At the beginning of the year, we were told to conjure some potential ideas for our degree show. As Eve and I were walking home, we started talking about making a landfill set and displaying everyone's work in it. However, we were too embarrassed to pitch this, so we decided to create a project about this instead.
We knew we wanted to create some sort of set, and something that we are both interested in doing is stop-motion animation. The concept of 'wonder', I would say, goes hand in hand with fun, so we decided to have some fun with this project and attempt to create a stop motion animation.
We started a sketchbook in which we could both write our ideas. By taking notes and doodling freely, we can use this book both as a means of keeping track of our ideas but also as a form of media exploration.
We started by brainstorming and exploring the potential stories that could be told in a landfill.
We were originally set on writing our own brief for this, since we had a fairly clear idea of what we wanted to do for this project - a stop-motion animation that tells a story in a landfill. However, after looking through the briefs, I found that the brief below felt congruent with what we wanted to say through the landfill.
The original conversation about landfills started with us thinking about where art fits into the world.
We were looking at multiple directions in which this could go. We discussed a more ecology-based angle on the animation. We also brainstormed a lot about the role of creative people in the world, and being an artist in a consumer society.
One book that we looked at during the idea generation process was Mouni Feddag's 'Illustration: What's the pint" which discusses the point of illustration in the world, which is something that we are also interested in exploring during this animation.
We started looking at different animations
As we were exploring the ecology angle of things, I proposed we look at Bakshi's Wizards, which takes places inside a ruined world.
At this point, we started moving away from the ecology angle, and more toward the artists' role in the world, which is a more relevant topic to us at this point. We also discussed this great book which Eve has read, where a factory is used as a methaphor for capitalism, which is similar to what we are attempting with the landfill.
Two of the doodles that we made on the shared sketchbook ended up turing into our main characters : the trashbag which represents the artist and the businessman who represents the need to make money in society, who oppose eachother. As we were trying to plan out what these characters do in the landfill, this billionaire guy who lost his bitcoin memory stick came to mind, so we decided to roll with it and embrace that as being the reason our businessman was also in the landfill.
As we were developing the story, we realised that it would make sense if these two characters were inside the mind of one person, the artist who is thorn between the wish to make art and the need to make money, the landfill being inside his mind.
The whole animation would consist of a pretty simple dialogue. Eve came up with the ending of the animation, which would consist of the trashbag ripping itself apart, symbolising the death of the inner artist. I then suggested that the businessman should find the memory stick inside the ripped trashbag, suggesting the exploitation of artists in society.
Since we kept getting confused about the order of events as we were discussing things but not writing them cronologically, Eve created a storyboard.
Since we knew this whole animation would take quite a bit of time, we decided to get started!
We came up with this initial scene while we were still discussing the central theme being ecolofy, but we decided to keep it even as we switched direction, since, even though it is no longer the main thing we are discussing within this animation, it is stilll important to bring about due to the inherently ecological problem that the landfill nraises.
This take went pretty smoothly! We tried to move around all of the elements for a dynamic look, then added eyes to them using photoshop timeline. We then started trying to edit this part together, trying to figure out how to add starts using after effects. I think it went pretty well.
After this first try at animating, we were ready to start building the set. We used a sturdy piece of card for the sky so that we wouldn't have to worry about it bending at all.
After building the set, we decided to take a moment to evaluate how it looks. It was a bit of a mish-mash, so we decided to think about how to make it more coherent. A stop motion we have recently watched together is 'Memoirs of a snail'. It begins with a panning shot of a snail collection. Although it is meant to look like a bunch of trash, it is still fairly homogenous. This is probably due to the similar material used to build the whole thing, as well as an added filter over top.
We started thinking about how we could also make our landfill more consistent looking. Colour grading could be done later, but for now we just tried to keep to a restrained colour scheme of trash, while not adding different trash for other places. We also stuck to playing around with mostly paper.
Puppet making
I stitched the trash guy by hand, using random scraps of black fabric which I have collected over the years, and used a real trash bag as its filling. I tried to build him with the fact that he will be ripped apart in mind, leaving a plane to rip into for our final scene. His face was made using a piece of ceramic that we find in the recycling room. His legs are made of wire and rope, with his feet (and arms, which will be attached for the final scene) being plasticine, so that we have some elements to play around with claymation, which is more expressive, while still having the puppets be solid and easier to move around (since plasticine gets really brittle when it is cold, and the studio is always freezing, I do not think it would have been wise to use too much plasticine, lest we want to remake the characters ever time we start filming again).
