M E L T E D
A student animation produced by Boba Productions.
A Manchester based student animation group formed by Paige Burns, Adam Frith, Danielle Bond and Alisha Jiwa
Melted
A snowman goes on a journey to find warmth in the world.
Sypnosis:
Two children build a snowman, who comes to life during the night. This snowman is particularly cold and goes on a journey to get warm. Eventually the sun rises, and the snowman finally achieves happiness and warmth.
TEAM MEMBERS
Paige Burns: Lead animator, Character artist and Project manager.
Alisha Jiwa: Script writer, Background artist, Animator assist.
Danielle Brindle: Concept artist, Promotional and Marketing.
Adam Lee: Lead animator and Comp lead.
A short view into the production of Melted
Early Ideation
The creation of "Melted"
At the beginning of our student animation, we began throwing around ideas that would work within our time constrictions and team constraints in terms of size of our studio and skill set.
Working around a table creating large mind maps really helped us throw the ball of ideas around to get something working.
INSPIRATION
Some visual inspiration for the direction of Melted
Our main inspiration was Netflix’s Klaus, we really wanted a visually stunning animation during wintertime which effectively showed off our artistic talents, as that was the main strengths of our team.
As a group we brought together a bunch of mood boards that really fit the aesthetic we wanted to pursue, this was an amalgamation of backgrounds from Klaus, Pinterest 2d cell shaded illustrative styles that used textured brushes and texture overlays to create dimension in the characters and background.
The colour palettes were also heavily inspired by Klaus as we really liked the gorgeous colours that was expressed through an otherwise snow-white dominated background. The textured 2d style with expert lighting helped the animation look 3D; from this we took a slightly different route, focusing on art heavy backgrounds and character design in 2D whilst utilising textures throughout the animation to help the visuals look better. This as difficult to produce in animate in making the shading more cell rather than blocked and flat. We chose to use a red outline which was soft and followed our colour scheme well.
Looking back, we definitely could’ve broadened our inspiration from just focusing on Klaus, however we had a really creative team that managed to produce a style we all liked.
Storybuilding
Set on 4th of October, where we started with idea generation for our animation. For the entire team this was an exciting part of the project as the ideas felt limitless and we could explore lots of visual narratives.
All our ideas played on the idea of “contradicting opposites”. For example, the witch without a wart or a vampire without fangs. This base concept was super simple and easy to build a narrative off. The witch idea was the first idea we really explored but was disregarded due to the world building aspect and too many factors that would distract from a short story.
We then came up with the “snowman who hates the cold”: “introducing the snowman and his motive to get warm > showing his trials and struggles > finding warmth in the sun and turning into a cloud to repeat the process”. From there we stuck with this idea as it was easy to create a centric character with 2/3 supporting characters relating to the story.
In terms of the witch idea it would’ve been good in T.V paint, its very difficult and everyone must stick to a strict schedule and always be doing stuff; devoting entire attention to it in and out of work hours. The programme is too expensive, and the pipeline would’ve been too demanding.
We were able to share our idea with the class and had help from our tutors to guide us into what would work best for the goal in mind, a short and sweet student animation. In terms of what could’ve been better during the iterative process, we could mention possibly utilising different methods in how to story tell with the help from academic resources such as “Pixar and the aesthetic imagination : animation, storytelling and digital culture” and “Directing the story : professional storytelling and storyboarding techniques for live action and animation” by Francis Glebas.
Storyboard
“Scriptwriting was a new skill I that I embarked on for this project, I was already comfortable with creative writing and found my skills there easily translatable to the script; all that was needed was for me to learn the stage prompts and formatting which I picked up well.” - Alisha, lead on script writing and storyboarding.
One think that could’ve been improved with this process is to use an actual scriptwriting programme such as Final Draft, which is industry standard screenwriting software used by the likes of Netflix and Pixar for the use of major television and film. This would have increased knowledge in that field and be a new skill learnt.
