Out of Your Head

Created with Minxuan Yang, Wendy Wang and Amy Thoetong

Preproduction

The brief for the Out of Your Head project was to create a 20 second animated short film with a beginning, middle and end. Within this, we had to draw upon techniques we had seen or tried in our previous rotations. The basis of our film began with the Word Cloud.

The four of us selected 2 words each, with some overlap to select the 6 that we would base our animation on. We chose: Decay, Greed, Lies, Hope, Forget and Silence. A lot of the words had strong links to each other so we created a mind-map of links to social issues or artists work that could possibly represent the words or be of interest to us later.

It was suggested to us by a tutor that we should try and create a drawn mind-map relating to our concepts to leave the realm of words and focus on the visuals , which ended up being a very useful exercise as some of the doodles would begin to form the basis of our story/ key ideas.

Straight away, we were really influenced by the stop motion animation we had done in previous weeks. I definitely came into this project wanting to experiment with animation techniques that I had never tried before; thankfully my groupmates had a similar mindset to me going into it as well. Drawing from our mind-map, we discussed including themes of climate change and perhaps showing waste through materials. We had similarly discussed only using silhouettes and pushing character shape language, inspired by the work of Lotte Reiniger.

First Idea: (Beginning) An overpopulated world is running out of resources, which are controlled by the rich. (Middle) People begin to protest this, all the resources are depleted and nature begins to die. (Climax) Suddenly, there is an explosion. (End) The world fills with colour as nature replenishes itself in a barren world. The camera moved underground to the people, rich and poor, huddled together.

Our initial story idea really did not take into account how little world building is truly possible in 20 seconds/ how fast paced everything would have to be. Our story touched on class warfare, pollution, climate catastrophe and apocalypse all at once and there really would not have been a successful, satisfying way to show this in 60 seconds, let alone 20. Thus, we had to narrow down our ideas and focus on what appealed to us the most.

Looking back at our initial story writing phase, if I could do it again I would have tried to experiment more by writing out different types of stories and developing on them further, as at times it felt like we were attempting to plug this big story into the tiny timeframe of 20 seconds rather than letting the time we had inform our narrative, even though I did enjoy the story we were creating.

The story we ended up developing into a storyboard (drawn by Minxuan and I) became more focused on individual character interactions. We set the story in a polluted world, which we wanted to show the cause through a photo album. Character A is trying to replant the world and runs into Character B who is greedy, hoarding wealth. A seems happy to see another person but B runs away back to their ruined house. As they run, it is revealed that the rest of the survivors of the apocalypse have fled underground.

This idea also seemed too long for 20 seconds, and the tutors we showed it to didn’t seem keen on the idea of the reveal of people underground but, at the time, we decided that we liked the idea of the three groups of people, and the ending which was open to interpretation.

Personally, a lot of my inspiration for the world design was derived from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations in his book The Little Prince. Exupéry set much of the little prince on these very small planets which could just about fit a person. Because the two characters were representations of two opposites, I felt that their world was a sort of microcosm for ours. Therefore, taking a microcosm as a literal by making the world the characters live on very small seemed really effective to me. I liked the idea that these two characters with polar opposite ideologies could quite literally run to polar opposite ends of the Earth.

Image left from The Little Prince (book) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Image centre & right from The Little Prince (2015) directed by Mark Osbourne

Final Logline: Following a devastating factory meltdown, a hope-driven young boy attempts to replant a barren earth, only to have a chance encounter with the only other person that hasn’t run underground – a cowardly woman who’s only cares for her worthless wealth.

Storyboarding

Our storyboards were mostly drawn by Minxuan, with input from the rest of the group. The storyboard was a constantly changing document that had to be thoroughly reworked as our story shifted.

One piece of feedback we received asked us about conflict. It made us realise that our story actually didn’t have any real conflict. The characters simply met and ran away. If we wanted to effectively show the difference between these two opposing characters, we needed conflict. Therefore we decided to make Character B less cowardly and more malicious by having her steal from the little boy.

At this stage, we still really wanted to keep the people underground, even though their inclusion was looking increasingly unnecessary. In hindsight, I wish we had cut it out a lot earlier than we eventually did.

Our animatic ended up being slightly long of 20 seconds, but within a reasonable amount we could cut down. One of the elements of the animatic and storyboard I thought would need to change was the inclusion if angles we weren’t going to be able to shoot with a flat background. Since we weren’t going to create the set pieces for them, it didn’t make sense to me to include them in the animatic

Character Design

Because we had two characters that were so different from one another, it gave us the chance to really push and play with the designs of both characters. We all began by drawing out multiple iterations of Character A & B, especially as we had not decided on the genders of either character or whether we’d use only silhouettes or have them in detail. I tried to use either boxy, hard angles or sharp triangles in my designs for Character B, drawing inspiration from fashion designers such as Alexander McQueen. Meanwhile, I decided to draw Character A as a child with a lot of circles to look more innocent and cute.

