I wanted to do a little more exploration with clay and animated a short scenario involving a clay monster and my own hand interacting with it.
As my project is moving more towards "materials and movement" I wanted to use a contrast in materials and see how the movement of those materials are different.
In this animation test I animated the clay creature at 15fps (frames per second) and my own hand at 30fps. I wanted to emphasise the difference between the two animated subjects, utilising a lower frame rate to bring out the animated charm of stop-motion in the character, keeping my hand feeling "more real".
A challenge of the pixilation technique (stop motion with live subjects) I found was animating my hand required me to keep my hand motionless in-between frames. This is was something I didn't foresee as I animated my right hand, so was left to do all the clay manipulation with my left hand.
While I didn't get stronger animations from the clay character because of this, I do notice the difference in the quality of motion between the two subject materials. The clay still gives the imperfect and very unique movement where the maker's mark can be noticed.
I met with Simone today for the final time. Today's meeting was short but helpful. I mostly spent the time explaining and showing my new story idea. Although I felt I was a little bit behind due to the animatic and dissertation, because I had a stronger story idea I felt more confident moving on from here.
Feedback was good: the new idea was simpler but stronger than the previous. The story is more concise due to leaving out things like television scenes and looking out windows. The character moves more from the start which is much more interesting to watch. This story was also much easier to tie into the dissertation as I was directly focusing on materials and movement and using these as the things to drive the story.
I also discussed my plans for the upcoming weeks. Since there is a progress presentation in two weeks, I have set myself the goals of completing the storyboard and expanding upon potential ending ideas. I will also dedicate more time to the dissertation and outline the structure more clearly so that it can be understood by others.
For the presentation I will show the storyboard for this idea and it would be nice if there were an animatic to go along with it. I want to ensure my story does come across strong and using the feedback from that presentation will help me further shape the story to its final draft. By that point I may already have started animating on that final animation. Starting from now I hope to expand on testing the range of actions and expressions the armature character is capable of so I know what to expect when beginning the final animating.
After creating the animatic and evaluating feedback from the last supervisor meeting I decided to brainstorm ways to improve upon my story. I realised the television scenes during the beginning aren't an interesting way of getting information across and it could be misinterpreted. That, and it was also boring and technically would get in the way of quality animation later on.
I started drafting up an story alteration where it begins with the character building themselves straight away. The window was still there but this time it showed the feet of people walking by. Since the character never saw the whole picture, his interpretation of the world was skewed. He would build himself with his own idea in mind. I never worked out how I'd end this animation.
During this second idea, I came up with an idea whereby the character starts off with jerky, more rigid movement as it moves for the first time. Like a machine starting up or a character that hadn't moved in some time (like Zog from Astro Boy or the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz). I quickly scrapped the second idea and moved into a third idea where this concept was expanded upon.
Again using the exposed armature character and still keeping the focus on the character building themselves. I changed the concept to the character coming to life not long after being built by the animator. The animator (who you only see their hands) leaves the room and the armature character comes to life, learns to move and comes across clay.
As time goes on, the motion becomes more fluid, while simultaneously he builds his body up using the clay.
The character would complete himself, before turning over a chair (a prop already on the set) admiring his new self. The animator would re-enter the room and find the character built up and sitting in the set. The little clay character would then give a small wave.
As shown in a previous blog post I've expanded upon the storyboard to create an animatic for this animation idea.
I made the animatic in Adobe Flash for ease. The animatic shows the same panels as the storyboard but with additional motion to help the viewer understand the concept easier.
I have identified some potential problems with the animatic. Without text for context, the TV scenes don't make as much sense. I think I spend too much time on the setup where the character has limited motion. The story would benefit from cutting down some shots from the start and focusing more on the interesting scenes such as the character building themselves.
My next step is to expand upon the ending and correct some pacing issues. I also want to get feedback on this from another lecturer or peers. I'll look into making alterations and creating a second draft for this animatic. With my armature now complete, I'll also want to test out the range of emotions and actions it can achieve.
This week Global Game Jam 2016 was held, an event where you team together and make a game over 48 hours. I participated in 2015 and made this game. It was a great experience last year and this year continued the trend.
Our team was pre-formed, usually discouraged but one of our team members flew all the way from London to take part. I ended up working with two people I hadn't worked with before, and two that I had. During the week running up to the jam, I had a slightly mad idea that we could attempt a game made from clay assets. I wanted to make the most of the Game Jam by both trying something out completely new (to me) as well as relating it to my Honours project this year.
Luckily, the team liked the idea and come Friday evening we had cracked out the clay (which had only arrived in the mail the day before) and began making characters and props to animate. My history with clay isn't big. I briefly worked with clay 5 years ago teaching primary school pupils the basics of stop-motion animation. While I helped them with the clay modelling here and there, the animation was entirely their work.
Our game ended up being an alien mating ritual rhythm based game, adapted from the "ritual" theme. It was "Space Channel Five" (gameplay inspiration) meets "Rick and Morty" (art inspiration). Space Mates can be downloaded and played via the Global Game Jam website.
I ended up designing and making 3/4 of the characters and animated them all, with a grand total of 35 animated moves to be used for the rhythm based button presses. I also created the title card and additional in-game UI graphics. While only about half of the animations made it in to the submitted game, I was still able to show off all of the movesets and I had something great to talk about in my honours project so none of these for nothing.
These are the characters and move-sets I animated:
Animating with modelling clay was a challenge as it was something I hadn't tried before. It felt just as natural as stop-motion with any other material but I could clearly tell why clay is favoured. The fluidity and ease with which you can bend or shape a character leads to so many more possibilities. The anamorphic properties of the clay led to new ways of thinking to approach how a character moved. I was able to mould something with ease without worrying about how it would tween in 3D or how I would need to trick a movement into working with Lego animations.
On the more technical side of things. I was able to use my existing knowledge in stop-motion animation and make appropriate estimates on how we would animate and import our assets. While my processes could have easily been automated, due to time constraints I had no choice but to manually cut the model from each frame. I used a blue-screen to assist in using Photoshop's threshold tool to remove the background leaving only the model. I manually removed anything that shouldn't have been left behind.
The reaction to our game was fantastic. During the weekend I was receiving great enthusiasm from sharing our development process photos on Twitter. When it came to displaying and playing the game, we received a lot of compliments on our game's art style and the animated characters. While I don't consider what we did to be anything above average but it was clear people have a soft spot for anything clay or stop-motion animated.
The use of clay again showed me that stop-motion is very rich in style and simply choosing to use the animation medium gives you so much free texture, physicality and style which would take a lot more skill and time in other mediums.
If you are interested in playing the game my team created, you can do so via the Global Game Jam website, or alternatively see the game's trailer:
