A Small Break Leads To More Productivity

Welcome to the sixth edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter! I decided to take a break from animating for the first half of the week to focus on schoolwork and rest. When I came back to work more on lip sync, I realized that my animation became more expressive and higher quality because of the increase in energy. I will remember this result in the future when I burn myself out again.

Lip sync updates

This past week, I continued creating keyframes for the parts of the film with dialogue, focusing on making the emotion in the dialogue believable. I think that taking a small break and coming back with more expressive animation actually paid off really nicely, as some parts of the film look intentionally stiffer than others to convey a contrast between fake emotion and genuine emotion.

I am very happy with how the longest shot in the film (Shot 21) is looking so far; about one third of the shot has the main poses all drawn, and I am beginning to work on creating breakdowns.

Sound design updates

The dialogue continues to be the part of the film I am the least happy with. Knowing my own limitations as someone who has absolutely zero experience voice acting, it's not terrible, but I think it at least partially retracts from what the film is actually trying to say. Unfortunately, since I was very hasty animating a bunch of lip sync parts, it would be very difficult to rerecord. I am disappointed by this, but I will keep this in mind the next time I decide to make a short film with dialogue.

You may recall from earlier newsletter editions that I am manipulating my own voice to sound more masculine by artificially pitching it down and preserving the original formants. My opinion on how this sounds overall has gone back and forth over the past few weeks. At times I feel that it sounds great, and at other times I feel that it sounds very robotic. Thus far, I have decided to leave it as is and simply move on (else I would probably keep messing with it forever), but recently I decided to try out some other methods to get it to sound a little better.

Recently, I decided to get a free trial of a bunch of Antares vocal processing plug-ins just to have some fun messing around with them. One of the tools included in this trial is Throat, which modifies audio by emulating an actual human throat which you can create a custom shape for. I decided to try using it on the voice lines I recorded to see if I could make a more believable sound.

Unfortunately, Throat comes with a lot of unnatural artifacts that I found unsatisfactory. The plug-in comes with a slider to change the pitch of the audio, but I found it to sound even more robotic than Ableton's built in pitch shifting tools. I think that Throat's pitch shifting slider works best within a smaller range, and Ableton's is better when you are transposing a sound by many semitones. In my case, I am pitching my own voice down by seven semitones, and Ableton's Complex Pro pitch shifting tool works better.

Besides that, I found many of the capabilities of Throat to be very interesting and useful. I made a few small changes to the length and shape of the emulated throat to make the final audio a bit clearer. The great thing about modifying the original vocal lines is that all of the pacing remains the same, meaning I won't have to redo any of the lip sync animation I have already done. The overall change in the final audio is very small, but I think it is at least marginally better than the original one. I will probably mess around with this a bit more in the future before my free trial runs out because I think it is very fun.

Conclusion

That concludes the updates for this week! I apologize for the lack of previews and updates in this post. Hopefully I will have more to report next time (I have said this many times before).

More Lip Sync And The Like

Would you look at that, it is already next Saturday. Apparently, it has also already been a month since the first installation of the newsletter. How much have I done so far?

Sacrificing my physical health

Unfortunately, I opened up this week doing way less work than I usually do because my body decided to be in pain for much of the day for no reason. While lying on my bed being unable to do much of anything, I began to question how much I have been overworking myself these past few weeks and how much it has affected my health.

The workload I get from classes has not lessened in the slightest, and while I have an ample amount of free time during school hours to get stuff done, time and energy are not equivalent. I severely underestimated how much brain power it actually takes to animate, and there are noticeable drops in animation quality from where I simply didn't have the energy to produce my best work.

I don't like taking breaks because they feel like wasting time, but I really should take more breaks. I am hoping that I set my deadlines loosely enough to allow for such an adjustment to my schedule.

I am honestly not sure why I wanted to get this short film out so quickly, but now that I have set the deadline for myself, it feels like an obligation. Unfortunately, I have also decided that I will meet this obligation no matter what. I am hoping that this will take less pain than it does currently.

Lip sync

This week, lip sync was the main thing I worked on. There is not much specific progress to report, though I have made significant progress on one of the longer shots in the film. One thing I have done is split longer shots into parts which I can focus on one at a time. This makes the whole shot less daunting to me.

There are some shots in this film which I am a bit more unhappy with, and most of them are lip sync shots. I didn't want the main character's head and body to be completely motionless while speaking, but the more movement I include, the more time it takes in general to get these shots done. This affects both the current rough stage of animation and the coloring/shading stage, which I am dreading more and more.

