Uncategorised | Berni Bozsik Yr1

For this elective, we had to record an unscripted 15-second audio to the theme “London.”
I decided to interview my friend, and chose a piece of dialogue which reflected a lot of strong personality and attitude.

Then, using the audio, I began to explore different character designs. I wanted to depict a historical setting so I looked at early 19th century clothing styles to begin designing my character. Below are some initial character explorations.

Character Inspo:

Fashion Explorations for Antoine:

Now, I also wanted to create a second, contrasting character who this first character (Antoine) would be talking to. I wanted this character to have softer colours and more smoothed, curved shapes in direct contrast to Antoine’s strong red waistcoat and sharp shape language.

Initially, I decided to make Bella, a very meek-looking quiet character, however this would have created an obvious power imbalance. I wanted a character who would not just wordlessly accept Antoine’s torrent of unsolicited advice, but be abhorred by it.
I made her a more vibrant purple in the second version, giving her a haughty and spoiled impression.

When Antoine says “If you see a rat scurrying into an alleyway, you do not follow it to give it a name”, they will point to Bella’s hideous little dog, to which she will take grave offence. Unfortunately, this design did not make for a convincing dog. When posted, I’ve had over ten people think it was a cat.

While working on refining the character designs, I also created a very rough animatic. I wanted to use two different camera angles, one focusing solely on Antoine and another where we reveal to the audience who he is talking to.

Then, I had to decide on an environment for them, initially, I wanted to put them in a gothic-style parlour, where they might be talking over tea. However, I suddenly had the idea of putting them in a train setting as this would also make for better storytelling. This could create the impression that a young noblewoman, Bella is headed for London for the first time. However, her peaceful time of reflection in her cabin is interrupted by Antoine, an eccentric noble who becomes exceedingly passionate in giving completely unsolicited advice, warning her of the dangers of London and even insulting her ugly little dog in the process.

Environment Mood board

Here, you can see the two rough sketches I had of the background, then a rough colour experimentation with a Turner painting pasted into the painting hung above the seat.

I then proceeded to complete the two backgrounds, creating clean linework before shading use a range of layer modes. For the final piece, I will need to create more layers for the outside world as the train speeds past, however this would be best done in the compositing stage, which is beyond my current scope of this project. I drew both backgrounds as 3840 by 2160 pixels to make them twice as large as the final video output will be.

I used a stormy, tumultuous Turner painting to go above Antoine’s head and a calm still life by Mary Moser to go above Bella’s seat. Additionally, the lamp on Antoine’s side is crooked to show his eccentric nature where Bella’s is perfectly straight to reflect her perfectionism and fastidiousness.

Following this, I drew up an X-sheet, carefully scrubbing through the audio and recording the different sounds being made at each frame. I also moved each sound up two-three frames so the mouth shapes happen before the sound is heard. Secondly, I have started planning thumbnails on the x-sheet but I didn’t do this completely as I realised I preferred planning separately so I drew the rough poses in a different document.
The x-sheet proved to be very helpful during the animation phase.

Here are some of my thumbnail sketches and pose ideas – I worked on some of these from observation but I also acted out all of the movements myself and looked at that for reference.

I’ve also thoroughly studied an absolutely beautiful pencil test from The Prince of Egypt – the subtlety of the acting had my jaw on the floor. It was phenomenal and wonderful to analyse.

Below are Antoine’s mouth shapes I drew. Initially I wanted to give them lips but I ended up going with a simpler line for a mouth. This is common for more masculine characters – otherwise it may look like they are wearing lipstick.

I then started animation. I worked in Toon Boom Harmony at 24fps, animating on twos (although some frames are held for longer).
I began by drawing in my key poses super rough. I worked from the 41 reference videos I had filmed of myself, as well as my own imagination and knowledge of art fundamentals to create the poses. Ed Hooks’ Acting for Animators was a very useful resource in helping me understand characters better. For developing Antoine’s personality, it was also helpful to thoroughly study characters with similar attitudes – notably Tulio from The Road to El Dorado and Kuzco from The Emperor’s New Groove.
It made me especially happy that, when I posted my work on social media, people likened Antoine to both of those characters without being told they were the influences!

I cannot entirely describe my animation process – I created 5 complete passes of Antoine’s acting, reaching countless dead-ends and difficulties. It was a lot of trial and error and pushing through that helped me get the animation to a polished stage. It was especially helpful to think of only one thing at a time – for example I animated the hair straight ahead on a separate layer – this helped me implemented the principle of follow-through and make the hair bouncy and dynamic.

In the video below – I show all iterations of my project from storyboards to rough animation, to cleanup and final coloured animation. You can view my progress here:

I drew the shadows by hand, using a blending node set to multiply and a cutter node to ensure shadows did not extend outside the characters’ bounds. This was a very tricky process, especially because the location of the shadow changed depending on the orientation of the body part it was on. I should have done a separate illustration to better understand where the shadows would be at different points of the animation. I also do not think the shadows are very accurate considering the lighting inside the cabin, however, this does not seem to be distracting or obstruct the storytelling.

Love through a Prism inspired my shading style.