While making the first puppet, I felt like they were a bit too flimsy, and the ratio of body mass to leg thickness and stability was quite skewed, especially the businessman, who has a heavy head. I consulted with Eve to decide how we should proceed, but we did not have any ideas on how to make them more stable, since, considering their shapes, they would probably never be able to stand on their own. With that in mind, I proceeded with making the puppets. Although I had doubts, seeing as they were not very stable, in the end, I decided to continue making them, since, looking at the storyboard, I feel like we will not need them to stand, as most shots are close-ups of them.
Since the trashbag guy took quite long to make, I decided that I needed a different way of creating the businessman, which would require a whole suit. Luckily, Annie let me borrow her sewing machine. I have never used a modern sewing machine before, so I was happy to have the opportunity to try it out. Since they are in a landfill, I didn't try to make the suit too perfect-looking. Since it was my first attempt at machine-sewing, it came out appropriately distressed. Since we only had one piece of ceramic for the trash guy, the businessman was created from some air dry clay( which is why it was so heavy).
As we were preparing to try to shoot some scenes on the set, we realised that we are unable to connect the camera to the laptop. While we were thinking about a possible solution, we took lots of pictures of the set and characters.
We also decided to practice stop-motion by doing some test shots on my phone. These are really silly and not of very good quality, but they were fun to do.
Whilst we were wondering what to do about our camera not connecting to the laptop, I decided to try doing a test shot to see if we could potentially take pictures and piece them together, instead of using Dragonframe. Although this would mean that we cannot use onion skins, if we didn't find a way to solve the issue, this would be our best chance. Unfortunately, this was not very successful due to the fact that the camera would only save pictures as camera raws, which, considering the large amount of pictures we had, would take ages to convert. This meant that making the animation without being able to connect it to the laptop would not be possible.
While still thinking about what to do about the camera, we decided on doing the dialogue cards, since this part is fairly straightforward, and would be done using the rig and the other camera.
Since they will inevitably take up quite a bit of time in the animation, they should have quite a bit of movement to not be boring.
I decided that the best way to make the text move would be to write the alphabet a couple of times, to then create an entire wiggling alphabet, which could be used to create all the dialogue. By animating the whole alphabet, rather than each line of dialogue, we could edit the text more easily, as well as keep it more consistent by having all the repeated letters be identical.
We used a piece of cardboard as the base of our type, to integrate it with the rest of the animation. We surrounded the cardboard with trash, so that the dialogue cards would look like the landfill floor. To create some visual interest, we created a circle of wiggling soda tabs, leaving space for the text inside.
The title cards get progressively more trashed as the animation progresses, reaching peak dirtyiness at the climax of the story, when the trash guy rips himself apart, around the 'I have so much trash!' line.
I then masked each letter in After Effects, and pieced together all the lines of dialogue, splitting some of them to try and get tacing right and create some drama, and decided what stage of trashed each line fits into. Since we have not shot a lot of scenes at this point, I mostly used the storyboards to figure out how to pace the text that needs to be split.
It is hard to establish what order to do things in; especially when our other pieces of equipment are not working, and we need to decide whether to wait and fix it or to move on with everything else that we need to do.
Having to present our idea helped a lot since we got to hear the opinion of somebody who didn't know anything about our animation.
After presenting, we took a moment to think about our feedback and how to respond to it, focusing on ways to make it clearer in particular.
This was the first time in the project where me and Eve disagreed on something important to the project, as I believe that the fact that the whole action happens inside somebody's mind is quite important and should be made a little bit more obvious, but she preferred that we leave it ambiguous and that we rely on the messages inside the landfill to convey that this is all a sort of introspection. While I agree that the hints in the set effectively hint that there is something more going on, and that the landfill has some deeper meaning, I think it is practically impossible for someone to extrapolate that this is happening inside a person's brain just from that, which was evident from the feedback that we got.
We went through a few ideas on how we could make it clearer, trying to balance making the message clear, while not being too literal, such as filming a person's real hand in a shot at the end pushing off the planets, or showing a persons' face at the end, in a different style of animation. In the end, we decided to keep to really simple, and to make a tunnel going from the Earth's eye into the landfill. This was partially inspired by the opening sequence of the movie 'Eraserhead' (which Eve recently watched), which is a movie about the mental state of this one guy, so in the first shot, it is almost like we are being brought inside his mind, where the events are skewed by his distress.
I think that this translates the idea of it being inside someone's head, as the Earth is a representation of people, and directly zooming inside should suggest the idea of 'inside someone's head', without making it too obvious. Also, the eyes are a window to the soul? (cliche but effective). Moreover, this allowed us to tie the beginning bit with the rest of the animation, which felt a bit disjointed since they are made in such different styles.
Also, since we changed the beginning just a bit, we did not have to plan out anything drastically different, which, I think, is a good decision due to the limited time that we have, and because we already have a couple different styles of animation, so adding something new would probably confuse it even more.
