Visual Language: 5th - 11th December 2016

I continued to work on designing my character but I was starting with the face and creating various shapes and features. I knew that I wanted the facial features to be rather small on his head in order to reinforce his size and weight. This way felt much more natural and comfortable to create my character. I started to really enjoy the big bean shaped head with the big fat chin. This made an interesting silhouette to the character. He is starting to resemble the likes of Family Guy's Peter Griffin and The Simpsons Homer Simpson with his shape and silhouette.

The Tuesday was our interim crit on our environmental drawings. I was told that my lines and shapes were very strong and well communicated the shapes. I was then told that I didn't actually have enough images so I will have to draw some more on my commute. Colour was something that I was planning to do digitally and this is what was suggested most as well so that was ok. That was the only things that I really received from this crit. I don't feel that this way of presentation for a crit works as well. When we put our storyboards around the room and people put sticky notes on, we gained more useful feedback in a fraction of the time. People are less inclined to shout out to give feedback in a presentation.

After this crit I will have to do some more environmental drawings. I will try to use a wider range of media and think about the colour I use. I will also be scanning in my drawings and digitally colouring them in different ways.

Animation Skills: 28th November - 4th December 2016: Surprise Crit

After just finishing my animation at the weekend, Monday opened with the crit. It was really great to finally see everyone else's animations as up until then I had only seen the odd few and others that were just single frames when passing. I really loved how diverse they were. So many different styles and interpretations of their chosen words. When I later spoke to people about them, I was very pleasantly surprised to hear so many positive things. A lot of people said they really liked it. Quite a number of people said that they loved how smooth the animation was. People were very fond of the expressions and said that they told how the character was feeling very well.

I was happy to hear how it communicated the story very well. The mood was well conveyed. Many people also commented on the use of sound. They all said that it worked really well to help the story and atmosphere. I also had positive comments on the depth of field used on the backgrounds, the subtle 3D effect of the door as the hand approaches and that my proportions were all very well kept and consistent.

Some of the things I was told could be improved were; the fact that the backgrounds were quite simplistic. This is something that I did already know but it didn’t really bother me all that much. This was because firstly, I am not as confident in creating backgrounds so I wanted to keep them quite simple and focus on making the character look as best as I could. Also, the backgrounds aren’t ever really seen all that much and when they are they are out of focus. I wanted to focus on the main character more than anything since he was the driving force of the story for my chosen word. Another comment was that because of my use of tweens, the character looked rather static. This is something I had thought about. I thought that because my character wasn’t animated totally frame by frame, it does lose some of the more flowing animation feel to it and maybe does lose some character.

Despite this however, I do feel that my animation does show the emotion of the character quite well. Each part of the face was still all drawn, but some were re used when needed which wasn’t an option that people who were using traditional methods had. It was also suggested to add some secondary motion to the hair and body rather than just the face. This is something that was simple enough for me to be able to add quickly and aided by the way that I had actually structured my animate files. All I had to do was go into the face symbol and lasso out the hair and put it on it’s own layer and make it bounce when the character reacts to the surprise. This is a very small edit but one that I think does add a good extra bit of visual interest to the shot. I also added a very subtle bounce to the jacket and tie, though this is hard to notice because of severe camera movement.

All in all, I am very happy with the comments I received and most people saying that they really liked it. Most things were positive and the only negative things were things that I had already kind of noticed and had accepted or justified. I think that with more time, I would have done more as frame by frame elements to make it more free flowing, but as it is am incredibly happy with what I managed to create in the time that I had to create it. I’ve really enjoyed this project and I am really looking forward to these kinds of production projects in the future.

Visual Language: 28th November - 4th December 2016

After completing my animation skills animation and responding to the feedback in our crit, I could then put my focus onto this character designing much more. I started fresh.

I started by going online and simply searching for some inspiration. I looked at commuters and trains and the like, and this is some of what I found. 

This kind of exercise is always pretty helpful to me. After looking at many of the stock images I gathered, I thought about the conductor doing the same thing every journey. The people could be different every time but there is always that consistency. I thought that I could do a story of the conductor. He could be going around collecting tickets as normal, but when there is someone who is taking forever to find theirs, he just snaps and throws them out of the window onto a platform. This way, I could make use of the backgrounds on platforms that I've also drawn. 

I tried to collect some more stereotypical thoughts of train conductors. What I first think of is a rather large man, maybe a bit sweaty, shirt and tie, pens in the pocket and typical conductor hat. Actually, a simple idea of what I think about goes back to the fat controller on Thomas the Tank Engine. 

As I was much happier with this idea for the character, I then went on to experiment with geometrical body shapes and silhouettes. These shapes weren't too dissimilar to what I created for my original idea. I want to go forward with the rounded shapes but I want to break away from being too close to the fat controller. I struggled with this as all my ideas seemed to be very similar. I just wasn't liking what I was making. I think that the method we had been told to use in order to develop our character just doesn't work with me. This isn't how I like to make characters so I will try to go about it how I usually do.

Animation Skills: 21st - 27th November 2016: Surprise Main Animation Week

This week, I really knuckled down to work on my animation. I had everything set up and ready to go so I just got on with it. I worked on each shot in a new document in order to make it feel more manageable and also, in the case of any file corruption, at least I wouldn't lose everything. 

When working on the first shot. I mainly just tried to focus on each feature at a time as I had set up each part of the face into a new graphic symbol within Adobe Animate. I went through with the mouth first as the sigh was the main character action in this shot, so it would be best for me to centre the rest of the movement around that.

The first shot was very focused on the main character and his mood. I wanted to try and communicate the idea of his character very quickly. I felt that the sigh and how he is dressed all shows he is a very tired man coming home from a hard day at work. I wanted to really show it on his face with how tired he was. 

Before starting the second shot, I wanted to have my background finished so that I could have a very clear idea of how it was going to be setup. I knew that I could draw one side of the street with the perspective curving around so that I could show the way down the street, like a fish eye lens. This would then let me use the same background for the second shot as well, as it was a different angle. I am not confident with creating background but I knew that this would be quite out of focus so I could make it rather simplistic. I used vector shapes within photoshop and curved them to the guide lines that I had created to help with getting a consistent perspective. I am quite proud of this background, though I know it is quite simple and could use more detail if it was going to be utilised more. 

I could then move onto shot 2. This one was quite quick to complete since it was only a basic walking motion on a mid shot so I only had to animate the bounce and swaying of the man. I did this using tweens in Adobe Animate. Inside these though, I did make sure to add more facial expressions and a bit of subtle head turning to add some more visual interest. There is also some movement in his jacket and tie to add secondary action. 
I went straight into the 5th shot after this one because they were the shots all using the same character model. I am very happy with the emotion that I have managed to capture in the ending shot. From surprise to frustration to a kind of sad smile. A very subtle effect that I added to this end scene was a darkening tint to the background. I did this so that the road would slowly become darker to make the focus much more on the character. This is done slowly and subtly enough that it is hardly noticeable but it just adds a bit more visual direction to him over anything else in frame. 

Shot 4 was the most complex after this because it involved all new elements. I knew that I wouldn't be able to draw all of the people inside so I made them all into silhouettes. This let me duplicate and edit them slightly to fill out the room. I then went through and added some basic tweens to them to make the room feel more alive. Moving from that into shot 3 was hard because I hate drawing hands, never mind animating them. I used my own hand as a reference for the first and last frames and then drew lots of inbetweens to smooth out and slow down the transition. I then put this frame by frame animation inside a graphic symbol to allow me to move the entire arm forward towards the door. 

The door was just a flat layer but I created a subtle 3D effect to it by adding a tapered version of it and then tweening into it. I also moved the door nob over as this happens to reinforce the effect. I am actually really happy with the way this turned out as it wasn't something I was originally planning on doing, the idea just popped into my head as I was animating the hand. This is another little technique that I learnt from the YouTuber, Draw With Jazza. About a year or two ago, he made a video on how to do very basic fake 3D effects within Flash by only using symbols and tweens. This is something that I have never actually done myself because I've never felt like I needed to but I am glad that I did it in this because I am really happy with the result. Obviously this is an incredibly basic method of making a 3D illusion and if I were to actually do anything more substantial I would have to use another program actually meant for 3D.

