Visual Narrative – Living Voices
For this project I chose to animate a clip of the character Dennis Reynolds from the show ‘It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’
My Sound Clip:
I edited this scene from “Making Dennis Reynolds A Murderer” (season 12, episode 5) to cut out the silent parts and focus only on the character’s answers. Since it’s 20 seconds long, the tutors and I decided that I would animate 10-15 seconds and then have the rest cut away to title cards, objects, etc. This works out really well since you need the full clip for context and building emotion.
Transcript:
Initial Storyboards
I’ve accidentally repeated some dialogue and scenes in these sketches since I was just putting down ideas rapidly, but the overall message and flow still works.
I’m not sure how experimental I want to go with this animation, but I know I don’t want it to be 100% straightforward either. The main thing I want to get across is a growing sense of unease in the character, making them get twitchy and tense as the clip goes on. This gives me a lot of room to have fun with the expressions.
Moodboard (version 1):
Above is my initial moodboard. I wanted to create a hazy aesthetic with a focus on eyes and expression, with little things here and there in the background that are unsettling but don’t draw the viewer’s eye. However, this moodboard is a bit too edgy/intense, especially since the clip is meant to be funny in a scary sort of way.
I also love the colours from ‘Perfect Blue’ and the mood it creates. However, I’m struggling to choose a colour palette so will need to do some experiments. Initially, I was going to go for black lines with a white background but that feels to honest and open, whereas I want to create an enclosed, intimate feeling with the viewer.
I quite like these colours so will need to do some experiments with them.
Screenshots from a lesson:
Story vs plot:
Types of Story:
Types of Conflict:
Basic Narrative Structure:
Jess’ main advice for this project is to “take your audience on a journey”.
Artists to reference:
Moodboard (version 2 – final):
I created this second moodboard using the images of artist’s work I wanted to reference as I didn’t feel the previous one reflected the atmosphere I wanted, appearing too edgy while I wanted something softer looking but still with a strong atmosphere and unsettling vibe. I’ve chosen all character-based images since this is a character based task, and the camera will almost entirely be on them.
I’d love to go for a painterly feel shown in Winterfoxo’s art, but I also adore the flat colours in Choodraws’ art. I’ll have to do some experiments to see what looks good.
Character designs:
I know I want to include a design with big eyes but not so big they’re cartoonish or immature. The clip I’ve chosen is meant to be funny in a scary sort of way so it’s a hard mix to humour and fear to achieve, so I know this design process is going to take me a long time.
I tried breaking up the facial ladder in the image above but I really didn’t like how this looked since it made the character look alien, although definitely more animated. I know I can design characters well while not using ladders so I’d prefer to stick with a general facial ladder for this particular film.
More face proportion experiments above.
Here I also try breaking up the facial ladder again but it made the design look like a child, which isn’t what I’m going for.
In the sketches above I had landed on the beginning of a design I liked. The left sketch gives me rich, snooty vibes while the right one gives me more smart and smug energy. I like both of these a lot but the design still needed more refining.
I had a lot of trouble with figuring out how the hair would look, spending ages drawing guide lines and figuring out different shapes. The below image shows a silhouette I really liked, although I still make some changes.
The eyes are really important for this design, and an opportunity to show a lot of the scariness of the character, especially since the character may look fairly normal and calm on the surface. It’s also where you can show a character being slightly ‘off’ even at the beginning of the clip where the voice actor has not yet become tense and upset.
Above I try different eye faces on the face designs.
Above I try some body designs. Originally I was going for a broad shouldered design but then I thought what if the character is pretending to be big and broad? He could use a coat to enhance his body shape. I really really love this and think it adds so much story to the character; to me, this shows an insecure, controlling sort of guy whose jealous and angry but wants to appear not to be- the kind of guy who might snap crow’s necks for fun (like the audio clip). One big issue with this is showing that the coat has fake shoulders. Do I animate him taking his jacket off? Does it fall off? Is it hanging on his chair behind him? It’s a lot of work to animate someone taking off a jacket so I’m really not sure how I’d do this. The only thing I can think of right now is having him walk in and take it off as he sits down, but this is a 10-15 second animation and that will be at least 5 seconds. Not to mention the focus is meant to be on lip sync only. I’d absolutely hate to cut this out so I need to do some brainstorming on how to do this. Maybe at the very end (“Who likes crows?”) the character can throw his jacket to the floor?
Here I tried to make a turnaround but it felt stiff and difficult. However, I did some stretches and loosened up to experiment with body types to get the image on the left, which evolved quickly to the image on the right. I am so so happy with this! This is exactly how I want the character to look, and I love the big coat silhouette and stick-like thin limbs underneath.
Storyboard 1:
I like the beginning of these storyboards, they’re visually interesting and not overly choppy or disorienting. However, the ending is weak and lackluster. I really struggled with putting in a scene where I can show the full character silhouette, since I know when you’re doing lip sync you don’t want the head to move around too much and the only way I could think of including a full shot logically would be for the character to walk around. I’ll need to get feedback and some other ideas to see what I should do.
