground. So I decided I would learn how to animate the smoke by hand.

I took to pinterest to start off with and just found all the references for the kind of smoke I wanted. something continuous too as there were lots of examples of smoke that dies out very quickly and that didnt seem likely for something like this. I wanted something that I could loop.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/Abimation/hand-drawn-vfx/ - this is the pinterest board that I made.

Then I attempted to figure out how smoke would move in a loop. I had to make something that came back to the point it began at as convincingly as possible. So that it didn't look as though it was looping.

I found this tutorial and watched it through several times to see what she was doing, and I learned a lot about how to make smoke. I gave her exact tutorial several goes. Making balls and tracking them up time after time, then joining them together to try to create a fluid line. Unfortunately for me though photoshop doesnt allow you to move from the end of the timeline back to the start so that I could work the same way she does in the tutorial.

During this time I was getting pretty annoyed at being told that I should just make the smoke in after effects because I could make it look like I'd like but having it look the way I wanted not only felt easy making it by hand but I didn't really want to give up an opportunity to learn a new skill either. Not to mention that I knew I was going to be happier with the end result if I animated it by hand.

I also had a look at the fantastic Etherington brothers series how to think when you draw. They have a mini tutorial on basically everything so of course they have one on smoke. In fact they had 2:

Which helped me learn some more smoke physics and understand how it flows and moves and where it gathers. Which I found really helpful when I came to the end animation.

So in the end what I decided to do was use a combination of the things I'd learned about animating smoke such as it being a lot more flexible than water because it has less strict physics than water and because of that it can be a lot more stylised in animation. That gave me the confidence to just free hand give it a go.

So what I did was I started off with a series of spheres that moved up and got larger and then smaller again as they got higher up. Then I animated the distance between the key frames. Then once this was defined I drew a line around the shapes on each frame to create a moving line I used as the bases for the smoke. I then started at the bottom and added thickness to represent the pooling of the smoke in one area before then being pushed upward when enough pressure had built. I added variation to the smoke with one off poofs of smoke or trails that split off from the rest. I continued the process adding in beneath the previous waft of smoke each time and fixing up the rough joints till I had a seamless loop.

In the end I'm pleased with the smoke and it's one of my favourite pieces of animation in the whole film. I think it was interesting to learn a lot of physics theory to learn how that would work before I started. Really felt like learning something.

EDIT

Once the roughs were complete I pulled each file into after effects to begin to edit. I added the camera to the scenes that needed them and masks to the scenes that needed those.

I also used after effects to animate the stars, for which I used a custom sprite PNG in trapcode particular to get a handdrawn feel to a generated effect. Admittedly the stars were very difficult and I think they're one of the things I'll look at further for the film house. I did notice a little error on the timeline with the stars too. After effects is also responsible for the animation of the phases of the moon between the sections of animation. They are two track mattes moving past each other to create a continuous turning which I then cut up and time remapped in after effects. It was a PROCESS.

Then finally into premiere pro to cut together a big edit. Working with the dynamic link through all three softwares didn't start out easy but turned out to be a blessing. It allowed me to work losslessly from one side of the production pipeline to the other and see instantly any changes made to earlier points in the final edit. It meant that I could cut together a final version of the film to work towards with about a month to go till hand in. Then I could go back into after effects and replace the rough files with the coloured versions and I didnt need to worry about the edit changing. That was very helpful when it came to sound design and composition because it meant I could timelock a version for them with complete confidence that there will be no changes.

Another thing dynamic link allowed for was the ability to correct large multiple shot mistakes with ease such as, realising your character should probably be walking from left to right to signal progress and not right to left which would lead you to believe they were going backwards. Which yes I did, I flipped the entire of scene 3 so and most of scene 6 too. Thanks Mike for spotting that one. Appreciate it!

Here's the edit from after all the roughs were completed:

After rough animation, I would have liked to do a less rough pass or two before clean up but time wasn't on my side so I chose not to and just jump into clean up, which for someone who likes lineless animation is the same step as colour. Which meant that the film really did all come together at once. I took the time to smooth over some rough edges when I was colouring the character in. I adjusted the bad angles and things as well. I made a lot of mistakes at this stage, I wont lie and there's some more to tidy up before the film is Filmhouse ready but I've only spotted 3 since I made the version of the film that I'm handing in (missing layer of stars at one point, scene 6 chapter heading is very far to the right and the final shot of scene 5 is grainy). Which I promise you is good. I've rendered out something like 4 this week and I've noticed errors in all of them. Eyes over hair when they shouldn't be, missing turtlekneck, patchy colour. so many fill bucket tool mistakes...

So really I couldn't be more pleased with it. At this time at least. I know that'll change and rightly so! But right now I am very happy with the level of draftsmanship, craftsmanship and skill I've displayed in the animation. I'm happy that I enjoyed the process and the number of revisions it took to get it here were totally worth it.