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I am an animator with a background in illustration. My artwork is primarily digital and celebrates the limitations of digital media.
Born in 2000, I began using computers just before the concept of “user interface” was being developed and standardized. For the first few years of my conscious life, the look of digital spaces still reflected their true nature: an assortment of pixels. Intentionally or not, the limits of the screen added texture to digital images that made the virtual world feel like an alternate dimension. In my artwork, I channel the excitement towards computer graphics of that era to create images that proudly display what they are at the elemental level. ⋆｡°✩ ⋆⭒˚.⋆ Lorraine and the Ladybugs is a cartoon about a neat girl who suddenly, inexplicably, begins spewing ladybugs from her mouth each time she opens it. Lorraine is based on early versions of the program MS Paint, which severely limited how good a drawing can look. The inescapability of the horrible image quality seems like an obstacle at first, but MS Paint has become my favorite tool as an artist because of it. Being forced to let go of the need for a clean line allows me to draw more expressively. ⋆｡°✩ ⋆⭒˚.⋆ When I started storyboarding this project, I thought it would be hilarious to animate somebody throwing up a bunch of ladybugs. I just wanted to make a light-hearted, unserious cartoon with MS Paint-inspired visuals. As I was working on it, I realized that I had accidentally expressed a lot of my feelings about living with ADHD. It's sometimes frustrating and isolating to feel like I just can't function like everybody else, but life with ADHD is also sometimes really funny! And eventually I learned how to live with it :) ⋆⭒˚.⋆
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It has been 2 months since my last update. Since then, I've completed the animation and soundscape of my film. Here is how I did it:
February 17-23
February 24-March 2
March 3-9
March 10-16
March 17-23
March 24-30
March 31-April 6
April 7-13
In all, I spent approximately 245 hours in the WACOM lab in EV5 this semester. Sometimes I also worked from home. Once I worked in FB 325.
This is my basic sound effect pass. It's not well mixed at all, but I just put it together to show Emmeline all the sound effects I had in mind. I don't know how good any of this will sound with music included, but I figure that the music she's composing is the most important sonic element of the film and that if any sound effects or ambience get in its way, they can go.
I already got some feedback on this sound effect pass. And I've also already added a lot to the animation since this export. Anyway, here are the changes to be made from here:
Backgrounds Update
In between rough animation, I've been working on backgrounds as well. There are two camera moves in the whole 2 minutes, and I've animated both in separate TvPaint projects. I've also started adding nicer linework and basic color (no shading yet) to backgrounds (cafe and bathroom). Just to work on something easier than animating and get a feeling of reward.
With picture lock due at the end of this week, I've been roughly animating/extensively keyframing across the entire film, and re-timing shots. I put in some of the changes recommended to me last week:
That's it!!! Just working on timing. This past week, I've been adding more keyframes throughout the film, particularly the first 2 scenes. I'm having difficulty with the acting, and I was trying to avoid using video references. Often, with drawing and with animating, I get lost in my references and my work loses some character, my animation becomes less elastic, and it starts to look rotoscoped, in a bad way.
I presented my progress on Thursday (not realizing that the version I showed in class actually didn't include a lot of the keyframing I did this week, I messed up my files due to a lack of sleep, sorry) and got some more feedback from Jean and the class.