Once all the shots were finished and added into Premiere, I added the rain effects. To do this I just found some free rain VFX assets and set the blend mode to screen to take out the black. I went through each layer of these element and added blurs and scaling to them in order to make them feel more a part of the scene. 

This was a very busy week for this module to create this animation but I am incredibly proud of what I have made in such a short space of time. I feel that, since the last time I used this symbol method of animating, I have improved a lot and so I feel that this is quite a strong and consistent little animation. If I had had more time, I would have done more frame by frame elements instead of tweening as I think this can make it look rather flat. My least favourite moment is shot 4 because of the way the room is filled. If I did have more time, I would have loved to have animated the people in the room in much more detail and with more natural motion. This would really help to bring the room into the animation. On the flip side of this, I think, as it is, it helps to bring the focus onto the main character. 

Visual Language: 21st - 27th November 2016

When starting on the character design task, I was a bit unsure of what to do. Using the scenery of the train as inspiration, I was trying to think of a type of character I could create from that. I saw the typical businessmen kind of people who commute and thought of doing something like that.

I messed around with basic geometric shapes to try and communicate this idea. I was going for creating a salesman that was overly enthusiastic. Trying to communicate this wasn't really working for me. I didn't feel very good about any of these ideas or shapes. None of them really stood out to me. 

Using this method of creating shapes to influence the characters design is a very common thing throughout animation and film. By creating a character that resembles a certain shape, you can instil certain feelings and judgements about them. This video covers this topic in quite an interesting way. https://youtu.be/lLQJiEpCLQE The key ideas from this are that if there are lots of circles in the character, it means they are generally nicer and more lovable as they create a soft shape. The flip side to this is that the sharper the angles used, the more dangerous and cruel they usually are. These principles influence how we see a character and what we think about the type of person they are, so I am trying to keep this in mind through the process. 

I didn't do all that much more on my character design stuff this week as I was really crunching on completing my animation skills 15 second animation. I think that I need to come up with a new and more interesting idea for a character because I am really not feeling enthusiastic about this at all. I need something that will give me more to play with with more interesting and with more room for changes and individuality. 



CHARACTER DESIGN USING SHAPES https://youtu.be/lLQJiEpCLQE

Animation Skills: 14th - 20th November 2016: Surprise Animatic and Rigging

This week was mainly taken up by MAF, but I did manage to get a bit of my animation done.

On the Monday, I managed to assemble my animatic. I cropped the frames straight from my storyboard and put them into Premiere. It was very helpful to finally have the frames timed up. This really let me get an idea of the pacing and it actually fluctuated more than I anticipated. I extended the final shot by more than I thought I would but it just felt much better. I think after later adding the sound effects, it really helped to capture the mood and atmosphere I was wanting. I went to the sound studio to record voices and other vocal sound effects. I first recorded lots of exasperated sighs and then shocked sounds. I then asked about 10 different people to all come and be recorded shouting 'surprise', 'happy birthday' and some cheers and woos. I'm very happy with the result. I feel that it really does help to fill out the room. It was also very fun to do, I really enjoyed the recording session and the editing of it. I intend to use the sound booth many more times in future.

After these sounds were added, I again made more tweaks to the timing. The voices made some shots just not feel quite right. The shot looking in at the party was shortened a lot since I wanted to really focus on the mans reaction. It also makes it more of a surprise to the audience but helps to reinforce the character because of how much it means to him.

After completing the animatic on the Monday, I didn't get any chance to do any more until the Friday. On Friday, I started working on the first shot. I had to start by creating the car. I did this with lots of vector shapes. I made this car so that the layers would allow me to easily place the man inside and also blur the elements further back to add depth of field later. The windows were all done using an alpha layer to make them slightly transparent. I can then tween animate the transparency in order to sell the effect of the camera movement later. 

At the weekend, I finally started on the character. I made him using lots of symbols. So I made the top of the head one symbol and the jaw another. This allows me to then animate them separately when he opens his mouth. I also drew quite a few angles of the head to let me simply pick one out when needed. This will make the actual animation process much easier to manage and much more efficient. This has set me up to be able to jump straight into animation and get through it at a reasonable pace. 

