20 May 2010

How to Make an Animated Film (Flash film, 2010)

(Flash, 2010)


This is my flash film, made at VFS during a year in the Classical animation program.
The whole thing developed in less than a month.

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A little about the project:

The idea took a while to settle for a couple reasons... but it was so long, that I ended up leaving too little time for it's execution in the end. So, the character was built in 5 days, and animated in 2.

Sound design
I tried recording the voices by myself but the files had too much noise on them. DIP instructor Jim Inkster helped me record everything again, in a noise isolated room. He also helped me with the final editing of the audio. I wanted elevator music for it.
I used my voice for it, because I was running out of time, and because I thought it was the best thing to do since, from the beggining, it was my inner dialogue what was going on.

Story
I was gonna make a film about cute tiny bugs from a ficticious planet habitated by cute child-like creatures called "Gunis". The story had no ending... nor story... It was gonna be like a little documentary. And... nothing really interesting nor fun happened at all. Thinking about a climax for that story, I scribbled a storyboard with this idea on a couple pages in my sketchpad.
For "How to make an animated film", it is actually me having an inner dialogue and scolding myself, what brought to those papers the storyboard. I showed it to some classmates, and they found it amusing, so I showed it to our flash instructor, Edwin Poon. He told me to do this idea instead.
The initial storyboard is longer and the story changed a little for it's final version. A day before the deadline, I realized I wasn't gonna finish everything on time, so I re-built the structure of the story. The original one had a single and longer dialogue. This one is divided in 5 different blocks, and each block contains a fragment of the original dialogue. And although the story was altered, the main idea remained, but the changes made the message stronger.

Art Direction

I was gonna use different colors for the clothes, eyes, and hair, of the character, but using different hues of the same color was the less distracting thing to do. I tried using different blues, yellows, browns and other colors. I liked it best in pink.
I also wanted to use soft colors for the environment, and make it a room or office or park... but since it was inner dialogue, I thought a plain texture worked out the best. Also, no other color than a dark one was good to make the character pop out in screen as I wanted. If I was gonna use soft colors for the background, I would have needed to use darker ones for the character. And I wanted her to look girly, cute, adorable, funny and delicate. Darker colors would have done any of those words become an opposite.
To make everything blend in properly, I used a soft-yellow highly-transparent screen over the whole film.

15 May 2010

Cups (Classical Animation, 2010)



I did this video as my final project during a year at VFS in the Classical Animation program.
The whole project was done in 5 months from the planification until it's very end.

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A little about the film

The sound
Thanks to Moises Torres (Sound Designer), the sound ended up as expected. I asked for his help since the beggining of the project, and he helped me out picking up songs, mixing them all to fit the animation, and to record and fit the voices as well.

The voices
Me and my friend Jenn Jackson (Animator) recorded our voices for the characters.
I'm the girl's and she's the boy's. We used a voice alteration device.

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How one does an animation:

It all begins when some braincells pass electric impulses to each other,
Lots of ideas start coming out and the animator puts them into lots of papers,
written or drawn, then rewritten and redrawn, time and time again, until once,
the animator starts to love one of his ideas very very very much...
and, adding a lot of heart, paper, sweat, tears, blood, efforts, flowers, colors, stars,
and as much time as the animator could possibly afford to give to the project...
An animation is born.
And dear reader, I hope you enjoy this one I bring to you :)