LoopDeLoop Creative Collaboration (2 Week Mini Brief)

With our second year starting there were inevitably going to be many changes. However one change that myself and my classmates did not see coming was the exit of our tutor, Kristen from First Year. In this lecture we were all introduced to Annabeth, our new module tutor, who has started this second year with a real 'hit the ground running task'. She has set a two week mini-brief to create animations following the guidelines of the in famous Australian animation contest: LoopDeLoop. About LoopdeLoop: LoopdeLoop is an animation challenge. Animators from around the world create looping animations based on a given topic and submit them to www.loopdeloop.org. At the end of each theme the top 100 posted loops are compiled and screened to a live audience at Loop in Melbourne, Australia and at other venues throughout Australia and the world. Our brief word for this month is the word: "Power". This is the briefing that was put on the website for a bit of guidance: Struggling for one of those light bulb moments? How about electricity, being in charge, the power of positive thinking, super powers, the power of greyskull, physics, the theory of relativity, power outages, alternative energy sources, flat batteries, power outlets, the power of love, phone chargers, lightening, and maybe some other kind of pow… er. Plug yourself in, charge your brain up with ideas and see where they take you! Submit a loop and help contribute to an animated VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER. The submission guidelines are simple; • it must be made by you. Any loops submitted which include copyright protected imagery or sound without permission will be rejected, regardless of their quality. • it must suit the current theme. • it must not contain pornographic material, incite hatred or include defamatory or discriminatory content. • it must be engaging to watch, both on the web and when screened to a live audience! (At the end of each theme the best loops will be screened, having your loop posted to the blog doesn’t guarantee that it’ll be in the final screening compilation.) • it has to loop! Here is the example compilation of videos our class was shown to get the creative juices flowing and display the correct interpretation of this competition, (last months brief word was 'Pizza'):

I have been partnered up with Josh Macey in this mini brief. Right away we considered the meaning of the word power and tried to get out some of the more obvious interpretations, so that we might better understand how this word could be interpreted from a more objective point of view. This was a prevalent part of our initial ideation and notes.

We then both went away with a basic idea of what we wanted to do. We had decided that we wanted to convey the meaning of power through nature. Do be more specific: The food chain. In this case we thought this would be a great opportunity to really play around with fictional creatures of our own imagination.

Firstly we both had to gather research and start mood boarding. https://www.pinterest.co.uk/joshuamacey10/loopdeloop-moodboard/

Josh went ahead and made a checklist on Trello so that we would both have a decent idea of where each of us was up to:

In the meantime I have been researching a key animator that came to mind when thinking about the interpretation of power we have both decided to go with. Felix Colgrave has not only made a sizable amount of animations that involve many fantastical, quirky and eccentric animal-based characters, (oft accompanied by a dark sense of humor)...

...but he has also made an animation that deals with the subject matter of power in his own way:

Taking influence from Felix Colgrave and aspects of the mood board I have created, I have made some initial character design ideas. Myself and Josh shall review all of these when we next get together and decide which designs will make it to the final cut.

Josh numbered the designs he liked best and I then went on to draw up a roughly- sketched height chart.

It was after this I was eager to get onto the digital side of things and quickly get into the production phase. I scanned in the drawings I had done by hand and went over them in Photoshop. "Bloomie"

"Ramfrog"

"Quadeye"

"Arse Bandit"

"Leech Snake"

"Lizzie"

Height Chart I drew this out to gauge an idea of how the character will compare in size. This will come in handy for when myself and Josh draw out our storyboard.

Whilst Josh was working on our background colouring, I also did some colour testing myself:

In true Felix Colgrave style, I have gone for vivid block colours to really make these creatures seem alien. Once we settled on which colour variations we liked best I started the animatic. With only the weekend to do this, I knew it was going to be tough. I decided to go off a basic idea of the storyboard Josh had sent over to me. But I more or less finessed my animatic from the thumbnail storyboard I had drawn up:

This was the animatic I managed to create over the weekend:

Josh sent over his background that he had been designing as a photoshop file that I could manipulate within Adobe Flash:

I had to manipulate the background to zoom in and out for each 'camera' movement. Due to pressing time, things like the leaves in the foreground and the sun in the background were removed because they became too complex to work with, especially when considering camera movements. And after colouring on the Monday night, before the 10th October deadline. This was the video we managed to create for submission:

Reflection: With the video completed, there were some things that I must now talk about, reflectively, in what went wrong during the process.

There were certain characters I had to scrap during the animation process because I was finding their body parts too hard to articulate without a proper reference.

Seeing as this particular creature was the most alien looking out of all of the characters I decided it was not worth wasting time on. This character may be deemed a failure however, to me, it is nothing but another lesson on the importance of having some sort of reference for complicated character walks. However I do feel like I did a good job with the other characters, mainly because they were more bedded in reality, but also because of the way myself and Josh positioned the 'camera' in our shots to only reveal the new animal coming into the shot by having the camera zoom out. This meant that I didn't have to do much animation for walk cycles. (This was vital seeing as I did not have much time to animate). After colouring the whole animation, I was ready for Josh to edit together the video and sound, (which was supposed to be created using Foley sound design techniques).

This was only going to be possible if Josh added in Foley sounds, as I was colouring the animation the night before. However we did run into trouble because due to unforeseen personal circumstances on Josh's part, he was unable to provide the Foley sounds. This therefore lead to a great deal of trouble on the deadline day. I was given roughly 10 minutes to edit together some SFX I had managed to find on Youtube:

This was all done very quickly on the tram journey from my house to the university. This was regrettable because I only had a very short amount of time to put together a presentable video for the exhibition we were going to have that night for our LoopDeLoop animations. The comedy of this loop relied on some sort of cartoonish sound effects, (It was because of this I had to put some SFX by myself, rather than Josh edit sounds in, post deadline). If we had more time I would've loved to have done many things properly. Not to say I did not enjoy working with Josh, or that even we have done a bad job. I am pleaded with the way our LoopDeLoop animation turned out. I have been greatly encouraged and complimented by my peers and tutors for the outcome of this project, I guess what was frustrating was the fact that I knew we were both capable of better and for various reasons and factors our time-management and organisation was not up to scratch. I would like to conclude by saying that myself and Josh are very interested in developing this animation further, especially where things like sound, background elements and tweeting are involved. This would be a great piece of work for something within our portfolios or showreels. I look forward to doing more LoopDeLoop animation challenges in the future.