Out of your head – ‘Aether’

From the word cloud of keywords that we had to choose from our group selected:

BURST, FORESHADOW, LOVE, SOLACE, HOPE, OTHER

BURST: break open or apart suddenly and violently, especially as a result of impact or internal pressure; an explosion

FORESHADOW: be a warning or indication of (a future event)

LOVE: an intense feeling of deep affection

SOLACE: comfort or consolation in a time of distress or sadness

HOPE: a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen

OTHER: a person or a thing that is different or distinct from one already mentioned/known about

With these key words we knew we wanted to create a story that followed a personal journey of development and progression where our main character starts as this one being and ends up transforming into something completely new at the end showing their progress and development in their new self and a new found confidence as they come through the other side of their transformation.

https://pin.it/14YkHBFag

-> This is the link to our collaborative Pinterest board we used to moodboard our initial ideas and the ideas that we had for colour pallets and visuals that we liked to consider for our project. Creating these mood boards was actually incredibly helpful for us to get the ball rolling with this project as we were able to consider the aesthetic of our animation and how we would want the beginning middle and end to feel and vaguely look without having concrete visuals that we would be less willing to change and adapt as our ideas developed – it also helped to keep us on track with the way we wanted to present each part of the story with the decay and hopelessness with the middle of the story in contrast with the more hopeful vibrant ending.

When considering visuals for our project with a world disintegrating/decaying, the image of the scene from Coraline where she walks around the world and it crumbles and pixelates to white as the world is unfinished and unravelling until she reaches the finished side again immediately came to mind. I think this effect could be really cool to explore with the idea of decay where the world could gradually crumble around our main character. I also was reminded of the final fight scene in Paranorman with Aggie and the way that the forest around them reacts to her anger but also the complete cut to white where the forest is back to its original state; I feel something like this could work quite well with the idea of the world decaying and then one last minute moment of magic transforming and healing our character’s surroundings. I’ve also discovered that making mood boards with my exact visual references is very useful so I will be doing this with all my references going forward as it is more concise and allows me to pick out the exact bits I want to discuss and how they inspired us/me.

I did some initial concept art to begin to explore the kind of visuals we wanted for our animation. As a group we decided upon it being set in this darkened snowy gloomy forest and we wanted the decay to stand out against this so therefore it would be in brighter more neon colours for contrast and also to highlight its unnatural nature. I really liked how this would also subvert the typical idea and visuals of decay being dark and corrosive and mould-Iike as whilst this decay has a clear ruinous effect it still is bright and quite beautiful. I played around a bit with Aether’s design, I kinda nabbed working on the character design from early on in the project as I had a bunch of clear ideas for visuals in my head and here’s where I started to play with some different concepts. I looked at different forms of Aether, giving them different eyes, ears, head shapes, different outfits etc. I personally like the more shapeless cape more than the other designs or the cape which has pockets/the herb belt. I feel incredibly strongly that Aether should not have a mouth, I think there’s something particularly enamouring with characters who convey emotion through just their eyes and expressions and considering that we intend for our film to be dialogue-less I think it will work particularly well to just focus on conveying emotion through eyes and expression.

These were our initial story concepts and the breakdowns of the timings for each of the scenes that we wanted to depict in our story and put into our animatic. It definitely needs tweaking and will be developed from here but it was nice to start to have a proper initial breakdown of our ideas and how we would present the visuals for each of the scenes even if we’re not too sure how we want it to end at the moment. Also by considering our visuals and the scenes we want to have I could start considering concept art and we could all start to consider how we would frame the shots.

Initial Loglines:

‘A small magical creature faces a race against time to save their world and themselves from the rampant decay which is ravaging their surroundings’

This log line was improved to become: ‘A tenacious magical creature sprints on a time crunch to save their withering world and maybe themselves.’

Another: ‘A distressed creature attempts to save their world, as it withers away, using herbs and a magical lake. What happens when they’re dragged into the lake, will they restore their world or will havoc ensue?’

It was improved to become: A distressed creature aimed to save their decaying world through magical means but what happens when nothing is going to plan.’

Our final longline on this day of initial longlines was: ‘As a violent decay ravages their world, Aether must race to save their environment and escape the divine fate which awaits them.’

Having sought feedback on this logline we came to realise that it was too vague and our story did not have a clear enough meaning and message, we then began to consider further what it was really about, was it an environmental message; commenting on humanity’s destruction of the natural world and events like Chernobyl, or was it a more personal allegory about overcoming struggles with fears or anxieties, or was it something of a trans allegory with our character’s transformation having a deeper meaning for them becoming who they truly feel they are. We had to think on this a lot more over the weekend.

Some more of the initial Starlight and Aether character designs. Starlights design came a lot easier than Aether’s, I decided that both creatures should have capes and be quite flowy and whimsical, I also feel that these design elements will look really effective for what we currently visualise our title opening run scene to look like as the flowing capes would be very dramatic. I also played around with the shape and size of Aether’s eyes and if they should have a mouth or not. I think the style with no mouth is most effective as we can then focus on portraying Aether’s emotions through his eyes and also their body language and therefore, I think Aether having larger eyes would be most effective as they would be able to be most expressive with pupil size and also just expansion/shrinking of the eyes. I like the more crescent shaped eyes of starlight, I think that they work well with the head shape and also work well in contrast to Aether. I’m not sure if I want to add more details onto their cloaks like pockets or ribbons or stars as they then make the design more complicated and would make it harder to remember these minor details when we animate but also they make their designs more developed and fleshed out. I think I will find the best combination of details which are simpler yet still effective.

This was the very first version of our storyboard for our animatic. At this point our story had more solidified the addition of another character – starlight, who will turn to stone before Aether does. It feels like we need something more emotionally impactful to help us build a connection to these characters before we know what they’re fighting to save but also to give them something more to fight to save, sure their environment and surroundings and self are important but giving them a companion who they witness turn to stone and now want to bring back from stone and save, feels stronger and more emotive. I like the idea of having statues of other of these star creatures in the backgrounds of the woods, showing that they were not the first to be ravaged by this fog but I do also fear it could make the story more confusing especially with the aspect of Aether’s magic in the lake being what turns everything back to normal – maybe it’s too easy for them and the hesitation and aether turning to stone before everything returns to normal is still not enough but also it does flow nicely as a story. I think we need to keep tinkering at the story to come up with a more cohesive ending which is clear and impactful but doesn’t feel too easy (easier said than done haha).

The final designs of Aether and Starlight: I really like their final iterations, I think whilst their cape styles could be considered very similar, I think they effectively look different enough that you could tell them apart especially once we decide upon their colour palettes. Jess was worried that their shapes were too similar and in less close up scenes it would be harder to tell them apart though, so I will consider some different style capes and styles for Starlight before we decide if these truly are their final designs, but I think that once they have colour they will look a lot more distinct and defined.

When designing Aether and Starlight, I did have an array of media which came to mind and also references which people compared their designs to/I realised afterwards were quite similar in style. I looked at things like the video game episode of Bee and Puppycat for inspiration for Aether and Starlight’s capes and how they would move with the characters when we animate them. In designing both characters, I realised that the style of their capes were quite similar to the characters from the video game Sky: Children of Light and I looked at the way that their capes would move with them but also the different level of details on the different characters and how they made therm look the same and yet still be different and be distinct enough that you could tell them apart from their designs and colour schemes. Journey was not something I had looked at when actively designing and developing Aether and Starlight but looking at their designs some of my peers compared them to these characters. I used Soul, Elemental and Inside Out (specifically the scene where they are abstracted) to help inspire my designs once I had them more solid, I think the colour schemes of soul and elemental as well as their shape language were things that I really focused in on looking at and part of me wishes that I drew more on some of the original designs of evolved Aether and the colour design of the spirits in Soul as I feel a softer colour palette like this would have made them feel more whisky. The scene from the end scene from Frozen was something I particularly thought about when I was considering the final pose of Aether and Starlight once they had turned to stone as similar to our story, Elsa desperately clings to the frozen figure of her sister and whilst our scene is gentler the sentiment was similar with Starlight already being stone so it felt like a good reference to consider for the composition of the scene and their body language. Incredibles was more of a reference when considering how the fog could work and transform Aether and Starlight and Turning Red was a beautiful reference for considering how our forest could look. Returning to look at our references now we finish the film, I think it could have been effective to have some trees at the forefront of shots just to add more depth like they do in this scene of Turning Red.

Whilst working on the project, I started a small sketchbook that I could doodle Aether and Starlight in to help me develop their designs. Whilst we thought we had the final design for Starlight, we wanted to consider some other options as it was pointed out that both Starlight and Aether’s designs were quite similar to each other . I tried to give Starlight more of a different shade and silhouette with their cape and possibly a different outfit as well. I was quite fond of the design with the more long and angular cape corners, the rest of the group quite liked the more dungaree type look but we decided that it looked too human and not whimsical enough. After trialling out all these other styles for Starlight, we ended up circling back to the original design and we figured that if it didn’t work in the concept art and once we decided on the colour schemes we would tweak the design somewhat so that they were less similar. In all honesty though, I personally don’t think that they are too similar due to their head shapes, heights and cape styles and I think they’ll look effective paired together as they seem to be of a similar species but not the same character.

We ended up getting quite stuck with how we wanted our story to go, especially with what to do with the ending. We were told that the ending with the magical herbs was too obvious and too easy, so we need to find a way to keep the core visuals and feeling that we wanted to evoke from our audience (a lot of heightened tension and then moments of sadness and relief) but also make the story flow better and not be too convoluted. I would agree in saying that maybe the magical herbs was a bit of an easy out as a way to resolve them turning to stone – even once we had added the moment of uncertainty where everything turned to stone and then it resolved itself. Whilst our current ideas start very much in medias res, these initial ideas did that a bit too much and it would have been hard to grasp what we were trying to tell without more context which we would not be able to give in 30 seconds. The addition of Starlight was definitely helping us to progress as with another character we could play around with Aether reacting to them and heighten the angst and tragedy of it all but we still needed to shift the ending. We typed up a bunch of different ways that the story could go, considering different endings as well as different openings and entirely different narratives with just the same characters. We wanted to initially give it a more happy and wholesome ending where they would both turn back to their original forms but we eventually decided that a more tragic ending where they both turn to stone would be more impactful and having them running away from the fog from a location (their town) would help to establish the world building. I like how the story has transformed from being more about magic and decay to being somewhat of a very tragic love story and being more about Aether and Starlight’s connection rather than just the world that they happened to be in, it feels a lot more personal and emotive even without all the subtext and metaphors that we wanted to have hidden in the narrative before. I really like the idea of a montage of them at the end of the story where they’ve turned to stone and we see the statues changing across time until they’re in a town centre like the one we start in, but I’m not too sure if we will have enough time to show this in our animation as 30 seconds is not as long as we think it is, but I believe that the story will still work even if we can’t quite show this entire montage idea.

‘Aether and Starlight are fleeing their village from an all consuming fog which is ravaging their homes and turning their people to stone, will they manage to escape or will it be too late?’ – our longline

This was our first storyboard version with our new ideas implemented. At this point we needed to cut out some of the frames to make it flow smoother and do certain shots from different angles which you can see on the notes on each of the frames. But this was where our animation really started to come together and we really started to have a solid idea of where we were going with our story and how we wanted to visualise that for our audience.

Our storyboard went through many iterations, once we had the base idea down and our story more solidified, I redrew all the storyboard panels so that the style of our animatic would be more cohesive and we would be able to better see how well our story and ideas flowed. As we tinkered at it, we found that some frames needed removing entirely and some could be drawn differently using other perspectives/angles or zooming out of the scene further so that the effect of it would be more dramatic, especially in the part where we see the distance between the fallen Starlight and fleeing Aether from towards the start of our story as well as the angle that Aether running into the fog after starlight is depicted. Our final version of the storyboard seems to be very effective and I can’t wait to see how the animatic comes together with all the sound and then how it looks once we have animated it.

