Negotiated Study Two: Final Animation and Summary

This is the final storyboard

This is my final animation!...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMMebnJLIfA&feature=youtu.be

Overall I'm very pleased with the end result of my animation. Despite it being a time consuming process I'm really glad that I chose to use the technique I did, by traditionally drawing out the frames, using paint to render it and digitally editing to put frames together and polish each frame off. By using this technique it means that the animation feels organic just as the body is. The paint also gives a really good feel of fluidity in the various liquids and organic matter within the organs.

I ended up cutting out the brain as I didn't feel that it was relevant to the subject matter of the animation and didn't feel it had any purpose. I also shortened the clots scene as I felt that it would have gone on for too long and would have lost the audiences attention.

At the end I added some text informing the audience that 'In the UK one person dies of a heart attack every seven minutes.'  I found this fact on the British Heart Foundation website and found this to be quite shocking. I found it to be very fitting with my animation and so added it to the end after the heart stops to try and make the audience think. I'm really happy with how I animated the text and how I've highlighted the main points. Hopefully this will help the words stick in the audiences heads.

I'm really pleased with the soundtrack, I've used a section of the final track that Chris Lacey made. I think he did a brilliant job on it and it sets the mood perfectly for my animation. I was particularly pleased that I could still use it even though I had changed my animation.

With the project overall I feel there were many things that I could have done better, one thing would have been making decisions. At the start I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to create and achieve. But after doing some more research after initial ideas and concepts were drawn up I changed my mind about the visuals, I decided that instead of using different shapes to represent different organs I would use realistic drawings as I found them to be quite abstract in them selves. I was very happy about this but as soon as this happened I had tonnes of different ideas thrown at me, not just on what it would be about but  the purpose of the film too. I was always quite adamant that I wanted to create something abstract, something that wasn't obvious as to what it was, something to make the audience think and make their own interpretations, yet still have a subtle message behind it. It would have been aimed at festivals, for people who had an interest in animation/art. For ages I was tooing and throwing, undecided as to what to do, this is where I feel that I lost a lot time with this project. In the end I decided to carry on with what I initially wanted to do, create an abstract animation about the life of a body. 

After I had made the animatic it became quite clear that it wasn't quite working, it was too long and it was very tedious to watch as there were many things that were being repeated. Even after I had cut it down once more it was still quite boring to watch. I feel that my down fall was my stubbornness, I had decided on what I wanted to do and so was going to do it, even though many times I knew it wasn't working. Now that I've finished the project I feel that I should have maybe looked at doing a film on heart attacks earlier on instead of a couple of weeks before the deadline, this way I would have had a lot more time to think about how I was going to do it and it may have been a lot stronger and better thought out. I do feel that the narrative isn't as strong as I would have liked it, but again this was due to the quick change in idea.

If I had had more time to create the animation I would have taken more care in the painting of the frames and I would have painted the blood as I initially had  when trying out the painted style. 

Not only did I waste time but I underestimated how long animating particular scenes would take and therefore the whole projects time management was terrible, despite making schedules.

Negotiated Study Two: Heart and Lungs: Build up of Fat

Now that I had created the first heart and lung scene I decided to do the three other ones whilst I had a good understanding of how to do it. These three next ones would have fat on them as they are near the end, infact one is at the end. The timings for these would be different to the one at the start as they would need to seem strained and not as healthy with their movements as the first. 

The first thing I did was paint the yellow fat on new pieces of paper over the heart frames that I had already drawn out. I scanned these in and edited them on Photoshop to make it look like the heart had fat stuck to it. I did this twice with all the frames, the first time the fat was thinner than the second..  They looked like this - 

I then animated them to make sure they looked ok when moving, before creating hundreds of frames only to find out there was something wrong

I then put them together with the lung to make the three different scenes..

Overall I am very pleased with all three scenes and the desired effect was created

Negotiated Study Two: Stomach Animation

By the time I got onto animating the stomach I still had the intestines and kidney to animate with only 4 days until the deadline and so decided that I wouldn't animate the intestines or the kidney. I felt that there wouldn't be much difference if they were included in the animation or not as they didn't have that much significance. The only thing was that the intestines would show the fat being absorbed into the body. However as I was going to animate the stomach with fat entering the body and the anus where the bowel was being emptied,with no fat present in the stool, I thought that that would show the audience well enough that the fat that goes into their body doesn't come out the other end. 

So I animated a scene for the stomach (where you could also see parts of the kidneys, so they weren't completely absent) which I was happy with. In the animatic there are two bladder scenes, which i now felt that was one too many and so decided to replace one with another stomach scene. Therefore having one near the beginning (without fat) and one later on (with fat) to show the progression. Being short on time I decided to use the same scene but to do the same thing as I had with the heart and paint the fat on seperate frames and edit them onto the stomach for the second stomach scene. These are the two different stomach scenes....

