To You, From the Past (WIP)
FNAR241: Hand-Drawn Computer Animation — Fall 2019
ToonBoom Harmony
Overview
This project is part of a hand-drawn animation class I took under Professor Joshua Mosley. For our first two introductory exercises, we did a “collision” project and a rotoscoping project, which you can check out here.
We had to brainstorm ideas for what we wanted to do for the final project, and the theme was open. We could practically animate anything we wanted! I was very interested in Japanese music videos and the anime drawing style in general, so I had hoped to create a dream-like experience with a storyline of my own. The current iteration of this project is a Work In Progress (WIP).
Brainstorming
I was thinking of drawing a dream sequence, featuring a young girl in class, sitting at her desk next to a window as it rains outside. She zones out and closes her eyes, and when she opens them, she’s in a dream world. Essentially the animation follows her moving throughout this dream world until she runs faster and faster at the end, seemingly chasing something, and finally— she wakes up! Class is over. She looks out the window and it’s raining, but sunnier outside. The girl sitting in front of her gets her attention, and gives her an umbrella. This ends with our main character accepting the umbrella.
I proposed this idea to my professor, and he suggested considering what I wanted to reflect about myself by making this animation. This was an opportunity to make a work that conveyed something that I currently think about in my own life, or some emotion that I want to explore. I immediately thought about the melancholy, repetitive nature of high school, and how I felt at that age. High school was a time where I was tired of being in school just to sit in class and do my homework and repeat the same process that I have been repeating ever since I started standard education in grade school. It got me thinking about the childish happiness we all have when we are younger, the innocence that allows us to find joy in quite literally anything. This innocence is burnt out of students by the time we’re in high school.
That train of thought led me to rewrite the narrative of a young girl falling asleep in class and just wandering through a dream world. I wanted her to nod off, and explore her fantastical dream world, and then find a mysterious figure. We can’t see the figure, not yet, but we see our main character chasing the figure frantically. The music picks up, gets faster and faster as she runs through the school, and even gravity isn’t on her side as her feet leave the ground— she starts floating, floating and yet still tries to find the figure— and finally, at the end, we get to see who she was looking so hard for. It’s herself, but younger. She wakes up with a smile, remembering the happiness that she knows is still inside her, knowing that there is more to life than just the repetitive nature of existing as a student in high school. Those melancholy days are behind her.
With this new meaning for me to pursue, and a song (Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence by Ryuichi Sakamoto) that I envisioned being the background music for this animation, I was ready to start.
Initial Storyboarding
First, I created physical storyboards, a quick sketch of what I wanted to happen. I did these in paper first, creating thumbnails of what I envisioned.
Then, I went on to the next step, which was drawing out the storyboards in animatic form. The software I used was ToonBoom Harmony and iMovie; I finished drawing out an approximation of how long I wanted the final project to be along with the music in the background. The music was an essential part of the process, since I really wanted the emotional impact of this journey to be evident to viewers, so I spent a considerable amount of time lining up the drawings and every frame to each beat of the music.
Rotoscoping Material
After this stage, I realized that my animatic was more than 2 minutes long. At 24 frames per second, even with the amount of still shots that I have, this would be a hugely time consuming task. So, I decided to make use of one of the techniques that we had been introduced to in the beginning of the course: rotoscoping. Recruiting my wonderful roommate, Carmen Lau, I took each significant set of frames from my animatic and made a shots list to film her performing actions for me to rotoscope over. In the span of two very busy, crazy days, in which I both learned how to film and direct, we managed to finish filming!
I now had amazing, useful reference footage to use for all the action sequences in my animatic.
Work in Progress
Now, I was ready to move on to the next stage. I knew I had a lot to do: sketching, inking, backgrounds, coloring, so I gave myself a timeline to streamline my process. For a few days, I compiled reference images for possible backgrounds. I gave myself a week for sketching things out, three weeks for inking (inking by far turned out to be the lengthiest process), and another one week for backgrounds and coloring. It was a whirlwind of drawing frames, coloring, drawing more frames, editing, lining up with the background music, editing again, and so on. After a lot of sleepless nights of inking, I was able to finish the inked version of this project. I continued to add on to this, splashing on some color and preliminary backgrounds. This is the current version of this animation:
I consider this a work in progress, my first real adventure in the world of hand-drawn animation.