Term 2: Week 5 – The End of the Exercises

Week 5 for the most part has been quiet on my part, as we wrap up on the lessons teaching the principles of animation.

During this time, we had reading week, which was spent cleaning up the lip syncs I posted on my previous post. I also expanded on Jerland’s character design, which I’m now making notes for using the 7 questions of Stanislavski to outline the choices I made in regards to reflecting her personality. Having adapted the source material 2+ years ago, I reread the story and considered how I would approach her attitudes and background more, elements I didn’t consider back then. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the overhauled design.

With that out the way, I’ve been getting on with some personal animations to once again continue getting used to other character designs that aren’t designed with my favourite approach of minimalism in mind. This week, I decided to do a half action-half lip sync from Demon Slayer, using the main character of Tanjiro. The clip in use is actually an inner monologue, so I wanted to recontextualise it as one of the many fights in this season, using a series of loops and expressive close-up to carry the voice actor’s performance.

There were a few key things I wanted to tackle with this animation. Firstly, mouth and facial movements. In my usual approach to lip sync, I usually outline several body positions on one layer and then loop and recycle mouth movements on a layer above. Instead, I drew several unique frames where the jawline lead the head movement, giving a more expressive bounce to emphasise the second of dialogue.

Secondly, FX work. I’ve tried a few times over this course to tackles this since Christina and Steve have brought it up once or twice, and Demon Slayer is a series filled to the brim with unique FX-style work. In this case, I chose to focus on the unique move called “Hinokami Kagura” (Dance of the flame god), which is animated in a very fluid and raw way. The video below by YouTuber Registry highlights the fluidity of this effect.

Of course, I’m aware that the animation studio, Ufotable, mixes hand-drawn animation with motion graphics to achieve the most fluid effects on show. There’s no denying I struggled getting to grips with how the fire moved (which led to a speed-up after the transition) but I’m glad the fire largely feels alive in the final product.

During the process of animating, we had a lecture from Sue Tong, a background artist who discussed all sorts of things from colours to composition. Amongst her tips, she mentioned considering the lighting between the foreground and background, staging as to where the audience can expect the characters should be, consider perspective and the horizon line which can suggest various dramatic effect and not to overdo backgrounds as characters complete the scene.

Compositing has beens something I’ve been interested in learning for a little while now, and I read this blog by Washi that detailed several ideas for successful compositing. They note that the ability to make the cel layers feel a part of the overall scene will result in successful compositing, with elements of lighting being able to make the characters feel as if they’re being affected by what’s around them.

In some ways, I’ve cheated because the scenes I’ve referenced (as seen in the Registry video above) already have a colour scheme somewhat set, which I largely stuck to. However, I did take some decisions as to how to composite the characters using both Premiere Pro and Clip Studio Paint.

In order to get the characters both blending in with the background at the start, a soft dark blue tint was applied which would darken their respective palettes. The same was applied to the buildings themselves, which used a variation of browns, greys, greens and reds as seen in the show, which contributes to the overall blueish grey aesthetic. But as the auras intensify and the FX work takes over, a yellowish hue was added to suggest a light source, both to the roof and the characters where the flames illuminate the scenery. This helps draw the attention directly to the characters, and helps to make it feel like they’re in the same space without physical contact – lighting, as Sue suggested. Auras were dealt with by using a soft airbrush and setting the layer to ‘soft light’, giving a nice subtle glow that separated them from the parallax background by the end. The last effect I added in Premiere Pro was a soft gaussian blur, one at 2.5 for the moving buildings, and one at 5 for the background sky and mountains to simulate depth. All-in-all, I think it worked out well.

For a personal fan animation, I’m happy with the way it turned out. 5 seconds is remarkably short, so I had a lot of trouble timing the swing and Daki’s reaction. I thought about what Steve had mentioned during the previous Lupin animation, about staging and timing in ways the audience can anticipate what might happen next. I was able to do this until Tanjiro charges into the camera, but I had a narrow window of time (1-1.5 seconds) before the animation ends, and couldn’t extend the animation due to the complexity of the set-up, so it’s a little chaotic at the end. Perhaps I should have planned both characters at the start, because Tanjiro was the only guaranteed character as shown in the roughs, and I should have eased the zoom out so the audience could take in both character reactions better. Timing is something I’m still trying to get to grips with, but I definitely feel like the quality of my animation is improving at a steady rate.

To wrap up this week, I revisited the storyboard I created for Bianca, making changes that she suggested such as centring the phone at the beginning, making the library more mysterious and improving the final framing to capture the plot twist. It’s something I’d like to get back to when I have more time, and turn it into a short film.

Next week sees the start of working for my second year, Masi, as well as lessons from Vanessa on perspective, and Robert Bradbrook on film language and storytelling.