A Tale of a Fish and a Dog

Usually I illustrate most birthday gifts, but decided to put my animation skills to work and make a short animation instead. The star character of this animation is based on my dad's dog, Russel, whose favourite pastime involves much fishy business.

Happy Birthday Dad from Natasha Tonkin on Vimeo.

Mousey makes his way to the festivals

Earlier this year during the second term of my studies, I did some animation work for Humpty Dumpty Films, who were working on a 2D animated short film called The Man with The Stolen Heart.

I've now learnt the will be showing at both the GIFFONI Film Festival and at the New York International Film Festival, which is fantastic news. As with the regulations for film festivals, it cannot be shown online, however I have included a screen shot of the scene where I animated the mouse. I will be sure to update with any further news!

Keeping the motion

My time at CSM has come to an end. No longer am I in the safe confines of the college walls, but I've now embarked on my journey into the big wide world and preparing to put the skills I've learnt to the test. I've been told by many wise minds alike that it is crucial to not stop and to keeping pushing on with both personal and professional work, so following college I've tried to keep the ball rolling, with some well-deserved breathing time inbetween.

During an industry screening of the final films at college, I was approached to do some work on an upcoming BBC documentary. The animation featured in this documentary is hand drawn, so based on the work from my showreel and final film, it was the perfect opportunity for me to gain some invaluable experience in the niche area I aim to specialise in. I was asked to create and animate a character, as well as do some inbetweening for a few of the scenes.

The most enjoyable part of it was creating the beastie character, which was meant to be a medieval-type beast that could be considered creepy by current viewers. During my time at CSM, I hadn't created any really scary characters, so this was a good way for me to explore something different.

I didn't mind the inbetweening either, although I much prefer animating my own characters, I found this was a was a good way of gaining insight behind other animation techniques.

The documentary is set to screen on the BBC at the end of August. I've included the uncoloured beastie animation below. It has been animated to run in a continuous loop.

Back to the beginning

Now that my animation is at the finishing stages I thought it would be time to reflect on some of the beginning stages to see how the idea has grown.

Before I embarked on this project I set some personal goals for myself. These were:

1. Create a relevant, timely and engaging story.
2. Practice highly skilled animation techniques.
3. Experiment with interesting camera angles and transitions.
4. Utilise different textures and mediums to create something original and unique looking.

Looking back on these personal objectives, I feel like I've made good progress in all of these goals. Should time have permitted, I would have loved to have taken these objectives even further. But, given the time constraints I'm really happy with what I have achieved.

Below are some of my initial character development sketches, as well as a drawing I did of the painting, which involved not looking at the page but keeping my eyes only on the painting. It was a method of exploring the painting I learnt during one of our workshops at The National Gallery. I found that doing this helped me understand many of the fundamental aspects of this painting.

Textural Collage

Below is a collage of the various textures I used as part of the backgrounds for my animation. The textures include textile materials, watercolour washes, gouache and paper.

A taste of the real world

 

 

 

 

Detailed above are some of the photographs I used as part of some of the backgrounds for my animation, the photograph above were taken by Yeshen Venema. I used the beautiful textural quality of the photographs to help create a sense of depth.

The Rough Cut

After what seemed like a lifetime of drawing (around 6.5 weeks), I managed to finalise the drawn animation, ready for the rough cut crit, which took place on 20 May, a couple of weeks back. Luckily the feedback was all good, the only issue being the sound, which at that stage was very raw.

During the drawing process I found a lot of the shots quite challenging. This was largely due to the 3D-like pans, zooms and walkcycles that feature throughout. However, they form a big part of the concept of my animation and I wanted to set some challenges for myself, as well as create a style of animation that sets itself apart from what is seen in the wider pool of animation out there.

I used reference footage to get an idea of how a shot was going to work, however tried not to follow it too closely, trying to avoid a 'rotoscoped' effect that can happen when one relies on too much reference material.

I found the best method to come to my final cleaned up drawings was to start with keys and push on with inbetweening the whole film. I wasn't too concerned with small inconsistencies in the beggining, what was most important was the movement. Once I had a rough version of the whole film, I timed it out and inbetweened and cleaned up the drawings accordingly. I found that by doing this, it allowed me to manage my time and energy effectively, as well as produce a much more consistent set of drawings. Previous experience has taught me that it takes time to 'warm up', so by the time I had drawn my character a few hundred times over, I knew her through and through.

