What On Earth!? premiered last week at the Rep Theatre
in Dundee. Here's a little edit of some of the footage I took
at the dress rehearsals...
The video below, Joan
Clevillé performing Duck's Dream during the dress rehearsals, is my
favourite part of the show I think, and probably the most successful
bit of collaboration between dance, choreography
and animation in the project.
Both Joan and Solène
Weinachter (who
performs the same part in the other cast of the show) really
bring the piece to life and I love the way they seamlessly react
to what's going on behind them - it's better than I could have
hoped for thanks to them, and of course Sally Owen who choreographed
this section. Thanks guys!
Needless to say, there were one or two technical issues to sort
out during the technical rehearsals, but I guess that's what
these things are for :) The biggest (and scariest the first time
I saw it) was that the projector seemed to want to horizontally
stretch all of my animations. This was probably caused by the
wide angle
lense being used and the fact that the projector didn't seem
to support
the
resolution I had rendered everything in. Not to worry though,
I ended up simply squashing everything in Final Cut
before rendering it out again so when it was stretched by the
projector
this time it just looked as it should do - not an ideal solution,
but it was all I had time to do unfortunately.
Another slightly trickier problem to figure out was some quite
ugly looking areas of the projection that appeared as
glaring
white
spots in certain areas of some of the animations. It turned
out that these were 'hot spots' on the screen, where
the projector bounces any particularly bright parts of the image
back off the white of the screen at the viewer.
We tried to fix it by playing about with the colour and brightness
options
(as
well as pretty much every other setting, out of desperation)
on the projector, but I ended up having to adjust some of the
brighter
layers in one of the original animations (the clouds in Duck's
Dream) and re-render the whole thing. Apparently this is a common
problem
though that could also have been solved by hanging some white
gauze in front of the screen to diffuse the light slightly. You
live
and learn :)
Those were the only major problems though, the rest of
the setting up process was (for me anyway) pretty relaxed. The
lighting
designer,
Emma Jones, did a great job of lighting the whole show in just
a couple of days (so many cues!) and she was really sympathetic
to the animations and made sure they all worked as well as they
possibly could with all that light bouncing about. Thanks Emma!
The show as a whole went down really well with the kids, lots
of random laughs and giggles at bits of the show that didn't
seem that funny to us usually, but that's all good :) There are
of course parts of it that I would do differently if I'd had
more time to work on them, mainly to add more detail to certain
bits
such
as the end of the Shadery section where you hear the sound of
the trees being chopped down - it would've been nice to play
around a bit more with that transition, as well as a few others,
but it's always the case that there's stuff you'd like to change
I think. Sally and Janet did an amazing job of
pulling the whole piece together during
the couple of days they had in the theatre leading up to the
first performance. It was really interesting to see them refine
all the transitions and connections between scenes and I was
quite surprised at how much of a difference these seemingly subtle
changes made to the piece as a whole. I think they plan to keep
refining and editing it before the show hopefully goes on tour
later in the year...
It's always a bit sad when a great project like this comes to
an end, but it's been such a pleasure to work with everyone
at the Scottish Dance Theatre - huge thanks to everyone there,
especially Sally and Janet for being such generous collaborators,
and of course all of the amazingly talented dancers who brought
the show to life with such energy.
I hope you've enjoyed reading
my ramblings about the whole thing
too. I'll shut up about it now :D
This bit of animation serves as a very slow transition
as the Seedling part of the dance leads into Shadery. As the
sycamore seed falls to the ground, a pile of pillows on the
stage will sprout as the dancer slowly emerges, forming
part of the forest that grows behind her. That background will
then remain for the next part of the show, which is a more lively
forest dance.
The Sycamore seed is made from a couple of bits of acetate and
some paper stuck together with blu tac, and then hung and spun
in front of a lightbox. That footage was then taken into After
Effects, edited into a loop, cleaned up frame by frame in Photoshop
and then animated on a path as it decends to the floor. Here's
a quick breakdown of that process...
The transition to the forest needed to be very slow to suit the
music and the pace of the dance, and it was good to play around
with the negative space and how different parts of the composition
are revealed over time. I'm looking forward to seeing this bit
on stage as I reckon it could work pretty well. Hopefully...