We trialed an array of different colour schemes for Aether and Starlight before we found the final one which seemed to work the best. Some of the colour schemes were too similar in both colour and value and Aether and Starlight would therefore look incredibly similar and not read as clearly. Some of the colour combinations were simply not very aesthetically pleasing and others would blend in with the backgrounds or the fog too much. I think the colour palette we settled on worked quite well and not only do they have quite contrasting colour schemes so you can easily tell them apart but they’re also vibrant enough that they will clearly stand out against a darker more gloomy background.

Once we settled on a colour scheme for our characters, I wanted to do some conceptual designs of what they would look like against a snowy background and a dark forest to see how well they would/if they would stand out from the backgrounds and from each other. It was also to trial colour palettes for different scenes and experiment with how the visuals would look in colour so that we colour have a better understanding of this when it came to animating and colouring. I do really love how they turned out and the strong style with vibrant details but very painterly edges is something I think we want to keep within our animation and try and replicate when colouring our actual animated scenes later on. Both character’s stand out well from the background and some vivid enough that even in the overhead your focus is immediately drawn to them and therefore I think that the colour scheme we chose was definitely effective.

Arcane s2 melded with our minds and stole all our ideas and had incredibly similar visuals to ours (we genuinely did somehow come up with these designs before the final eps of s2). Arcane S2 coming out alongside working on this project was an absolutely marvellous thing as it gave me so much artistic motivation and just general ideas. it did also have some very effective references which I considered when developing the designs for statue Starlight and Aether. In S2 episode 7 there is a moment where one of the characters (Jayce) gets stuck in somewhat of a parallel dimension and he sees all these citizens turned to statues and finally a statue of a fallen version of himself. I think this bit really resonated for how I would imagine that the town that Aether and Starlight fled from would have looked like. There is also a moment in the final episode with Viktor and Jayce where they’re in this sort of astral realm in these glowy soft forms. The way that they look here somewhat inspired my concept art of Aether and Starlight as statues from their colour palettes and also the way that they hold onto each other and touch foreheads felt very reminiscent of some of our initial ideas for the ending of our narrative where Aether does that with Starlight to turn back the petrification but also of the pose that they turn to stone in together.

The starlight statue – We realised that we didn’t really have a point of colour reference for the statue of Aether and Starlight other than from the concept art which was a lot more complex visually. So I doodled a smaller version of what Starlight would look like in the final scenes of our animation so that we would know how to colour her and what her posing should roughly be like.

Ancient Greek mythology was an influence and reference point that we drew upon throughout our project. When we were struggling to develop our story, Jane suggested that we look at the myth of Apollo and Daphne as well as Orpheus and Eurydice. As someone who studied Classics for 4 years before this, the mention of the parallels was incredibly exciting for me and it really helped shape the way that I viewed our story and the tragedy of Aether and Starlight’s relationship. The myth of Apollo and Daphne depicts a story to give origins for the Laurel tree and Apollo’s connection to it. Apollo pursuits Daphne and Daphne continuously rejects his affections as she is a hunter of Artemis and eventually after being chased by Apollo, she cries out to her father who was a river god and he turns her into a laurel tree to take away the beauty which Apollo was so enamoured by. The statue by Bernini depicts this moment beautifully as Daphne turns into the laurel and it really struck me as something beautiful coming from a story of a Greek god lacking boundaries and care. The way he’s reaching for Daphne however is something we want to emulate with Aether and Starlight to present their desperation. Orpheus and Eurydice’s tragic myth really reminds me of Aether and Starlight, Eurydice dies an untimely death and Orpheus journeys to the underworld to get her back, the one rule he’s given to leave with her is to not turn around when they’re leaving but Eurydice has to walk behind and they may not speak to one another. Orpheus’ fears get the better of him and he turns back around just before they are free and Eurydice is taken back to the underworld. Aether’s desperation to get back to and bring back Starlight in every version of the story we went through reminds me of the way that Orpheus does everything he can to bring back Eurydice and in many versions of the myth ends up joining her and accepting his fate or going mad. Whilst on the topic go Greek Myths, Medusa of course came to mind but particularly her character in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the garden centre full of statues of people she has turned to stone. The fear on the faces of those statues made me wonder if maybe Aether or at least Starlight should have looked more shocked/in fear in their statue forms but I do feel that they faced a form of acceptance before they turned to stone knowing that their chase was finally over.

