PAPER DOLLS Progress Notes

     When I think about the past few months, I feel as though I’ve been drawing a LOT, almost to a point where it’s been the only thing that I’ve really been doing… and yet, when I skimmed through my recent illustration work for samples to post, I found myself coming up really short for anything even remotely current. This bothered me for a moment, until I thought about some of the other projects I’d been spending time on and realized where all of this supposed energy had been spent. I HAVE been drawing a lot—a hell of a lot, really—because at 24 frames per second, a 4-minute animated short will swallow up every bit of time you can put into it and still demand more attention. I’ve gotten really, really familiar with my tablet, to say the least.

     I’ve wanted to work on an animated short for a long time, and as well as that I’ve always wanted to make an animated video for any of the music I’ve worked on. Obviously those two things go together, and this past summer I started work on an animated video for a song called Paper Dolls by my band The Saints Collapse. I’d written the song out a few years ago intending for it to be completed by visual accompaniment, so I’ve always had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to pursue video-wise. The problem was and is, though, that I had originally envisioned the story as a live-action scenario, and adapting it to animation would inevitably require a lot of attention to detail in order to convey the right atmosphere.

     My experience with animation until now has been pretty limited. Other than a brief attendance the Vancouver Film School for basic 2d principles, occasional basic gif-making, a few storyboard classes and workshops, and on-and-off diddling in Flash, I’ve never had any “real” formal training or consistent experience to use as practice. What I’m getting at here is that this is my first real animation project on this scale—or any scale at all for that matter—and because I do things the way that I do, I decided that I would try to get my start by attempting something out of my immediate range. Famous last words, maybe, but I do love a challenge.

     I’ve been learning how to use Flash as I’ve been going, using an amalgam of Flash’s native vector elements and texture overlays rendered in Photoshop and Painter that I had just sort of hoped would work out the way I’d imagined. And so far it has, though not without issue. At first I was trying to keep texture use to a minimum, my main concern being the file size of the finished .swf, but once I began adding in real-time effects and more detailed vector drawings it became pretty clear that this whole thing just wasn’t going to work in 99% of people’s browsers. Basically, the addition too much detail caused a lot of scenes to slow from 24 frames per second down to about 3 or 4. After a little trial-and error, I decided that I would continue with things as they were but render the scenes to a video format (rather than Flash), where the data size would be more manageable and the playback would be more consistent. Since that point, I’ve been free to use effects and bitmap textures without restraint, and the overall quality has slowly gone up as I’ve learned to deal with the different elements. On the other hand, however, the overall time spent per shot has started to go way up as well.

     It’s really difficult to write much of a progress report without revealing parts of the story and idea that I want to keep quiet until people can see it first… likewise it’s also kind of questionable how interesting any of this could really be if there’s no finished product to back any of it up. In the next little while I’ll be getting a quick comp together for my own reference so I can see where I’m at, and I’ll be sure to post at least a part of that when I do. In the meantime I’ll also try to get some of my pencil work together so I can show how I’ve made the transition from sketchbook to animation, at least with some of the characters, and some of the reference photos I’ve used for the scenery.

     At the point of writing this, I’ve been working on the video for about 5 months and so could probably write another 20 pages of anecdotes and source material… maybe at some point I will, but for the time being I’ll spare it and just leave you with these screenshots. If anyone wants to hear the song, you can check it out it The Saints Collapse’s Myspace page.