Make the Movie

Making The Visit - Animation Test

2007-11-27T22:59:00.000-08:00

I have added several new shots of Oksana in her room listening to her parents through the door. This is the scene where she realizes all is not well in the household. The first image below is the background painting of Oksana's room. Next is the shot as rendered out of Flash with some darkness added.

The movie has been going slowly for a while now. I simply have not been able to concentrate on it. I'll try a little harder to get through to the finish.

Click the play button below to see these shots added to animation test.

Making The Visit - Animation Test

2007-09-13T22:56:00.000-07:00

Slow work isn't it? But here's another shot added to the pile. Oksana closeup looking into her bowl at the dinner table.

Click the play button below to see these shots added to animation test.

Making The Visit - Animation Test

2007-09-10T23:31:00.000-07:00

The father has come home and now we fade into a shot of the family at the dinner table. This is a difficult shot because all three people are moving and must work together to convey something. It's a quick shot but it's the first time we see the family together.

Click the play button below to see these shots added to animation test.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

2007-08-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

Here are four new shots for the storyboard. Oksana has entered the cabin and moves toward the fireplace. She opens her sack and finds the bread, cheese and matches her father packed for her. She starts a fire and boils a small pot of soup that she makes with bread and water.

I am now using YouTube to host the storyboard as a video file. This should prevent any loading problems for slower connections.

Click the play button below to see these shots added to the storyboard movie.

Making The Visit - Character Animation

2007-07-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

Oksana's father comes home and watches her scrub the floor. I am gaining a better feel for how to animate these characters. Notice the little touches of movement I am trying to put in for the father as he takes off his hat and stands there. The body looks alive by adding subtle hand and head movements. The character must always be expressing something. My next task is to add facial expressions to the father for this shot.

Making The Visit - Character Animation

2007-07-22T19:23:00.001-07:00

Oksana's mother watches her scrub the floor while eating candy from a bowl. Here is an image from the animation. The shot is composed of multiple layers. The main components of the shot are a background painting of the wall and cupboard, the animated character sitting in the chair, and the table in the foreground.

Here is the background painting.

Here is the initial guide sketch drawn directly in Flash to provide a basic map of the image.

Click the button below to see this shot added to the animation.

Making The Visit - Character Animation

2007-07-20T23:27:00.000-07:00

Oksana continues to evolve. She is patterned after anime characters because I think the technique helps give her a cute but capable look. Her eyes are becoming more definite and her hair is getting a lot of scribble added into it. Watch the animation below to see her first close-up animation.

Click the play button to watch the animation.

Making The Visit - Animation Test

2007-07-19T21:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a color test of the opening of the film. You will see how the background art for the town and Oksana's house lead the viewer into the story. I am doing this because it is essential to give myself some indication of how the background art and character animation fit together.

Click the play button to watch the animation.

Making The Visit - Animation Test

2007-07-17T22:35:00.000-07:00

Here's a new animation test of the shot near the beginning of the film where Oksana is scrubbing the floor at home. This work entailed painting a background that is loosely based on the storyboard sketch I did weeks ago. I used a paint program called ArtRage to do it. Then I imported that image into Flash 8 and set it as a background layer. Then I drew Oksana in four separate parts (hair, face, body, and arm with scrub brush). I then used Flash to animate each part of her. I had to draw Oksana in proper perspective so that she would fit with the room background.

Click the play button to watch the animation.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

2007-07-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

My vacation is finished so let's get back to work on this movie. It's been difficult to sit down and draw. Sort of like starting an old car that's been sitting out in the cold too long. But once the pencil starts moving things happen. These two sketches show the inside of the old shack after Oksana opens the door.

I am beginning a series of model sketches for the Oksana character. This is the first of them:

Click the button below to see the two latest shots added to the storyboard movie.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

2007-06-14T21:22:00.000-07:00

In these shots, Oksana watches her father disappear down the road. We fade to black and then see her prying the shack's door open to look inside.

By the way, a few days ago I found an example of a blog that's maintained by someone who loves to write about good movies. She does it with seriousness and perception. I like people who watch movies and think about them the way she does. I think we need more people like that writing about film in blogs. Newspaper film critics long ago gave up the ghost and lost any true interest in film they might ever have had. Best advice: stop reading the newspapers for film criticism. Start reading some good blogs. Way more energy and life in the online writing. So anyway, this woman's blog is called 'The Lone Review.' Go check it out. We need more people like her here in Los Angeles. In fact, I've already promised her a cup of coffee (maybe tea) if she ever gets here.

