Daily Mail Dystopia - Production and Roundup

So today I put the final touches onto Daily Mail Dystopia, the first animation to be started this year and the last to be finished. There's got to be something poetic there.

The animation was put together as a response to The Daily Mail and the hate and misogyny they inspire. It's directed to the people who post insulting things in the comment sections and believe every word they print. It's meant to be positioned as a sort-of faux public information ad. The sort of longer one they'd play at a cinema.

It's been a heck of a rocky ride this one. Best start at the beginning. At the time it started, I was still coming off the final animation of last year, Birds, and as the only one of last year's projects I consider a success, it's understandable. That animation was really strong in terms of humour, length, and quality of art. But the animation was incredibly simplistic. Each character only had a couple of sprites and the background never moved. So that was the basic plan.

I started sketching out ideas and storyboards and as the idea formed I realised I wouldn't be able to do the background in traditional art. A lot of the planning sprung from the final shot where it pans out over the city revealing that it's the Daily Mail logo. That would be so tricky to do in pen. So I decided to do it in Cinema 4D. At this point I'd barely ever used it before so I decided to combine traditional and digital animation.

The first step went fairly smoothly as I built the city in Cinema 4D. Inspired by tricks from the likes of Silent Hill 2, I played the city to my advantage, hiding my lack of expertise behind darkness and foggy volumetric light. I then built the streetlamps and a few of the more complicated features. After that I put together a set of textures from my computer. Several of these were screenshots from previous animations. Finally, I set out a camera track with the music in mind around the city, following my original plan. For the first time I was able to use some interesting camera angles in a university project.

Finally I rendered it out. In my inexperience, this part went terribly. Rendering the whole thing at once and at home was definitely a bad start. As I've learned over time, my computer is terrible at long renders. It took a couple of days to get to the final scene, and then the render times went crazy. I had used a really render-intensive background and with that scene being pretty long I decided I had to restart. After all of that I had to convert it a couple of times as my computer was having trouble with it and THEN import it into flash then After Effects too. By the end of all that the picture quality was pretty tragic.

I then went back to the C4D file and laid out a series of camera-facing figures in the map to act as animation guides. With the memory of the previous render still around, I chose to only render single frames of choice.

After my first assessment I picked up the project again and began working on the 2D side of things. This went really well thanks to my recent purchase of a lightbox. Within a couple of weeks all the artwork was finished. Then the troubles hit in the editing. With most of the artwork being open at the ends, excessive amounts of paint-brushing and trimming was required to keep the objects in solid white. This, combined with the requirement to make each art assets a separate file created one of the most awkward editing processes of my life.



I was then able to add all the artwork together in Flash. This was a bit of a twisty turny process with some days being great but other full of complication. Some of my art worked perfectly but some was far trickier to work with. The final two scenes were particularly nightmarish along with the hair from scene 4. I put the main characters in first the added the background ones second. Finally I added effects, and did an unbelievable amount of bugfixing. All of this was done in Flash, as I find it far superior for frame-by-frame animation. Generally it made things easy but I did wish it had some motion tracking at points.

One of the heavily improved things from Birds is the movement. Despite having no walking cycles in it due to time constraints, I came up with a new technique that felt dynamic but didn't take days to make. Inspired by the likes of Loony Toons and RWBY, I crafted a really effective way to move characters around. Using five frames of smoke, usually tailored to each frame when possible, along with cartoonish movement lines, I created a method of conveying motion without needing a few hundred frames of walk cycles. I'm proud of this.

Final touches were applied to the Cinema 4D file towards the end of the year. I initially made the animation in full colour before having it suggested to change it to black-and-white, which looked far better. For the final render though, I decided to shift the colours again. All of the textures were changed to shades of grey to mimic the black-and-white finish of the first render, but then I changed the streetlights to red and pink to make a more dramatic effect. I also updated a few more textures here, and improved others by using more repeats to make the detail level realistic. The final render was done in 200 frame chunks both in university and at home. This made for a far easier edit process. Plus I discovered how to export Flash with a transparent background, so as a result, all the files were only ever compressed once. The final edits were done in After Effects, as I fixed a couple of lingering bugs as well as a whole host created by Flash doing a terrible job of rendering out the piece, with frames being skipped and altered left right and center. But thankfully it all came together really nicely.

As a highly experimental project born out of inexperience I can't help but love how it turned out. Despite initial concerns, the final outcome looks busy, and the two techniques blend well together. There are still problems, but I find myself overlooking them in light of how much it took to get to this stage and how happy I am with where it is.