DM60 - Mini Brief

During my second university project this year—'experimental animation'—I had the opportunity to work on a mini-brief by the Design Museum of London. This brief involved coming up with an idea for an animation in only sixty seconds based on a random three word prompt produced by the Design Museum’s idea generator, ‘The Idea Machine’. Our class morphed this into our own version, instead coming up with an idea in own our time for a sixty-second animation created within a week, but still drawing inspiration from the random prompt presented to us. For the first time, I was able to collaborate on this project with a classmate of mine, Jack, and we were given the prompt words ‘Adult, Heath and Touch’.

Jack and I decided we would combine the areas of animation we we both most interested in, so I would be focusing on 2D animation, and Jack would be focusing on 3D animation/modeling. This was exciting for me because I'd never tried combining different mediums like this, so I was very excited to see how the end result would look! We decided to take inspiration from Studio Ghibli movies for the combination of a painted look for the backgrounds and the flat/cell shaded look for the characters.

I wanted to try making the characters look like the comfy, retro sort of style that Ghibli are well-known for, so I began designing the character, making sure to keep in mind that it will need to be simple enough to animate fairly easily, but still detailed enough reminiscent of a Ghibli kind of style. Below is a quick front and side view sketch of the character. I gave her a simple outfit—t-shirt tucked into jeans—to emulate the character designs we'd taken inspiration from. I thought the character didn’t need to be particularly interesting or have any specific recognisable features. We only had the week to create the animation, so I tried to focus more on just creating a character than trying to give them ‘character’, since I needed to use most of the time to animate it.

I used Procreate to animate the characters, setting the blocked out 3D environment as ‘background’ so I could use it as a basis to work from. I mostly only animated the main female character, however added a bit of eye and foot movement to the other metro passenger so they didn’t look completely static. After Jack had finished more of the background, I added it in for a better reference.

I then also added in the front and side reference I created of the character so that I could make sure the proportions remained consistent when she stood up. I used 60 frames in total and animated on ones at 6fps to give the animation more of a Ghibli feel (and to save me time!).

We met our three prompt words ‘Adult, Health and Touch’ by incorporating an adult character into an environment in which she is interacting with things, covering the first and last prompt words. To cover ‘Health’, we thought it’d be good to give the characters face masks, making the animation much more timely and relevant to the current climate/pandemic.

We had originally planned to create four scenes within the animation to fill the original minute-long brief (outdoor/picnic, kitchen, windowsill and metro scenes) however I found that the hand drawn animation was taking a lot longer than I’d anticipated. I had deliberately made the frame rate of the hand-drawn animation lower so that I would be able to make fewer drawings, but I still wasn’t able to finish in time. I put this down to not having much experience with creating frame-by-frame animations yet and needing more practice to be able to draw out frames quickly without being too much of a perfectionist and spending too long on a single frame. Despite this, I would love to work in this medium more in the future and develop my skills so I can produce higher quality animations in a shorter time frame, since 2D hand-drawn animation is where I am most passionate.

Regardless, I think the overall end product we were able to achieve looks great. I love the incorporation of 2D and 3D animation together and think that the styles compliment each other well, especially had I been able to clean and colour my half of the animation. This live brief was very experimental for me as I’d not tried animating in 2D to composite with 3D before and I found the workflow we used interesting and helpful for future work, as we had to be considerate of where each of us were in order to work side-by-side. Despite having created small frame-by-frame animation tests in previously, I hadn’t actually created an animation like this before, so using Procreate to draw my frames and figure out timings was quite new for me. This live brief was incredibly fun and I would love to work on another such as this. I’d be eager to create animations that combine these two styles in the future, whether the 3D was created by another animator or by myself, and to explore more into frame-by-frame animation, whether traditional or digital.

I will be working on this mini-brief once my university work is finished as I would like to see the scenes we’d planned all completed and finalised, cleaned and coloured. I think it’ll be a good project to work on alongside Jack outside of university work and would be great in my portfolio or showreel.