This is a technique I learnt and developed from an animator called Josiah Brooks on YouTube. This was the main video I learnt from but he makes a range of Adobe tutorials on his channel, Draw With Jazza. I have learnt most of what I know about animation from him. This technique not only allows for flexible and easily editable animation, but also speeds up the process a lot and so I felt that since I didn't have that much time left, this technique would be the best suited for me on this particular project. Also, I haven't attempted this technique in about two years so I felt I would see how I have improved in it since then.

This technique also has a similar look to the show 'Archer'. Archer has this similar near realistic style and the animation isn't redrawn for every single frame. There are a lot of reused elements just like how I will be doing. I think the style works very well because Archer is based around the comedy and the writing. I think that the expressions can look a bit limited and flat but I think that in mine I have given myself more elements to work with in order to give myself more flexibility to get more expressive faces.

Visual Language: 14th - 20th November 2016

Continuing on with my enviroment drawings, I did another in the Leeds station. I went upstairs since this is somewhere that I don't often go because of the platforms my trains usually go to. I sat down at the end of the big pathway and attempted to draw across to the other side of the station. It was very cold here and there were lots of people constantly blocking my view. I didn't spend very long on this because I just wanted to go home. I did, however, later that night, make the main lines much bolder to make the shapes stand out more. 

I did another quick one at my hometown's station. There are no benches here and the only shelter doesn't allow for any interesting composition, so I leant against the fence further down the line. Since it was incredibly cold, I wanted to get this one done very quickly. To aid in this aesthetic, I chose to use a marker instead of a pencil to get more sporadic and expressive lines. I feel that both of these look rather messy because of how my hands couldn't stop shaking. 

After attending Manchester Animation Festival, and seeing Ethel and Ernest, I was in love with the style and use of the backgrounds. This is done in pretty much the same way as I talked about with Treasure Planet, but the 3D backgrounds in Ethel and Ernest have been painstakingly drawn over to achieve the same soft water-colour painted style as the characters. While it is still easy to be able to tell which are 3D rendered backgrounds, this does help them blend with the characters. This technique is used mainly for panning or tracking shots where the background is rather geometric, like buildings and roads. 

Another example is the backgrounds used on the classic Disney film. These backgrounds were all more painted and had a great look and texture. This always makes a great looking contrast between this and the black outlines characters. I like how they will paint a big background that allows them to pan across it as a panorama to create a big scene that can sometime achieve a subtle and simple 3D effect. 

These drawings weren't all as bad as I was expecting. I've never been confident with backgrounds and dynamic angles and compositions but I feel that this task has been somewhat helpful for me in choosing more interesting looking backgrounds. Focusing more on the shapes rather than details will help in creating brand new backgrounds.

Animation Skills: 7th - 13th November 2016: Surprise Storyboarding

This week, unlike the last couple, have been very heavy on the animation skills module. I had already established and developed my idea for the 10 - 15 second animation and so I just had start working on it.

Finishing up and refining the designs that I started last week led me to completing a facial turnaround for my character. I am very happy with the final design I now have. I feel that he is nicely stylised and not quite the normal cartoon shapes I tend to draw. Since the face is such a vital part of a character, and even more so in this short animation as it needs to tell so much in so little time, I am very glad that I've reached a point that I think works well.

I started rough story boarding on sticky notes. I'm very happy with how these turned out as well. I believe that it tells the story very well and once everything is timed up properly with all the voice and sound effects, it should be very clear.
When I translated the rough notes into the final storyboard. I decided to drop a couple of shots. This was done for multiple reasons. The first and main reason was that they simply weren’t essential to communicating the narrative, and second they were cut in order to ease the work flow. There was a shot of the man stepping out of his car while throwing his jacket over his shoulder. I decided this wasn't needed because in the prior shot, I will be making him move to exit, and then in the next he is walking up the drive with his jacket on his shoulder. This easily tells the audience what they need to know. This would also have been quite a complex shot to animate.