Alice through the looking glass had some beautiful visuals which really helped to inspire me when designing the statue of Aether and Starlight especially when Alice is reaching forwards. It was also a very prevalent reference earlier in the design process when we wanted our story to be about the world decaying and rotting away and everything turning into statues – including the environment. It was interesting to look at the way that the rust consumed different character’s and also the surroundings in these final scenes of the movie. I also looked at Doctor Strange as a reference but more in the initial stages of our conceptualising because the more dreamy rotting world reminded me of the mirror dimension and the scene where he gets pushed through dimensions by The Ancient One. Visually the sort of warping shifting world around him is something that was very captivating and I feel elements of our film would benefit from that captivating nature – especially some of the backgrounds in that scene.

I drafted up a script for us to work with when doing the animatic and also to help when we get further into production. It wasn’t entirely necessary as we did not have any dialogue in our animation but I’ve found from other projects that it can be quite useful for me to create a script, just to give myself a better and clearer understanding of the story. It helped me to properly lay out all the parts of the story in my mind not just as visuals but the events of each of the scenes and the story that we are trying to tell within each of these moments.

I did some small tester animations of the movement of Aether’s head to show the rest of the group so that they could understand fully what I was trying to describe and explain when I spoke of the movement that Aether’s head would have. I imagined each of the little blobs moving in and out at a different pace and sometimes they would change in size, shape and amount almost like a flickering candle flame. The little flyaway bits would have to be considered as a secondary action and they would move independently of the big blobs actually attached to Aether’s head but if Aether was to turn for example, they would still flow with the rest and keep somewhat in line with them rather than drifting off and away. I think doing these little tests not only helped me but all of us to imagine what Aether’s movement would be like and had us consider how we would implement this secondary action throughout the animation.

I’m very excited for us to now turn our animatic into an actual animation. I’m a bit apprehensive for how we will animate some bits like the head turn and the run cycles as they are not something that I have done before but I think that our story flows really smoothly so I can’t wait to see how it turns out. I love the way that the sound really compliments the visuals already and I think this will work especially well when we have animated it fully. I think with our animatic we will now be able to take the timings from each of these scenes to know how long the scenes that we need to animate have to be so that we don’t go over the 30 second time limit.

Esther experimented with the watercolour backgrounds over the winter break, the 1st and 2nd row middle images were what they had first done in their experiments. We all loved the style of them but felt they were a bit too bright and blue/brown and that they could be darker. Esther then used a different palette of colours (3rd row middle image) and these outcomes were absolutely beautiful. They were a lore more gloomy and dark which was the mood and tone that we were trying to aim for for the forest scenes and they felt quite ominous which I feel will definitely be enhanced when we add the animation, fog and lighting to the scenes. I loved seeing them layer the different trees for the over the head run through the forest and how the scene came together and was built with the different layers of opacity for the trees as well as how adding in slight branches/trees in the very first scene where we see the town wall, really helped to bring together the background. I wish we had more time to experiment with working with these backgrounds in stop motion and do the trees on different layers etc but nonetheless, I love the way that Esther animated the backgrounds digitally and I think they look incredibly effective and can’t wait to see how they look with the animation on the top.