Creating the storyboard was a fun part of pre-production which required interpreting the script that I had written into a funny and attractive visual story. The storyboard helps to make the animation process smoother, enabling our team to identify any issues related to the story, narration style or any other details and reducing the cost of alterations.
Upon being tasked with the storyboard, I was nervous about how well I could translate the unique quirks of the story, however having written the script I felt like this made the process a lot easier.
The storyboard was a good foundation for the animatic and made sense in a storytelling sense, however the notation of what shots and angles were used could’ve been drastically improved to aid the animatic; technically it was weak, but if more time was spent into it then the outcome would be improved.
ANIMATIC
We think we spent so much time on the animatic because we had really high output standards. We also squished the process in such a small time.
The main problem we faced was that we split the process of the animatic which was a huge disadvantage and took a blow to our schedule and time and mental health. It was straight up poor management and lack of experience in this field. We should’ve sourced help from another person to assist us or gave the job entirely to Danielle who had produced a really wonderful animatic for her previous project.
We all had different ideas of visuals and style. Visualising what the actions would look like proved a lot harder for me and Paige than it did for Danielle for example.
“In my case (Alisha) even though the storyboard I did was good and worked well (translated well and I did a good job in making the story come to life) it was a whole other skill to be able to visualise in the sense of how frames would’ve been shot and the timing. Similar to how the storyboard lacked in more technical aspects about how each scene would be shot and the different angles, this definitely toppled over to my experience in creating the animatic. My focus fell, confidence fell as it was my expertise and I’ve learnt that if I can’t do it, SAY SOMETHING rather than try shoulder it on. Communication is key especially when you feel you are weak on a certain task; always speak up and express your feelings to the rest of the team, its why we are a team in the first place. To help and support each other and produce something exciting together.”
The main issue we felt was communication and even before corona leading up, the lack of communication was already bad. This did improve towards later in the project, but first semester was really terrible. Could’ve been a lot better as if one doesn’t communicate it was a fall on effect to the other members in the team and everyone loses passion and focus.
Danielle speaks of how Covid19 was especially difficult for her in second semester as her mental health was really weighed down.
"I had no contact with anyone outside as I had to stay in the flats the whole time; there was no room at my parent’s house, so it was unavoidable. “The project made things a lot harder as I dealt with feelings of being unable to help due to my circumstances. The team accommodated well. You can’t always explain what is happening currently in your life all the time, and due to the pandemic things got a lot worse. We were able to overcome this and do the best we could in the situation, but as always communication is key to making the process go smoother. On top of this all my equipment broke and replacing that during Covid19 was especially hard and further took a toll on my health.”
Overall time management and the splitting of the task into 3 was our major downfalls. When asking Adam if it helped, he said it contained all the main keyframes and enabled him to animate well, so there are still positives in the outcome.
For the future, dedicating one person to work on one task that they excel at would be the ideal procedure to follow, but at the time it was a learning process, so we now know for next time.
Character Development
The progression of our characters.
Finalised Character Designs
"I enjoyed the character design in first semester probably the most over the whole project as that is my passion.
To improve I could’ve done more iterations, rather than sticking with one design. If I were to go back through the cleans I would quality control a lot more and used our final designs to ensue everything looked right. It felt like there was so much ahead of us, that going back to do stuff and check things seemed difficult to do and a waste of precious time due to the circumstances we were placed in.
I think if we started our animation a lot earlier then we could’ve been pickier with the changed and quality control, but like we said the severity of the pandemic couldn’t have been foreseen.
Paige and Danielle both worked on it." - Paige, lead on character design. “Danielle did the turnaround which helped me a lot, I wasn’t really good at turnarounds and always struggle with the feet especially. Even now I feel like my turnarounds need a lot of improvement but each year I’m getting better.” Paige on character design
“I feel like my child turnaround wasn’t the best and that translated into our animation, which wasn’t the animator’s fault, more on my end to produce a better turnaround. The rest of the team felt that the turnarounds looked fine, but one can always be too critical.”
The designs were easy to draw due to the character being a snowman. Simple rounded shapes and his face consisted of dot eyes which in hindsight should be easy to keep consistent.