Hand drawn animation can be time consuming, but I very much enjoyed the tactility that it offered. Knowing the lengthiness of the traditional process, I ensured that I planned my time as effectively as possible, making myself a production schedule, detailing daily deadlines and landmarks. Although I didn't follow it religiously, it made me aware of how much time I had and kept me on my toes.

Below is a link to the rough cut of my animation. I am still tweaking the timing and the music is an extremely rough indication for the composer (Robert Ashbridge) I am working with, who is currently studying at the Royal College of Music.

Colouring in

Originally during the concept stages of my animation I had planned to paint watercolour backgrounds for my animation. I wanted to use watercolour, as not only do I really enjoy working in this medium, but I felt it would provide some additional depth in the 2D world I was creating.

I started painting the first scene, and completed a painting that was 'nice', but it felt too 'realistic' and it didn't suit the simple line style that had developed throughout the animation. I wanted to maintain her look as a boring 2 dimensional character, so decided this would be best showcased with her simple design and coloured in a flat grey. Because I needed her to be distinguished in this way, the background needed to provide a platform of to demonstrate the stark contrast between her and her environment, whilst complimenting the overall style. In addition to this, I needed the world that my character was passing through to be somewhat abstract, and so somewhat easily applied to any city, town or country.

Watercolour alone didn't achieve the rich, gritty world I was after. I remembered, back to late last year, when I had experimented with using textures in a couple of animation exercises. It had produced a great effect that was both graphic, but also offered a sense of depth that I was after.

So I spent a weekend gathering and making my own textures, using watercolour washes, gouache, textile materials, paper and photographs and merged these together to create the background environments. I've included some of these below.

Third time lucky

As mentioned in my previous post, after revising my animatic for the second time, I discovered that the train scene still didn't quite fit my character's 'outlook on life'. So I searched for a solution that would be simple but effective in capturing an 'escapist' moment.

I thought about the nature of the train journey and it seemed intrinsic to me that at the presence of any window our gaze will become somehow directed to what spans beyond. Even the gaze from a focused and busy individual is not safe from it's pull. I had found her moment of peace, thought and contemplation, a breath away from the hectic pace of the world.

With this third version of the animatic, I feel that the process of questioning and revising has helped the story to grow stronger and have more resonance. Now the blueprint is complete, construction begins!

Beginning of the end.

I have finally navigated my way through two very intense terms of learning and am now embarking on the final term to complete my Pg Diploma in Character Animation here at Central Saint Martins. During this final chapter, we are required to individually create an animation inspired by a painting found in the National Gallery's extensive collection in London. The films must be at least 1 minute duration and after a premiere screening at the National Gallery in September, they will be later showcased on the National Gallery's website.

I have both been really excited and terrified at the thought of this project, knowing that every moment of learning leading up to this point would need to be perfected, to be able to handle the challenges I am about to face.

Since starting the course, I visited the National Gallery countless times, managing to find an array of inspiring paintings - it seemed the choice was endless. Although there was one painting that I had always felt drawn to, long before I knew about this brief or course for that matter!

Frans Hal's Young Man holding a Skull (Vanitas), has been a painting I've long enjoyed. Not lest for the energised brushstrokes and animated pose of the young sitter. But, it is the engaging way that the Dutch concept of Vanitas had been interpreted by Hals, by breaking conventions of the time, which really blew me away. I aim to take his interpretation of the 'transience of life' further and reflect it in a modern day context.

The character of my story is a professional business woman in her 20's, steadily climbing the business ladder, with little time to spare. In the way that Hals uses a cyclical motion to convey a passing of time, I also wanted to use same motion in my animation, to depict a narrow, repetitiveness, in an attempt prompt people to think about how they are passing their own time and demonstrate how it can pass before one's eyes without noticing.

After developing the character through drawings and delving into her mindset through the 'Seven Questions of Character', I began drawing thumbnail sketches and developing scenes. After discussing my ides with my tutors and fellow classmates, paired with a good portion of self evaluation, I edited my rough thumbnails together with makeshift sounds to create a final working animatic. Unfortunately I didn't have time for colour treatment or cleaning up the drawings, but in the end the most important thing was that the story came across clearly.

