The Brief

LONDSMILE

LIVE PR

The brief was set by Jo Kotas, from Bunch design, who also was the tutor for the project. The brief was to create a 20 second short film to be shown on the underground projectors at a number of tube stations. Bunch design had been in contact with CBS Outdoor (the company who own the advertising space on the underground) and were in the process of organizing a two week period where two days a week specially designed animations would be shown.

One of those days was a Monday, for two hours in the morning. The brief was to produce an animation for this time slot in the vein of cheering up commut-ers so that they could have abright start to their weekend.

The piece would have no sound and could be any media. There were techni-cal considerations to take on board, like the rendered resolution, file format of the final piece. I learned new terms such as action safe and key safe (the digitial animation equivalent of a printer’s bleed).

NDONSMILE

LIVE PROJECTS

Initial Idea

I had an idea sketched in my notebook prior to the briefing with Jo. When the briefing was over I began to sketch the character in more detail with backgrounds etc.

At the first lecture with Jo, we were asked to come up with an initial idea that would be the basis for the rest of the project.

My idea was to use the 20 secs to show an animation that poked fun at the stuffy and uptight environment of the underground. I wanted to do this by creating a hysterical character that would have a series of mishaps on the underground.

I had to reign in what I wanted to do, 20 secs didn’t leave much time for building character and the animation couldn’t be too sardonic or dark. I began sketching ideas of a character and possible styles.

Research

First off I started to take notes when I was on the tube, just about the projectors and patterns, all to aid me create ideas of how to create the animation. I paid attention to the ambient sounds, styles of people on the tubes etc. I sketched continuously, things like storyboards and scenarios.

Selection of pages from notebooks I was sketching it at the beginning of my research

Cartoon Characters

I gathered examples of classic and modern cartoon characters. I noticed that their hair, clothing, col-ouring were all non animated features that made a huge difference to how the character came across.

The simple the character, the easier they would be to animate. You can see the line weights are even and the shapes are simple to draw in most of these examples - otherwise it would become very time consuming to animate them.

I gathered together examples of different cartoon characters. I looked at how they were drawn so they could be animated easily. I also looked at how they were dressed and started to sketch to see how clothes and features contributed to the personality of a character. The characters, like Homer Simpson and Fred Flintstone all had a variety of expressions to suit the situations they were written into.

The simpler the characters, the easier they would be to animate.

The clothing and attire of characters makes a huge difference to how funny they are.

Short Animations

The shapes are simple and therefore simpler to animate. These animations also have a highly graphic style that is modern and alluring.

I went to the portfolio sites of animation studios like Peepshow, Studio AKA and Air-side and watched the animations they had created. Some of them were very simple and somewhat abstract.

I played the animations and counted how many different events were fitted into a time frame of twenty seconds. I noted that a continuous shot was used in most of the short animations, so that no time was wasted reintroducing a scene.

I counted the amount of “events” that happend in the short naimations to roughly judge how much I could fit into my 20 - 25 seconds.

Patterns

I like Art Deco Style and the patterns and felt it had a relevance to the tiles ont he underground. As I was going to animate with B & W vectors I thought it would be nice to add some colour and intricacy with some patterns splashed in the animation.

In the beginning when formulating the idea I wanted to mix media, using vectors for the animations and prints of art deco patterns for various elements on the under-ground. This was based on the mosaics and tiles of the underground.

I looked at books on Art Deco and also various other online resources to gather dif-ferent examples.

I looked online for examples of underground patterns and tiling, as well as sketch-ing and taking my own photographs. These formed a basis for patterns I would later create.

I found a wealth of photos of tube tiles online and these played a part when I was drawing up my own patterns

Commuters

To get a feel for the different people or ‘tribes’ that use the underground, I looked at pictures on flickr as well as sketching. The tube plays host t a wide variety of people, distinct in their own ways and open to easy stereotyping – effective ways of commu-nicating a certain type of tribe.

Books

I took out books from the library. Some were for basic reading on animation, others were on contemporary examples of moving image, patterns and kinetic typography. I bought a book on the program After Effects.

Development

Experimenting with facial expressions

Development of background characters

The research all came together when I started to develop the ideas for the anima-tion. I developed the main character, Nervous Ned as well as numerous background characters. Development also meant drawing story boards, scenes and environ-ments.

I sketched ideas for the character from the beginning. I developed him to be more figurative, taking queues from the cartoon characters I had looked at. I also drew characters for the background, tough guys, punks, business people, hipsters etc.

Working on dfifferent facial expressions and sketching out scenarios for the character to get into.

Nervous Ned

Raw Material Brand Identity

Characters

Raw Material Brand Identity

Business Woman Old Lady Tourist Tough Guy Punk

Scenes

Ned’s hallwayRoad to tube

Tube platforms

Production

Raw Material Brand Identity

The elements were all saved as .eps files, with animated elements on their own individual layers. These elements were then brought in to After Effects and brought together to form a continuous scene which could be moved from one side of the canvas to the other over the twenty second clip.

Learning After Effects was a real learning curve I felt, especially when learning it by trial and error. After a number of days I began to make progress and am happy with my animation considering.