The compromise I have settled on is having the character still for large portions of the speech in which it feels natural, and having brief head turn or body turn movements at occasional intervals. I also tried to include movements which emphasize certain words to make the speech even more natural, but I am not sure how well I pulled this off.

The longest shot in the entire film

The longest shot in the entire film is shot 21 according to my storyboard, and it comes in at a whopping 1716 frames. At 24 FPS, this is about a minute and 11 seconds of runtime. It is also a lip sync shot. I have been putting off working on it because of how intimidating the length was, but I decided I should probably just do it since it has to be done at some point. The techniques I mentioned above (splitting into smaller parts, having larger portions of stillness) have helped significantly so far, and I think it is possible to complete it by the deadline I set for myself, though it won't be easy.

As a quick side note, I do not actually plan on drawing 1716 frames. During periods of stillness, the vast majority of frames are repeats, and on top of that, I am animating the whole film on twos. This means that a new drawing will only appear every other frame, so I will only have to draw 858 frames at the absolute most.

Bonus: general process of animation

This week, you get a bonus section of the newsletter! Here I will explain a bit about how I approach animation.

Animation usually follows a simple workflow: first you create the endpoints and keyframes, then extremes, then breakdowns, then inbetweens. Keyframes are frames which determine the general action within the shot. Extremes are frames which show the extent to which an action is performed (for example, in a punching animation, an extreme would be the frame in which the character's arm is the most extended). Breakdowns go between keyframes and extremes. Breakdowns define the in between actions (the transitions between keyframes/extremes) and still take a decent amount of effort to create. Inbetweens are then used to fill in gaps in the animation to fulfill a certain FPS, and these are the frames which you spend the least amount of energy on. Basically all you do to create inbetweens are draw lines in between the lines in the frame before and the frame after. Basically, inbetweens are busy work.

One rule of thumb I follow is that, the more keyframes and breakdowns you have within a certain time period, the higher quality ("smoother") that part of the animation is. For example, shots with rotation in 3D technically should not have any inbetweens (should be purely keyframes and breakdowns) because the whole shape of the object is changing every single frame. If you only draw two keyframes for any kind of significant 3D rotation and simply inbetween them, then it will not look right; features and landmarks on the form will slide around instead of rotating in 3D. It is for this reason that rotations in 3D take a lot of effort to pull off, even if they are not necessarily as difficult or complicated as other shots.

This should explain why low FPS animations can still look smooth, and high FPS animations can still look stiff or choppy. There are other factors that go into this as well, but I believe that this accounts for a lot of what "smoothness" is in animation.

In my animations, I try to use this property to my advantage by manipulating something I call keyframe density. Basically, some shots have more keyframes and breakdowns than others, and I use this to emphasize certain actions or ease the workload for myself in less important shots. Lip sync shots get very few keyframes because the actions in lip sync shots are not very important. Shots with head rotation get more keyframes partly because of what I mentioned above and partly because I actually like animating head turns and I find them a bit easier. In this manner, I can focus most of my energy on the parts of the film I am the best at animating. In the end, what I am hoping for is that the fluidity of some shots will make up for the comparative stiffness of others, making the film's animation overall a decent quality.

Conclusion

That concludes the fifth edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter! Thank you for reading. I hope to actually have more to report next week.

I Do Not Know What I Was Thinking When I Started This

As the title of this email may suggest, I am currently going through a slightly rougher period in the short film's production. I will explain in more detail in the rest of this edition. This edition will also contain more animation previews than previous editions because more animation has been completed and I think that previews are long overdue.

Aside from that, can you believe that it's already been three weeks since the first edition of the newsletter was released? I suppose time flies when you are really busy, or something like that.

Pushing back deadlines

I didn't want to have to push back the original release date for this project, but I am pretty sure completing everything by the deadlines I had set for myself at the beginning of the project would be physically impossible. Previously, I planned on completing all rough animation (I am considering this to be all parts of animation except for coloring and minimal shading) by September 13th, but I do not think this is possible without sacrificing my own well-being, which I think I have done enough of already. I have decided to push back this deadline by three weeks, meaning the new deadline for completing all rough animation will be October 4th.

Similarly, the deadline for coloring and shading will be pushed back. I originally planned on completing this by October 31st, which would have given me about 7 weeks to complete all coloring and shading, but I think I will also extend the amount of time I have for this task. At the moment, I am not sure how long coloring and shading will take, but judging by how severely I underestimated the amount of time rough animation would require, I think it is reasonable to assume I underestimated finishing the animation as well. Thus, the new deadline for finishing animation will be pushed back five weeks to December 5th. Altogether, this places the new release date for the film in mid-December.

