Frost Fair – A British History in Weather

A collaboration project with BBC Radio 4, depicting the history of British weather using an animated medium for their website. I allied myself with other creatives and we began preparations for our film idea.

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RESEARCH:

The first step was to choose the script of the various ones provided to us by the BBC to creatively respond to with our animations: Wisdom of Winter, The Punishing Weather, Holiday on Ice, Britain and the Sun, The Weather Indoors, Wind and Storm. Each with very different tellings of British weather, we read each script and decided on which script we liked the most, and thought we could creatively respond to. Holiday on Ice was the script we chose, for its use of descriptive language to bring the feeling of the cold alive and accurately portray the emotions through evocative language.

We each created mood boards, and did research of our own into the Frost Fairs, so that we could decide on a particular style, as well as have some information to create the base for our animation. We needed to research into various styles, a look into life during the 1600’s in London as well as inspiration for any ideas for the story of our animation:

 

This is a mood board comprised of various imagery denoting the the Frost Fairs held on the River Thames in between 1309 and 1814. The Thames itself froze over 23 times. On 5 particular occasions, the Thames’ ice became thick enough to hold Frost Fairs on the river. There would be bull baiting, ox-roasting, football, among other activities held on the ice. The Thames became a theatre itself, inviting all in its leisure.  It is less likely to freeze over nowadays due to climate change. These Frost Fairs were held during the “Little Ice Age”, where the Northern Hemisphere was considerably colder, during the years between 1350 and 1850. After doing this research on the topic, we drafter together concept work and art styles that we might cater our film too. The consensus at the moment moved that we would make this animation using a 2D Vector based style, in one of the Adobe packages like Illustrator and After Effects. I began first by drafting concepts and styles might have been pretty exciting to try and emulate:

After recently watching through the entire Kung Fu Panda series with the release of Kung Fu Panda 3, I thought it might be a cool idea to try out a similar style for our film. Although, the 2D vector style fits better with the final reference image, this 2D style of animation used for the Kung Fu Panda 1 and 2 films was really dramatic. It was able to create a lot of tension and evoke feelings into the audience with the incredible visuals and interesting plot. The final reference image was also an example of a possible route we could take, as it displayed a creative use of puppetry and moving geometry on the 2D plane.

This is another example of 2D animation that I was particularly interested. The fluid motion of the characters and interesting choices of filmic language was the reason I was so interested in this as a source of reference. There is a range of extreme close ups and wide shots that show the dramatic nature of the film. I thought that this would be a great idea to emulate for our own film, and I can see us taking advantage of wide shots and extreme close ups for people and the attractions on the Thames during the Frost fair, as well as for an establishing shot of the River Thames with all of the attractions on the ice.

I did a rough sketch of a concept that we may use to help build our narrative for the animation. It was more of a creative response to the idea of The Frost Fair. I roughly mapped out an environment in the background, the ice and snow in the midground, and some tents protruding forward to resemble the tents at the fair. One element that drives any rough sketches or mood pieces that we will be doing at this time, is the fact that BBC Radio 4 wants the animation to be a mood driven/emotional piece of animation. We will have to focus on using emotive and evocative colours and themes, to embellish the icy nature of the weather and frost fair, as well as enhance any feelings that are brought on by the audience for the characters and information being relayed to them on the screen via the animation.

 

After deliberating with the group, we became more interested in pursuing a type of low poly 3D animated style. We knew that it was more ambitious, considering that we would have to model, rig, animate and render out our scenes, but we wanted to be able to really embellish the feeling of the cold through the use of 3D ice and snow, that we could create in Maya. Taking a 3D approach meant that individually, we would all be able to develop a skill to bring to the table and enhance whilst working on the animation for the client. Animation is a skill I personally want to enhance, as I am a character animator. We were able to find examples of characters, environments, and texturing styles that we could use for the assets and models:

 

To get a better understanding of the events that occurred within the 17th century, as well as helpful information and resources to create assets of our own, we decided to go and visit the Museum of London and took pictures of our own:

 

There were not many resources for the Frost Fairs at either of the museums, but we were able to take pictures of anything that would help us during the production stage of our project, like examples of textures and assets, as well as architecture of buildings in London that existed at the time. After our initial research had been done, we then began to planning our animation. What we were going to have in it? How would the narrative pan out? What types of characters we were going to use to illustrate the Frost Fair? Etc.

