Middle Watch
Middle Watch Instagram
Middle Watch IMDB

In early 2021 I officially took up the role of Animation Director for the 2D short film Middle Watch, directed by John Stevenson, Co-directed by Aiesha Penwarden, and Shepherded along by our wonderful producer & production Manager Dimana Bratanova. Over the course of the Production I oversaw the animation and clean up of the film, from recruiting to supervising the respective teams of 15-20 people in each department, providing supporting resources, guidance and working along side our crew of collectively over 100 people, spread across a half dozen countries to complete this 12 minute film.

Rob & Aiesha's Studio Space
A little slice of the home studio Myself and our Co-director Aiesha did the majority of our work on Middlewatch from.
Layout Keys

This is a sample of some of my layout keys, that formed a apart of a larger collection of drawings, drawn by myself & Aiesha, that acted as an integral part of the character design reference for the animation team. What this allowed us to do was too keep the production more agile so we could have the team always work from the best, most appealing, and most up to date drawings of the character.

MAQUETTES

Creating the maquette of the main character/s is a step I like to integrate into any larger production, where I can, and in this instance it was an asset that was used as a part of the Character Development process, Pre-Vis, Reference for Animators & Lighting Reference. With a team of young artists driving the production, all working remotely and nearly all part time, is was all the more important to create these kinds of assets as aids for the team to produce the most consistent level of work to deliver a coherent film.

ANIMATION SUPERVISION

Throughout the production of Middle Watch my I led several meetings per week split between the Animation (character, 3D, FX) & Clean-up departments where each department averaged a crew of between 14-20 people. Also as our crew was nearly all working remotely and part time (with the exception Leads and Senior artists) it meant providing thorough supporting material to compensate for the natural distance of running a remote production. Broadly speaking my key responsibilities included:

LAV

Through production I had animators record LAV as an essential step in the animation pipeline. My view is if you want to understand how things really work and move you need to first study reality, and with Middle Watch and our main character’s (Starkey) performance being grounded in a style of naturalism, it was all the more important a foundation to build upon.

The LAV also helped facilitate a clear dialogue between myself and the animators, and their intentions for a shot. Where an animator could shoot several takes quickly and efficiently and then with those in-hand, we could jump on a call to to talk through the presented options. While this was a key initial starting step for most of the animators with their shots, there was still a significant number of LAVs that I and Aiesha directly shot for the animators to work from.

CLEAN-Up Process
MIddle Watch Clean Up guide
“I think it’s the most detailed cleanup guide I’ve ever seen, it’s pretty amazing” ~ Eleonora Quario

Apart of my role as Animation Director extended to developing the clean-up pipeline to meet the directors stylistic requirements for the films grainy partially lineless look, any and all documentation that was required to take an artist from opening the file to finally exporting the layers into After Effects and the naming conventions to follow in doing so, TVPaint tools, teaching resources, supervising the clean-up team itself and working with our Production Manager and Director to sign off of the weekly deliverables from the team.

The Clean-up process itself it included 4 main components:


A big part of having such an involved clean-up process was to insure that the artists working in the department were not only getting training in a broader range of skills but that those skills could be clearly demonstrated in the showreel shots that the artists would take away from the production.

CleanUp Example Frame
RGB… but Y?

A little quirk of the production that can be seen in the image above is in the use of the RGBK line colouring for Clean-up. The main reason for this originated from the need to use different colour modes on the different coloured sections to achieve the final look. The easiest way to achieve this separation was to use TVPaint’s FX tools to procedurally separate the RGBK sections onto their own layers. It also meant that once separated any of the line colours could then be recoloured in batches along with providing a lot of versatility for our compositors.

ANIMATION
FX DEVELOPMENT

A lot of the animation work I did for the Middle Watch was as feedback, style development and movement tests, etc… across the 2D, 3D & FX animation departments. And to insure that these elements remained texturally coherent in their performance style, movement signature and shape language. An example of some of the FX Style Development Animation can be seen below for the torpedo’s cutting through the water. Here I worked closely with the Art Director’s style keys to maintain an appropriate shape language and style that could be scaled across the film, while keeping in mind the constraints of having a quite small FX team. (finding available FX artists is tough, though we were very fortunate to have the all Star, Caracan join us to do a couple FX shots on the film, it was a real privilege to be able to have her work on the film with us.)

Because of the graphic angular nature of the art style, I wanted that same quality to be fundamentally present in the FX. It’s easy to resort to a generic look with FX, especially with water, and it can so easily break the aesthetic coherence of the world. So here, rather than solely pulling inspiration from water, I broadened the scope of reference to include Shattering Ice/Glass, Ice breaker ships and the physics of smaller scale water splashes. There’s a wonderful clip of a little sea turtle as it’s swimming across the surface of the sea as small waves shatter into beads of water as they break across his little head. But, the sea still needs to capture the feeling of water, stylised water but still fundamentally water, and finding that balance was the challenge.

CHARCTER ANIMATION

While I had animated several smaller shots through out the film, towards the end of production I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I could really get into a hearty chunk of animation of my own. In total it was an 18 second shot with a camera move that I was able to take from rough all the way through to Final Line, Colour and Shadow.

A full breakdown of the shot will be coming soon.

BAFTA

Then one day, out of the blue, we find out our little Middle Watch had been nominated for a BAFTA! But that’s a whole other story, if your interested feel free to ask me in person some time.

Instagram
Vimeo
LinkedIn
Facebook

© 2023 Rob Strachan