This is the first bit of animation near the start of
the show when one of the dancers turns the TV on from their bed.
Hopefully it'll elicit a scream or two from the kiddiewinkles
:D
This bit was fairly straightforward to put together
once I had the great voiceover to work with, and it was quite
refreshing to come from the epic Duck's Dream to something releatively
quick and painless to produce. The only technical consideration
was the positioning of the TV - it was originally quite low down
the screen but because there would be a bed on the stage at this
point, we needed the TV to be further up in the composition so
that the audience at the front would still be able see it. Not
much of a problem... Just trying to think of stuff to say really,
aren't
I?
Anyway, animation production is pretty much done and dusted now,
just waiting to get into the theatre for tech and dress rehearsals
next week. I'll keep posting about any stuff I've not mentioned
yet, and I'll hopefully get some footage of the performances
up on
here
too.
If you're in Dundee, you can see the show on Wednesday the
11th April at
2pm
or Thursday
the
12th
at 11am at the Rep.
It's also showing in Stirling on the 18th of April and in Banchory
on the 28th of April. There will be
more
shows later in the year around the uk and europe as well I think...
This is a short piece of animation used as surtitles
for the sing language section of What On Earth!?
It was a tricky one, this, and I'm still not entirely sure it's
going to work in combination with the dancers. I went with the
OHP style as it felt like a good fit, and a good way to keep
the images simple and direct and fluid. But it's possible that
it still might draw too much attention away from the signing
dancers. We might get around this by playing with the positioning
of the
projection - perhaps if it's filling the screen behind the dancers,
almost silhouetting them maybe, you'll be able to take in both
elements at the same time. We'll
be looking into this soon when we get in to rehearse at
the Rep.
I still love doing this style of animation though - the best
way to do it, I've discovered, is to basically make it look rubbish
while you're drawing the acetates, film all the basic movements
on the OHP, and then try and salvage it in After Effects, adding
elements
to
try and improve the shoddy work you did earlier. You'll never
get it to look good, but it looks deliberately bad, at least
:)
From quite early on in this project I was aware that there was
going to be a fairly hefty chunk of animation that I'd have to
tackle at some point. It came in the form of a dream, Duck's
Dream, set to the Beatles' track 'Because', and I struggled with
it a bit, as usual. Here it is in it's final form,
before
I go on
to moan about it...
I say final form, but there is a key element to the whole thing
missing at the moment, as with all the other animations for
this project that I've talked about here so far - the dancer(s)!
This
piece, more so than the
others, doesn't really work or make much sense without the
performances
of Joan
Clevillé or
Solène
Weinachter (each playing Duck in the two casts of WoE!?) making
the link between themselves and the animation. In the final
performance Duck anticipates the pylon rushing towards him,
looks down with
a big grin on his face when he first takes off, and is heartbreakingly
sad
at the end as he realises he's stuck in the dirty, oily water
as all his mates fly away above him.
Joan performed it in front
of the projection for me the other night in the studio, and he, Solène and
Sally have adapted the choreography from the initial version
I was
working
with to make it work beautifully with the animation - I can't wait
to see the final thing in the Rep!
My initial idea for the look of Duck's Dream
was a bit more experimental than
it ended
up being,
and
I spent
quite
a
bit
of
time
(possibly too
much) trying to make it work. I really wanted to try and push
it to make it look a bit different, so I eventually came up with
this projection mapping
idea,
with
200-odd little trees for Mr Duck to fly over...
It took me two or three days to get from the sketch above to
the image below, but it didn't really work as I'd hoped. The
idea was to treat the trees as a 3D background that I could animate
with the projector to create the illusion that the ground was
passing below, in combination with some hand held camera movements
between the trees and the vertical projection screen behind them,
and some After Effects compositing. There
were a few problems that cropped up though...
You
can't really see it in any of the images I took, but the tripod
holding the projector up just took up too much space in my already
cramped living room/studio, so I couldn't really get the best
camera angles or movements without getting in the way of the
projection. The nature of the triangle set up meant if I wanted
it to look
like the trees were scrolling from top to bottom (which I did),
the movement had to be very stop/start, unless they were moving
every
one or
two frames which would've been too fast for the nature of the
piece. This staccato movement also doesn't combine very well
with the smooth movements inherent in any computer based compositing
or animation, as you can see in the horrible looking tests below.