Making these decisions made me really sad, especially considering how far the new release date is from the original planned one, but I really think that it is for the best. I also tried to give myself a lot of breathing room in between deadlines. If things get less busy over the next few weeks, which I am hoping they will, I might be able to complete some tasks a bit earlier.

Lip sync

I have just completed lip sync for one of the shorter shots in the film, the first shot for which I have done so, and to my pleasant surprise, it actually did not take that much time. I was able to add lip sync to the entire thing in a little over an hour! Granted, the other lip sync shots will be much longer, and animating the underlying movement of the head and body took a few days by themselves. Regardless, I would consider this something worth celebrating.

Can you guess what he is saying?

Miscellaneous work in progress shots

As stated previously, this edition of the newsletter contains more animation previews. This is partly because I have not done that much new stuff since the last edition of the newsletter and I don't want this edition to be 95% bad news and 5% filler. Here are a few previews of animation that I hope you will enjoy. (Only a few because the rest are surprises!)

Conclusion

That wraps up the fourth edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter! Apologies for the lack of updates in this edition. Hopefully by next week there will be more to report.

2D Animation Takes A Long Time

This is the third edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter and the third time in a row I have forgotten to advertise it on social media, but I will right before this edition goes live (I promise). This week, I focused on project organization and 2D animation.

Organization

My work tends to be pretty disorganized, but due to the scale of this project, I had to come up with a system to keep all my files in the right place and have an efficient workflow that doesn't compromise the rate at which I can get this project done. I decided to number off all of the shots in this film and name the .blend files and scenes within those files accordingly. This makes it so that I can sort all the files alphabetically and find the shot I need to work on much quicker. In addition, I have my audio, images, and project files separated into different folders to keep things from getting messy. I would highly recommend anyone starting their own project to come up with a similar system for their own file organization.

File organization makes the next step of having an efficient workflow much easier. This next step is file linking, which is a very convenient tool in Blender which allows you to reference data from other .blend files and keep all included data up to date. With this tool in mind, I created a new project file for the full sequence of clips and linked each of the scenes from those clips in the video editor. This allows me to sync up the shots with the finalized audio I recorded last week and see how the project is looking as a whole. The nice thing about file linking is that all linked data automatically updates whenever the source file is updated, which means I can see the project taking shape in this master file as I work on each individual shot. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that file linking breaks whenever the source files are renamed or moved, which is why it was important to organize everything early on.

Using this system also forces me to create files for each of the shots, which I have been procrastinating on doing for a while. The bad thing is that this made me realize just how much 2D animation I still have to do, but the good thing is that this allows me to alter the lengths of some shots before I have actually done the work to animate them. The final audio I recorded different significantly in timing and length from the demo audio, so many of the shots have to be shortened or lengthened to compensate. I really don't want to waste the work that I have done by cutting short some of the already completed 2D animation, so I think it is a good thing that I still have some unfinished shots I can change.

2D animation and lip sync

This week, I started some of the lip sync shots for this short film. Lip sync is tedious, but not difficult in the same way that some of the other more complicated shots are. These shots are the longest by far and constitute about half of the film's runtime, but luckily they involve only one character, subtle movement, and zero camera action.

One challenge I expect to run into is audio synchronization with the master file. I decided to be a bad voice actor and not separate my audio into voice lines, which means it will be difficult to sync the audio of the individual shots (as I animate them) to the master file. I have a plan in place to mitigate this, but I still don't know how effective it will be.

Apart from lip sync, at this point I have at least a rough starting frame for almost all of the 2D animated shots so far, and I have made significant progress on many of the simpler shots. According to my document, 5 out of 23 total 2D animated shots have been completed (all still uncolored), 9 shots are being worked on, and 9 shots have not been started yet. It may be important to keep in mind that some work-in-progress shots are drastically farther in the completion process than others, and all shots vary in both complexity and length. While animating, I changed some shots to be less complicated so as not to compromise animation quality or my own health. I think I have been overworking myself a little bit.

My hope was to complete all rough 2D animation by September 13, but looking at the work I still have to do, I am unsure if this is achievable. If not, I will probably move it back by a few weeks to ease the workload on myself. This will likely result in a publication date in late November or December as opposed to early November as I was hoping. I do still have to color and (very minimally) shade all 2D animated shots, as well as work on compositing and sound design after all animation is completed. I think that trying to force myself to complete all of this within a few months was a very bad idea, but I will try my best to do it anyway.

Conclusion and side note

That wraps up this edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter! As a side note, I think I have figured out why the unsubscribe button is not appearing at the top of the newsletter emails. I believe this is due to email sending reputation, which is very silly in my opinion. The good news about this is that as I send out more emails from this address to more people, the issue should resolve itself over time. I will now go advertise this newsletter on social media like I said I would.

A Little Stress And Slow Progress

Welcome to the second edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter! For this edition, please confirm that there is an option to unsubscribe at the top of this newsletter or in the preview in your email browser. For some reason, this option did not appear in the previous edition. If it does not appear again, please contact me at my main email address so I can find a solution.

The start of classes

This week, classes started, which means I have a lot less time to work on my projects. Most of the work from this point forward will likely be completed on the weekends as weekdays are reserved for actual class, homework, and resting after long school days.

I am still trying to gauge the amount of time I will have on weekdays to animate. This past week was the very first week of school and therefore likely not a very good indicator of what the rest of the year will look like. That being said, I think I have an hour or two to work in the mornings and evenings after classes if the workload I get from school stays manageable.

It may also be important to note that the time I have to work should be separated from my actual ability to work, which is influenced by many other things. I have been consistently getting home exhausted because of long periods of waiting in the triple digit weather for the buses to arrive (among many other factors), which means I usually can't produce my usual quality of work even if I have the time. Going forward, I will do my best to continue producing the highest quality of animation I can for the project while not sacrificing my own health or performance in school.

3D backgrounds

This week, I started modeling the backgrounds for my upcoming short film. Having 3D backgrounds eliminates the need to draw interior rooms and buildings at multiple different angles and allows me to reuse assets, making the whole process of adding backgrounds a lot easier and more efficient.

Much of the short film takes place in one room. So far, I have tried using the Blender Home Builder add-on for interior design. It is a very efficient and useful add-on, especially for its free price, but it is also still very limited. So far, I have found it very useful for creating the basic shape of the room as well as adding cutouts for things like doors and windows. I will probably use a mix of free to use assets and very rudimentary modeling to create the rest of the room.

My hope is to spend no more than a week creating all of the backgrounds, keeping in mind most of them (except for the main room) are only on screen for a few seconds.

Voice acting

I have finally gotten the voice acting for this project to a point where I am happy with it! I kept the same technique explained in the previous newsletter edition, but this time I changed my own voice a bit more and preserved all of the original formants. This made the final voice clips a lot less robotic. Having the completed voice acting now allows me to work on all of the clips with lip sync, which I am very happy about! This also gives me a good estimate of the length of the final film, which is looking to be a little less than six minutes in total.

Very slow 2D animation

2D animation is simultaneously the most tedious and largest part of this project. I think I had a good instinct to do most of the hardest parts of the animation before classes started, which means I can create the rest of the animation while expending a bit less energy. It still does take a lot of time though...

That is it for this edition of the newsletter! I once again forgot to advertise it on social media, but I will do that as soon as I remember to at a reasonable time.

The Very First gaierhei Weekly Newsletter!

Welcome to the very first edition of the gaierhei weekly newsletter! First of all, deep apologies to those using dark mode who are seeing an uglier version of what this newsletter is supposed to look like. The way emails are altered for dark mode varies from client to client, which means that it is exceedingly difficult to properly prepare an email to look acceptable to all viewers. In particular, Gmail's dark mode seems to invert the colors of all emails, even if they are already in a dark style, turning light text on a dark background into dark text on a light background. If this is the case, there may be an option to view this email in light mode in your email client somewhere and see this newsletter's original colors.

I will use this newsletter to share news and progress on projects that I am working on. In this particular edition, I will give an overview of all the progress I have made on my current projects so far. Subsequent editions will probably be more detailed as I will only have to report the progress I have made that week.

If all goes well, I will also post this and all future editions of the newsletter in the archive, which means they will be free and available to read for any future subscribers or non-subscribers who just want to see what I'm working on.

The creation of this newsletter

I have had the idea of a newsletter for a while, but only acted on it recently. This newsletter was created over the course of just a week or two using Listmonk, a self-hosted newsletter application, and SMTP2GO, a free(ish) SMTP provider. Initially, I wanted to send the emails using my own self-hosted Postfix email server, but this turned out to be both too difficult and too fiddly. I tried using Amazon SES as an SMTP provider at first, but they refused to grant my account production access and refused to give a reason why. So far, SMTP2GO hasn't given me any issues, but we will see if anything comes up down the line.