I feel like this was a good way to compromise, as we changed the beginning to be clearer, without overly explaining it. I feel like this addition, paired with the latter scenes that exemplify the contrast between business and art, should hopefully be enough to get our message across.
FIRST SHOT
Since neither me or Eve have worked on stop motion animation using 3d objects before, there was a lot of trial and error when we first started filming using the set.
Since the first shot(which would consist of a continuous establishing shot of the landfill) was the longest one, we decided to start with that.
In the beginning, we attempted to do this by taking a lot of shots while moving the camera across the whole set. Doing this, we encountered a lot of problems while trying to make it smooth.
We tried quite a few different methods, mostly playing around with how we moved the camera. Between shots, we needed to: zoom in/ out, as well as slowly turn the camera. We tried doing this separately: zooming on one shot, and turning the camera in the next one, but this made the end result quite choppy.
Eve made a tiny version of the businessman to use for the far-away shots
Since that was not working, we decided to try zooming in and moving the camera at the same time, which gave slightly better results, but not by a long shot.
It was also during this stage that we realised what we had gotten ourselves into.
When creating all the set and props, we got really carried away in the fun of making them. In the end, our set had a lot of details, and while we started it by glueing the biggest pieces down, we also had a lot of tiny parts that we added later that kept falling or moving, meaning that we constantly had to redo whole shots. However, since we planned to film both the zoomed-in and zoomed-out shots on the same set, we had to keep the small parts unglued so that they could be removed later on.
the tentative fall of the tiny trash bag escalates my despair
After many attempts, we took a second to rethink this shot, and we decided to try and film it in one take instead. The biggest issue with this was the moment that the character comes into frame and starts moving, which we still need to animate. To address this, the plan is to keep the camera perfectly still after we finish the panning video, so that we can start the stop motion part of the shot immediately after, to minimise how much the shots need to be adjusted when editing them together.
We experimented with how tight the tilt tripod head was, which affected how much we could swivel it. To make it all glide smoothly, we needed the tripod to be fairly loose, but that meant that when the time came to stop filming, it would be very hard to keep it in the same position. I also kept tripping over it and moving it right at the end, so we had to retake the video multiple times.
our many takes - somtehing to think about in the future is to label the videos properly, as we were struggling a lot when trying to find the final one
firts attempts at filming the first shot
last attempt
On a more positive note, the more times we retook a shot, the better it generally got, as we got used to handling the camera.
We were also experiencing a lot of issues with the focus of the camera, since we had a lot of rapid zoom-ins and zoom-outs. We tried out both manual and auto focus, but we could not manage to get it right, especially since this had to be done in one long take.
With 'Memoir of a Snail' still in our minds, we took inspiration from the opening shot of the movie, which shows the snail collection of the main character while playing the opening credits.
After many many many takes and accepting that we would probably never get the whole shot to be completely in focus, we decided to embrace that, and use the establishing shot as opening credits, adding text over all the parts which were out of focus, to make it look more purposeful and to distract from the mistakes.
In hindsight, I think we got too excited to start filming and jumped into it too quickly. While we looked at examples of stop motion animation in the early planning stages of the project, we never sat down to research how to produce one, nor did we look up any techniques specific to shooting this kind of stop motion animation. While going with the flow and having fun with it lent us the ability to explore the medium without any self-imposed restraints of doing things 'the right way', it definitely also made this process a whole lot longer than it could have been, as we started learning everything from scratch. When filming the next scenes, I feel like it would be good to look more into the making of stop motion animation, to at least get an idea of how they would be done in a professional environment.
Up next, we started on the scenes of the tiny businessman digging around. This is also where a few more problems with our set began to make themselves known.
Initially, I wanted to place the tiny man in the middle of the set, where there were a lot more small trash elements that were of a more appropriate scale. However, because the trash was too similar in colour to the puppet, he had to be moved. We ended up placing him into the orange area of the set, where he could pop more.
After taking the shot as good as we could manage, there was still a slight difference in the takes, so we decided to ad a popping animation, to make the abrupt transition more intentional, as well as to distract from it.
I feel like me and Eve also have quite different approaches of starting projects, as I would have felt more comfortable if we spent longer planning and thinking about how we would do this, whereas she prefers to figure it all out whilst experimenting; I feel like this made the project pretty balanced as our different ways of going about a project melded together pretty well, reaching a balance between planned, while still being spontaneous.
But, we also discovered that we tend to enhance eachothers impulsiveness. For example, at one pint, a fly entered the shot, and we both rushed to try to get it in, and we only stopped to think that it is not a very good idea after.
We ended term 2 with an animation of the hands wriggling trough the trash. This was quite difficult to film, since we needed to try and scoop out the trash with the hands, which meant that someone had to hold them constantly throughout the takes, which gets physically exhausting.