Below is the initial animatic that was presented last Friday, where I received some really valuable feedback on how the story was translating to a wider audience. This feedback lead me to rethink and revise the train scene for the animatic, as it seemed that it altered her character, from being someone who was busy and remotely aware that she is 'missing out on life around her', to being an annoying person on the train.

So I went back to the drawing board and decided to have her reading a book instead, to represent her escaping into a moment of peace, only to be jerked out again by her phone. However, after replacing a few of the rough thumnails and putting them into a revised animatic (below), upon further discussion and reflection, I realised that this didn't quite gel with her character - being a busy business woman choosing to read a novel on the train, when she could be spending time on her work. I am in the midst of revising this scene, with the intention to repost the revised and very final animatic in the coming days.

The task at hand

At the end of the first term we were briefed on a 30 second task project, where we were asked to develop a character, and animate this character performing a difficult task. During the term break we were asked to produce character sketches, a storyboard and following this, an animatic. Once completed, we then moved onto animating the final film. The most important thing was to make sure that the animatic was to the point where it could be 'set in stone'. Because of the amount of work it takes to animate, you want to be 110% of what you are drawing, and avoid wasting time in drawing any unwanted material.

I based my character on the Northern Quoll, an endangered mammal, native to the Northern Territory in Australia. I wanted to challenge myself with engendering an animal character with human characteristics. However, I'm also a big animal lover and wanted to use this as an opportunity in some way help these little relatively unknown endangered animals by broadening awareness, however large or small.

Like the majority of my animation, I decided to animate this traditionally, the reason being that I feel that it is the most effective means of learning how to animate movement correctly and these skills can then be transferred onto other mediums. I also prefer the aesthetic of traditional animation compared to that produced by programs such as Flash. Interesting effects can be achieved by Flash, but in my opinion it takes time to find your unique style in this program, and during this course time is very limited, so I am sticking to my 'traditional' guns.

After drawing my entire animation, I felt my animation skills jump ahead in leaps and bounds. It gave me an opportunity to practice everything that I had learnt to date and remember to include little intricacies, that I have been taught along the way.

Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to add sound or colour the animation, but this is something that I plan to do in July, when I finish the course. It'll give me an opportunity to also correct any areas that I later identify for improvement, with hopefully even more attuned eyes.

Below is my animatic and final film. Enjoy!

Quoll from Natasha Tonkin on Vimeo.

Presenting 1927

As part of our assessment, we were each required to host a 10 minute presentation about an animation-related topic, the sky being our limit. A topic that immediately came to mind was the use of animation in live performance, and more specifically animation in the context of theatre.

Over the Christmas period, I had watched a performance by theatre collective 1927 Cabaret at Battersea Arts Centre. I was blown away by their clever combination of animation and live performance to create a whole new world and a place where the endless limits of creative animation and performance could be explored.

I was lucky enough to get the chance to have a chat with Animator and co-founder of the company, Paul Barritt, who kindly agree to meet me for an interview. Upon meeting we decided that 1927 deserved something much more interesting than a dull power point presentation, so we combined our creative powers and came up with an idea that would better fit with the 1927 aesthetic.

Overall, I found this to be a fantastic experience. I got to learn all about a company that I really love and respect, as well as being able to learn some basic stop motion techniques, master my sound and editing skills and discover some new exciting visual effects.

Question of character

 
As part of the character development process for the lead character in my animation for my Final Project, I asked myself the Seven Questions of Character, to help better understand what her motivations, actions and reactions would be in the film.

Who am I? Professional businesswoman in her late 20's. She is independent, focused, time poor.

Where am I? Lives and works in the big smoke.

When am I? Current day. Technology is an important part of the modern business person's working life. It is a time when women are gaining more weight in the workplace, but in order to do so must leave behind traditional roles. Or divide their attention between the personal and business spheres, thereby degrading their capacity to do focus on either properly.

What do I want? To be successful, which translates directly to her career and means having a job that boosts her social status and provides a comfortable income.

Why do I want it? It makes her feel in control and good about herself.

How am I going to get what I want? By making her life her work.