I drew simple turnarounds for Aether and Starlight so that it would be easier for us when animating separately to have a clear understanding and reference point for us to return to. I think as a group we found this helpful as we were able to refer back to a clear full body visual of how each of the characters would look and all the details of their character and bodies as well as their proportions. I think along the way I was worried that all of our styles when animating would not look the same and that the animation wouldn’t be cohesive enough and whilst you can somewhat tell that different people animated different bits (though I may be biased as I have been staring at it for hours as I worked on it) it still comes together incredibly nicely and all those slight differences blend together really well.

We printed out a copy of a picture of our storyboard so that we could break it down into tasks and scenes for each of us to work on and also note down the exact breakdown of the timings for each scene and I think this was one of the best things we did for our own productivity and production. We were quite apprehensive of how much time we would have to get everything animated, coloured and composited as whilst 3 weeks seemed like a lot of time, at the same time it really is not. So we gave ourselves internal deadlines to help our own stress levels as the thought of all we had to do was very overwhelming but breaking it down was really helpful. We decided that we wanted the animation done by Weds 22nd so that we could have until Mon 27th to colour, by not leaving the deadlines up until the last days it meant that we would have some contingency time to finish anything that we hadn’t done and to then also piece everything together, this little bit of extra wiggle room was great as it meant we had prepared ourselves to finish before the deadline and we did in fact manage to do that. On this sheet we also assigned different scenes to each of us so that we knew what we would be animating and we each animated what we felt most comfortable with. I took a lot of the Aether character focused scenes like their head turns and the expression close ups as I felt I would be able to animate it with clarity as I had done test animations of one of these scenes and had an idea of how to do the rest and also understood how we wanted Aether to look. As well as this, we also used the sheet to note down all the timings of scenes from the animatic so we all would know how long we needed our animations to be at maximum and then we could work within that and if necessary edit down afterwards. Then as we went along we ticked off scenes for if they were animated and then if they were coloured and if they were added to the final animation so that we knew exactly what had been done and what was yet to be done. This was really useful for our communication and knowing where each of us was at so that we could check in on each other or ask for help referring to specific scenes. We did later also number all the scenes again for our own convenience. Whilst we were animating, we all sent each other little videos with updates of what we had done and then would ask for feedback on if it looked right and to check that all the details were there and nothing was missing from the scenes and it was also just nice to see how each of us was getting along and see what progress we had been making together.

Maya developed the texture of the fog which we used for the fog itself when it was chasing Aether and Starlight as well as using it for the final scene where both characters are inside the fog. We wanted it to be a purplish colour, so she painted 3 different fogs and created different textures with all of them. My personal favourite was the right hand side one here as I really liked the colours and the hints of blue and red but it would have probably been a bit too dark for the film and the rest of the group was very fond of the texture of the one on the left hand side so we went with this one and then we opted to use the middle one for the inside of the fog and digitally edit it to look a bit brighter. I think the texture of the middle one really worked well for inside the fog as the swirly pattern just feels very cloudy and heavy like how I would imagine inside the depths of a petrifying fog would feel. We had initially wanted to stop motion animate the fog and animate it separately as different pieces which we could have then put together in post. Unfortunately we did not have enough time to do this or to experiment with it and decided that it would be best to still use the textures that Maya had made but to animate them digitally. I wish that we had had the time to at least attempt playing around with stop motion fog but I’m glad that we played it safe so that we would have enough time to focus on animating cleanly and nailing our colouring. I think the fog may be one of my favourite parts, I love the way that the others animated the movement and the way that it turned out.

Animating Aether’s head turn was definitely the hardest part of the scenes which I worked on animating. I was STRUGGLING if I’m being entirely honest, it was just something I could not initially wrap my head around at all. My first attempt at the head turn was okay but Jess pointed out that it didn’t follow enough of an arc and that the flickering parts of Aether’s head should move around rather than turning over their head which were all things that I then attempted to implement in my animation. My second attempt at the head turn was a lot cleaner and the motion felt a lot more realistic and smooth, I then used this as a template to base my final animation of the head turn for the actual scenes on. It was really helpful to make these rough drafts on Procreate which I could then get feedback on as I was able to better understand what I needed to do and the type of arc that I needed to follow with their head. I then was able to use what I had learnt from this to do the full turn from right to left in the scene that came after. Whilst I’m certain that there are many ways that this could be improved, I think it was quite decent and worked well in the scene. It was a lot of fun to make Aether blink in-between the turn as well because I hadn’t considered how their eyes could blink before at all but it worked out very cool.

We realised when we went to animate that we didn’t really have a scale reference for Aether and Starlight in comparison to the forest around them, so I drafted up 3 quick options for what Aether and Starlight could look like in comparison to the size of the trees within the forest as we didn’t want them to look absolute minuscule but we also didn’t want them to look giant. I sent these all to the group and we all thought that the middle version was best as they seemed in the best proportion to their surroundings.

Minor Issues in production:

I don’t have images for all of these struggles but goodness me did they exist. I think one of our hardest challenges was finding a brush that we all liked that we could also use within Photoshop. When I had made my concept art I used Procreate and we discovered that the brushes are not transferable to Photoshop and only Maya and I were able to use Procreate which is why we had opted to colour in Photoshop in the first place. Well technically they are but they don’t export with all of the brush settings and therefore the brush is almost just a stamp version of the Procreate brush which is the biggest inconvenience known to man. We then tried to scour the internet for any similar brushes or simply just Photoshop brushes that had a painterly texture but all the ones that we tried simply did not have the same visual effect that we were going for. In the end, I took one of the attempts at an exported Procreate brush and tinkered with the settings until we had something we liked that had a soft textured edge and still would look bold and vibrant especially with the shading/colouring style we had opted for. As a group we liked the visuals that I had created for the concept art so we wanted to try and replicate that as much as possible with our colouring style in Photoshop. The magnetic lasso and fill tool became my best friend and it made colouring a lot faster and then I discovered all the keyboard key shortcuts you could use to change materials and this was absolutely life changing as it helped me to optimise and streamline the speed of my colouring. I also had not known before this that you could animate in Photoshop and that you could have a timeline up and import videos into it to work with which was surprisingly quite easy. I’ve never been a big fan of Photoshop and have never really had a good grasp or understanding of it but this project really helped me to appreciate and understand the software a lot better.

From my concept art and the other designs, I created a list of all the hex codes for the different characters and the different details and shading on them so we would all be using exactly the same colours and colour palette as we worked so there wouldn’t be discrepancies in that aspect of the visuals. This was really useful as then we had an exact point of reference for all of the colouring for all of the elements and then we could build our own colour palettes on Photoshop which made it incredibly easy to pick and return to the colour that we were using.

We decided that we would use the other fog texture that we didn’t use for the outside of the fog, which Maya had beautifully painted, for the inside of the fog as whilst we considered painting a new background we thought that it would look far more consistent if we had a background of a similar colouring and texture. With Jess’ help, Esther made the fog at the end move and when animating the actual fog movement itself, Maya and Rhianna J rotated the texture that we were inputting so that the fog looked consistently like its texture was changing which was incredibly effective and looked really good in your opinion. I really loved how that part turned out.

Once we finished all the animation and Esther had put it together in After Effects, I wanted to play around with the lighting of the forest scenes but we didn’t really have much time for us to properly go in and light each scene so we tried an array of different light modes and opacities in layers over the top of the scene so it could help tone down the colours and make it all blend together even more. Rhianna J and Esther were not too fond of the more dark overlay so we settled in-between with a more purplish tint and it being relatively light. Given more time I would’ve loved to play around with it more but I think what we did was quite effective and it looked very nice.