Of course, there are work arounds to these problems, but it
was getting to the point where I had to make a decision as
to whether
to carry on with this and try to make it work (and possibly waste
more time), or just cut my losses and go with a more traditional/conventional
approach.
I decided on the latter, obviously, and looking back I think
I made the right decision for the piece - the slow,
controlled
movements
and compositions
that
you're able to produce in After Effects are a much better fit
with the music and choreography than the projection idea or the
rougher style
I've been adopting for other parts of the project would've been.
I'll maybe go into more detail about the final version of the
dream at some point.
It's really hard to get your head around working
on something that looks so small on your little laptop screen
that will end up being projected to four and a half by eight
metres. How much detail do you need? Can
you get away with big blocky flat areas of colour? If something
goes really fast across the screen, it'll be, like, super-fast
on a big screen won't it?
It turns out that you probably don't need to worry too much about
those kinds of things. I was worrying about those kinds of things
quite a lot, but I think on the whole the projection tests we
did at the Rep the other day seemed to work pretty well.
It's possible that I was just a bit over excited about seeing
my work on a massive screen, but I did have a big list of
stuff to look out for, and most of it was ok.
I was mostly worried about compression. The worst part of any
project for me is the process of rendering the final thing and
trying to get a not-ridiculously-big file size while avoiding
ridiculously-badly-compressed-and-ugly-looking-image-quality. My
perfectionist brain struggles to handle even the tiniest little
imperfections that compression throws up - but it was fine! You
can't even see
these things when it's projected, and even if you can, they look
deliberate to anybody else but me!
In short, stop worrying, it'll all be ok in the end.
It was good to get Quench (the fairly big chunk
of animation for the Scottish Dance Theatre's new production
that I spoke about last time) out of the way. A visual style
was beginning to come together, so I felt this would be a good
time to try and
nail
down some of the ideas that Sally and Janet had talked about
for the rest of the show.
The storyboard below (you can click on it for
the full version) is a pretty rough outline of the whole show,
minus the bits that
don't involve animation. I won't go into the details of the sequence
as I'll talk about the individual sections when I get round to
them - it was really just an attempt to get a handle on
the contents of each scene, how they relate to the choreography,
and also to get a sense of the flow of colour throughout the
piece.
I'll
admit, I was struggling to
get my head around what was
happening with
some parts of the choreography and how some of the
transitions between scenes would work. The
process of developing the storyboard (along with a more detailed
script and list of actions for each scene) over the course
of a week or so, in
between other
things, really helped pinpoint the problem areas for me so
I could go on to discuss them with Sally at a later date.
I
usually try to avoid doing storyboards for my personal work
(boring boring boring - I'd rather just animate stuff), but
it was
pretty much essential for this project, and has proved very
useful as a reference point for later discussions.
If you have a look at the whole storyboard you might notice
a fairly hefty chunk of it devoted to a dream sequence. This
is
what I went on to develop next, as it was probably the most
complicated and detailed piece of animation that needed to
be produced for
the show - I'll tell you how I wasted a couple of precious
weeks on that one next time :)
For the past few months I’ve
been working with the Scottish
Dance Theatre on some animated projections
for their upcoming show for kids, ‘What On Earth!?’.
The project is still in production, but the lovely people at
SDT have been kind enough to allow me to blog about my involvement
as we continue to work away on it. Over the coming weeks I’ll
be posting some videos, images and notes about the processes
I’ve been going through throughout the
course of the project, so keep an eye out for
new stuff
:)
'What on Earth is a curious nocturnal
journey full of surprise encounters with strange
flora
and fauna – dreaming
of planet Earth. This dynamic, physically adventurous, by turns
spooky,
funny and thought provoking roller coaster is for children from
6 – 11 but fun for all the family'
I was really excited when Janet Smith and Sally Owen (who
are collaborating on the choreography for the piece) first
got in touch with me about the possibility of my getting involved
with
the project. The prospect of having my animations projected
as part of such a well respected and talented dance company was,
needless to say, irresistible :)
I've
never done anything like this before, certainly nothing
on this scale, so I've been feeling my way along to a certain
extent, and I thought the best thing to do initially would
be to get invloved as early as possible in the choreography
process.
