"Van" Animation

In a lot of ways, animation is the heart and soul of the project. It's where all of the ideas generated beforehand come to life in motion. This phase was fairly exciting to get to, though unfortunately as it came later into the process, our time was cut short just as we were getting started on that front. However, the animation team put in a lot of practice and stayed committed throughout the journey. We had felt before that this may be an issue as animation tends to be a process that happens much later in the pipeline, but despite this the great direction and leadership of our animation leads, Jane Lucero and Lily, made this area of production more organized. They did a great job and we enjoyed hearing and seeing the amount of enthusiasm from the animation team, so a big thanks to everyone on the team and who contributed work to the project!

Justin Armstrong

Christian Balbido

Ellen

Savannah Baca

Chinh

Diego

Taiki Satake

Jonathan Yip

Diego

Andres Cordova

Elaine

Jordan Glickman

Cami Pardoe

Dayan Garcia

Adrianna Xibille

Lily - Animation Lead

Jane Lucero - Animation Lead

Scenes to animate for the actual scenes of the film was taking some time to arrive, and so before this, the animation team worked on some test animations. These also served as team building exercise, evident in that some of these tests had quite a few hands working on them. Their method for dividing up the work in these early stages shared some similarities to how they approached it during the actual production phase. We may not have every example here but this is some of what we had seen being posted on our server.

Here we have a very rough test animation that was then used as reference for when the team chose among the character designs being made at the time to animate with. The scene has a little bit of character acting, a walk cycle, and a little bit of extra movement and secondary motion that would serve to be good for a practice run.

They had then used the character they selected from the character design team at the time for the next step, getting more people in the team involved. This character wasn't the final design that we ended up going with for the film, but it was still a great design!

There was another test done for the father using one of the scenes that at the time had already been boarded. From what I'm aware, this scene was worked on by quite a few people as well. They had divided the work among themselves for keyframes, inbetweens, and I believe even divided portions of the scene as well. It sounds like complicated work but with good direction and experience on their side, working this way proved to be fruitful.

What came next for this group was tackling the official animation as the official storyboards were coming in. This was an exciting time since we could finally see the film come to life in more fluid motion. A test animatic was made by our animation leads, Jane Lucero and Lily, in cooperation with our storyboarding lead, Kenneth Cheung. Jane Lucero actually contributed to quite a lot of the iterations for the animatic. We were surprised, with each suggestion of feedback we had, bam, another iteration done with different timing, and another, and another. It was really impressive to see, and I think there were 4 iterations done. They weren't built completely again from the ground up, but they had substantial alterations that frankly I couldn't imagine being able to do in such a short amount of time. Here is what the latest timing looked like, and therefore what the animation team would use.

With this done, the team could now work on each scene. They had divided the work into sections as to not get overwhelmed, and to have a goal for completion. They divided the film into two halves, and then each scene was split in half to account for a workload that would be realistic for one person to take on. There were keyframes that needed to be done for each half, as well as cleanup and inbetweens. Multiple people could be working one scene, but one importance of the keyframes was for there to be an established cohesion of how the character was drawn. This was especially important since we would have a lot of different hands working on the scenes throughout and so keeping in check with the character turnaround sheets done by the animation team proved to be helpful, and they even made an extra one since there is a time in the film when the girl is not wearing the jacket she had at the beginning.

The opening scene was keyed by Diego. There weren't any inbetweens done for this one before we had to end production, so all we have are the keyframes. However there is more of a motion here, and some additional frames of movement that were not in the storyboard that bring a bit more fluid motion and life to the scene.

This portion was keyed by Chinh, taking this one the rest of the way to scene 2. He had added a motion of walking to the Van entrance before scene 2 begins.

Taiki had worked on the opening of scene 2 up to reaching the bed. The walking motion receding into perspective was the only instance we had of this in the film and he did a great job!

Here we have scene 2, taking place in the bedroom, which was worked on by Elaine and Dayan who did the keying and inbetweening for this scene, and we loved the secondary hair motion they brought to the character! It brought a bit more life to what were otherwise some relatively subtle motions.

The second half of that scene, where we see her exit the home, was keyed by Adrianna, making good work of keeping on model and interpreting the character design to the scene based on the storyboard.

The next scene we had merged into one since they are fairly short. We still considered these scene 5 and 6 at the time. Ellen keyed this scene and we loved the extra emphasis on the final expression at the end here!

A portion of scene 7 was keyed by Chinh. We had always wondered how this scene would look in smoother motion, and Chinh really sold that that sneaky motion.

Here is what Lily and Jane had done for the dream scene. This was another moment that we were really holding our breath for. If you had read all the other posts you'll probably hear about this scene quite a bit. While timing for this scene changed over time to be a bit slower, this is the work that we did still have on record for this moment. The arm dangling down was an extra touch they added.

Other than that we unfortunately do not have any other records of other animation work to share here. Again, around this time was when production had to end due to the virus and challenges people were facing with having to adjust, whether it be a lack of equipment or needing to last minute plan a trip back home. It caught us all by surprise, but nonetheless we really enjoyed seeing all the work that came out of this team. They had a strong thing going and with how things were going, we were confidant that they would have been able to finish!

That's all for here, one more time we want to thank everyone who contributed their time and efforts to the animation side of things; thank you for being so patient with us, having to wait to animate on the actual film so long was something we wish could have been done differently. Another thank you to the animation leads for being to energetic and attentive to the team, you rock! We hope to maybe see some of you again in the future endeavors of this club, and for those who are graduating, we wish you the best out there!