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DEVELOPMENT:

I looked at the script that the BBC gave us and went through it highlighting the key words and evocative pieces of the text that we could use to our advantage for the animation. Parts in the blue represented the emotive language, parts in yellow represented the informative text, and the parts in green represented bits of the script that could apply to both natures:

 

With the script highlighted, we were able to come up with our own idea for the animation. We wanted it to centre around a main character, that we would then use to illustrate different aspects of the Frost Fair on the ice.

PLAN –

Boy walks out of a shop excited to leave work early. He turns down the street and runs past an alleyway. The boy continues to run and comes to a set of steps which lead onto the Frozen Thames. He runs down the steps and jumps on to the ice, catching himself after he stumbles.  He runs down to the fair to buy something from a merchant at the Frost Fair using money that he has pick pocketed from a woman. The woman he has stolen from falls over on the ice, and is aided by a merchant.  The boy opens a tent drape which reveals a play is in progress. He turns around and walks through a crowd of ice skaters, dodging as he comes into near collision with them. As the sun sets, the boy leaves the fair, passing some men sitting at a tavern stall, lit by lantern as they drink

[ENDING]

After looking at the script, we decided to fix up some areas. As an example of sensitivity to our clients demands, the final video had to be decent in some regard. Although we were not planning on showing indecent imagery during any course of our film, the only area we were concerned about was the boy getting away with stealing the money pick pocketed from the woman on the ice. We did not want to advocate thievery on the BBC Radio 4 website, so we decided for the boy to actually get caught and be punished in some way, or for the conflict to have some sort of resolution. We came up with the idea of having the lady buy him a hot beverage from a stall on the ice, and they both enjoy it as the sun sets over the frost fair. We also did not want to focus so much time on the child leaving a place of work. It is a better idea to focus more on the frost fairs as that is the anchor for this entire animation.  After the necessary changes were made, we were able to draft a new script:

 

Boy runs to the fair from the shop he’s been let out from to work. He runs down the steps and skids on the ice for a second or two. He then dodges people as they are skating by, grabbing a woman’s purse as she passes by. He then takes notes out (or jewellery) and drops the purse.

The boy then walks down a row of merchant tents and is in wonder at all of the objects on display and the food, aromas and colours. He then pokes his head through a closed tent to watch a short section of a scene from King Arthur being performed on a stage, before being shooed away by shivering stewards.

The boy then moves on past a man preaching the weather as a sign from God. Nobody is listening. Just past this some drunken men are playing Highjinks at a tavern tent. One slips as the others laugh and an oarsman policing the fair comes over to help.

The lady signals an oarsman and they catch him. He thinks he’s going to get in trouble, but there is an element of pity, so instead of punishing him, the woman exerts some kindness and buys him some coco for a bittersweet ending to the narrative. He then gets to the other side of the Thames and behold the whole event as the sun is going down. Lanterns are being lit.

• Also dodges people on chairs sliding in a ring

BACKGROUND ELEMENTS:

• Puppet shows with adult and child audience
• A coach race
• Bull baiting (Bear and bull)

With our own script in play, we were able to craft a storyboard, so that we could then choose amongst the group who captured the visuals the best to then put into an animatic of our own. We each created a version of the script in our own eyes, so that we could experiment with visuals and filmic language in our own rights individually, and discuss them as a group. The storyboard depicts the key moments in the script, which are the boy running out of the shop where he works, seeing the frost fair and running down the stairs, stumbling on the ice and dodging a character skating by who then knock the purse out of the arms of a woman, our main character picking up said purse and visiting attractions around the fair, seeing the theatre before being thrown out and walking by the preacher, then walking by a tavern scene in which two drunken men and laughing before the attention of an oarsman is grabbed by the same woman in the story from before, the boy being reprimanded for his mistakes before being shown some compassion, and then finally looking over the frost fair as the sun sets. Here is my own storyboard concept:

STORYBOARD:

CONCEPT ART:

As the role of an artist, concept art also fell under my belt when necessary. I was able to create a piece of concept art that we could then pitch to the BBC Radio 4 team in charge of the project to illustrate the mood and feel we are going for with our mood piece. I was able to make use of a new painting software I was shown by my producer called “Clip Studio Paint” which allowed me to paint the visuals in a similar blending style to actually traditional media type painting. Here is my concept art which shows a section of the frost fair on the River Thames in all its glory:

 

ANIMATIC:

Once the final visuals and filmic language concepts were discussed and agreed upon, we were able to come together and form an animatic to then pitch for necessary feedback. Here is our first animatic produced from the efforts of the group.

From the feedback, it became clear to us that this was a very ambitious project of ours that we were trying to create. Although it may make a great animation in itself, it may be difficult to replicate this with the small time frame we currently had to start and complete this animation. The story was centred too much around or main character – the boy – so we went back to the drawing board, and made revisions on this concept to better suit the small time frame we had, as well as not focus too much on the narrative within the animation.