Suits seemed to be a common feature between all of our designs for Character B, perhaps because its formality juxtaposes Character B’s childishness, although we ironically scrapped the idea of their suit by the end of the design process. In the end, we chose that I would design Character A and Wendy would design Character B.

When designing ‘the Kid’ as he would become known, I wanted to him to look cute but also show that he has basically nothing. I thought it would exemplify his character well if he was in rags but continued to smile despite it all.

The main inspirations for my designs were the works of Aoi Tokunaga and Kiyohiko Azuma’s manga protagonist ‘Yotsuba Koiwai’. Tokunaga’s paintings seemed to really strike something within me, as we had solidly decided to animate using paper at this point in the production. I quite liked the idea of the paper model standing out as blank against the background or having the folds/ crumples in the puppet itself to further emphasise the hardship he went through- though we decided not to move forward with this idea. Yotsuba Kowai is the cheerfully naïve 5 year old protagonist of the Azuma’s comedy manga Yotsuba&!, the design of her large head in comparison to the rest of her body as well as her large eyes served as inspiration for the Kid’s proportions, though I do think it would have been good to play around with his proportions further.

As the Kid was planting potatoes, it only felt fitting to me that he would be wearing a potato sack to further emphasise that his potatoes were all he had. The potatoes, in a way, symbolise his hope as he believes they could grow into something bigger than him. I also gave him a kettle in place for a watering can for a similar reason.

His final colour palette was influenced by the environment colour palette that we had agreed on.

One aspect of Character B that I thought would add to their personality was the concept that they’re dragging along a bag of money, despite the fact that it doesn’t mean anything anymore in a world devoid of people. They’re clinging to this symbol of the past that once defined them instead of properly seeing the new world as it is.

Wendy decided to make Character B a woman, which we named ‘the Lady’. She presented us 3 ideas for her design. As a group we decided to choose the design on the right as it gave off the impression of someone coming from old money, who perhaps was born into wealth, defined by it and had never had to fend for herself.

While I really liked the way the two character designs really juxtaposed each other- the Lady being well-dressed, long and spindly while the Kid was in rags, small and round- I think the character designs could have been more effective if Wendy and I had worked and communicated more closely on the designs specifically. One of the pieces of feedback we received was that the two characters looked like they came from two different worlds, which would be concerning to the immersion of our story.

When we had finished the character designs, our group split into two teams. Amy and I went onto create the set pieces for the environments while Minxuan and Wendy created the puppets for the Kid and the Lady respectively. We had decided to use coloured designs to be cohesive with the rest of the sets

I think the problem of our characters looking too different was ultimately solved when they were made into paper puppets. However, this gave rise to a second issue of scale. The Kid looked very big next to the Lady. Again, I think this could have been solved if we had established their height difference more early on in the design process, but that’s something I will have to just take forward into my next projects.

Set Design and Production

We wanted to establish a cohesive colour palette for our animation, therefore we looked at the colours of a few sci-fi and apocalyptic films. The high contrasting, complementary colours of Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds really stood out to us. Amy drew out the large set and used various colour swatches for us to decide on. We decided on the first colours.

We had originally planned to make the final set piece even larger, but when we tested the view on the multiplane, it was far too large to even fit into frame. Even the final prop was too large to rotate in the camera view, thus we decide that it would be better to animate the walk around scene in post with After Effects.

Shooting

Animation Test

Green screening

Post-production

Final Outcome

Overall Conclusions/ Reflections

One of the largest challenges we had with the brief was with the time frame which we were given to tell a story. Especially at the beginning of the project when we were only starting to come up with ideas, our initial ideas were often too large to be clearly show for the length of a minute, let alone 20 seconds. Because there was so much we could do with the concepts we chose from the initial word cloud, we had to really narrow down our ideas into the key elements we wanted to develop. In a way, it felt like we were trying to saw down a massive story into a small length rather than letting the 20 second time frame really guide our narrative. I think this is what ultimately led to our animation not being understandable to an audience seeing it for the first time. A lot of the feedback we received was that people liked the visuals but didn’t really understand the story. This could have been avoided if we had shown more people our storyboards and animatic without explaining the synopsis of our story.

On the other hand, I do think that Overgrown was a really successful project for me, personally. I came into it wanting to experiment with animation techniques I had never tried before. I was inspired by the paper frames we used in the stop motion rotation, as well as the making-of film that we had been shown of 2016 short ‘Au revoir Balthazar’ in particular to use the glass multi-plane. It was our entire group’s first time using the apparatus. We encountered certain problems such as the bars holding up the glass being visible, while it was suggested to us by a tutor to edit it in post, I think that using cotton to cover it up added to handmade look of the animation overall. One of the scenes we did decide to do in post was of the two characters traversing the world in a wide shot due to camera restrictions. It was interesting to use After Effects in a way that had been very different to our previous use of it. The green screen worked really effectively.

Ultimately, although the final outcome as a film had a lot of issues in clarity, the overall process of creating it enhanced my understanding of the production process and gave us room to experiment with techniques that were both digital and physical. Overall, both our skills and our shortfalls can be taken further in future projects.