Inktobers!

I heard about inktober on the first day of October and had to try it! I only lasted 19 days though ha!

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Behind my Behind!

That was the title of the film project I worked on over the summer, directed and created by David Chai! This one I felt was a real challenge because none of us on the crew ever did stop-motion animation so the whole process was a good learning experience for us all.

Some character sheets I made for the main character

Before I get to the stop motion part I'll go over what I did for the 2D side. The film is about Ernest Knapp, a man who feels miserable with life until one day he discovers something right in his own home. My first task was to animate people in a subway train with Ernest, then a bunch of other people piling in and squishing him.

Although that wasn't always the case, the original animatic had Ernest just sad on the train.

This is the animatic for the updated version.

I really liked all of Dave's design for the subway characters so I wanted to keep it as close as I could to them. Here they are one by one.

and here's the finished version! Inked by Melissa Paff, background by Catharina Sukiman.

For stop motion shots we had to animate in pencil first to get rough planning and timing for the shot to make it easier on us noobies. Luckily it turned out to be more helpful than we thought since we found out in DragonFrame you can import a video file and follow it frame by frame! My shot was Ernest blowing a kiss. This was hard because I had to get the right feeling of longing, loving, sentimental and happiness.

The animatic for the shot.

My first test for it was too happy and carefree.

 He needed to feel nostalgic and sad but a happy sadness like he's moved on.

After getting somewhat close, next came animating it with puppets! The fabrication part was challenging as well. We only had one person creating the puppet the entire time as she had the most experience and access to the lab equipment. The awesome Rosie Diaz had to go through many trials and errors with different types of puppets before the final one was made.

Here's two early versions she made before casting and molding the final version, which is on my head.

Animating this guy was fun and challenging. It got a little frustrating sure when it wouldn't cooperate the way we wanted it to but we had to make do with what we had! We would use other people to help hold the puppet while another person animated and took the pictures. I learned a lot from stop motion, in traditional and CG animation the movement is thought out and can be easily manipulated, for our set up since the puppet wasn't really held down, we had to be quick and hope the shot in the end would work. It was amazing how little and how large you would have to move him for the pose you want to work.

With the help of Samia Khalaf, we were able to create this shot in the end. I'm very pleased with it and feel we kept it pretty close to the original!