The Forest Update #14 - The battle of the blockers - Animation last week (Patreon)

Good morning everybody. I hope you're doing well. Holy heck things have been busy last week.

Last update I said that there were 14 blockers stopping this video from going out the door. There are now 7 blockers remaining. In what is proving to be a frustrating grind. Where the end looks so close and yet is being hamstrung by the difficulty of the remaining tasks.

This last weeks activity has been very interesting though. As I've worked to clear blocker number 10. An interesting change of work pace - The dynamite animation. A 2 minute long segment/skit around halfway through the video.

Here it was in its pre-production form:

During the video-essay, as an attempt to prove a point, I asked 12 people to join me in teamspeak to tell me what they know about dynamite. A prominent item in The Forest

The purpose of that was to determine if they could correctly guess two of its core properties - its volatility and unusually short shelf life. Making old and improperly stored dynamite dangerous to handle. To the point that it's normally destroyed by soaking in diesel and burning it.

I then asked each of the participants, if I were to animate them in cartoon form, what they would like to be drawn as. And passed that onto three artists to split the workload. Asking them to draw all of the limbs of their own photoshop layers.

And on that front they thoroughly delivered! 

Drawn over many weeks as I've created the rest of the video, with emails back and forth to make corrections. There are 13 characters for the skit, ranging from normal humans to fantasy creatures.

I then imported each of the characters into Adobe After Effects. And built a sort of primitive animation puppet. In a very South Park'esk' manner. In which the various limbs, eyebrows, mouth shapes etc are parented onto the above it in a hierarchy. Inheriting any movement automatically.

From there it was mostly a case of animating the parts to try to express the various emotions the interviewees displayed as I hypothetically described a box of old dynamite in front of them. Sorting the limbs above and below the other layers as necessary to make the motions look convincing.

It's a bit of a primitive type of animation. But for quick and simple dialogue scenes it does the job pretty well.

One of the things I think is quite important for cartoons though is mouth shape. As there's a myriad of poorly made cartoons out there that ignore that. So on that front, with almost every puppet, I asked the artists to provide half a dozen mouth shapes that correspond to various sounds. A sort of catalogue that would let me "paint" the layers, roughly corresponding to what they're saying.

You can try it with your mouth now. Your EEEE sounds need teeth showing, the oooo sounds need close lips. Your AAAAAA sounds have your mouth wide open.

And I'd simply play the sound back in slow motion, dragging and dropping the layers as they seem appropriate. And once it looked mostly correct, a quick click of an After Effects plugin snapped all the layers perfectly in place.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy! With some rework to smooth the bits that seem iffy.

Before long you've got semi-convincing looking dialogue.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qbonllxp8q22h0t/extra%20-%20stop%20shaking%20-%20cut.mp4?dl=0 

So that has been the focus of all of last week. Taking all of the 13 puppet and properly animating them, corresponding to the words being spoken and the emotions being displayed, over the course of 2 minutes.

Since my particular puppet, as the interviewer, stops talking and then awkwardly stands there listening to the responses, I decided to have a little fun by asking BewBew to modify the puppet so it can peel a stick of dynamite. Nonchalantly eating it like it's a banana.

Additionally, in the final part of the week, some of the original puppets ended up doing things not originally specified in the brief. Notably with their hands. For example, Harry's puppet is unusually animated due to his speaking voice. Therefore I made him move his hands a lot more than the others. And clench fists looked a bit weird. 

So I asked the artists to make minor tweaks. Such as pointing fingers, open palms, etc.

That's one benefit of this animation style. You can rapidly swap out things like it's a model or a doll. Rather than redrawing the entire thing. Don't like the eyes? Well you can just redraw just that layer. Need the model to be pointing? Insert new hands.

And whilst all of this was going on, the artist Ilse was also tasked with creating the cave background. And with her prior reputation for sneaking in easter-eggs now known, it wasn't long before I noticed one of the hanging bats on the ceiling was not quite like the others.

Butt bat!

Here's a work in progress comp of that animation. There's still some bits I'd like to tweak. But for the moment I urgently need to move onto the remaining 7 issues. Listing any further changes as minor rather than blockers. Gotta get this project done :)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/o47uxxl13ms4ab5/Test%20Render%20of%20full%20cartoon%20comp.mp4?dl=0 

So going forward, there are 7 remaining blockers. I can list them all:

• 1.) Complete introduction sequence.
• 2.) Complete conclusion sequence.
• 3.) Review incoming feedback from viewers, spotting stuff my eyes will miss.
• 4.) Record a joke segment on my wall concerning art additions from Ilse.
• 5.) The creation of the thumbnail for a Youtube Studio specific thumbnail image.
• 6.) Note the precise timestamps to insert skippable moments into the edit to let people dodge spoilers on specific things.
• 7.) Modification/animation of the Satan speculation animation. With an artist commission request.

Now I'm picking the next one one and knuckle down on it until completion. This dynamite animation was number 10. Between Monday and now I was able to do 9 and 8. As always, thank you again for your extreme patience!

Also dog update! Having successfully hunted the bacon-flavoured biscuit, the dog sleeps off its recent meal. A predator perfectly adapted to life on this sofa: