Conclusion

I am happy with my animation as a whole and feel that it portrays well the idea of everyone having their own demons and the battles they face with them. Even though I feel that it's hard to guess what sin Sams demon is, this is because his demon is newly formed and is just starting to gain control of him which I hope the viewer will understand. I am proud of the character models I have made because I feel that they have a unique style to them.

My favourite scene that I filmed was the smoking scene as it allowed me to combine puppet animation with claymation. This was a method I hadn't used before and I was excited to try it out and see the results. I think it worked well although I would have liked to do more with the sloth demon but with how the puppet was placed around it I couldn't move the demon around too much. Because it was the sloth sin it was representing I didn't want it to be moving around too much or too fast. I really liked how the lightning effect in the final scene worked out as it looks really realistic and gives the viewer a sort of jump scare when Sam is also being scared.

I'm not happy with how the walk cycle turned out as while animating Sams legs had become too loose to pose more realistically, because of this I had to spend a lot of time balancing him to get his feet in the right position or as close as possible. I also wish I had more time to mask out the rig as I think it's quite noticeable that it has been masked out. I am also annoyed at myself for forgetting to take empty pictures of the earlier scenes where the rig is shown because this meant that I wasn't able to even attempt masking the rig out of these scenes, before entering the film into festivals I would like to re-shoot these scenes. I was originally going to have 2D printed backdrops and printed on the walls to the buildings but I had to change this idea. From my research into 'Tom Moody' I found that using black backgrounds would make the scene look like its in a world of its own.

The first thing I will change in my film before entering it into festivals is the sound as it is too quiet when not being viewed through with headphones. This will be easy to change as it is simply a case of turning up the volume before re-rendering but I didn't have time to do this before the submission. I also want to change the black scene when Sam gets knocked out as the colour is slightly off for the solid black layer I put in-between the clips. Again this will be an easy fix as it is just a case of colour matching them up or by simply removing the solid layer. I would also like to spend some more time working on post production effects but I feel I need more practice using After Effects before I can do this to a good standard.

I have really enjoyed this module as I have had a lot of creative freedom to create my own unique  narrative on something that has been reproduced a lot with usually the same ideas.This module has taught me a lot about independently creating a film and I am proud of the amount of work I have produced for this throughout the semester. 

Finished Film

Inner Demons Film from Tom Hall on Vimeo.

Please watch with headphones as the volume still needs adjusting. (ending is quite loud)

Artist Statement

My animation shows the hidden battle between people's everyday lives and their inner demons. In my work I follow the main character Sam who gains the ability to see peoples inner demons as an exterior form silently controlling the person they belong to. Sam spends the majority of my animation observing the different demons he encounters as even though they are seen as a bad thing he is envious that he doesn't have one, or does he...

My work strives to show the viewer that everyone has there demons even though they may hide them well and that we shouldn't let them control us.

I chose to focus on inner demons as I have had to battle my own demons throughout university and because of this I felt as a final project this would portray my time at university best. Each of the demons in my narrative are based off one of the seven deadly sins greed, sloth and envy as I feel I can best relate to them.

I decided to use stop motion to animate my film as this has always been my favourite type of animation and I have been wanting to create my own short film in this media throughout been at university. I also felt the roughness of stop motion suited this idea best as I have been focusing on peoples imperfections.

For the demons I didn't want to use the traditional representations of the seven deadly sins and decided to create my own style of demons, for this I researched what colours best suited each demon and developed the appearance of each demon through my own judgement of the sin it is based on.

I created all the demons out of plasticine (apart from Envy what is made by coating plasticine in silicone to make him more durable) and all the humans from Sculpey to show the difference between reality and what Sam can see. The clothes for the characters. The set has been made with MDF board then decorated with paint, Sculpey and card, I chose to use quite bright colours for my set to give it a stylized effect.

When filming I decided the lighting would get darker as the film progresses to show the shift in Sam's mood. To animate Sam I used a Rig which allowed me to balance him easier but also meant I had to mask it out in post production.

Post Production

I started the post production section of my module by combining the clips and creating the credits with a font I feel suits my animation well, then making them scroll up like real credits in films. I also added a saying I had found and modified it to a quote that I feel suits the theme of my story quite well and adds a nice finish to it.

One of the most difficult parts of post production was masking out the rig because the image I had taken without Sam in the scene was a different colour for some reason even though I didn't change any settings between taking the photos. There was also a strange flashing effect that was happening in this scene due to the camera which I think may have been the camera as there was nothing else during these frames that could have effected the filming area at the time. I also had a lot of technical issues while masking the rig as when I tried to adjust a mask that didn't fully cover the rig it wouldn't let me change it which meant I had to create a new mask each time I wanted to change something. This was probably made harder because this was one of the first things I did and before this project I hadn't had much practice with after effects, but luckily tutorials helped me out a lot. After masking out the rig it also hid his shadow so I had to adjust the static image underneath this layer to be more darker and tried to match it up with the actual shadow as best as I could.

I found out while watching through the film on After Effects one of my scenes was filmed a bit too bright compared to the others, so I've had to put a filter over a section of the animation to make it darker. I think this worked really well as now the scene doesn't seem out of place and also reinforces the plan I had to make the film darker as Sams story developed and as his demon got closer.

The lighting when Sam puts on the glasses didn't feel like it emphasized that they were giving him an ability enough, so I decided to fix this in post production. I originally planned to create an effect where lightning was coming off the glasses while a shocking effect would course through Sam. I followed this tutorial (http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-make-an-awesome-electric-shock-effect--ae-26175) to help me achieve my intended effect, however this tutorial used a lot of paid third party plugins so I had to find alternative methods. I used the rotoscope tool to only focus on his eyes and the glasses, then when it comes to the scene where the glasses fly away I moved the rotoscoping focus to the plasticine flying away while having some remnants around his eyes still. I used the find edges effect to sharpen out the areas that were going to be shocked then used hue & saturation to turn the saturation down to 0, to reduce the noise find edges had caused. There was too much black in the area so I turned lightness up quite a bit until it was mainly white. To break up the shocking effect and to make it less stable I made a new solid layer and added a fractal noise effect to it then experimented with the settings so that only parts of the rotascope showed rather than the whole thing. I added an expression to the evolution tab of the fractal noise so it would randomise and made it a large umber so it would be random for each frame. I finally added a glow effect to the comp and made it green to match the lighting. I stopped following the tutorial at this point and carried on just adjusting the settings to the glow effect and the other effects until I was happy with how it looked. I decided against adding lightning to this scene as I felt the glow effect perfectly conveyed the idea I was going for with the glasses and it may have overpowered the effect.

 I knew while filming that I would need to add smoke to the smoking scene in post so I researched if this was possible before I filmed. After watching a few tutorials with different methods I decided on using the Particle Playground effect to simulate smoke. After changing the colour, adding a blur effect and playing around with the other settings I added a wiggle expression to the direction of the smoke coming from the cigarette to make it more realistic, and for the other smoke parts I manipulated the direct manually as the direction changes when the shot does. I found this very easy to do and the actual hard part was tracking it to the scene as I had to do this manually frame by frame.

The last scene felt a bit empty so I used the lightning tutorial from earlier and skipped to the adding lightning part, but when I realised it was just one effect (Advanced lightning) I stopped following the tutorial again and experimented with the settings myself. I quickly rotascoped the Envy demon out and made multiple layers so there would still be a background shot of him going at the same time. I added a wiggle expression again to the direction as I feel these are really useful for making randomised movements appear more authentic. I used the opacity node to make the lightning appear and disappear which I feel really added to the the dramatic end. Because the original shot I filmed was very dark I had to use a brightness and contrast effect to the rotascoped layer so that when the lightning appeared the Envy demon would also light up as though it was real.

I really wanted the title effects to be interesting and to stand out so people would remember the name of my film, and I found this tutorial for an effect I liked (https://forums.adobe.com/thread/924230) but unfortunately after following the steps I realised the shatter effect wasn't working for me, and  after trying for awhile to find out why or what the problem was I decided it would be more time effective to just make a simple title screen. The good thing about this is that now it won't take away anything from my film or seem out of place.

Audio

For the audio in my film I tried to record as many sounds I could use as possible, then used freesound.org for royalty free sound effects that I couldn't make myself. To put them together in the scenes at the right time I used the program Soundtrack Pro as I had used this previously and found it a lot easier to use than After Effects. Using Soundtrack Pro I adjusted the volume and cut each sound to better fit its purpose.

For some reason the sounds I have recorded are quieter than the free sounds so I added the sound with the computer on full volume and didn't realise how quiet the whole animation was until I had rendered it, I haven't had time to amplify the sound and re-render it but will do this before entering my film into animation festivals.

Audio Recording List

Here I have made a list of sound effects i need to record to create the audio for my animation.

1. Background noise (at least 2 mins)
2. foot steps (multiple)
3. picking up can 
4. till buttons
5. till opening
6. till closing
7. can opening 
8. Drinking
9. can falling on floor
10. boy falling 
11. clothes shuffling (multiple) 
12. picking up glasses
13. gasp
14. mystical sound 
15. spots popping (multiple)
16. smoking : inhaling
17. smoking : exhaling 
18. wind (multiple)
19. scarf blowing
20. lightning

Filming

I haven't been able to use tie downs due to a design flaw in my characters feet because of this when doing the walk cycle he lost balance and fell off the table and broke in multiple places. To fix this problem I had to re-sculpt a finger and his ear from Sculpey then dried it with a hair-dryer as I was unable to place him in the oven at this stage because other parts may have melted. He fell off the table a second time and the 3D printed forehead snapped along with the fingers on the other hand. This was a harder problem to fix because I had to either sculpt a new forehead or get it 3D printed and painted again. To fix it I decided it would be cheaper and faster to sculpt the forehead out of Sculpey but then this made the character head heavier which in turn made him even harder to support and I needed to use the rig for the duration of filming.

I used Dragonframe to control the lighting and camera for my film. This module was the first time I had used Dragonframe so when filming the animatic, sloth test and character turn around's, I tested various lighting possibilities and played around with the program so that when it came to filming there was no surprises and I would know my way around so there would be less mistakes.

Over time Sam's armature became loose at his hips due to the glue I had used to secure them from breaking, and this eventually restricted his leg movements a lot and made it harder to animate walk cycles.

When filming my last scene the tripod broke and wouldn't tighten, because I was doing a zoom into the demons face the camera moving wasn't an option so I had to wrap the camera and tripod in masking tape to keep it from falling down. Even though this worked reasonably well I can still see a slight movement of the camera as it zooms in which is unfortunate but beyond my control.

The following pictures are from while I was filming and the last picture is a moment where I had to swap the replaceable face mid scene to make Sam gasp at seeing the Sloth demon. This was hard to do because I had to be extremely careful and make sure I didn't move the character too much because otherwise it would have messed up the scene.