Bloody Mary the animation

Behind The Scenes

With the Bloody Mary project finished we can reflect on how the project came full cycle. Below is a short 2 min behind the scenes film on making Bloody Mary.

Cultuurnacht Breda 2013

On the 25th of January on a -5 cold night in Breda surrounded by snow we came to the conclusion of our project. Bloody Mary was projected in a continuous loop for the whole evening. The audience responded very well and each of the St Joost students where given a beautiful key as a gift from the Huis Voor Beeldcutuur. Below is a video of the final film projected onto the Chasse car park and entrence to the Pop Up@chasse installation.

My view on todays animation

My personal definition of animation is something that in reality doesn't exist, but on screen it moves and lives. I will explain my definition by start with live action films.

Live action films are films that are not produced by using animation. I see animation as an extra touch or even an extra world that can transform the live-action films into their proper story. Some people go for fantasy and some try to mimic reality with animation. What I find interesting is when animators create a world that is completely impossible to exist in reality, a fantasy world. Pure fiction. That's one of the moments when I enjoy watching animation films, because that fiction world consists of imaginary things.
When imagination and animation become one, the result can become something that no one has ever seen before on screen. A simple example is instead of watching a human walking with one head and two arms, the animator can create ten heads and six arms on that one human.  The animator becomes like a creator and helper for the person that creates a story. It can make the fantasy/imaginary things that happen in the story become real.

I drew some examples of when animation is being used as an extra touch in the live action films

As you can see from these images, animation can be a solution to create things that don't exist in real life.

When it comes to drawing animations(2D), it's like a painting that becomes alive. In the old days many animators used this technique to make their cartoon animations, but nowadays they use more 3D. I think they choose 3D because its more time efficient than 2D. Most 2D animations need to be drawn frame by frame. In my opinion it does have a positive effect, because the 2D animation gets an extra artistic touch. For example lines show that it's animated by a specific artist. 3D animations can sometimes look too robotic or static, which can sometimes be frustrating to see with the viewers eyes. But thanks to the modern technologies the 3D animations become much better.

I hope that de developers of the animation software focus more on 2D animation too, because I see more and more 3D software being developed than the ones of 2D. It saddens me to see that the two styles are going out of balance when it comes to development.

Montage: Interview with David Wilson

Swordfight scene

After being sick for 2 weeks, I've finaly worked on the final scenes that still need to be finished. The first scene that I had to work on was the transformation of Bloody Mary's life cycle from kid to barmade. The second scene is a swordfight scene of Bloody Mary with a random pirate. This scene takes place on a big pirateship.

The transformation of Bloody Mary scene is an important one, because we have to show the viewers that the people from the past thought she was a boy.
Details from the maincharacter need to be adjusted carefully. Short hair and clothes that look like a boy are added to the character so that she looks like a boy. We have put a small tail at the back from her head so that the viewers can still see it's a lady.
Thanks to the reference footage I was able to animate the characters without getting weird movements. The reference footage can be used as rigs for our characters. Rigs are like bone structures that can be used to get a precize movement of a character.

The reference files came in really handy for the swordfight scenes of our animation. My task was to animate Bloody Mary having a swordfight with a random enemy pirate. This also needed to be looped so that Raimke can use this animation later on for her vector objects to place them in the right order.

Putting these scenes all together makes the story come to life. I must say I am happy with the result of how it looks so far. Minor details are still being added so stay tuned for more!

Vector-parts are finished too

Today I've finished all the vector animation parts of the Bloody Mary animation. I had to make a vector Bloody Mary crying, a pirate ship with a canon, some sea and money. As you can see in the images under here.

My part in this animation was the animating of transitions that zoom in or out. I had to do this with the program After Effects, the same program in which I will edit all the parts of animation together into a film.

Before the video mapping on the Cultuurnacht, we will adjust the background color, to a color that really makes the silhouettes stand out. Probably the kind of blue/green that Rowena used in het last update. This also means that we have to render everything in a TIFF sequence with Alpha layers (no background).

I'm really happy with the compilation we have now, were all the different parts of animation come together.

I think that the people that visit the Cultuurnacht will really like it. At least I hope so!