Sally and Janet were
keen
to get me into the first few rehearsal sessions, so I basically
just sat and observed them to try and get a feel for what they
were developing. It was really interesting to see them at work,
and their process struck
me as
being a
bit like animation, only in extreme fast forward - both practices
are concerned
with movement, or more specifically the
control of movement,
and the dancers would be constantly performing their own individual
movements, refining
them,
subtly changing
and perfecting them in front of the mirror and with each other
- something I found myself strangely identifying with, despite
being a
clumsy,
uncoordinated lump of a man. I remain very jealous
of their ability to make such swift changes to their animations.
It's not fair :(
Quench
Over the next couple of weeks or so the choreography began
to take shape, and the first section that seemed to emerge
was based around
a duck character that Sally had been developing (the piece would later be christened
'Quench'). It was to be set in a swamp, a bottle of water
would be on centre stage and the Duck would
try
to
figure
out how to pick it up. Once he did so, the swamp would drain and dry up
and some
strange, thirsty, wiggly creatures would slither on to harass the Duck and eventually
help re-hydrate the swamp scene.
This was one of the first images I came up with.
Not really a swamp is it? But I liked the idea of the reflected
flower in the water, and for some reason I was keen to use sand
in some way (that's what the textured background is). This idea
developed a bit more, and I came up with the version of the swamp
that you
can see in the video below, which also includes a very rough
outline/animatic of the whole section.
In hindsight, I think I jumped the gun slightly with this.
I was a bit too eager to bring something to the table, and
as a result ended up bringing something a bit bland and in
the wrong aspect ratio. As with most of these things though,
at least it was a starting point, and I hadn't spent too much
time on it.
I think I find it hard sometimes, when I'm actually
being paid to do my own style of work, to let go of that horrible
instinct to sanitise and clean up all the rough edges that you
tend to have to do with normal commercial work sometimes. Sally
and Janet reminded me that they were hiring me for my rough
edges
(which was really nice to hear actually :) so it was time to
get the OHP and marker pens out!
This is a quick mock up image I did in about half
an hour just to loosen up a bit. I was far more happy with this
style.
If
it was to be animated, the different layers would all be moved
quite roughly by hand under the camera and then composited in
after effects,
a technique I wanted to develop and refine for the new version
of Quench
and probably other sections of the show as
well.
Once we had decided upon the aspect ratio (a decision that is
perhaps more complicated and tricky than it sounds - because
the show is to be toured at various venues throught the UK and
Europe,
the stage size will range from the fairly big to the relatively
small, so we were cautious, maybe slightly overly so, about
deciding on the final size and ratio of the screen. Better to
be safe than sorry though) I was able to go ahead and produce
Quench version 2.
So in keeping with the OHP style, I came up with this mock up
and asked Sally and Janet to approve it before I went
ahead with any animation.
An initial version of this background loop included some slightly
over the top movement of the foreground reeds/straws, where I
was blowing them in an attempt to simulate a light breeze. It
didn't work, so I just gave them some much more subtle swaying
movement in after effects. The rest of the movement is all done
with acetates, manipulated and filmed on an overhead projector.
I've put together a quick shot breakdown of some of the elements
which you can see below.
The transition to the dried up swamp
at the end works better with the little bit
of
crunchy
sound design I've done for it, which I'll hopefully get uploaded once the rest
of
the section (where the ground re-hydrates) is properly finished.
The music for the piece actually pauses at this point too, as we felt that
the
animation
would need a brief bit of space for the consequences of the Duck's actions
to properly hit home :D
The timing seemed to work pretty well when Quench
was
performed
alongside the animation at
the
Rep
in
November
as part of Backstage Pass (an event that the SDT have put on the last couple
of years where you get a glimpse behind the scenes at the Rep and are treated
to excerpts from various shows and works in progress).
It
was great to see it in something approaching it's final context, and I was
pretty happy
with
it,
apart
from
the slightly rushed bits at the end. I'll post more about that once its done.
26/09/11 - Dead
Man's
Waltz
'Swings
And
Roundabouts'
