April-July : Animation

I've wanted to write about my feelings on animation for a while, and my current project 'Frühlingssturm' (Spring-storm) has given me a fair bit to think about on the subject.

It is my first fully photographic animation, all others until now have been drawn - either on paper or on some form of software (Photoshop, After Effects, TV Paint). It is photographed using a Bolex in the single exposure mode, on Ektachrome 16mm 100D.

The original idea was to make some kind of abstract time-lapse, a Frankensteinian mix of flowers blossoming and leaves growing from winter into spring, but to capture the different stages of growth on different plants as opposed to one plant or one image over an extended period of time/ growth. 

I wanted to see how the animation of the growth would combine with the chaotic movement of the image/ frame, to see if there would be a through-line or if it would all just fall apart because of a lack of cohesion.

I found a mix of both, at points the growth and movement are cohesive, but more often there are the points of chaos, where something else takes over - our perception. 

Just as we are fooled by traditional animation into seeing movement (even though we are seeing rapidly changing still single images), we project movement into the abstracted images.  

This de- and subsequent re-construction is the new route that this project took.

From having the working title 'Frühlingsfarben' (Spring colours), to it's current title 'Frühlingssturm' (Spring-storm).

Just as the image has been put together from disparate but similar images so too is the sound. In my workshop at uni I found a tin someone had cut out to make into a phenakistiskope with a record player. I knew I wanted to make a rhythmic soundscape, the tin allowed me to hit the slits at intervals with different materials; sticks, screws, leaves, baby's toys. Recording with a stereo microphone helped give it all some auditory space.

Like I said, I wanted to have a rhythmic sound, so as to help the image - if the movement is jagged then a jagged rhythm will help us accept it. Rhythm of any kind helps abstract animation a lot, watch any Norman McLaren and see us interpret the synchronicity which is only, or chiefly, given to it by the music (or course not in all of his animations, but in ones like 'Begone Dull Care' there is some synchronicity, maybe 10% or 20%, and the rest merely seems to be in sync).

I particularly appreciate the random rhythm in that it gives the image support without, for lack of a better word, regulating it. In that I mean the sounds that are often found in animated films where foleys are used so intensely that they inform the content rather than supporting it, they can take over. It is something that has always bugged me, and I still don't quite know how to describe it - maybe it can simply be described as obvious and bad foley sound. Which in itself needn't be such a bad thing, if it weren't so present, so common, that it can seem almost canonical to animation.

Sound is important, but animation is about movement, the magic of seeing the static come alive, and I hope that there is some life in this film.

Frühlingssturm Full Film

January II : Snow

My friend Manaka Nagai has just gotten done filming her masters graduation film at the HFBK.

It's a nice studio film, based on very sad personal experiences of hers this past year.

Set in winter she wanted a shot of the city where her film takes place, so she had a small cardboard city made up, where her studio set room lives.

It being winter it's supposed to snow at the end, and she was vexed by the frequent problem of weather phenomenon being quite hard to film. Some of her snow was visible and some not.

So I offered my help with After Effects, so below is a moderately detailed example of how to work with analog footage in AE.

I've already finished the project, so I've retroactively turned effects and layers on/ off to illustrate my work process.

Original ungraded shot

We only really see snow in the background, and also not in the middle, these are the main issues that we need to deal with.

Sky masked and added extra layers (pre-composed)

I duplicate the footage, and make a mask for the sky. After this I can further duplicate the sky layers and move them around on the time line, so that there is more snow falling.

This current screenshot has the finished pre-composed layer, which we will open for the next screenshot

Inside the pre-comp

Here we see the various duplications of the original footage, the sky mask is added on top of the pre-comp in our main composition.

The contrast is much higher, obviously giving us more intense snow, and making the image black & white allows us to key out the background, so that we can see the snow behind the snow. Otherwise having multiple layers wouldn't achieve much, and lowering the opacity would weaken the strength of the snow that we just boosted.

Keying out the background is simply done with the Extract effect.

Making the rooftops snowy

Simple effects are the most effective in After Effects.

Once again duplicating the original layer, masking the roofs, we just boost the brightness with the Curves effect, then on the timeline we put a keyframe at the beginning, and then at 80% completion. First keyframe is ~20% opacity, the second is ~40% opacity.

So the rooftops get slowly more snowy.

Light pollution

Not what Manaka asked for, but some creative liberty, I found the black sky to be a bit empty, and you can never miss the hazy layer of light pollution over a city, so using two layers with separate masks (one mask the contour of the buildings, and the other you see above) we use the shape layer as an alpha matte, and the layer below it is a shape - just the colour orange.

But this needs to be super subtle, the opacity of the orange layer is 5%, and the alpha matte is super feathered.

Snow in front of the buildings and in the middle of the shot

Probably the more tricky part of the project, getting snow in front of the buildings.

There was some in the footage, but there's no was to separate it from the background and make it brighter like I did with the background.

So I just copied and pasted the snow from the background.

Once again we can only see the pre-comp in this screenshot.

Sampled snow

So doing my best to make it not look like looped sampled snow, I looped and sampled the snow, here you can see one of the masks which was taken from the buildings (as is plain to see from its shape).

Taking multiple such masks and scattering them throughout the empty spaces looks pretty ok.

If it were on a black background you would notice that something is off, but this way, in front of the buildings, it blends in very well.

Before

After