Character turnaround:
Work in progress turnaround:
Lesson notes:
Cut storyboards on motion – for example if a character is turning their head, have a cut halfway through so the cut is motivated by an action. Otherwise it can feel flat and redundant.
Greyscale turnaround:
I also created a version with line art for the arms.
Final character design:
I coloured in the character then put a blue overlay on top of it to make all the colours colder, since I didn’t think warm colours fit with his personality. I also decided to keep the low contrast everywhere except for on the face to draw the viewer’s attention to it, and chose a red rather than blue or green jumper so the colour relativity would make the green/blue backgrounds look more intense when shown next to the reds.
Backgrounds:
When I was colouring I found that the light grey leaves were far too light and so I had to darker them significantly to fit the near monotone aesthetic I wanted to create.
I wasn’t happy at all with this shot, although I liked the colours and values. It felt very flat and inorganic as well as confusing- what place is this? I have no idea. Therefore I changed this completely.
Final outside background:
For the outside background I changed my concept significantly, but while keeping the same general atmosphere. I kept in mind that the character would be filling most of the frame and that his coat would direct the viewer’s eye upwards, so added some simple foreground bushes to help with that but not make the scene overcrowded.
Final inside background:
I had a general idea of what I wanted to make, and drew a simple perspective chart to help with that. In addition, I put sketches of a light and guns to direct the viewer’s eyes towards the character. I also put a transparent copy of him in my drawing software to make sure I knew where he would be and how big he would appear.
I wrote notes on how I adapted my drawings as I went on.
Above is the finished version of the interior background. I wanted to keep it low key with a series of dark values, focussing on cold colours but with some gold to compliment it and add visual interest. Overall, I am very happy with how this turned out. I think it fits the graphical style of my character design, and the colours and values compliment it nicely.
I used this free to use texture from Unsplash.com by the Britsh Library to add some visual interest to the wall paneling. After importing it, I experimented with different layers and opacity modes to fit the low key aesthetic I wanted to create.
Final Film
Final Reflection
This project was a real challenge for me. Not only is learning a new software difficult and overwhelming, but learning an entirely new technique- lip sync- is a huge task. These two were definitely the hardest part of this project, but I’m incredibly proud that I managed to push through the difficulties to get a final product of this standard. However, I felt quite overworked and stressed for the majority of Living Voices, which made me slip into my perfectionist tendencies. I should have realised I needed to keep my character and background designs as simple as possible, and approached the task with a more learning-through-failure mindset to allow myself to experiment and push myself rather. If I were to do this again, I’d have to force myself to do this rather than be overly ambitious so I can really focus on learning ToonBoom and lip sync. I will do my best to not be a perfectionist in future projects. Despite this, I enjoyed this project so much and am really excited to do lip sync in future. It seemed like an impossible skill to achieve and I’m incredibly happy to have learnt the basics of it.
One thing I’m really happy with is the character design. I absolutely should have gone for a less complicated one that was more organic and easier to move in a fluid, dynamic way. However, I love this design so much. You can immediately see how much of a bastard this man is, and how punch-able he would be even without hearing the audio. I’ve had several people tell me he looks like an evil little gay rat man, which was the goal. Pairing this design with a clip of Dennis Reynolds from ‘It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’ (TV) was a great decision, and I think the two synergise really well. I’m also very happy with his sharp and angular mouth shapes, as they fit his design nicely. I would love to come back to this character in the future and improve his design. If I were to design a character for this project again, I would have to spend a long time practicing dynamic drawings and animation to use his silhouette to create something more impactful and exciting for the viewer.
One thing that didn’t go so well are the background designs. I think my methodical process went well, and works for me! But backgrounds have never been my strongest skill and these are pretty flat, although they’re definitely an improvement from my initial thumbnail sketches. They also took me an extremely long time, for not the best payoff. I would have been better off doing a flat colour to save time and spend longer on other aspects like character acting, considering this project was only five weeks. On the other hand, I think the composition for the interior background works well. I think it’s a pretty funny inside joke to have the guns pointed at the character’s head, and they do lead the viewer’s eye to the left of the screen where he’s positioned so it was fun for me (which if of course important to avoid burnout) and useful for the project. Aesthetically though, I wanted to create a really moody low key image, and I need to do a great deal more practice to achieve the skill level I need for this. Going forward, I’ll need to study backgrounds for future projects but will keep the basic composition skills I have in mind.
If I were to do this project in it’s entirety again, I would create a much more experimental and illustrative piece, as that’s the aesthetic I prefer even though I really haven’t done any university work in this style. This would allow me to relax and use more acting and dynamic poses in my work, which this piece could have definitely benefited from. Considering the short amount of time we had to complete this project, I would have also done much simpler backgrounds to allow me more time to do my key poses and inbetweens, as well as plan for less head turns as these are quite difficult to animate without it being distracting for the viewer. I would have also liked to do more animations with the character’s arms and hands, although this could have added even more challenge to an already challenging project.