A few things I took into account after the last storyboard task, were the point with the amount of detail on the characters. In my humpty dumpty storyboard, this was something that I did with just basic construction skeletons in order to show where they were looking in a very basic manner. With this however, my main focus of this animation was to convey the emotion on the face of my character. So I made sure to actually draw him properly in every frame of the storyboard. While this took longer, it did work much better in communicating the actions and emotions in the piece before I went any further with it. I also tried to reduce the amount of zooms that I used as this was something I recieved a few comments about last time. However there are some points in this animation where I really do feel that zooms are more necessary to convey the surprise to the audience. 

Visual Language: 7th - 13th November 2016

This week I made a start on my environmental drawings. Originally, me and a few others were planning to drive to brimham rocks and draw them since they are very interesting and unusual things. We never got around to going and then also it would simply be just too cold to keep going. After that I was struggling with where to go and where to draw. I had considered drawing the interior of the pub that I work in but I would have felt far too uncomfortable doing that. 

For my research into backgrounds and interesting compositions, I started looking at Treasure Planet. I have always loved this film and it's use of 3D backgrounds with 2D characters. Since they modeled backgrounds in 3D, it allowed them the freedom and flexibility to play around with compositions a bit more, but also to achieve some more interesting and impressive shots even with complex elements within. The style creates a contrast against the linework of the characters which I think is quite appealing. The 3D elements do almost look too smooth because they don't have the slightly choppy and personal feel of the hand-drawn 2D elements.

I eventually decided that, since I commute to and from uni every day, that I could just draw the interior of the train and the train stations. While I did still feel quite uncomfortable drawing with so many people around, at least I didn't know them, so that made it better. 

I made an effort to try and draw 1 drawing per journey home (30 minutes), so it gave me a time limit and stopped me from adding too much detail and instead, focusing on the shapes and composition. I also did a few while waiting at the platforms. I also sat down at the pub in the train station and drew the view of the ticket gates. As I was focusing on the environment, I had to draw what I could see when I could see it since there were so many people blocking my view. When drawing certain areas, I had to wait for a glimpse through the crowds to see what was behind. Because of this, it may be somewhat inaccurate in proportions but believe that I succeeded in making it recognisable in what it is. 

I did this same thing with the train itself. I didn't want to draw the people sat in the chairs so I used the empty chairs as a reference to draw the ones that were obscured from view. Doing these environment drawings hasn't been as bad I was expecting it to be. I get very uncomfortable drawing when people are around but I think that having actually done it, I found it easier to stop worrying about the people around me and just focus on the drawing itself. 

Visual Language: 31st October - 6th November 2016

This week I finished my rocket task. This was difficult for me to finish. I found it incredibly hard to find the motivation to finish all 24 drawings and then the next 12 and storyboard. 

I am proud of my work on the 12 final pieces as I could then refine them into doing something that I actually enjoy doing, therefore creating better work. I do feel that these vector art rockets are much better than any of the other rockets I created. I started messing about with more simplistic vector art using silhouettes and I feel that these worked quite well. I really like the look of these. 

I am always happier with what I can create on computer over anything practical. This is obviously something that I do want to work on but mostly, my proudest work is done on computer. Also work that I simply enjoy doing more, and I think it's very important to enjoy what you do otherwise what is the point? I do need to work more traditionally more often in order to keep building my skills.

Overall, I have to say that I didn't really enjoy this task. I found it incredibly tedious and I just couldn't get motivated to do it. I am happy with some of the later rockets I made but I am still very pleased that we are now moving on from this. I do understand why it was useful and why we did it. It was a tricky exercise that has worked to make me really think about how one word can be interpreted so differently. 

Animation Skills: 31st October - 6th November 2016: Surprise Character Designing

While I didn't get as much done as I would have liked this week, I did manage to make a good start on production of my animation.

First of all I made an Adobe Premiere document and used titles to describe the action and to gauge the timings of the animation. I had used this method before to try to see how long I actually had to play with. Working with time limits like this is never quite as you’d expect. Doing this text animatic made me realise that I didn’t have the time that I thought I did. 15 seconds wasn't as long as I thought when trying to tell a story. This made me make the decision to have a standby shot. The shot where the man is getting out of the car and putting his jacket over his shoulder is one that I decided wasn’t needed but I could still have there if it felt right. If not, I didn’t want this too feel too rushed by shortening all the other shots and everyone will still be able to understand that he has simple walked to his door. This depends on how it feels when I have finished the storyboard.