RETURNING
We started term 2 b going to the foley studio and recording lost of trash sound to give Ella(who is creating the sound for us) plenty of fun stuff to work with
After coming back to this project, we realised that one of the important cables to connect the camera for the set was missing, which was quite a big predicament since we did not get any good shots of the puppets.
But this was not our last hurdle! Eve misplaced the memory stick (effectively becoming the businessman in this scenario) , so we lost some of the scenes. The way we solved this was by downloading it off of our presentation ppt, meaning that it ended up being significantly lower quality than the rest of the clips. But, since this is also the only shot that is completely different from the rest (the earth and sun), i think it could be marked off as a stylistic choice.
To make sure that this does not happen again, we started a onedrive, which we cannot loose.
But the issues do not end, since while we met up over the weekend to work on the animation in dryden , the file crashed and we lost a lot of progress, so it's safe to say we were not in high spirits coming back.
Until finding a solution to the cable, we resumed the scenes that could be taken with the rig camera. We created a cut out that looks like the trash man, so that we could film a zoomed in take of him.
We kept going, finishing all the scenes that could be filmed from above. Since the lack of cable was already an issue, we got all of the shots we could out of the way right now. We filmed a lot of simple trash shuffling takes, which we could use to transition between the shots, while also potentially using them for layering.
While probably not hoe the professionals do it, we discovered that the best way to film the hand takes is for me to put my hands through the sleeves of the character and to hold them by the wrists. My hands are small enough to fit inside the sleeves, but due to having to grip them tightly, this gets exhausting really fast, so these takes had to be quite short.
Last week
We borrowed another cable!
For the first time during this project we split up due to the lack of time. Eve started editing the animation together, while I stayed upstairs and continued finishing all the scenes. This meant that we had a delay in communication. This is probably more similar to how this would work in a professional studio, so it was good practice, however, since it is the first time we were both working on really important things separately, it took some getting used to.
Even though it was a little difficult getting used to working alone at first, it did make me realise that we have been doing quite a few one man jobs in two, and that perhaps, this had the potential to be finished much earlier. However, we would not have had as much fun separated!
Doing the stop motion scenes by myself was also more difficult. The puppets never super sturdy, but we also did not take much care of them, as we just threw them around, so, by this point, I had to rely a lot on leaning them against the set. A lot of falling was involved too, making this a bit longer than it should have. I tried to get lots of differnt close ups, so that there were plenty of different takes that could be used., without the need to repeat any takes in the animation.
I thought it was a shame that we went through alll the trouble of creating clay hands and feet, only to not have done any claymation, so, although we were on a time crunch, I thought it would be worth it to have at least a couple elements of clay animation sprinkled thorughout.
We then reunited to film the very last shots, where 2 people were needed, specifically the shots at the very end, such as the hand with the memory stick, and the ones where the business man needs to be help up.
In the initial plan, the trash guy was supposed to be ripped apart, for the trash to fall out. However, since he has been here for a long time, we did not have the heart to destroy him. Instead I made animated an explosion coming out of him, so that he did not have to torn apart in real life.
Initially, the plan was that the animation would end with a real trash bag getting flown away by the wind, flying away towards the sky. This would have been a nice ending to further emphasize the fact that this is all happening inside someone's mind. Me and Eve spend an hour outside trying to take this shot, however, after numerous failures, we decided to just end the animation on a shot of the memory stick.
This was the best shot of the trashbag that we got.
We also tried out using some textures over top of the animation.
While Eve was colour grading the animation, I edited together our poster using one of our favourite images.
After Eve was done colour grading and Ella sent us the sound, the animation was done! We did not discuss much with Ella in terms of what we would like for the animation, and I think giving her freedom over it worked out great as she did amazing! The sound completely change sthe tone of the animation.
Final!
This project has been incredibly fun and I feel like I learned so much over the course of it all. I really enjoyed developing the whole narrative with Eve and building the whole set together!
Working with Eve has been amazing, I feel like there was never a time when we have gotten completely stuck on something. Even though we faced plenty of challenges, we were still able to complete the animation. Trying to tackle completing the project as well as learning how to animate props has been a challenge that has tested my time management abilities. We spent a lot of time re-doing scenes in the beginning, as there was a lot of trial and error, meaning that other thing had to be rushed.
I also learned the importance of keeping track of my things, and generally staying organised. I think quite a few of our issues could have been prevented if we were more organised, both with our time, and with the space that we shared, which seemed to eat up our equipment.
Technical skills wise, I learned so much from the whole experience, as over the course of the project, I feel like I got better at using a camera. We also got to use so many cool NTU facilities, such as the foley studio, while also learning how to use professional stop-motion software like dragonframe. I feel prepared to start another one!
Overall I am proud of both of us for managing to finish this!