That's it for current next steps! I'm making so many little changes it's hard to keep track of them. Picture Lock is next week and I'll have to spend lots of time keyframing to make it. The flow is getting easier now and it takes less time and effort to make new drawings every week. When I work out now, I think of my movements in keyframes. Backgrounds Update I made some good progress this week. I reworked my colour script to make each scene more cohesive and less reliant on local colour, and from that I was able to create colour keys for several scenes. Ramona gave me some good feedback that the farm scene was way too bright. I decided to tone it down by painting it over several times in a light grey on Hard Light mode, which lessened the colors while keeping the lineart bright and fun. I like the way it looks!! I also started putting in some linework in TvPaint, which means I can start animating certain scenes where the action is behind/around background objects.    Soundtrack Collaboration
I met with Emmeline today, a composer who's going to create original music for the cartoon. She reached out to me after seeing my animatic on the soundtrack collaboration sheet with a TON of really great ideas for the score, including to represent the ladybugs' flight with a bassoon and to incorporate that instrument into the upbeat melody at the end to show how Lorraine and her bugs are in harmony. Our meeting was super productive; both of us had prepared cue sheets with our ideas and we discussed them. I really trust her sense of timing and emotional cues, and it's such a relief to know that my film will have good music!!! Background Update I finally painted a background that I like!!! The buildings are detailed with washes of color and some bricks and windows. For this shot, the sky is changing from sunset to nighttime to sunrise, with the sun and moon rotating like they're on a spinning wheel. The clouds, stars, and birds will be coming in and out from outside the frame. The buildings don't change color at all and I think it still works. I know I said I would adding a bunch of lineart to my backgrounds but for this shot, it made the buildings feel smaller than I want them to. I think this will look REALLY good all pixelly!!!! I'm so excited to draw it with my special brush!!! Sound Exchange Jesu and I partnered up for this homework assignment, which was to exchange detailed feedback on what we would do with each other's soundtracks. He was super generous with his feedback and I feel so hopeful now that I have clear ideas for what to do next! Here is the list of advice from Jesu (and I will be implementing all of it):
In the last week of the fall semester, I fully animated the shot of a ladybug flying onto a clover with an aphid crawling over it. I don't love how it looks, and it made me realize that if I try to color in this project in TvPaint using local color for everything, I'm not going to get a sophisticated color palette.
For now, I am using Photoshop to paint some color keys with techniques like underpainting and light washes of color, using square and triangle painting brushes. I plan to use as references for when I render my backgrounds with the pixel brush technique. 
I worked on a color script and some background color keys. It helps to see the whole film's palette on one page, but it is still too dependent on local color. Getting away from rendering things the way they "should be" is really hard, but I want this cartoon to look interesting!!!
I particularly like the city shots and Lorraine's bedroom. I think this film really works best when the backgrounds don't draw too much attention (some of my classmates even said they think I should keep it black and white except for the bugs). So at least this color script was helpful to figure out what I DON'T want.
Color tests I brought my drawing from last week into Photoshop and played around a bunch with Hue/Saturation layers and Gradient Maps. I tried to go for analogous color schemes centered on green. The first 5 veer towards warm green and the last 4 towards cool green. Honestly I think this background simply doesn't have enough detail. No matter what I do to the colors I just don't like it. It doesn't look how it looks in my head. Also, it's like, even though all my references and the style I want to do DON'T color things in their real life colors, I like can't stop myself from doing that. I think I really need to step away from the computer and redraw this background using the stuff in my pencil case, where I don't have access to literally every color that the human eye can register.  Character design
I've been drawing Lorraine over and over again in my sketchbook this week. I can draw her pretty good from the front but any other angle kind of sucks. I think I might do like a Fairly OddParents thing where the character has a front and a side angle and they just flip from one to the other. But now that I'm thinking about it again I don't like the idea. Saehee and I decided to do our editing exchange together. We booked the Cintiq lab at the CDA and worked for a couple hours.
We edited Saehee's animatic first. I made a lot of timing changes, mostly extending frames for much longer. I also added frames for a title and for credits. Their animatic starts with a few frames of text that explains the myth they're exploring. I ran the text through a calculator that tells you how long to hold text on screen for legibility and we found that this exposition, when paced slowly enough to actually read, lasts 30 seconds. Afterwards, we re-timed and reordered each sequence. A lot of frames needed to be held for much longer, taking into account the amount of time needed to animate the movements. Before this, Saehee was worried that they had a lot of gaps in their animatic, but in the end they actually had 2 minutes and 30 seconds of content and need to cut down. We started editing my animatic next. I had a clear idea of the edits to make (see last week's list), so we just had that to follow. Unfortunately, TV Paint wasn't opening in the Cintiq lab so we had to use Saehee's laptop instead and then it crashed without saving. So. I did my own timing edits later but we talked about my project and Saehee gave me a really good idea: for the scene where Lorraine wakes up in her room full of ladybugs, I could recreate the rose petal scene in American Beauty. |