What gets in the way of what I want? The urge to be free from constraint.

Face On

Over the past couple of weeks we moved from full body acting into facial expressions and lip sync. For the facial expression exercise, we were required to animate a character moving from one facial expression into another i.e. from happy to sad, and so on. I decided to use an existing character of mine, the little girl drinking, that I used in the body acting exercise. This was with the intent to later weave both exercises together to create a more interesting final animation. Below is the facial expression that will be used as the beginning of the animation.

After exploring facial expressions we then delved into the world of lip sync. For this task we were each given the 'last words' of renowned poets, philosophers, film stars and so on. We were required create a character and animate them to bring these famous last words to life.

The thing I liked the most about about lip sync, is that it sets the timing for you, which can be a huge time-saver. During this exercise I learnt the importance of using the whole body to help accentuate the words and their emphasise their meaning. Below is my animation of Paul Claudel's last words......Doctor, do you think it could have been the sausage.  

Role Play

Over the past two weeks we have been required to draw upon our theatrical skills from deep within, and use these to create our own skits, which were to be filmed and ultimately animated.

The aim of this exercise wasn't to rotoscope our own live action movement, rather it was about feeling the movement in our own bodies and understanding how we can push them further, so they can be effectively translated onscreen. I found this particularly useful with working out the overall timing and action, and what would be most effective to get the story told in the simplest way possible.

For these exercises, the story scenarios were loosely prescribed to what we had randomly drawn from an envelope passed around the classroom.

The first drawcard presented me with a scenario of a person drinking an energy drink and reacting to it. I learnt a lot of lessons with this exercise, mostly on how important it was to 'overact' to make the message clear for the viewer. I also rediscovered the art of anticipation and how it can be just as effective as the action itself in getting the message across.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to finish the entire animation, due to the sheer amount of frames I needed to animate - another lesson learnt here, keep it simple, the less time and frames it takes to tell a story, the better! Here is the animation, the last section still being keys.

In the next exercise we were required to add another character to the mix. I used two birds as a guise for a flirtatious interplay scenario. In this exercise I learnt an enormous amount about timing between interacting characters, which could be likened to a game of tennis, each character taking their turn to act and react in sync with the other. I'm still working away at this one, and will hopefully have the finished version up in the next week.

Crunch Time

It's the last day of term one and today we are each presenting some of the animated exercises we worked on during term-time. The line up includes: an animated ball bouncing, human walk, 4-legged walk, bird, fish, snake and last but not least a mood change through walk type.

I spent the last few nights up until the early hours trying finesse and rework my animations, and could have spent another week ironing out all everything I wanted to; however, a line had to be drawn in the sand. I am pleased with how much I have learnt over the past 10 weeks and feel like I have come a long way from my initial scratchings.

Out of all of the animations I am most proud of the horse, mostly because it's movement was so difficult to master. It taught me an important lesson, which is to recognise mistakes in your animation and then move on afresh and inject what you have learnt from the previous exercise - just animated over and over until you get it right

The mood change project is the most heavily weighted animation for assessment. I kept the story in this one as simple as possible. Things I'd like to improve would be the walk-in, especially around the arms, and the hand coming out of the pocket. If time had permitted I would have like to have him flick up his collar and act-out the mood change a little more in the middle.

After doing the mood change walk, I had plenty of practice with walking, so it would have been great to attempt another walk cycle, and I almost certainly would have made a better job at it; however, once again time was running short, so I had to go with the limp cycle I had made a few weeks back. The thing I like the most about this particular animation is the fact that I made up the walk through my own research and trial and error. I also like the colouring and textures I used in in. 

Between the bird, fish and the snake, I think that the fish is probably the weakest. I would have really liked to slow him down a bit and work more on the pause and the turn. I really like the colouring I've used on the bird, but if I had time I would have liked to have revisited the bag and the up and down movement of the bird. I am probably most happy with the snake, he moves well, only change here would be to slow him down a bit on the move out.

Finally, I haven't changed the ping pong ball since I'd done in 8 weeks or so ago. The main thing I'd like to change in this one would be to make it bounce higher and intensify the bounces in the end.

All in all I think it's been a successful, albeit tiring term and am looking forward to exploring storytelling and technique along with refining my animation style over the next 6 months.