Another forethought could’ve been to make rigs of the characters, Purple Parasol made a really nice animation in illustrate and aftereffects. The rough was in animate but the rest of it was shapes and layers, the aesthetic looked really nice and could’ve been something we would pursue in another project.
We also felt that Chip the dog is something we felt was missing from the trailer, would’ve been really nice to include that scene; having Chip waking up the snowman by peeing on him creating an amusing and cute dynamic between how the snowman interacted with others in the his world. A lot of people loved it during our class reflection sessions, but at the end of the day it wasn’t a possibility due to time constraints of Covid19 circumstances.
Backgrounds
Danielle used Klaus inspiration to create the concept art. We all watched a video on how the backgrounds were made, using the lasso tool to create solid blocks that made up the foundations of the background, then adding colour and texture layers on top with effective use of shape language. The initial concept backgrounds really inspired the team and got us excited to how the animation would turn out, even if in the end we didn’t end up using them in adobe. I feel like if we had more backgrounds later in second semester, the production value would be much higher.
Adam organised the backgrounds by letters which really helped. The majority of backgrounds were done by Alisha and Adam, however, would’ve been better to have Danielle hold our hand and take the lead on backgrounds however the circumstances didn’t allow us to do that.
"For example, I struggled with the background for the indoor shot of the kids. The issues mainly lay with the colours which didn’t match the animation; not enough communication with the colours used, if someone took the lead there to help that would’ve helped a lot more. We went through a really weird and slippery process of handing the art to Paige to try colour correct and then to Adam etc. if we had set hexcodes for each backgrounds e.g. this is the colour for sunset. Similarly, we should’ve had either one person does the backgrounds with an assist OR have set hexcodes for each scene and if you deviate from these it won’t look right." - Alisha, background artist.
Additionally, due to the brief change to suit the pandemic we had to focus on creating a trailer. We decided quite late on to insert sky/cloud backgrounds as in-between transitions for the trailer and so I (Alisha) picked up this task without really having practised beforehand. It was a flimsy and last-minute idea, but it worked out well. To improve I would’ve matched the clouds more to the theme we had; I made them a bit too painterly and not stylised enough to go with the animation. The backgrounds did deviate a bit, but like we said if we had someone to helm the backgrounds, I felt like quality control and keeping the styles consistent would’ve really helped. This is something we could do for next time.
Adam didn’t feel bad doing some backgrounds as we had a lot of material from Danielle’s concepts and animatic, pretty simple flat side on background, putting blur effects for some depth.
Final Trailer
Adam lead the way with the animating; organising the animators and creating the amended shot list from Alisha’s previous one to fit the trailer brief. Having the animatic was the foundation for it so once all the shots were separated and identified it was a case of setting the times on the timeline and drawing out the roughs. Adam had a lot of previous experience with animating so was a huge help to the team and made everyone feel a lot more confident when going into it.
To improve we could’ve explored different programmes as we have always centred around frame by frame in animate, this is why Adam was originally keen to work with the team because of the different programme which we were going to explore, clip studio paint. Unfortunately, the cost of the programme was out of our reach and didn’t have a timeline in only the pro edition. It could potentially have worked rigged; people can do them really well and it would’ve reduced the animating time. On the contrary, learning to rig is a new skill in itself and so would’ve taken an investment of time too.
In conclusion we think the pipeline we had worked really well; for everyone except Adam, it was the first time we had worked in a proper step by step process of roughs, cleans, colour, clean up. It was a well-oiled machine (as much as it could be for the distance and situation) and worked smoother compared to all our other processes in the project.
The pipeline allowed leeway for each of us to move onto the next prospective shot whilst providing work for the person in charge of the next process. Having a single individual role that you don’t stray from really helped and I wish we would’ve had this organisation and management implemented earlier on in the project; this leads to maybe having a director role assigned to someone outside of the group to help organise a bunch of creatives that aren’t great with management or communication.
As a side not I feel as though if we really were motivated and had a continuous line of passion for the project, we could’ve animated a lot more, but in our circumstances, it just wasn’t doable for us.
