My Uncle’s Dental Health
O.K. Here it is:
Am I thrilled with it? No. Am I happy with it? I have to say yes. Here’s some Q&A I did with myself one lonely evening:
Why do you consider it “done”?
Leonardo da Vinci was quoted as saying “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” and this is a project that I’m ready to abandon. There are some obvious flaws and things I don’t like. Unfortunately the things I consider flaws are things that aren’t easily fixed without major work like a total reshoot. It’s time to move on to a new project. My father is quoted as saying “Well I’ve done all the damage I can do here.”
So what don’t you like about it?
The armature is an obvious flaw. It was created with 24 gauge florist wire spun four thick. It was very hard to work with and had a springy bounce to it that made smooth movement nearly impossible. Luckily I’ve gotten some great feedback from the folks over at stopmotionanimation.com and my friend and fellow Atlantan animator, Grant Goans, who has some great posts on the right way to do stop-mo armature.
The timing is awful in many parts. I’d love to blame it on just the armature, but impatience was definitely another reason. In After Effects I attempted to correct this by stretching the time of some of the sequences (sometimes down to 4-6 frames per second). It looks terrible. This is most obvious during the part when Uncle is chewing on the onion.
The sound is flinch worthy. I really tried to score some voice talent or at least some friends that could record some lines for me and they all fell through for one reason or another. This left me to fill in for all the voices. I was also recording directly to my laptop and that left me with a lot of static and noise. I tried to clean it up with Audacity with some limited sucess.
The over-all story itself just didn’t work out the way I hoped. It’s based on a short story (flash fiction) I wrote years ago for my other site cockroach.org. It seemed like a good idea. The story was SHORT. It had a limited set of characters and a single set. I’ve discovered that independent animators are often under the same limitations that playwrights work under. Unfortunately there was just too much narrative. I was hoping for an Adam Elliot kind of thing. But without the humor and visual punchlines, it didn’t work out that way. At only 2 minutes it’s BORING. I added the line “And there she was.” at the very last minute to break up some of the monotony and it actually helps some. I learned that the shorter a piece is the more of a punch it better have. This story was just too reflective.
So what did you like about it?
I love the puppets. Despite the armature issue I do dig how they look. I love the replacement eyes. I think they worked out very well. Especially in the one shot where Uncle rolls his eyes at the ceiling and shakes his head. I also like how Uncle twiddles his fingers at the very beginning.
I think the lipsync worked out alright. Considering I didn’t have the sound to work with up front I was able to retrofit the open and closed mouth movements pretty well in After Effects. Speaking of software, all of this was done in either After Effects or Moho (now Anime Workshop) and I learned a lot about how such animation packages work. Moho was an especial pleasure. I love how the Tooth Queen segment worked out.
From a more logistical stand point, I’m proud of some of the concessions I made (See “Things I don’t like”). I’m learning that you have to fine tune your vision if you want to keep moving forward. I originally planned on having Emmy animated as a cut-out and it became a HUGE stumbling block. One night I decided to just do her voice “off stage” and suddenly I was animating again.
The decision to change cameras worked out very well. I was initially shooting everything with my Fuji Fine-Pix but picked up a camcorder in Nov 06. The initial scenes were all done with the Fuji and the bulk of the rest was done with the Canon Elura. I think the difference in quality is barely noticeable. The difference in my work flow was tremendous. With the Fuji I had no way of previewing what I was shooting until I downloaded all of the pics. With the Canon I could use Firewire out to my laptop and use the wonderful AnimatorDV package for live preview and the glory called Onionskinning. I’ll never look back until I decide to go HD.
The other difficulty I think I handled well was balancing my day job and social life with getting this done. My day job often has me in strange cities living out of a suitcase and finding time to work on this was difficult. This article on living a creative life changed me entirely. I also have some smart damn friends. I once said to a friend of mine that I was too tired on the weekend to work on animation and he said, “If you really enjoy it I think you’ll find that after you put some work in you have more energy than you did before you started.” Truer words are seldom spoken.
So that’s it. “My Uncle’s Dental Health” is in the can and I’m off to my next project. Thanks to everyone that helped to keep me motivated over the past YEAR (god, really? Yeah, really, get over it K).