Click the button below to see these shots added to the storyboard movie.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

2007-06-12T22:22:00.000-07:00

Slow going lately. The drawings are tough for me. Each one is a little discovery unto itself. Incredible as it may seem, I am still working out the style of my movie. Sometimes I think I've got it nailed, and then I do another drawing and get a slightly different idea. I think I might make the characters look sort of like painted cutouts. This approach to the animation would save a lot of time and drastically reduce the amount of drawing required. The characters would work a little like movable dolls. In fact, the walk cycle test animation that is in an earlier post was done with each part of Oksana's body as a separate piece. Then I animated the pieces together just as one would animate paper cutouts by making them move slightly for each frame of a movie. Some of my favorite animated films are made this way. Unless one is ready to do thousands of drawings, animations done with all movement drawn by hand tend to result in jumpy cartoonish films that are best suited to comedy. In a movie like this one, it is important that movement be subtle and smooth. Frankly, I'm sick and tired of funny animation. One out of perhaps a thousand are funny. Most are a complete waste of effort. Animations should try to tell serious stories. I went to a film festival and listened to a very famous animator tell other animators that in order to get into film festivals they should make their films funny. I thought that was probably some of the worst advice I'd ever heard. Simply beyond idiotic.

In these shots, Oksana's father pushes her away, telling her to go live in the little broken shack. Then he leaves her there in the forest.

Click the button below to see these shots added to the storyboard movie.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

2007-06-07T21:07:00.000-07:00

More shots for the storyboard have been completed. Oksana wakes up and is taken on a journey through the forest by her father. As they approach a broken old shack, Oksana is at first delighted, but almost immediately her father's true purpose becomes clear.

Click the button below to see these shots added to the storyboard movie.

Making The Visit - Walk Cycles

2007-05-20T15:34:00.000-07:00

Oksana comes to life! Here's a Flash movie of the first walk cycle for Oksana. It's her 'snow walk.' She lifts her boots and clomps them down in the snow. A walk cycle is simply a series of images that show the different body positions for a complete 2-step walk cycle. So if the character starts off with their right foot in the air ready to hit the ground forward of them, the cycle goes through that step and continues on through the other foot lifting and hitting the ground, until the cycle comes back to the original foot in the air just like it was in the very first position. This series of images can be repeated to give the illusion that the character is walking. For this movie clip, I have added all sorts of background and foreground images. These must all move along past the character so that it looks as if the character is traveling forward. When she stops, all the scenery images must stop with her. I do this by putting my different pieces of art work on different layers in Flash. I can then make each layer move at a different speed. So, layers of grass and pine branches that are closer to the viewer move by a little faster than the layers in the background.

Also, the overall atmosphere of the film is starting to solidify into something I am more comfortable with. That is why I wanted to do much more than a simple walk cycle in this clip.

Making The Visit - Backgrounds

2007-05-16T23:55:00.000-07:00

This picture is just something to show for today. It's a rough try at the little town for the beginning of the movie. I made a painting of the hills and sky in the background. Then I pulled that into Flash and made layers on top of it where I drew a little town and some trees in the foreground. This is sort of what I want but not quite. I am beginning to really try things with combining the paintings and the more cartoonish drawings done in Flash. I'm not sure that this works. It may require making the foreground trees look painted like the background hills.

Making The Visit - Backgrounds

2007-05-15T22:43:00.000-07:00

Today I've made a painted version of the Oksana family home sketch I drew yesterday. What I did was pull the photograph of yesterday's sketch into the ArtRage paint program as a tracing layer. Then I followed the original with the program's pencil tool. After that, I made many layers for the different colors of paint and filled it all in. It is important to get comfortable with using very thin watery layers of paint. For instance, the roof of the house is painted on three layers. One for the pencil lines of the straw, one for the dark brown paint, and one for the light tan paint. Using layers, I don't have to be too careful not to mess up what I've already painted on another layer.

Making The Visit - Design

2007-05-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

This is a new sketch of Oksana's family home. If you look at the shot of the house at the beginning of the storyboard movie, you will see certain similarities, but the house is starting to take on a more rustic appearance. Also, the entire scene has less of a storybook quality in this sketch and is actually getting a little more lonely and sinister in tone.

At this point it should be obvious that I am in no hurry to finish this film. I am fully engaged in a battle to carve out the reality of the film. This fight with my undisciplined imagination, distractions, vague notions of what will look good, clumsy drawing skills, shifting impressions of a scene, an incomplete understanding of nature, too little observation of real objects, constant profound worries about how I will make all the characters actually move, and simple fatigue is the fight that will refine and hone the movie until it becomes obvious how it will all work together. You must be willing to get into this fight if you want to make something. You don't need to fight if you are going to advertise breakfast cereal with a cartoon. But you will need to fight if you are going to make something to be seen by that person who you imagine to be your most intelligent and perfect audience member. You must always make your movie for this super-person who understands all and sees all there is to see. This ultimate judge of your movie never has to pay to see your movie. This person gets in free and you never know when they are going to show up. So you must be ready.

