Term 2: Weeks 6 and 7 – 2nd Year Work Experience and Key Roughs
The last two weeks of this term largely focused on a simulated work experience, helping our 2nd year peers developing their final graduate films. To be honest, when I heard we’d be getting work experience under the 2nd years, I imagined they’d be further in their projects and we might be involved with tasks like cleaning-up or composition. As it turned out, the 2nd years are still in the early stages of their projects, with most around the animatic-character design mark.
I was paired with Masi, whose work was called “The Last Gift”, a story about a child coping with the loss of his father and finding a game that connects them after his passing. I got in contact with Masi who asked me what I’d like to do. I offered to do rough key animation, and didn’t hear from him for a few days afterwards, but eventually got given an animatic and character designs to work with.
Summarising my experience with Masi, I enjoyed it. The work was a lot shorter than I imagined, only being a fraction of the allotted time, but I enjoyed what I had to work with. Masi’s been working on a short film that uses animation friendly designs, particularly round and soft. I was prepared to animate a minute of work when Masi asked how much animation I would like to do. In the end, we agreed 13 seconds of animation as Masi couldn’t outsource a minute, which I get, because its his film and having ownership over one’s own work is part of the pride of an animator.
You can see scene above, both the original animatic I worked with as well as the changes I made to it. Admittedly, even though I’ve gotten much better at reading timing charts, I still haven’t learnt how to use them to work out key animation, and as such, I’ve given Masi a bit more with in-betweens beyond rough keys. I went and corrected each frame, bringing the animation much more in line with the character design Masi gave which gave me subtle hints of Dragon Ball (it’s the eyes, those square-like outlines feel like they came straight out of that series. It’s not perfect, I definitely went off model in some instances and volume control as well as timing can definitely be improved. But Masi seemed to be happy with the work I did, saying he’ll fix it up as he sees fit when he gets round to clean-up.
That’s largely my work experience in a nutshell. When I finished my key roughs, I offered Masi to do some more work, but beyond extending the scene by a little, I didn’t get given anything else. But I did enjoy what I got given and it’s always a treat to work with other people’s designs and work from their roughs.
To keep myself occupied whilst waiting for the work experience, I recently got into an anime series called Jujutsu Kaisen, a series written by Gege Akutami and adapted by Mappa. For a series with detailed designs, it also isn’t afraid to go off model or be goofy (similar to Demon Slayer). As such, I felt compelled to try animating Tadashi Hiramatsu’s character designs, which feel a lot more realistically proportioned than my own style that I’m used to. I’d compare it a great deal to Attack on Titan’s final season designs, which ironically is produced at Mappa also.
Beyond playing with facial acting and the more detailed approach of the art, I was particularly interested in playing with compositing once again. Like the Lupin animation, once I had worked out elements of motion tweening and camera controls, I exported the cels and composited them into Premiere Pro to create a parallax around the characters. Two layers of buildings, the clouds, the streetlights and the lamp all help to simulate depth, with a blur tool being used to blur the further away from the foreground. The art style is largely based upon the first opening “Kaikai Kitan”, using a lineless, almost vector-based, approach.
Beyond this practical work, we had two guest lecturers come in. The first was returning National Film and Television School lecturer Robert Bradbrook, whose lecture focused on film language and story telling.
And that wraps up the term really. Submission is next week, so I’m just double checking all of my animations and making sure they’re ready for submission. I’ll probably post some inspirations throughout this term in a post or two later on, but that’s a wrap on Term 2.