Here is our revised animatic detailing a new script that we were able to develop, as well as including some sound that was edited in by one of the artists who was also in charge of editing at this time:

 

By this time, we had chosen bits of information that we wanted to use to “teach” the audience watching the animation. One of the requirements for the animation was that it was supposed to have text that was either helpful, scientific or informative, so that the audience member could go away and feel like they have learned something. This was a main reason we chose to do the Frost Fair, as it would serve as a vantage point to teach anybody about life in the 17th century and this holiday on the ice.

MODELLING & TEXTURING

The Producer for our group drafted a list of things we would have had to finish modelling and texturing for the final animation. She also found a space for us all to upload and share work with each other. Although as a group, we were always sharing work and commenting on any adjustments we could make, but this space worked as both a source of back up, as well as an online pool for the rest of us to look at and share work as well. An account with “MEGA”  – the online cloud based system – was created.  And with it, our list of things we needed to model and texture. It is an example of how as a group, we needed to truly collaborate and communicate with each other in order to get the work done. Working in such a large group meant that it could easily become very troublesome if we lost contact with each other, or did not tell the rest of the group how the work of the project is going on our individual machines:

 

Alongside creating the animatic, we had begun creating assets and models for our animation, as it will be a piece that is rendered out in 3D.  My role in the group was an Artist. I would be handy to make concepts, draft ideas and work heavily on the 3D aspect of the animation. I took charge of animation for the scenes, animating a majority of the characters in our Frost Fair film after they had been rigged by our rigging artist. Before Animating however, we needed to model and texture assets and characters for our scenes. Here are examples of the assets I modeled and helped to texture using a new painting software called “Clip Studio Paint”. Clip Studio Paint works differently to Photoshop, in that I can blend my strokes without having to go into separate blending modes like in Photoshop. It works like painting naturally, which was really helpful for me as I come from a painting background in traditional media:

Using a simple cube, and implementing a deformer, I was able to manipulate the cubes shape and create this shape for a Peach Tart. For the peaches that sit along the top of the tart, I used a simple polygon sphere and deleted faces that were unnecessary. It would go into the section of the animation where our character is amazed by all of the food on show at the fair.  I then moved on to texturing other assets already modelled by my other group members. Because I was using Clip Studio Paint to texture, I was able to just bring in the UV’s of the separate modelled objects and just begin to paint over them to then reapply in Maya. The bananas, dice and pastries for the pies, I applied as lambert materials as they did not need to worry about things like reflecting the light off of the lanterns in the scene. The container material for the pastries however, I added as blinn materials, so that I could manipulate how they reflect light and produce reflections, which is necessary for the type of metallic material it would have been. To make things look weathered and appropiate for the time, I had to make sure that I just gave some slights marks and elements of rust here and there. This would separate out the geometry, and take away that “fake” nature by having the geometry looking pristine and fresh. It needed to look used and authentic:

The toughest item I had to texture would have been the glass, that is supposed to be used to end the tavern scene, and bring us back to the full frost fair at the end. Because of this, I wanted to texture it using a Blinn Material instead of just painted colours. It would look more natural that way, and I can teach myself about some of the other ways of texturing in Maya too.  It was a matter of using Ramp Shaders to manipulate the textures. I used a series of V-type ramp shaders, with linear type interpolation. This allows  the the ramp to be applied based on how much of the normals on the geometry are facing the camera; the bottom of the ramp shader will represent an angle that is 90 degrees away from the camera. The ramps will affect the reflective and transparency attributes of the glass. Here is  the process and final result of me working with the ramp shaders to test out and finally achieve a glass texture that I am satisfied with:

 

After modelling and texturing the assets, I aided in modelling characters to then populate the scene. Without the characters, there is not going to be much of a “fair” at the frost fairs at all.  We modelled the characters in Zbrush. Our teams producer who is proficient in character modelling gave us a base mesh she had designed, and the rest of us could create models for clothes and characters to then pass on to our rigging artist. I brought the base mesh into Zbrush and began modelling clothes onto the characters:

When modelling and designing the clothes for these characters, I looked at these images of men and women wearing genuine items of of clothing from the 17th century. Because our animation resides in the past, it is imperative that we are able to stick to historical accuracy:

I brought the model into Maya to then beginning a naming convention of geometry and export the model as an OBJ/FBX file to send to my rigging artist, for her to begin rigging as soon as possible. Bringing it into Maya however opened a can of worms, which was good as we were able to find these problems early on, but a headache to power through…

 

Firstly, we noticed that whenever we imported models into Maya, the program itself would become slower, as Maya is trying to compute everything. We also noticed that the model itself did not have any UV’s, so we could not apply a skin texture to any of the newer models we created after the original model was created. Our biggest issue was that bringing the models into Maya from Zbrush in the way the way that we did was very destructive, as it brought in a model that had many MANY faces on them.