Before I could do the storyboards, I had to design the character. I wanted to really show the exhaustion on his face. This is a man who has been in a very tiring and stressful job and isn’t happy about it. I showed this by making his eyes always squinting and having bags under them. Only having a maximum of 15 seconds to communicate this idea means that I have to use stereotypical ideas to show who this character is. This is really a basic trait of many animated characters and is done all the time in order to communicate their person.

I looked at quite a few different references for character designing while doing these sketches. I was struggling to find a style of hair that I felt suited the character. I wanted to make him look very tired and stressed, but I didn't want to make him look too old. I find it really interesting to look at character designs of things that are finished to see what could have been. It is hard to even imagine them as the same characters sometimes. Like the ones below, while you can tell that it is the same characters, they really do look so different!

Animation Skills: 24th - 30th October 2016: Animate It Briefing and Brainstorming

Not much happened this week in terms of the animation skills module. Most of my efforts have been on the visual language module and trying to finish the 24 drawings task. On monday, we did get our briefing of the next task. This is one that I am very excited for.

We received a choice of 7 words to use as a stimulus for the project. These were surprise, lateness, love, hate, longing, happiness and fear. We must then take one of these words and attempt to communicate the idea of this word through a 10 - 15 second animation, after creating a storyboard and animatic for it first. This is the kind of stuff that really excites me. I instantly had ideas for quite a few of the different themes presented. 

I had ideas for an atmospheric and creepy piece for the 'fear' theme where someone could be trying to escape a spooky house before being caught by some sort of monster and cutting to black in a shocking ending, but after looking at images online and compiling this moodboard, I came up with a few more for the word surprise. 

I like the idea of this story being quite character focused. Below is the file of notes that I wrote and came up with my ideas in. I have then done a more detailed sort of script for my final idea.

Surprise:

1. A robber is sneaking through a museum or bank vault, trying very hard to be quiet. The music starts to build tension as the camera shows the audience he is about to step through a motion detector, but instead, when he turns the corner, he sees another robber and they stare at each other in shock.
2. A kid at a zoo. Looking around inside the cage to try and see the animal inside. Then a tiger jumps out of the bushes at the kid and cut to black.
3. A tired looking man coming home from work. Very down and slow. Monotonous work. He opens the door to his home to find his family waiting to surprise him. It is his birthday.

A man slowly approaching his house. He is wearing a shirt and tie with a jacket thrown over his shoulder. The tie looks scruffy and loosened. He has very baggy eyes and looks incredibly tired. He slowly and wearily walks to the door of the house. He opens the door to a dark room, the light bleeding in around him. He flicks on the lights. There is a big group of people and a big banner across the room saying ‘Happy Birthday’. The people shout “surprise!” and blow party horns. The man jumps in shock and looks around. He smiles. Thankfully, as his eyes tear up.

I can't wait to get started on this but I am trying to finish off this visual language task before I start working properly on this because I know I won't want to go back once I get into this.

Visual Language: 24th - 30th October 2016

This week I continued to work on my 24 drawings task.

I was struggling quite a lot to get really motivated. I couldn't really think of many ideas for different rockets or methods. I haven't really been liking this little project for this reason, but then that has been making it even harder to actually do it. I think it is also harder for me because I am so excited to do the new animation skills task and I have so many ideas that I just want to do that. I've been trying to make myself finish this before I make a start on that though.

I felt that I had really run out of ideas. It wasn't helped by the fact that I had been doing all my drawings up until this point at the wrong size. I had been using a very small sketchbook as I thought that was what was said in the briefing. I had gotten confused and was going off of something else that was said and the brief did in fact say that they should be done in A4. So because of this, I redrew all of the prior rockets into an A4 sketchbook. I can make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen again by thoroughly reading the brief again and asking questions to make sure I am totally clear on what to do. 

