Documentary Weekly - Final Submission

Here is the final animated documentary trailer, 'For Freedom':

Updates to this version:

• Adding and animating the ships
• Adding and animating the last background
• Altering the style of the subtitles to be more consistent
• Adding some subtle movement to the brown cow in the Village Long Shot scene

The final background took a lot longer to finish than I thought because of all the tents and people I had to draw for the refugee camp. The boats were comparatively easier to pull off.

Some reference pictures for the boats

Completed boats for the River Long Shot

Some reference pictures for the refugee camps

Last background with character

The only thing I'm not entirely happy with in the animation is the crowd in the Village Close Up scene which is inconsistent with the realistic characters used in the rest of the animation but on a whole, I really like how this turned out and I really had to exploit some new techniques I'd never used before in After Effects.

Documentary Week 10 - Semifinal Submission

I spent this week trying my best to finalise the compositing and post production for Petra and El to submit the best possible version.

I replaced the end wobble with a slight pan out but I kept a very mild wobble on the fact cards because I liked the subtle movement effect.

El sent over her final scene which was the village crowd, however it looked far too cartoony and out of proportion for the realistic style we were going for and the discrepancy was really noticeable. I told her this and she offered to redo the crowd. The remake was better than the original but still a bit too cartoony but unfortunately there wasn't time to improve on this anymore before the final submission so I updated the new version into the animation as it was.

Luke our musician sent us the track and I was absolutely blown away by how good it sounds. I also asked Dotty over email if I should be aiming to make a trailer type of end credit screen and she responded saying it was a good idea as it would stay in keeping with the style of the animation, so I googled out some trailer credits for reference and put one together in Photoshop.

I also finished off the press pack including a poster (which unfortunately I had to redo when my laptop crashed and corrupted the original file):

With everyone's parts together, this is how the version of the animation that Petra and El submitted looked like:

What worked well:

• The music
• The 3D layer transitions and camera movement in general
• The general style of the animation with illustrations drawing themselves up
• The subtle motion in Petra's Sheikh Mujib scene and El's boat scene
• The end credit screen

What could be improved:

• Finishing off the river scene with the boat
• Finishing off the last scene
• The proportions of the crowd
• Adding some subtle movement to one of the cows in the village long shot

I was overall really happy with how this semifinal version looked. Now my priority will be to finish off those two scenes before my deadline.

Documentary Week 9 - Final Critique

This week I made another background and made the decision to leave the last background for now and finalise the backgrounds I already had to start creating animated assets out of them in After Effects, as we didn't have any actual animation to show for the final crit and I knew I'd need time to employ the splatter/stain effect I had learned to recreate from a YouTube tutorial.

The finished backgrounds with all the improvements in place:

I have greatly underestimated backgrounds in general. It probably took just as long animating all the layers (which I created separately as I went along) as it did to draw them. I considered at one point handing over some of the background animations to my team but it felt inappropriate as I knew my layers well and it would probably delay things to ask them to take over.

Every asset was animated to look as naturally drawn as possible, with a mix of a stroke mask effect and a stain/splatter effect.

One of the masks on one of my layers looked like this
(Halli walked in on me making this and wondered what I was doing)

The result of that masking made it look like lines on the boat were being drawn out

I didn't finish animating all the backgrounds but what I did finish I took and compiled everything into a rough animation (minus the transitions and with a placeholder track), including the scenes I got from El and Petra.

This was the progress shown at the final crit:

Feedback from the final crit:

• Need to try and add some more motion in places, it’s too still in parts. Can use puppet too to fix this
• End title should be still at the end. People don’t like the wobble.
• Might need to add white noise to make parts without a voice over less quiet
• Subtitles should be in a regular font that’s easy to read
• Need to work on timings and transitions
• Backgrounds and background animations looking good

I had already intended to put transitions in (I didn't have time to add them at the time), however I was a little surprised people didn't like the wobble because I was actually a fan. Regarding the silence issue, I'll address it if it's still a problem with the actual soundtrack in place when our musician sends it over, which he told me would be soon.

Documentary Week 8 - More Backgrounds and Fonts

This week I made more partially completed backgrounds for my teams to use.

I learned that ropes were more difficult to pull off than I gave it credit for and ended up using a few reference pictures to get the right look for the boat background:

It ended up looking something like this with the guides:

Everyone I asked about the green bananas (although a common sight on Bangladeshi boats) didn't necessarily recognise them as bananas at all, something I'll need to fix with a bit of artistic licensing.