Following on from out trip to the zoo, we embarked on the very difficult task of animating a four-legged walk cycle.

This was certainly no easy feat. If two legged cycles weren't difficult enough, here we had an extra two legs, along with the weight and movements that they involved. I found there were so many different parts you needed to be aware of at once. For example, between contact and pass positions the front or rear of the horse would move slightly up or down accordingly. This also impacted the head movement, which would move down when the front was up and vice versa. And then there are the tail and mane to think about!

I gave a basic walk cycle and a trot cycle a go and have included them here below. The cycles certainly aren't perfect, but are convincing enough. They were good practice to get an understanding of the movement, and as with anything, the more practice, the better you'll become. I'm currently working through a four-legged walk going across the page, slightly adjusting the horse character I developed. I've found it good practice to use the same character in these type of exercises, because the design tends to develop alongside the movement, becoming a bit more integrated.

Back to the colouring board

After last week's lessons in colouring I decided to tackle the task once again, but this time with a new animation. Also moving on from the hard lessons learnt with my cockatoo, I took the opportunity to create a new flight cycle, which after some initial struggle, I managed to get working well and cleaned up to a suitable standard for scanning. This time I made sure I was happy with the meticulously cleaned up lines, before moving into Photoshop.

I love to experiment with new ways of colouring, and after watching the Secret of Kells animated film over the weekend, I was inspired by the wonderful organic textures they had introduced into their animation. This prompted me to pull out some watercolour paints and cold press watercolour paper. Despite all of the wonderful enhancement features that Photoshop has to offer, I've found that making your own textures helps to create something that is much more unique - it is how you use the technology to achieve your end goal that counts!

I've included the coloured draft version below, I am still working on adding tone and adjusting the bird's path slightly to add the finishing touches.

Adding some colour

During week 7 we learnt some basic colouring methods that would help launch our line test animations into more finalised animations.

There were a couple of important things that I learnt during this exercise. The first, was that you should try to clean up your drawings as much as possible, to prevent any major headaches in reproducing the line artwork in photoshop. Secondly, when coloured, any minor mistakes in your animation will stick out like a sore thumb. Unfortunately I found this out with my limping boy in details like his foot, hair volume,  hands and arm. It's all a process of learning, so I'll be much more aware of this in the future.

I've included my coloured limping boy video here. I used some textures to give him a bit more depth. I'd really like to look at using these type of textures in my final project. I'd like to do a bit more experimentation in future animations and see where I can push this style further.

Under the Sea

During Week 6 we left the human figure behind and ventured into the animal kingdom. Our week began with a trip down to the London Aquarium, where we studied a variety of sinusoidal waves running through countless sea creature's bodies. We observed timing, behaviour, paths of movement, surrounding environment, as well as details on their general appearance and personality traits.

Once we resurfaced, we moved back into the classroom where we went on to discover more about the intricacies of fish movement. But, it didn't stop here, there were plenty more tricky animal movements to cover, and so we found ourselves suddenly launched into the world of snakes and birds. Each of these animal movements were quite complex and pretty mind-blowing, especially the sinusoidal wave of the fish.

I gave the basic fish a go, just to get a feeling for it and here it is below:

Wanting to push myself a little further, I thought I'd try to animate my own fish movement, based on some of the drawings and footage I had collected from the aquarium. A big lesson I learnt while animating this fish was that fish like any other other animal character, should 'quote' the movement of their real-life counterpart, but they should for the most part be animated with human actions. This became really clear when I started to animate the fish following a life-like path down the page, but for some reason during line testing it didn't register as 'real' to the viewer. My lecturer Steve said that I needed to figure out how a fish would swim if it were a human, because under every character is a human presence of some description. And human traits are what viewers want to see reflected back to them. I've included the 'right' and the 'wrong' rough line tests. There is still a fair way to go, but should have the final version uploaded in the coming weeks.

With so much time spent on reworking the fish I quickly pieced together a flight cycle of a cockatoo. The movement was somewhat based on the handouts and from imagination. I picked a very difficult angle to animate from, especially considering I didn't have any reference video footage to work from. This served as a good learning exercise and something that I can build on for my final bird animation assessment piece.