It was a really hard slog to make myself finish this off as I really wasn't enjoying it. I am happy with some of the pieces that I have made throughout this series of drawings but all in all it's been a struggle for me. I have just been really wanting to move on from it.

I like the idea of the new environments briefing. I am excited to start drawing places using perspective points. This will be a very useful thing for me because I am not confident with creating backgrounds so I really hope to improve through this. I am not sure yet where I will draw but hopefully I will make a start on this task soon. 

Animation Skills: 17th - 23rd October 2016: Storyboard Crit

Following the creation of our nursery rhyme storyboards, we all stuck ours up all over the walls of the studio. We then went and used sticky notes to give constructive feedback to other peoples storyboards.

I really enjoyed seeing what other people had created. They were all very creative and communicated the ideas of the story very well. Thought I did not get to see everyone's storyboard, I did not see any that I didn't understand. I liked seeing the many different styles and ways of telling the story.

I found it particularly interesting to see other storyboards of 'Humpty Dumpty', as this was the one I chose so I could see how others had interpreted the story for themselves. When I came to giving feedback, I actually found it very difficult. I was really struggling to find write 3 things to be improved. Maybe they were actually all just that good or I was just being too nice, but I just found it really hard to think of things. I did feel like I was repeating myself quite a bit with very similar pros and cons. 

When I wrote things that could be improved, I also gave a suggestion or two of what I would have done. Whether or not people would totally appreciate this, I'm not sure, but I just thought it could give people some other possibilities and be more constructive.

Feedback on my storyboard was all very good and constructive. The main things that I read were to do with adding details to the soldier characters as I had just drawn them simply as construction skeletons. This is likely because I have always drawn construction characters like this for any storyboard I've done in the past as they were mostly live action things so drawing the detail of the actors wasn't really necessary. 

The other main criticism was about my use of zooms. Some notes said that they really liked the zooms that had been used, while others said that I had used too many. I can understand that I may have actually used more zooms than were really needed. The zooms could have been cut down to just a few shots that I feel do need them. For example, the establishing shot, the shot as humpty is falling off the wall and a zoom into him once he has hit the floor to show emotion. 

When I was then not working on the visual language module task, I did more work on the wizard paper animation. I have completed the key poses and now just have inbetweens to do. There will be a lot of inbetweens in this because I want to really accentuate the anticipation as he is about to shoot.

Visual Language: 17th - 23rd October 2016

After receiving the brief, we each picked a random word to use as our stimulus. The word that I ended up with was 'rocket'. I was pretty happy with the word that I had been given. I felt that this had a lot of potential to make cool variations upon. First I googled the word to try and see any of the possible other ways that it could be interpreted other than the obvious, rocket ship. 

I found rocket leaf, rocket launchers, rocket raccoon, and many other ways of using the word, all of which I wrote down in my spider diagram before starting on anything else. I don't feel as though I have done all that many. I know that I do work slowly and this is something that I am trying to improve on. I attempt to work more impulsively and experimentally, without worrying about what the outcome may look like and just doing it anyway. 

One of my favorite drawings so far is the tonal Biro pen piece. I really like these line shading styles and the depth they can give so I was quite happy with my attempt at this style. I do feel that I could have done a better job with consistent proportions, perhaps I will create another space shuttle like this later in the book.

For the drawings I have left to do, I will also try to be more experimental and use different materials and techniques. I feel that I have been using pencil too much as this is my favorite practical media. I'll see what other techniques will help me achieve. I am making an effort to try and think outside of the box to come up with more inventive ways of thinking about 'rockets'. 

Animation Skills: 10th - 16th October 2016: Humpty Dumpty Storyboarding

On Monday, I had finished my flipbooks and 2 second animation, so I started a new one. I wanted to be very ambitious with this being a more detailed character animation. I have started to create the plan of a wizard trying to shoot some sort of magic blast but instead it backfires and he goes flying off of the right side of frame. There aren't too many complex movements to be done in this but there will lots of inbetweens to smooth the motion and build anticipation. This is something extra that I will continue to work on in my own time since we have moved onto storyboards in the studio.