 The Out of your head project was something truly challenging and yet seeing it all come together and how our final outcome looks, I can say that every moment of effort and struggle was absolutely worth the hardship. I enjoyed being able to put the skills I developed upon in our rotations, like developing an animatic and the core animation principles, into practice to help further our animation. I think our group worked really well together, from the very beginning brainstorming ideas from the word cloud up until the final moments of composition and actual animation production, it was very easy for us to listen to each other’s ideas and feel comfortable with making minor and major changes throughout the whole process, we supported each other and I could have been happier to work with the team of people that I did. There were moments where we had doubts about how well it would all fit together with our mixture of traditional watercolour backgrounds and 2d animation but also with us each animating individual scenes rather than someone doing keyframes another doing inbetweens another colouring etc. But I found that despite our apprehension it all came together beautifully and was very effective in conveying our narrative. I think that initially for the story for our animation we were far too ambitious, we wanted to tell this grand story of personal change and growth but make it a metaphor through this rotting and decaying world and Aether’s frantic hurry to save everything around them, and whilst I still think it would be an epic narrative to tell, it would not be effectively presented in 30 seconds of animation and so I think the story of Aether and Starlight and Aether’s desperation and heartbreak and finally acceptance of them both turning to stone was much simpler but still held a lot of our original ideas and sentiment. Whilst I am incredibly biased, I think there was something beautiful about the story not having a necessarily happy ending, despite all their efforts both Aether and Starlight do end up as stone in the end but they’re together and they’ll be admired and looked up to for years to come. I liked how easy it was for our group to adapt to changing our story overtime, I personally get quite attached to my initial ideas and find it hard to be willing to change details but as a group we came up with compromises and found ways to still keep the characters and aesthetic which we had built up for our narrative and yet make a story which would flow better and be much easier conveyed to an audience who don’t live inside our minds and understand the levels of nuance which we were wanting to portray. I do think that one of the hardest parts of this project was definitely creating the concept and story we wanted to tell, despite being willing to make changes, having certain aspects of our ideas shot down or for them to not come across like we thought they would was disheartening at times and made it hard for us to move on and start again on various versions of our stories, but creating various loglines as a group and each writing different takes on the story and how we thought certain parts of it could go definitely helped us a lot to come to the final concept. The process of creating the animatic was a part of the project I really enjoyed as once we had this clear concept we were able to properly put it into visuals which is my favourite part of a project – the character and environment designing. I loved how initially we all drew our own versions of certain panels and parts of the storyboard as we all got to bring our own ideas in for how each scene would look and then be able to cut scenes or certain visuals to make the story more succinct, working on post it notes definitely made this process a lot easier. When it came to animating, I think as a group we were quite apprehensive about our skill sets and how ambitious we had been with our storyboard and animatic and then if we could pull this off in animation. We learnt new tools in Photoshop, Blender and After Effects as well as new animation skills – like I learnt to do a (half decent) head turn and Esther, a run cycle. We did have to settle for not doing stop motion animated backgrounds and fog and cut that corner, as with only 3 weeks we would not have had enough time and it would have hindered us but I do think just using the hand painted backgrounds and fog texture still gave the visuals that we had desired. Given more time I would have loved to play around with the lighting of the forest scenes more and individually light the scenes rather than having a more general purplish overlay on it and it would have been nice to be able to animate in more of a production line way where we each did a different part and I wonder if we had done this if everything would have been even more cohesive but I think each of us working in the one style and animating separately was still very effective and came together better than expected. I think it worked particularly well as when we decided to split the animation up like this, we kept track on our storyboard of what timings we needed for each scene, when we wanted things like the animation and the colouring done by and who would do which bits, I think our organisational skills were really effective for us and helped us keep track of what needed doing so we wouldn’t get overly stressed about having enough time to finish animating and have enough time to compile it all with sound. I genuinely think one of the heightened struggles was trying to find the right colouring style as we had such strong concept art but couldn’t put the same brush into procreate but with a lot of tinkering I made a brush which turned out to be very effective for the visuals we wanted. Despite the moments of stress where we thought we couldn’t get the animation or the story right or that we wouldn’t be finished on time or that some kind of visual element wouldn’t work, I think our animation came together beautifully and I’m proud of the short that we created and how well we worked as a group and communicated clearly with each other on what we wanted.