Documentary Week 4 - Translating and Scripting

I was able to take the help from my mother and one of my friends to translate the parts of the interview I couldn't understand. It turned out there was about 25 minutes out of the 45 that was specific to the war and to freedom fighters. I met up with El and Petra and we sat down and went through the whole interview, picking out the most interesting parts and cutting it down to a minute and a half so it can be used in a trailer.

Interview first pass

After meeting up with Dotty who approved of our intention to make this an animated trailer, she advised us to compress it even further down to a minute. El and I went through the whole thing again and compressed it even further.

Interview second pass

I went home and added some random fact cards as well as a snippet of Sheikh Mujib's public speech and met up with the team later to run it by them. We also sat down and added some suggested visuals so we now have a script in video format.

Script

This has given everyone something to work with in the absence of a storyboard. The next step is getting the storyboards, but I know not to expect anything until the 502 module deadline is out of the way this week.

Documentary - Week 3 - Taking the Interview and Background Experiments

Interview

I spent a day trying to test and figure out the ways I can record an internet call. Conveniently enough, it turns out Skype now has such a function built in and the test call to my friend in Bangladesh gave me a decent quality recording. I gave her father a couple of days to think about what he wanted to say and collected any questions the rest of our team had that we were interested in knowing, and then I conducted the interview.

Being fully aware that we were doing a roughly one to two minute animation, the uncle gave me about 45 minutes worth of interview material. In Bangla. English is my first language but I know enough Bangla to get by, however not too much that I fully understand a conversation about a war, though I got the main gist of it.

I translated and transcripted what I could of the first ten minutes of the interview (tagging the parts I'd need help with) and made an excerpt of it to put in the preproduction presentation.

The next step is to translate the whole interview so I can sit down with the team and we can pick out the parts to keep for the animation. I'll be using the help of a friend to get this done before Monday.

I will also need to have a written consent form at some point to cover my bases - at the start of the interview I explained in Bangla once again what my interviewee's voice would be used for and he once again gave me consent, but for me to have this on paper I will likely need to send something via email to my friend so she can translate it for her father and send it back to me with a digital signature.

Background Tests

In preparation for the preproduction presentation, I also made some tester backgrounds to experiment with a style we wanted to go for, which is to have the backgrounds paint themselves up. I did this using the frame animation mode in Photoshop and making a new layer every time I made a new stroke. I think it looks good, but it results in needing over a hundred layers for the more complex backgrounds.

Watercolour brushes and blending

Oil brushes and blending

Crayon brush, blending, and outlines

If I'm honest I'm leaning more towards the watercolours just because it's more typical of the art that comes out of Bangladesh, but I also like this style of the picture staying in the middle and not touching the edges.

Feedback from Preproduction Presentation:

• Generally looks good so far
• It would be a shame to cut down the interview - Consider making an extended trailer instead of a self contained heavily cut down animation
• Background styles - look at Funan
• Idea of backgrounds painting themselves up is good
• Consider using coloured pencils and then scan in for use in backgrounds

Competition Weekly - Submission to D&AD

I spent a day tweaking the animation to make the whole thing fit the beat of the music. I also prepped the submission, pending Damo and Eleni's final scenes.

Eleni couldn't tweak her picking up mirror scene in time but I think I was able to make it look better with some zoom, blur and repositioning in After Effects.

Damo was able to pull off an all-nighter and keyframe his last scene so that it looked almost finished. Eleni gave me the roughs for her last scene too and I noticed that she was trying to animate a lot more than she actually needed to (animating the whole reference video instead of a section that would fit the animatic timing) and I let her know after I updated the final animation in progress.

With everyone's parts together, this was what we submitted to D&AD:

What I've learnt:

• How to add a timecode in After Effects
• How to generally improve the look of an animation in After Effects

What went well:

• Adding strings to the soundtrack
• Addition of crowds and car
• Proportions on Damo's scenes
• Face warp behind the lights

What could be improved:

• Some of the backgrounds could still be tweaked (if there is time)
• Shoulder movement and hand animation when the main character picks up the mirror
• More crowds in some of the scenes (if there is time)
• The proportions on some of Eleni's scenes are a bit off

I'm hopeful that once this streak of deadlines from other modules is over, everyone will have time to finish off their parts before the final submission.