Making The Visit - Design

2007-05-10T17:15:00.000-07:00

This is a background image of the inside of Oksana's house combined with a fast sketch of her stepmother and a keyhole. It's an effort to try putting together the elements shown in the last three sketches I added to the storyboard the other day. It's a kind of mental exercise to try and see if the design ideas for the artwork can start working to build a real scene. This is all really a gradual working up of the entire concept. I'll will start to trust the way I'm drawing things more if I can sometimes see them working together.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

2007-05-08T21:14:00.000-07:00

Three more shots added to storyboard. I'm fussing with the faces since these are close-ups. I may be leaning too much toward realism with the father's face but that's alright for now. There's nothing wrong with experimenting in a storyboard. It's only paper.

These three shots were harder than the prior ones. There's one thing I'm confident of and that's my effort to get emotions to show. I want these characters to live and to be unmistakably real. The finished storyboard will ultimately tell me whether or not I can achieve this and whether or not I actually want to go ahead and make the movie.

Click the button below to see these three shots added to the storyboard movie.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

2007-05-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

Here are eight more shots that have been added to the storyboard film. It only took me about an hour and a half to accomplish these. I'm getting faster. The reason for that is because I'm getting more comfortable with my impressions of the scenes in the story. I've pretty well figured out how I want the characters to look and that informs every storyboard drawing because now I have an instinctive feel for how each person moves and how they express different emotions. I am also getting more comfortable with my scenic thinking. In other words, I am starting to move the point of view or the camera around for different angles and compositions.

Making The Visit - Character Design

2007-05-01T23:31:00.000-07:00

First up tonight is the most recent pencil sketch I did of the stepmother character. This was completed about two hours ago. It's full of erasures and mistakes but it is finally getting at the core of the character as I see her.

Here is what she looks like when I go into Flash and draw her directly with the pen tablet and then color her.

And here is the little family posing for us out in the cold.

So, now I think I feel pretty happy with the way my characters look. I'll continue tomorrow with the storyboard and as I draw the scenes there I'll get better and better at visualizing my characters from different angles.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

2007-04-30T23:18:00.000-07:00

After several days of inactivity, I have added a single shot to my storyboard. I am still sketching the stepmother, trying to figure her out. I cannot solve the drawing problems I am having with her. Tonight I worked hard at trying to draw her properly but gave up and dashed off the shot of Oksana looking into her soup bowl at the table. Even though the day has produced little that I am happy with, the very fact of putting the work in makes the next attempt that much easier.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

2007-04-25T22:20:00.000-07:00

I added three more shots to the storyboard movie. This storyboarding is like a war for me. I am a very rough draftsman. I have to fight for everything I can get in a drawing. So making the storyboard is a terrible battle with awkward limbs, flat compositions, ragged lines, too many erasures, dull pencils that make a mess of thick lines that smudge into one another, torn paper, pencil shavings all over my nice neat desk, and many more. It's really difficult to draw all these pictures. I'm simply not that much of an artist. It's just that I have this idea of a movie and I will make that movie even if I have to do it by scraping a nail in concrete. Nothing matters but the finished movie. I've jotted a list of all the shots I think the movie will need and come up with a total of seventy-one. That's seventy-one pencil drawings I have to put into my storyboard. I've got seven so far.

Doing the storyboard is a little like making a comic of your movie. The great thing is that while doing it you can work on character and scene design as you go. Once you finish all those drawings you really own your movie. You will have figured out solutions to many practical problems in the staging of your scenes.

Making The Visit - Storyboards

2007-04-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

Today is my first crude attempt at starting a storyboard. A storyboard is a very rough series of sketches that show all the shots of the movie. You can do each picture on a separate piece of paper and pin them all up on a wall so you can see how your movie goes from beginning to end. Or you can actually take pictures or scans of your sketches and pull them into the computer where you can edit them into a little movie. Doing this helps to figure out how shots will be timed and how they will look when they lead from one to the next.

In the photograph above, you can see my storyboard. It's the little pad in the lower right corner. I did a few drawings and photographed them. Then I put them together in sequence by using Flash. You can press the button below to play the storyboard movie.

I am not looking for anything close to perfection with this. It's fast, sketchy, and totally changeable any time I want.

Making The Visit - Backgrounds

2007-04-24T00:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a new image. There will be shots in the movie of characters walking through woods. I'll need lots of tree trunks passing behind them. I expected this picture to be much easier than the last one. But it was much more difficult. It caught me by surprise because I could not handle the shading on the tree trunks as naturally as I did yesterday. But at least I made something.