Palnning & Production

Planning & Production

After the research on movie intro I decided to go with Howl's Moving castle, as it has been one of my childhood favourite animated film. Here I made 2 examples of storyboards, with different content and construction to choose from.

1st version of the story board.

The storyboard starts a lot like the actual film's opening scene. All that can be seen is fog.

In the second one the castle slowly comes towards the viewer, the fog still covering it partially

Here the camera has changed its position from front view to a side one, much like what happens in the actual opening scene.

Here the camera position is the same, just the walking castle moves forward.

here the view moved to a green field with a cottage, herd of sheep and a person. The fog is so dense nothing beyond the green hill can be seen.

Here the fog clears up a bit and the castle can be seen emerging from the it, walking up the hill. Behind mountain chain can be seen.

2nd version

In this scene the cast is show in the middle of a rural environment.

This scene the main character (right) is asking the witch of the waste (right), to leave.

Here can be seen the scarecrow (part of of the story) and Sophie parting ways.

In this scene the main character (left) is stoped by two soldiers.

This shot shows the food that Sophie (the main character), takes on her adventure.

In this shot Sophie is in the movie castle with the fire demon Calcifer

I want to recreate the intro in a minimalistic way, by keeping it simple. That includes simple shapes, flat colours and etc. The guidelines to take in considerations when making either minimalistic or modernist work were made by my class collectively, to help us when deciding what we have to focus on dependent on what we want to do. I plan to use line drawings and flat colours.

I think I will be using Adobe Illustrate, Animate and possibly After Effects in case needed. I want to do the castle from the story board in Illustrate, because I can make it into vector art, which means that if I enlarge it the quality won't get bad, which may be needed for the animation.

All the details of the castle like the legs or anything else that may need to be moved will be on different layers so I am able to do so. The rest of the things that need to be done I'll make in Adobe Animate, as I think that they are not too complex to be done in a different software.

After some thought I decided that I'll do all the drawing and animation in Adobe animate. I may move to adobe After Effects at the end if needed.

Starting production

This is the trailer of Howl's moving castle. I decided I will do the firs 20 seconds of it. Since the trailer has lots of moments where the scene goes dark and then lightens again. I was thinking a log time as to haw I will do that. I remembered the tutorials we had last year in Adobe After Effects, about lighting so I decided that I will have to move to After effects when I'm done with everything in Animate.

When I first opened animate I didn't know where to start from. I decided that I will download the trailer and then convert it to an image sequence. I found a tutorial that helped me do that trough photoshop. I wanted to turn the video into image sequence so I could put the frames in animate and draw over them to help me with the animation, as I was struggling.

The steps were simple:

First I had to open the video in photoshop. I had to go go to File > Open and navigate to the folder where I had the movie trailer, the select it and click Open.
I had to define an are for export. I had to select the start and end point. In my case it was 20 seconds.
Then I had to define the image size. I had to go to File > Export > Render Video. I had to choose Photoshop Image Sequence instead of Adobe Media Encoder. Then I had to select image size according to the Animate file, and it was 1280 by 720 (HD), I need to define frame rate (24:00/sec), and then choose Work area as my Range option, and finally click on Render

The steps were pretty easy, the only problem I had was that I didn't select a folder to send all the images to, and because of that the images, that were around 400, flooded my entire desktop. I managed to create a folder to put the images in. It took me around 30 minutes to clear all of the images.

In the folder all the images were lined by number, which I was worried about, but it was alright.

After I turened the trailer into a an image sequence I put the images in animate, an image in each frame. That made around 400 frames and more, for 19 seconds. I started drawing over the first. I realised that it was very hard to draw over that scene as the castle wasn't very clear as it was behind a fog in the actual trailer. And on the of that it is the longest scene that I have to work on.

I set the frame rate to 24 per second at the beginning. I drew the first frame with the brush tool, in grey, but I would like to change it in black later on.

I drew around what I could see behind the fog. I couldn't see the outlining of the castle so the end outcome doesn't look as I wanted it to.

I decided I will move on to the next scene and focus on making that one better. I plan to go back to the first scene if I have time left before the end of the project.