This wouldn’t be a huge problem if the models were stationary, but because our rigging artist would have to rig them so we could animate, it proved to be very troublesome. Having double faces meant that all geometry that was exported out of Zbrush had a thickness on them. Because there was a thickness, there is all of this extra information that Maya has to compute. This would also be a huge issue for our rigging artist as it would reveal faces that we did not want to see when the characters would move around and be animated.  Regarding the issue about the program becoming slower, we could remesh the model back in Zbrush, so that Zbrush can use the same space on the model, but drastically reduce the polycount. Reducing the polycount meant less polygons exported out of Zbrush and into Maya. In regards to the model not having a UV when in Maya, we thought it best to extract all of the pieces from Zbrush separately, and then replace the base mesh on the new character model with the original base mesh. The original had a UV, so we could apply textures to it. This solved this problem easily, as it was just a matter of importing and swapping base meshes whilst in Maya. The final issue about double faces was sorted via our setting in Zbrush:

By reducing the thickness down to zero and un-highlighting the buttons in Zbrush that allow double sided faces and a thin border to be created along the sub-tools, we were able to create clothes that sat on top of the models, and did not interfere by creating more faces and extra geometry that would not be seen, but still computed. After rectifying these two issues, it became relatively easy to model the variations of characters, and export them out of Maya to then send to my rigging artist to begin rigging.

RIGGING:

After completing the modelling for all of the characters, we were able to send them all to our rigging artist so that she may be able to starting construction the rig for us. After the rig was created, they could be passed back onto the group to then begin animating in the scene for the animation.

She was able to do an absolutely amazing job on these rigs for us to begin testing out. She also did some test animation which you can see above, which adheres to the stepped style of animation that we are aiming for, which was helpful for us to pitch to the BBC client when they had come in to see how our works were fairing after the original pitch to the BBC. The work and effort she put into the rigs can be seen on her own blog.

We were also having to render out a new pre-viz to be shown to the BBC Radio 4 team, as an update on how far we have come since the initial BBC pitch. Scenes had to be rebuilt with all of the updated models and textures put in them where necessary afterwards. As I was working on testing out the rigs, the producer and director for the film worked on rebuilding the assets in the scenes to render out, and pass along to our editing and sound team member to cut into a piece of pre-viz. Here is the pre-viz we were able to create. It showcases that changes to filmic language have been made since our previous animatic. We decided not to focus to intently on a “main character” so to speak, as it would mean that the film would become too plot driven. Although we want the film to be a mood piece, we have to sacrifice the narrative we wanted to build up with the character, so that we could focus holistically on creating a memorable and evokative environment for our frost fair. We have been able to do this by removing sections of the script where we focus directly on our main character multiple times throughout the animation – meaning just as he opens the tent for the theatre scene, as well as the glass dropping to transition into his eye before an establishing shot of the entire Frost Fair. Here is the pre-viz:

ANIMATION:

With the rigs complete, we were then able to begin the animation process. Because Character Animation is a skill I want to utilise for the 3rd year project, I asked that the character animation be left to me. I was willing to animate all of the scenes for the film. Within the small time frame, although it would have been possible, it was a little bit risky. The nature of the unit is COLLABORATION after all, so we were able to collaborate with one another to lighten the animation load on myself. I took the responsibility of animating the Food Tent, Theatre and Preacher scenes for the animation.

For the Food Tent scene, we will have a gathering of people in a tent, having general movement and chatting whilst being warmed up by a roaring stove fire. The intended animation style we opted for was stepped, which we drew inspiration from by looking at “The Lego Movie” as well as Youtube personality “Pixlpit”. Both of these styles informed our research whilst deciding on a style and theme for our animation.