I was very happy with these. If I was to do it again, I wouldn't have used the same frames for both of them just to make it more interesting and I may have added more fat to the food entering the stomach and in the stomach juices in the second scene, just to emphasize the fat intake even more. 

Negotiated Study Two: Dope Sheets

I thought I would show how I worked out the timings of the separate animated scenes. Without doing this I can imagine there would have been loads of mistakes, not only that but I wouldn't have been able to get my head around it. Especially with the heart and lung scenes. 

Here are a couple of the sheets, the bottom right one was for the heart and lung scene after the clot.

The 'F' stand for 'Frames, 'H' for 'Heart' and 'L' for 'Lungs'

Negotiated Study Two: The Clot Scene: Improved and Finalised

So before I had made the first version of the clots scene, to which I found the movements way too fast and the scene wasn't long enough. So I've revisited it, added in about 150 more frames, painted and edited it. Here is the final product..

I'm very happy with the end result of this scene. The build up behind the clot is much slower, therefore much more realistic. Some people may argue that there should have been a more visible build up behind the clot but in reality the fat inside the artery would be very hard and would prevent the blood from stretching the artery too much. I've changed the saturation of the frames where the clot is blocking the artery to show the starvation of oxygenated blood to the tissue and I feel that it sends the right message to the audience.

Negotiated Study Two: Heart and Lungs: The Beginning Sequence

At the beginning of the animation I planned to show the heart and lungs where the heart would first start beating and then the lungs start breathing after. This would be a little representation of the beginning of life, where the heart starts beating in the embryo and then when the baby is born it starts breathing. There's no fat in this scene as it shows the start to be healthy and fat free. So to put this together I had to edit the heart frames and lung frames together in photoshop. This wasn't easy as both the heart and the lungs moved at different rates, the breathing naturally slower than the heart beat. To help me I made up my own basic dope sheets that I could work from. This was quite lengthy but seeing the end result was great..

When I first saw it I was worried that there was a bit too much going on and it may be too much for the audiences eyes. However I decided to leave it for now. I was very pleased with the result it made me feel that the heart and lungs were very much alive and the timing was great.

Negotiated Study Two: Brain Activity

For the brain activity I had a look at various images of brain scans to get some ideas as to how I would represent the activity in the brain. For the animatic I made wiggly, zigzaggy lines, however I knew that that wasn't how I was going to animate it in the final animation. After looking at brain scans I decided that brain activity wasn't something that I was going to draw on but instead go straight in with the paint. I had to play around with the frames digitally to get the desired effect as animating the frames as they were looked terrible, the animation was all over the place. 

This was before editing

It kind of had the desired effect that I was aiming for but the movement was way too fast and felt that brain activity would be shown to be much slower. So I tried the next effect...

But this was terrible, it looked like I had put a few images onto a video editing suit and made them fade from one to the other. So I tried again..

It still wasn't right as I felt that it felt too frantic but time was ticking by and I felt that it was good enough and so decided to leave it as it was. 

Negotiated Study Two: New Animatic

So to get an idea for my new idea, to know which scenes I would still be using  and to work out how this changed animation would work and feel I made a quick new animatic (from my original animatic) along with part of the soundtrack that Chris Lacey had made for me.

Here it is...

I was much happier after making this, I felt that it was much more achievable within the time I had left to work with and became much more optimistic. Although it's not shown in this animatic I planned to show the build of fat throughout and show the deterioration of the organs as the fat built up. Then at the end the clot would form and the heart and lungs would stop beating. Something I had to research was if you would stop breathing before or after your heart stopped beating, and it turns out that you may take a couple of breaths after your heart stops. This because your lungs are controlled by your brain and its only when the brain is starved of oxygen (lack of oxygenated blood from the heart) that your lungs will cease to breathe. So now I was making an animation about heart attack, this would show what would risk a heart attack (fat), the cause of a heart attack (a clot in a coronary artery) and what happens. I would also like to add in a figure at the end of the animation to inform the British public how likely it would be for them to die from a heart attack. Especially as heart attacks are the most common way for someone living in the UK to die.

Negotiated Study Two: Lung Growth

Despite the time problem I decided to crack on with the lung growth sequence, but decided to make it simpler and quicker to do by stopping the movement around the body to the lungs and make it just jump from the brain to the lungs. However I still felt that it was taking me a long time to animate the lungs growing just through the detailed nature of the lung drawings. Not knowing what to do and having time ticking by I decided to email my tutor to see if she could give me any advice. Many suggestions were made but one that made the most sense was to cut it down and focus more on the ending. From this I decided to get rid of the beginning with the growth sequence (all of the work that I had just done) and make it into more of a public information film about heart attacks. 

