In developing my backgrounds for my animated film, I've been looking at how other animators develop their own backgrounds for animated works. I've looked at feature films by Studio Ghibli, animated television shows by Cartoon Network and Disney Channel, and independent animators including students at Gobelins L'Ecole D'Image and Victoria Vincent. I have also included some videos by independent animators showing their work process. These videos gave me some insight into what one should and shouldn't include in backgrounds, and how to make them flow with the rest of the animation.
The screenshots from various animated works below have been selected because of their particular use of colour, composition, lineart and detail/simplicity. I'm looking at how the characters interact with their surroundings, how much detail can or should be put into a shot, and how to keep shots interesting and dynamic.
For my film, I have a lot of dialogue that I will need to lip sync. I've never done lip syncing before, so it was an interesting process learning how to do this. I first tried recording a video of myself saying the line I'm working with, and rotoscoping my mouth movements. As seen below, this wasn't at all successful. It looks awkward, the mouth movements don't sync up at all with the sound, and it's not very expressive.
I found a YouTube tutorial on working with lip sync that seemed beginner friendly, so I followed along to that and developed my own chart of mouth shapes. I adjusted some of the shapes to fit more with my film's shape language.
Here's the lip sync test that resulted from working with this method
This version is a lot more readable and flows well. I'll keep experimenting but I have a good framework for creating my lip synced shots now.
I created the above animation test of Alistair's mom June twirling her dress. I tried this to see how long it would take to keyframe and tween a sketchy animation. The next step of this will be lining and colouring the frames. I took approximately 12 hours to animate this sequence, though some of this time was spent getting accustomed to Toonboom Harmony. Through this I have a better sense of how much time each sequence should take in my film. In my past experimentation with animation, I hadn't done much tweening, and I hadn't animated at 24 fps before, so this experiment gave me insight into the process.
I think the twirl of the skirt isn't quite realistic, so I might need to try rotoscoping shots like this in future to get a realistic sense of the physics involved.
This is an animation test of Sunny in the opening shot of the film, opening their curtains to reveal their bedroom. This GIF plays with the colour palette of the film, the visual style, what elements will be visible in the background, and how the characters will interact with the backgrounds.
By creating this test, I was able to learn that I don't want my colour palette to be so monochromatic, or so based in this yellow ochre hue. To evoke the softness I aim to capture in the film, I need to use slightly lighter tones and more variation in hue. I realised that the position of certain background elements, like their bed, don't work well, so this will need to change in future versions of Sunny's bedroom. I'm overall happy with the visual style - using charcoal brushes to create blocks of colour with slight variation and "messiness". With some more development I believe this will contribute to evoking the soft mood of the film. I've got a better sense now than I did before creating this test of how characters interact with background elements, and how colour and line quality can make them blend in or stand out from their surroundings.
In a lecture about colour theory, I was introduced to the idea of a colour script, in which an artist captures the mood and colour palette of a scene in a rough image. We looked at Lou Romano's colour scripts for Pixar animated films. In these we can see the mood of each scene/section of the film, and this gives us another look at the way storytelling is deployed effectively through colour in the film.
Lou Romano, The Incredibles, colour script
With this in mind, I put all of my colour script together to look at them in the context of one another. I may still make some tweaks to the mood, but this gives me the ability to see my film from a distance and imagine what it might look like by the end. I can also imagine what colour palette is needed when I design and create my backgrounds.