 

I began animating the rigs in the scene. One useful tip that I learnt whilst animating this term is the use of the Reference Editor whilst using rigs. It is much safe to reference rigs into the scene – as well as easier on the processing power – rather than to import them. This way, if the rig breaks or becomes corrupted, I am still able to salvage my animation by replacing the rig with another reference file for it. I made sure to reference all of my rigs whilst animating to avoid an mishaps down the road. I was also able to make some Maya shortcuts to speed up the process. I found this plugin that let me duplicate objects long a curve I assigned it to within the Maya software. It allowed me to duplicate the peaches when creating the Peach tart, and place them along a curve I created, so that I may be able to evenly space out the peaches and then go in and add my own offsets. Using the Script editor, I was able to create a Maya shelf tool for parts of the rigs body that I may select together to keyframe and begin animating. This was helpful when certain curves were being hidden by the geometry on the rig:

After referencing the characters in, I began to move the rigs around to see what felt the best. I experimented with different ways to set up the characters that were standing, and produced this:

I was not happy with the lady character walking in front of the camera as we will lose information from the characters in the back that I have spent time animating. I have decided to move her walk path behind the stove, as well as switch the maid looking character’s position and place her on the right side of the scene. I also slowed down the pace of the characters talking in the background. It moved too fast for my liking, and I felt that it would not flow very nicely to have them moving quite erratically  in the background. This to show that all of the space is being utilised within the tent:

Happy with the new placements of the characters, I decided on a camera movement after experimenting with a few options and was happy with this camera movement:

We are able to see the characters clearly, and I am happy with the way that the camera moves to show off the decorum of the tent. It feels like there is a believable environment.

 

The next scene to animate is the Theatre scene. It is comprised of a character on stage dressed in regal attire, putting on a performance as King Arthur to the audience attending. I originally had the audience very still, but to not have the scene looking dead pan with animation, I animated slight twitches here and there from the audience to give the illusion that they are reaction to what is being performed on stage. I animated the King Arthur character prancing about on the stage in a powerful fashion, much like his powerful title. Here is a playblast of the animation:

I was quite satisfied with this scene, and did not see the need for any developments or changes. The only issue I resolved during the rendering stage was changing the settings for the lights. The original render had come out very bright, which made the King Arthur character look overexposed in the film. By reducing the intensity of the lights and slightly changing the position of them, I was able to create a romantic lighting set up, which works well for the film in my opinion:

 

The final scene to animate is the Preacher scene. For the Preacher animated scene, we will have a character dressed in Preacher garments giving a speech to people passing by. Due to the very cold nature of Britain at the time, religious factions would claim that the bad weather was a punishment from God. We wanted to emulate this in the animation. The characters walk by, not even phased by what the Preacher character is saying, which causes him to sigh out of grief. I started animation within this scene by focusing on the smaller elements in the background that will help to bring the scene to life. Characters moving in the background, as evidence of the frost fair attractions on the ice.

 

After creating the base animation in the scene, I went back and animated a few more characters in the scene. To really portray the fact that the Preacher character is being ignored, I decided to animate a lady walking right past him as he speaks, which is what prompts the man to give a huge sigh afterwards. I experimented with a few different camera angles to see what would work best, and to see how I might creatively respond to being able to experiment with my scene once complete:

 

 

 

 

Upon looking at every angle, I have decided to go with the final truck into the scene. It was the shot we had decided for the pre-viz after all. I feel that it works the best in terms of composition, as well as following the filmic language of shots prior to this shot in the final film. If I were to have too many contrasting shots, the illusion of the film’s flow will be broken. I went back and did a little bit of editing on the final shot I had rendered out previously. I felt that the woman walks on by very quickly, which can be quite distracting. Instead, I wanted her to start from in the shot already, and walk off, seeming as if she is uninterested with what is going on around her regarding the Preacher character.

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Working with BBC Radio 4 to create this project was a rewarding experience. From the beginning, right up until the end, we had the clients intentions in mind. The original brief:

• Produce a video, complete with sound fx/music and speech (if they like) inspired by one of the weather programmes.
• The video should feel inspired by one bit of weather so either sun or wind or apocalyptic weather. It shouldn’t try to represent many
• The video should include some text.
• At the end of the video the viewer should feel they learnt something – history, science or language fact, saw a great quote, got a handy tip.
• The video should make the viewer feel something – mood or emotion driven.
• It should be no more than 2 mins long
• Be as daring as you like with your creativity. It will have to go a BBC site though so taste and decency etc!

 

What will happen to it:

• They will live on the BBC Radio 4 website
• They will be shared elsewhere, BBC homepage

 

Having the opportunity to pitch to such a client as the BBC was a character building experience. The BBC came to us for an opportunity to collaborate, so I had to do my best to fulfill my role in this collaboration project, and it has had a fruitful end. Our animation was shared on the BBC Radio 4 Facebook page, as well as tweeted out by the official BBC Radio 4 Twitter page and now lives on the official BBC Radio 4 website.