I don't really like having to rely on third parties for services such as this newsletter, but at least in the present, I think this is the most convenient and effective way to get my newsletter up and running. I am also happy to say that, as of yet, I have not spent a single cent on the creation of this newsletter, and it likely will remain that way for a while. Listmonk is free and open-source, and SMTP2GO has a pretty decent free plan.

Bear in mind this newsletter is partly just an experiment and the system I am using is bound to change after a while. I am very much a newbie in terms of configuring things on my server and working with all these different networking concepts, but I learned a lot while making this newsletter and I hope to improve my skills more as the newsletter (hopefully) expands!

The new short film

I am currently working on a new short film which is mostly 2D animated with 3D and live action elements. So far, the script, storyboard, and a few 2D animated scenes are complete, with a few more 2D scenes on the way. It is set to release in early November, but there is no telling how much time I will actually have to work on it once classes start in a few days.

Voice acting

The main character for this film is a teenage boy. Unfortunately, I do not have the voice of a teenage boy. The thought of having to work with a voice actor for this project made me kind of uncomfortable (I don't like talking to people), so I looked into some options and eventually settled on a method using a little bit of voice acting and one of Ableton's pitch shifting methods, Complex Pro.

The Complex Pro pitch shifting method allows for the base tone of a sound to be lowered while preserving the formants of the original sound, which prevents the final voice from sounding unnatural. I found that lowering my own voice by around 7 semitones produces a believable masculine voice that I felt fit the character I was trying to portray. After applying this and a bit of EQ to bring back some of the higher frequencies, I think the final voice clips turned out decently well for someone with absolutely zero voice acting experience. However, the final clips gain a weird metallic quality that I am hoping I will find some solution for in the final film. In the future, I will probably just get over my fear of talking to people and find an actual voice actor.

I am also hoping to release a behind-the-scenes video at some point detailing exactly what changes I am making to the voice clips in Ableton, but this will probably be closer to the video's actual release date, or more likely some time after.

2D animation

I used my drawing tablet rather than my mouse (as in Flower Basket) to animate this newer film, and it is also in a far more traditional 2D style. I think this is a lot easier than trying to animate everything using my broken mouse, but on the other hand, animating this way requires a lot more attention to detail as mistakes are far easier to catch. I will likely keep the animations in this film sketchy and loose both to fit the story and tone of the film and to make it easier for me to finish on schedule. Currently, I am trying to complete all of the rough animation and lineart for all of the shots before moving on to coloring.

I am using Blender for all of the animation in this film. I like Blender's grease pencil editor for its ability to alter individual strokes after they are drawn. This makes it easier to delete unnecessary guidelines and move specific parts of individual frames. Because Blender can be used for both 2D and 3D animation, the process of blending together 2D and 3D elements is also very simple. I also plan to use Blender for all video editing and compositing, which is the same process I used for Flower Basket.

So far, I think I have made significant progress on the parts of the film that are the most difficult to animate. These involve a lot of camera movement, multiple characters, and weird out of sync movement. A static shot of just one character that had multiple head turns and fairly complex movement took a few days to complete; a shot with three characters and a moving camera has taken me over a week, and it is still not done. The majority of the film is just one character with no camera movement, which makes me a bit more optimistic about the completion of this film.

3D modeling

3D modeling plays a big part in this film. Currently, I plan on creating all of the backgrounds and most of the props in 3D, which means I will be able to reuse them from shot to shot. This also means that animating very complex props, such as a cello (a very important prop in this film) will be made much easier. I am fairly comfortable with 3D modeling characters, but I rarely model props or backgrounds, so this will be a new experience for me. So far, I have only created the model for the cello, but I am not very happy with it and will probably remodel it at some point.

Along with the 3D models used directly in the film, I have also created 3D models to use as guidelines. For some parts of the film which are shot at a weird angle or require a lot of complicated rotation, I create rough layouts using simple boxes in 3D and then animate over top of them as a supplement to my own limited 3D intuition. I also have a rough 3D sculpture of the main character's head which I have available for reference, though I don't use it very much.

Live action

This is the aspect of the film which is the most experimental and which I am the most unsure about. I know that I want to have some real life clips in the film to amplify the sense of unease in some scenes, but I haven't really decided on where I will record those clips or what exactly they will be. Most likely, I will just use random footage on my phone that I already have, which is also what I did for the very beginning of Flower Basket.

That concludes the very first edition of the gaierhei newsletter! I forgot to advertise this newsletter on social media, so this email will be sent to basically no one. But what matters is that it's out there, right?

Emails to this address will fail to send, but if you have any questions, comments, or advice, feel free to contact me at gaierhei.art@gmail.com. This newsletter is very new, so feedback is welcome and appreciated!