Most of us unfortunately felt as though the project ended up being something we just wanted to submit so we could move on, which really isn’t what any of us wanted but to focus and keep a clear driven mind through the happenings of the world has been probably the most difficult aspect of the entire project.
We think we made a good choice to do a trailer as it gave us a set time to focus on the work that needed to be produced, almost as if we created a new brief for the situation, we were in.
Obviously distance due to Covid19 made the entire situation harder to communicate but that’s unavoidable. Another issue we had caused by Covid19 was when I packaged all my animate files nice and neat to Adam so he could comp them together, however Adams aftereffects was older than mine the files wouldn’t open so I had to discard and do a workaround of file swapping and more added difficulties. If University was open, we could’ve gone in and sorted the issue a lot quicker but because of Covid19 it was closed. Even if we didn’t go in all the time the fact that the option was there was a nice safety net for us.
Additionally, Adam says that I work about 30% quicker animating on a Cintiq in university environment than at home.
Adobe animate made the process easier and quicker however wasn’t the style we really wanted; wanted in photoshop and animate made the visuals flatter and blocky whereas we wanted a more traditional hand drawn feel. However, photoshop wasn’t something that everyone was comfortable with and was a niche programme to adopt. Animate made things so much easier. Could’ve done roughs in animate and cleans in PS but would’ve been so much longer and more difficult which didn’t adhere with our time constraints.
There were also a lot of discrepancies in the snowman’s face during the shots “nose growing bigger almost”, just small stuff that you can learn from. Head changing shape, scarf changing shape. But honestly snow changes shape, it is water after all.
Animation pipeline really helped the process of animating, splitting the task into three sets (Adam roughing, Paige clean and colour, Alisha colour assist) helped even the load out and made process effective and quicker.
Backgrounds were a big weakness we feel; could’ve been lots better and by that we mean have a lot more backgrounds produced.
Both a time and passion thing towards creating it with distance is hard, there’s a disconnect. We just had to work through it and deal with the cards we’ve been dealt with.
Leaning aftereffects was hard for Paige, felt like didn’t learn it, more rolled with the punches. Solids and layer styles and effects and particle effects were all I really breached, not the most advanced stuff but for this project was good. Weren’t even going to approach it but glad I did as it made such a huge difference in correcting colours and lighting to match the mood and aesthetic of the scene. Additionally snow particles could’ve been fatter and more cartoony to fit style, wish mad more time to explore more than just pre-set particles.
Adam took over comping the animation together in After effects; he mentions “It took a couple hours to put together, because I had already roughed most of the shots from the animatic all I had to do was drop into the timeline and decide on timing and what worked best to really highlight our animation in such a short trailer.”
ON MUSIC:
There was also a lot of miscommunication with the sound and music people because of the pandemic, even now the Foley guy that promised us work didn’t deliver. This disrupted the sound pipeline. Our brief also changed so we had to ask for a shorter piece on top of the music he had already produced. So there was a lot of difficulty in what he produced; he wasn’t able to make a shortened edition for the trailer as he created something individual that wasn’t what we asked; in the end it was all due to not being able to meet in person and directly fix the problems addressed. The music and Foley guy didn’t use discord (only Facebook) and probably wasn’t comfortable as we are in our team and so wasn’t able to ask for clarification. I think overall the music worked but we would’ve loved to have more contact to really polish it up and match the trailer. The only thing we don’t have is the Foley which was a bit sad but nonetheless we did as best as we could with what we had. We don’t really know him well enough and the problem wasn’t localised.
Socials and Branding
This felt kind of hard to do as we feel like with every kind of project that requires a social media growth to promote the project, it feels impossible to keep up with because there isn’t a following and it takes time to create the posts dedicated to your viewership that people can interact with; it’s just another task that seems a hassle but we all agreed it’s a passion thing too, if it was something we were all really excited to work on and show everyone then the progress on social media would’ve grown, all links back to Covid19 really and how that took over the majority of our minds.
