So, a while back, I made a very seeeerious decision....
I would have to cut a sizeable few scenes from Dancing Nina, and join up the remaining space between one half of the film that was almost finished, and the last half that was almost finished as well, if I was to have any hope of finishing it.
These are some of the blocked scenes from long ago that will now never see the light of day since being cut and replaced (THANK GOD)
(this scene still exists starting from the spin and has since been animated by Robbie, cleaned up with dress effect added by me and comped by Stan)
So, a meeting was called (it's been a while since that's happened) between Freya, Robbie, Joanna and I to try and brainstorm a do-able solution.
Our problem was that we had to realistically and stylistically join up two parts of the film, get Nina from one standing position on almost centre stage to extreme foreground and spinning with minimal effort and time.
We danced awkwardly and talked, and then sketched awkwardly. Although i was keen to keep Death out of the scene since i had effectively got rid of him in the previous scene- a convenient little mood swing from Nina (these are cleaned up keys, since this test they have been inbetweened and comped):
Others felt it was necessary to bring him in in some form to provide great enough force to throw Nina into a curve that would end in the position, spin and momentum we needed for the following scene.
I ended up compromising by introducing him as a force; sort of tendrils pulling Nina off to the right:
However i decided Death needed to be there as more than just a force after doing these initial tests and ended up finishing of Nina's timing with the intention of placing Death in the scene mirroring Nina's movement perfectly before using some elemental force to yank Nina backwards from the heart or stomach, and continue to pull her to the right after having transformed into a cloth (and therefore saving me a lot of 2nd character animation). The idea of Death using invisible force to pull Nina backwards and the mirroring idea came from this video reference, Thanks Jo! (for invisible force part see: 1:38)
These were Nina's keys with the timing sorted:
These are the final cleaned and inbetweened linetests, now waiting to be scanned and comped, The scene was meant to be a simple solution but ended up taking me 2 weeks and getting quite complicated with weight and transformations etc. but i'm pleased with it, and proud that i managed to improvise it with some help at the initial stages and block/ key/ inbetween/ clean it all myself :) I think my time spent observationally drawing dancers at the space definitely came in handy for this scene, with the strange perspectives and thinking-on-the-spot work that was done.
So I'm just starting to think of putting together my "making of" when THIS pops up on my radar, and i think hey, why not? I'll give it a watch maybe i'll get some ideas for structuring the "making of".
Little did i know i had just stumbled upon the animator behind some of my favourite parody animation: Harry Podder. I had never found out who made it until now!
More importantly though, I laughed very hard at how much David Stodolny takes the piss out of artsy fartsy nonsense with his animation style and how much the style he animated his short "I Am Art" with is so very similar to the way i've animated Dancing Nina...
Well my deep, artsy cover's blown, you got me Stodolny!
Any ways, here come some semi- complete shots!! (disclaimer: the colours will probably change, this was a test comp)
These are from Scene_03 part _03.
This was an early line test of the scene with only Nina:
This was the final inbetweened and cleaned line test:
The timing was changed, and some anticipation added, a breathe and an extra key was added to make the face touch look a little less like a slap.
This segment was blocked, keyed, inbetweened and cleaned entirely by me. Mainly because believe it or not it's faster this way, when i inbetween i don't need a clean up stage.
This is the scene i will be talking about in my Final presentation for the section "finishing competence" as i feel it has one of the best examples of acting in my film. It's a quiet scene in which the characters mainly observe and react to each other. (It was also the first to reach comp but sshh)
I got the extra acting ideas like the face touch (which was not in original choreography) and the smile Nina gives Death at the end from primary research i.e myself and Joe acting out this (full) scene; And research on Nicole Kidman's character Satine in Moulin Rouge led me to the decision to have Nina smile at her partner.
I began my acting research by watching films with characters that inspired Nina's persona. (There's plenty of this in illegible notes, in my sketchbook, so i'm not going to bother typing everything up...) Here's the run down:
Moulin Rouge:
Satine- Nicole Kidman
*spoilers* Satine finds out she's dying and then proceeds to... die.
But i found it interesting to observe her movement fluctuating between defiance and exhaustion very dramatically and theatrically, much in the way i am hoping to achieve for Nina.
I developed the amount of facial expression i hope to achieve for Nina by remembering that Satine smiles at her lover before she dies, so now, Nina shows much more recognition than first anticipated.
Also, Tango de la Roxanne is pretty darn close to the kind of movement want to emphasise in Dancing Nina, and was actually a very early influence for me and Jo.
upon reviewing it i made changes to the choreography: such as having Death grab Nina by the wrists more to indicate his personality flip-side.
Personality flip side?? I hear you cry!
I'll get to it, hang tight. (see what i did there?...)
I also watched Chicago to look at the dances of innocent Hungarian lady what gets hung *spoilers*. I've always loved the choreography of her Cell Block Tango routine, there's so much good staging, silhouetting and mirroring in it between her and her partner,
and although it remains a tango, it has a classic twist. The way the woman acts is so theatrical, in keeping with the film's creative thrust. Especially when she is executed and her dying scene is transformed into a glamorous disappearing act:
"Pina" was also very influential to us from an early stage, and i recently re watched it when thinking more in depth about my characters. There are a couple of pieces that stand out to me, particularly this one:
The way the woman moves around as if she is in a dream and relies on her partner to catch her constantly but without ever acknowledging him is something similar to the way i want to characters to interact in Dancing Nina. Except a little reversed...
I've been reading up on Acting
"Acting for Animators" Ed Hooks
I read about objectives and conclusions and thinking as well as doing in acting. Which was helpful at this stage of refreshing my understanding of the characters i already knew so well.
"Unity of action"= "doing something 100% of the time" -Aristotle
^This helped me work out some creases in the choreography. Re-establishing what exactly my characters wanted and why made me add certain bits that hadn't existed previously, such as when Nina reaches up to touch Death's face as if trying to establish a connection only to be harshly rejected.
In Dancing Nina I'm aiming for Death to be the dream state character. He is entirely Nina's subconscious creation, and so, as well as being a vague memory of her lover he is an embodiment of her pain as her body dies.He constantly fluctuates between sympathy and cruelty for the duration of the (metaphorical) dance eventually truly embodying the lover Nina longs to be with in the final scene.
As for Nina, there's a small essay explaining her motivation in my jotter/sketchbook and it's 5am so, shhh.
I took Dancing lessons!
I don't know if i've mentioned this before, but i used to dance regularly. It occurred to me that since i was a ballet dancer and never really performed, i had never danced with a partner, so i took up Swing dance at the Swing Dance society at Dundee to gain a better understanding of how people are meant to move as a pair. It turned out to be very helpful with hand gesture in particular; i found i could suddenly refer to my own learning when it came to what position hands should be in.
It was suggested that i should hire drama students to act out my piece with a good understanding of the characters, which, strangely enough had not occurred to me since i have so much dance research and reference to work from. Anyway, i skipped the middle man and acted out the beginning (the part i am currently animating) myself. My partner was Joe who has acted before, and was ... available. I took time to explain Death's character to him before filming.
Today we filmed at The Space @ Dundee College Kingsway Campus. Here's a pick of the best footage we collected, first of all: the choreography both in costume and out. Dancers: Miranda Sheehy, Jessica Catrin Engberg and a boy who's name I haven't got yet :P
And these are some of the cloth tests we made; both interacting with someone and simply being dropped:
Productive day i think, the plan now is to make solid character sheets/ turnarounds, recruit animators, and divide a chosen 10% chunk between us all to work on for our Christmas deadline. the camera man/ driver was Scott Sutherland and the photographer/ general tech. hand was Rob O'Hara. I'm the one throwing cloth. For hilarious out-takes visit: http://insovietrussiaartblogsyou.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/dancing-nina-filming-day-at-space.html
Finally! The new storyboard according to the shorter choreography has been drawn up, complete with new style decisions made in a meeting yesterday with Tricia Anderson. Tricia had the wonderful idea of having our characters not only move like pieces of cloth but also have them disappear and appear by morphing from and into cloth, when necessary. Freya and I thought it was a much more elegant and artistic way of hanging Nina at the end, let us know what you think.
Obviously we haven't yet asked Finn Anderson to tweak his music to our new timing, we should be filming with the dancers at the end of this week and i also plan to get some cloth tests filmed; So hopefully by Monday-ish i'll be more sure of the timing and will feel confident sending a more accurate animatic away to him.
The storyboard's progressing and i'm making a few instinctual decisions about the choreography as i go, so, really, it's quite different from the live action animatic now. Hopefully some kind souls will dance the new storyboard out for me in the next week or 2, so that i can use them as reference.
Hold on to your hats everyone there's been a change of plans, Dancing Nina will now be a 2D production, traditionally animated, and will be roughly 1 minute long, or under. I (Slava) am now basically in charge of the project as Jo has dropped out of her role as director and production manager. There may be more people joining my team but for now it's just little old me.
All of these changes have come about due to the brief drastically changing over the summer and requiring everyone to specialize in 2 areas and demonstrate those specializations in at least to different productions. So far mines are Character animation and 3D Modelling- so this should showcase my character animation in my showreel, at least- I just couldn't bare to give it up when we'd all worked so hard on it already.
Anyway all I can hope for now is that it doesn't kill me and it turns out simple and beautiful.Oh, and i hope to complete the models of Nina and Death to count towards my course work and use them as 3D reference or something.
This animatic is something I quickly cut together from our old (much longer) animatic which included storyboard, I plan to re-film the dancers to have more solid reference material in the next week or so and obviously Finn's music will have to be tweaked to fit the new duration.
I'm in the process of drawing up a new storyboard based on this animatic.
Still working on choreography. Here you can find few versions of the dance sequence. I had a small problem with trying to figure out how to approach this task. In the end I decided to edit existing reference material and play with selected movements, treat them as a puzzle game. We still have a session planed with Alicja and Tricia. But that will happen after the hand in. The main difference between the choreographies lies in the climax moment.A dance tempo, timing and camera shoots will change. The main purpose of it is to check if the movement flows within the dance.
Here - a version that seemed to pleased both Charlie and Slava. Nina in the main moment dances with Death:
Nina goes on her one. Climax is a solo dance.
Nina's solo dance with slight change in the movement. Solo dance is shorter and starts with the spin.