The other partially completed background was for the sneaking out scene. I used a mud house as the main reference:

This is how it turned out:

I'm a fan of the goat and the little pots. And now, everyone now has a background to work with for their scenes.

I also searched out and tested some fonts and everyone was of the agreement that the 6th option was the most readable. We now have the font for our fact cards.

What I learned:

• Artistic licensing is good
• Ropes are hard

What went well:

• Composition of everything in the boat scene
• Ropes in the boat scene
• The addition of the goat and the pots in mud house scene
• Picking the third party 'Daniel' font for the fact cards

What could be improved:

• Making the bananas yellow and refining them so they're more recognisable
• Adding a background wall to the boat scene to make it clear that the scene is taking place in a boat
• Adding more texture to the roof of the mud house.

Documentary Week 7 - Starting the backgrounds

I have been having a hard time starting these backgrounds and I've been scrapping and restarting them a lot. My main focus is to finish the backgrounds my team needs first in case I have to drop the project and run for personal reasons, but after a few tries at the village close up background I ended up starting with the simpler river background to get a feel of the style I'm trying to achieve.

The visual for this background is based on a "huge sailing boat" that was mentioned in another part of the interview (that we opted not to use the audio for but just the visual to mix it up). I ended up asking Arin (the daughter of the interviewee) about it and she sent me a picture of what it would've looked like (as they're not common anymore and I'd never seen one in person) so I knew what to look for. My reference pictures consisted of both paintings and actual pictures:

The river background with the boat guide looks like so:

Now that I had a style down I started on the village close up background. These were the references:

And this is how it looks with a rough guide of the villager crowd:

I ended up redrawing the hut about three times and I was not as happy with how it generally turned out so asked my team if they had any suggestions. In the meantime I've uploaded this to the drive for El to use as a guideline for her scene and I'll improve on it later when everyone has their rough backgrounds.

What I learned:

• How to simulate a watercolour painting in Photoshop by using a mixture of watercolour and smudge brushes
• The usefulness of using both watercolour and real life references to help with the backgrounds

What worked well:

• The general washy style of the river background
• Simplicity of river background
• The trees, hut and hay of the village close up background
• The general blending of the colours in both backgrounds

What could be improved:

• More trees in the village close up to add more interest
• Possibly extra grass/ground details in the village close up background

Possible change in leader dynamics

Due to some issues I'm having at home, I've assigned Damo and Petra, from the competition and documentary teams respectively, as my second in commands in my groups. They have kindly agreed to step up and help out if needed.

Documentary Week 6 - Animating the Flag

I tried to test out the paint splatter method I found on an attempted background but I scrapped the background on account of not liking how it looked. I did manage to make a few assets that were a mix and match of third party and Photoshop brushes and try out the effect on an ending title card for the animation using the Bangladeshi flag.

The current Bangladeshi flag - the green represents the field and the red represents the sun as well as the blood of the people who died for its independence, which seems appropriate for the documentary

An image I found some time back that I used as inspiration for the animation test

The first flag of Bangladesh had a yellow silhouette of the country and I thought I'd use these colours for the paint smear that would reveal the title

The end title card test looks like this:

The title might change and I think I'll search for a more suitable font, but I generally like how the effect looks.

In the meantime, El finished the storyboards and animatic and we split all the scenes between us. As El and Petra were interested in doing some of the 'fact cards', I made a fresh set of white animated assets in a separate After Effects file that they can use to keep the animation consistent and made a reference sheet on how to edit the assets when they're placing them in the animation.

My cheat sheet for the team to reference when making the fact card scenes

We are now ready to start production and I'll be doing the backgrounds at the same time.

Documentary Week 5 - Testing the Animation Technique

We decided near the start of the project to go with a sort of illustrative painting that paints itself up kind of style of the animation, but I had been doing the tests on Photoshop by making a new layer every time I make a stroke and then creating a key frame animation. Petra tried this and was concerned about the fact that it meant there would be over a hundred layers in a file and not much leniency for alteration. We sat down and googled if there was an easier way to achieve this and found an After Effects tutorial that could simulate it without needing to make so many layers.

This is a test using the After Effects method we found

I later found an even more impressive After Effects tutorial that would allow a paint stain/splatter effect but lacking the Photoshop brushes I needed to create the assets, I started experimenting with some third party brushes. Dotty blew my mind by sharing some of her watercolour brushes with me that can actually be found on the Adobe website so I spent the rest of the day trying out every brush and noting down the favourites.

I was also concerned if we would be marked down for doing what essentially felt like limited animation but Dotty assured us it would be fine if it fits the style of the documentary, which it does.

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

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.

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.