Documentary - Week 2 - Pitch Perfect

With multiple deadlines converging around the same two week period, I haven't had a lot of time to work on the documentary project, although I did manage to put together a presentation for the pitch. We presented the pitch which was overall received well although Dotty warned us it might be too big a subject to focus on; to which I agreed that the Liberation War itself is a big subject which is why we wanted to focus specifically on the freedom fighters.

The documentary will be participatory and implementing 2D animation that looks aesthetically similar to the type of drawings and paintings that are typically seen in Bangladesh. I'm thinking a watercolour look would be nice to achieve.

The mood board slide in our pitch looking at the type of styles we might go for

We just submitted for COP this week which will be followed by a PP presentation in a few days but in between everything I'm aiming to at least get the interview sorted before the preproduction presentation on the 22nd. I asked Dotty for advice on how to record an interview if it's an internet call and after testing it out on the phone she advised either a good quality mic next to the speaker or to just use Skype and record it within the computer.

Competition - Week 9

I managed to finish off all my scenes in time so I took on the extra phone scene at the start.

Phone asset that will be animated being lit up in After Effects

Finished end reveal scene (pending Eleni's big hands that are uncovering the camera)

I also started adding crowd animations. Dotty helped me pick out the colours of the silhouettes for the crowds as my colour theory is not the best, and I learnt the best way to do it was to pick out colours from the backgrounds and work with those.

The crowd test (with an Easter Egg)

Eleni has also allowed me to help her correct her backgrounds so I've started making alterations to them, like extending the John Lewis exterior so that it looks like it's on a high street.

Eleni's original background (left) and my alterations (right)

With all the other modules going on as well as the documentary project, I'm going to shift my focus away from this project for now, until I get more completed parts from my team to update into the main animation.

What worked well:

• Limited animation on crowds
• Crowd colours
• Phone design
• Movement and character acting in the end reveal scene

What could be improved:

• Curve on background amendment seems off
• Need more finished parts
• Altering the music so that more instruments like strings are added when the optimistic part starts up again.

Documentary - Week 1 - Choices, choices!

For the documentary segment of our module, I wanted to change it up and focus my efforts on something I hadn't been solely responsible for before when it came to the animation process and I found that Petra and El were also looking to do the same. We formed a group and decided I'd be doing backgrounds (instead of the usual storyboards), Petra would be doing character designs (instead of her usual puppets), and El would be working on storyboards (instead of her regular character designs).

Because we had all been directors for previous projects, none of us were actually willing to step up as director this time on account of wanting a break, so it was decided that the director would be the one who pitched the best idea for the subject of the documentary.

This ended up being difficult to choose.

We met up a few times over the week and ended up changing the topic a few times. We considered the Potternewton brief but actually decided at first to focus on the history of Leeds Arts University; however the information was too easy to find on the uni website and the subject wasn't as interesting as we thought it would be. We then thought the Yorkshire Ripper, but that was done already before and we wanted to be original. We had the same issue when it came to haunted places in Leeds.

I woke up one day inspired by a thought and messaged a friend (and ex roommate) from medical school to ask her if there was any chance her father, who I knew was a freedom fighter from the Bangladesh Liberation War, would be up for an interview for a documentary project and she very eagerly responded that she thought that was a great idea and he would be down for it.

The final choices boiled down to avocados (and the impact of their farming on the environment) and freedom fighters. We ultimately chose freedom fighters as there was an interesting history behind it and I already had a confirmed interviewee.

I am the director once again.

Competition - Week 8

We have a musician! Jacob Maloney does a lot of pianoesque type stuff which I thought would work well with the animation and he kindly agreed to work with us. I made some more progress and put together a video that had feedback for everyone's parts as well as suggestions for the track, and he sent me a draft soundtrack which I updated to the video:

We decided to change the character acting of the bedroom scene so that he's sneaking out instead of being clumsy. This is Eleni's scene and she's aware of this. I've also been made aware of some personal issues going on with Damo which is interfering with his work and I've suggested he simplify some of his scenes further to help with the time constraints.

What worked well:

• Piano style of the music
• Use of arcs in card scene and end reveal scene

What could be improved:

• Adding a car and some crowd to the walk cycle scene
• Adding crowds wherever possible inside the store
• Add an arc to hand movement when underlining writing in card scene
• Add another finger under pen in card scene
• Use actual font for 'Happy Anniversary' in card scene