Anyway, here is the lung growth sequence that I didn't finish.

Negotiated Study Two: Brain Growth

Following the growth of the kidneys and bladder I decided to follow the movement around the body up to where the brain would grow. I decided to start from the left kidney and move up from there. The movement around the body isn't very good in this sequence as it does a bit of a zig zag, obviously where I didn't chose very carefully as to which key frames to use from the animatic and so am not very happy with it at all. Again, this sequence took many more days than planned to create and so I really started to panic about finishing the animation, especially as I hadn't even finished the growth sequence and was two or three weeks from the deadline. 

This is the animation of the brain growth sequence

I kept the brain growth pretty simple and used the same sort of technique as the past few organs which I felt worked well and was satisfied with.

Negotiated Study Two: Kidney and Bladder Growth

This sequence was quite complicated but more time consuming than anything. I think that was due to the amount of veins that I had to draw, it took up to an hour per frame. The kidneys are also quite complicated in themselves so it took some time to draw them out too. I had set aside 2 days to do the kidney growth sequence and 1 for the bladder but in all it took me 7 days for the kidneys and 4 for the bladder Although it was lengthy I did enjoy animating this part. Due to the amount of time it took me to do I did start to worry if I was going to be able to finish the animation, especially as I hadn't even painted any of the scenes, and painting usually took longer than drawing the frames. Here is the result

The movement around the body wasn't as fluid as it was in the animatic, this was because for some reason I decided to only use a few frames from it to animate, where I moved in straight lines rather than curved and didn't particularly follow the arteries as I did in the animatic. I'm really pleased with the growths of the organs though, I feel they worked well and I'm happy with the beating of the heart where the heart is in shot. 

Negotiated Study Two: Bladder Animation

So after animating the anus I decided to do another relatively easy scene, just to get it over with before starting on the growth sequence again. So I chose the bladder, this was a little bit more complicated than the anus but that was mainly due to there being more lines to control. Again the movement was pretty simple, the bladder filled up and then emptied. To make it quite realistic I made it so that the bladder expanded when it was filling up and then contract when emptied. Again I managed to paint and digitally alter the frames. Here is the result..

Overall I'm very pleased with this animation, especially with the movement of the urine and bladder, and the way the bladder expands and contracts.

Negotiated Study Two: Anus Animation

I decided to have break with growing bodily parts to do some simpler scenes, so I chose the two anus scenes where the bowels were being emptied. The first was a straight forward emptying of the bowel where the body is younger and the second  is where haemorrhoids develop and the body is older.

Because these two scenes where simple I managed to paint and digitally alter them so that they are completely finished. This is the first anus scene..

This was a relatively easy scene to make, there's nothing complicated about it and so it was quite relaxing to animate. Overall I'm happy with it movement wise and visually

This is the animation of the anus with haemorrhoids

Again this was very simple to animate, it was a little bit more complicated than the first anus animation but that was because of the growing of the haemorrhoids. I found this very fun to do and I'm very pleased with the results. As you can see there is more fat on this second one than the first one. This is because as the body gets older there will be more and more fat build up on the organs and body parts, the fat is the cause of the death and the heart attack and plays an important part of the life of this body. This also aims to make the audience think about the roll of extra fat on their body and how it could possibly affect them.

Negotiated Study Two: Heart Growth

Having done a few test animations I decided that it was about time that I started with the actual animation. So I started at the beginning where the heart and veins grow and then the heart starts beating. 

This is the result..

So to start the growth of the heart I decided to start off with a representation of a cell and to then make it divide as it would in the womb where the embryo grows. I was very happy with this effect, although I do feel that at one point where the heart is almost visible there aren't enough frames, and so the movement is way too quick. I may have to add in some extra frames. With the heart growth sequence I didn't really plan it out, instead I made it up as I went along and I think that that was my downfall. 

The growth of the arteries and veins where pretty simple and straight forward and I was very happy with the result of this. And finally the growth of the blood and the beating of the heart came next, in which I was really happy between the smooth transition of the two. I was going to do it like I had in the animatic where the blood formed within the heart and then got pumped round as more blood was made but this would have taken me far too long. So I found a simpler and shorter solution that I felt worked really well.

Negotiated Study Two: Improved Breathing

I've managed to correct the breathing for the lungs so that they no longer jump. This mistake meant that some time was wasted improving it, which I'm not very happy about but I didn't have much choice! I also painted the frames so that I wouldn't have to return to this part of the animation (non digitally anyway)

This is a video with the improved movement and painted. 

I'm really happy with the result of this and is exactly how I imagined it to be. I will later be taking these frames and putting them with the heart so that the audience will be able to see them both in motion together as they would be in anyone's chest.