I think we had likable characters and beautiful backgrounds that appeals to our audience but after semester one we didn’t really contribute as much as we would’ve liked. Another thing was our animation being based around winter; the hype died down post December, so to post things related to our animation felt farfetched because of the seasonal change. We talked about how other studios keep on top of social media output and how its their job, life and passion, whereas this felt more as an assignment as time went on.
(Alisha) “I created the twitter and Instagram and put a few posts and a Christmas countdown. However now that we have finished the animation, the process of rough to finish would be really interesting to share and has sparked my interest in creating more posts for our socials. This along with learning adobe premiere makes me quite enthusiastic to see what I can produce, even if its later in the project than I would’ve liked. “
For branding we did BobaProductions; we decided really early on and left it from there. We didn’t really revisit it, but we felt it worked so we stuck with it.
Branding
Typography and Logo
Fonts used: Sweetheart, Breathe, Watchtower
Speak about how we picked these font and why/ explain process of preceding fonts.
The need for typography was increased due to needing it for the trailer, "Paige had hundreds of fonts to go through and I was tasked to go through them and pick a few that matched the painterly cute vibe that we wanted for the trailer. I did a bunch of style frames for the text that was provided for the trailer with different colours and layer effects to see what looked best. It was then a group decision to decide and input into the trailer." - Alisha, Typography assist.
In reflection of our title typography, which was hand drawn by Danielle, we felt as though there was something about it just didn’t go with the style towards the end of the project. We could’ve done a lot more for typography and made the title look a lot more fitting rather than the blocky style we had. If we had more time, we would’ve had more graphics effects on the words to have them trace and look a bit more interesting.
Maybe some fresher newer iterations of the title designs would’ve really helped us in terms of linking to the style that our animation progressed in at the end of the semester.
We also wish we had an ident that would’ve made the trailer look a lot better and professional, this could’ve been done in illustrator like a 2D rendition of the BobaProduction logo.
Merchandise
Sticker packs, posters, key rings and more!
Speak about how we picked these our branding and colours, as well as what merchandise products; explain process of this.
Poster timelapse painting
Marchandise
Danielle lead the merchandise (cute emotive designs, Danielle has done patches before so has experience in promotional artwork). Sticker packs, pins, posters and keyrings were all blueprinted and planned for.
Unfortunately, when we found out that Covid19 was having a large impact and there was no final year show, we stopped working on updating or making more/deciding to make them physical completely. The designs were really gorgeous and would’ve looked great as 3d products.
The final year show is something that really kept us going, it keeps us inspired and motivated to have a final show to display our hard work and products. A physical comic con type environment is a place where we would thrive in, and to finally show off the animation would’ve been a great opportunity that won’t come to fruition.
To conclude, the whole experience was a challenge that was made easier by working with like minded individuals and overcoming problems together as a team.
Together we worked through individual weaknesses and problem solved according to the hand we were dealt; making the most out of our project whilst under the constraints of the pandemic.
Luckily we were able to work from a distance well and utilise programmes such as discord to set up out communications. We had weekly calls/screen shares and separated neat channels for each task in the project, which was accessible to look at and change by everyone.
There were downsides however, we all felt like the passion for the project dwindled during Covid19. It took both a mental and physical toll on all our team; it was a very scary and confusing time where no one really had the answers, and this definitely reflected on our work.
The key problems that we faced included: overall management in semester 1, lack of backgrounds, individual role placement on animatic and needing more technical research in areas such as storyboarding.
To improve, we would need to have both a project director and decide on "leads" for each area of expertise to clearly manage each task, rather than winging it and trying to manage it together with no proper thought to it. Another improvement would be to increase the production of backgrounds by setting a better schedule to follow, basic time management skills. As well as this we feel like our pre production could've been informed by heavier research.
Overall the experience was difficult and confusing, as being placed under the circumstances of a pandemic is something no one ever expects to deal with. Meanwhile, in saying all this, we feel like we have accomplished something very hard and will grow thicker skin and a stronger mental attitude through this experience.