I finally started the second scene. I drew around the castle on a separate layer to the land. I also separated the the legs of the castle, from the rest of the body. It's much easier to draw over this scene as it is much more clear than the previous one, and it shows the actual movement of the castle. I used a black brush to draw the outlines of the castle. Since the scene is a close up, some of the details of the castle are bigger I can just use the free transform tool to move, instead of erasing and drawing again, which is what I did for the previous scene. After I finished with this scene I looked back at it to fix anything that was missing.

I have been going over the first scene. I realised that I don't really like the first few frames because the effect of the castle coming forward is not visible at all, as the legs of the castle are missing. This is because I can't see the legs trough the fog. I plan to delete those few frames and work on the ones after to make the castle seem that it comes forward.

When I started the 3rd scene I used the line tool to make the lines of the cars and the top of the bridge§. That Made my job much faster and easier as making straight lines with the brush toll is extremely hard if I don't use "shift" key, however using that method only allows me do make either horizontal of vertical lines, unlike the line tool.

After I started the 3rd scene and drew a little I had to delete all the previous frames before the key frames of the new scenes. I did that because they could be seen in the previous scenes and that should not be happening. I did the same thing with the previous scene, but I forgot about it so I was a bit startled when that happened now. I marked all of the frames I didn't need I clicked the right click of the mouse, then I pressed cut frames.

I drew the bridge, the lamps and the cars (I'm no sure what they are), on different layers so it is easier to change and modify them. I used the frames from the actual trailer to help me with the animation.

I had to add another layer so I could cover the bridge lines where they went over the cars. That had to be adjusted every layer to match whenever the cars move. I used the paint brush tool to paint over the bridge lines as the regular brush tool couldn't cover them.

Also when I finished the scene I put all of the layers in one folder, just like the previous scenes.

I started the forth scene by separating the features of it and started animating them separate. I wanted to try that approach, in order to see if it is going to be quicker. I started with the background details first. I

did around 11 frames and then moved to the face. I think I prefer this technique more than the one I used before where I just change all of the features of the scene in all together and then move to the next frame.

I did the out line of the face on a separate layer then I did the eyes and the brows on the same one. I worked on these two layers until I got to the 11th frame, and then I moved on to the dress. I did the same thing to this layer too. I used the frames from the actual trailer when I was doing this, just like all the scenes before.

As I said before I found this method much easier as I only had to focus on one thing at a time and the continue the progress of that one thing until it I get where I want to be. After I am done with that one layer I move on to the next one and repeat the same process.

The next layer I worked on was the main characters's hair. I drew it and coloured it in black as the actual character's hair in quite dark already. I had to make some changes here and there while I was working but they weren't a major ones. At the end when I was reviewing the scene when I was done I really like how fluidly the strands of hair move.

The last layer that I had to do was the hat. It was fairly easy. I just had to move it back and forth, it lines up with the head.

In this scene I used the same method as in the scene before. I find this method much easier and it helps me focus on only one feature, and thus making that one feature look good.

The scene is quite simple, it's two hands, and one of them holds a card. I drew the hands on two different layers, and the card on a separate one.

I kept working on a single layer until the scene changes too much, and then I move on to the next layer. The hands were pretty easy to do as there wasn't much to change. I had to adjust the every 3 frames. I had to add another layer for the smoke that comes from the card.

I used the frames from the actual trailer to help me to do the movements. It was very helpful when I was doing the the smoke.

To get the effect of the make the effect of the smoke I increased the transparency from 50 to 60, and used black brush to draw the base colour, and a grey brush for the brighter parts. I had to add a lighter shade as other wise I wouldn't get the effect of the thick smoke.

I had to erase the entire make and then redraw it again to match the frame of the actual trailer. The same goes for the hands. Every time the position of the hands changed, or the smoke moved, or the card flipped, I had to erase the previous drawing and drew an new one to match the frame from the trailer. I found it easier that way, as that way the animation and the actual drawing will be much clearer.

I personally think this is one of my favourite scenes because it is the end result of all that I learned during the previous scenes. It was a combination of all of the new tools and skills that I discovered. In addition the making of this scene take only 4 hours, where in comparison the rest took days or even weeks.

The last scene is around a second long and the only thing it has in the name of the film. I wanted to finish very simplistically and to add more time to the actual animation as I changed it to 24 frames per second which made it significantly shorter than it was, however now it looks much more smoother so I'm happy with the change.

This is the final out come of my work. It is 6 seconds long, much shorter than I wanted it to be however it is finished, and this was one of my main goals for this project.