When we started on creating storyboards, I was really struggling to think of a nursery rhyme to use as my story. I realized that I didn't really know many, so I settled for Humpty Dumpty. I started off in creating this by thinking of the camera angles and movements I was using. I wanted to make this to be as if it was a very short, cheesy animation. I open with an establishing shot of humpty on the castle wall, followed by a shot looking slightly up at him. I was originally having him fall forwards off the wall but it is harder to fall forwards when rocking like that. It would be much more likely and realistic for him to have fallen backwards. Also, this meant that the kings men could see him straight away. I wanted to fall to be sudden and shocking which is why I chose to have it cut to black before impact. After this point is where I actually got a little stuck. I was struggling to think of how to make the kings men come to help. 

I took a break and came back to it the next day and then simply had them walk over. Following the close up shot of humpty as he is on the floor. I wanted to have the shot of the men approaching to be rather close from his point of view.  

I was looking at other storyboards made for Wallace and Gromit. The main focus is always to follow the action. This in particular scene is from 'The Wrong Trousers' and is such a well made scene for its visual comedy and inventiveness. It only cuts away to show other important elements that impact on the main action of the scene which is the train chase. It has a lot of interesting movements and communicates the story very well. This is the whole point of a storyboard and something that I'm trying to do in mine.

Once I had finished my storyboard on the sticky notes, I then started recreating them on photoshop. This was fun because I like drawing in Photoshop with graphics tablets. For the most part, the storyboard stayed the same. There was only really one major change and that was with how the kings men saw humpty once he had landed. I made the camera much tighter on them as they turned to look. I felt that this would help to keep the tension and emotion in a scene of this kind, as it would be a proper reaction shot. Once I had finished drawing each frame into the storyboard sheet, I could then turn it into an animatic.

I cropped every frame of the storyboard down to its own image and then exported them into Premiere. I could then set the timings of each shot. For some of the shots where the action was more substantial, I created variant frames to show the movement. I did this for the shot of humpty rocking off the back of the wall, the kings men turning their heads and them then walking up to humpty. This helped to show what was going on in those frames. One issue I faced in the stage was the fact that because I had earlier changed the direction of the fall, it then made the camera zoom not work as I had envisioned. I first thought that since he was falling face down, the camera zooming into his mouth could work to show the speed and then also be what cuts to black at the same time. Unfortunately, as he was now falling backwards, this would make little sense, so I had to have the camera zooming out from him to show the speed and then just cut to black normally. I feel that this did take away a visually interesting transition but it was necessary to communicate the speed of the fall. 

I enjoyed creating this storyboard and actually found it more challenging than I had expected. I have created storyboards in the past and been fine with it but I think it maybe was to do with the fact that this wasn't my own original story. All in all, I am pretty happy with how this storyboard has turned out. I do not feel it is the best I have made but I do like it. I feel that it maybe loses some sort of interest in the second half but I'm not entirely sure why. I look forward to doing more storyboards in the future and hopefully make them better quality. 

Animation Skills: 3rd - 9th October 2016: Paper Animations

This has been the first proper week of animating! It's been very exciting. I have thoroughly enjoyed creating flipbooks and paper animations.

I have already taught myself the 12 basic principles from online resources but I felt that this was a very useful refresher. It did clear up and clarify a few details which I had wondered about, especially 'solid drawing', which is one that I wasn't entirely sure about before.

I have created flipbooks in the past so I was excited to do some more again as it's something I always loved to do. When creating the flipbooks, I tried to focus on making the squash and stretch very exaggerated. This brings the ball a lot more weight and character.

I was very happy with how my bouncy ball turned out though if I were to do it again, I would give myself more time for the ball to stop bouncing more naturally. I feel that the two major bounces aren't enough and that the ball then stops too suddenly. This is only a minor issue though, I'm very pleased with the result.

I think that this same issue presented itself in both of my other flipbooks. For the sideways bouncing ball, I feel that I didn't have enough space at the end of the page. I also did start it too far into the book so that the first few frames can't actually be seen when flipping it. I think that this could be rectified by making the arcs of the bounces tighter so that it bounces higher rather than further.

The last flipbook simply doesn't have enough frames of the take off. It doesn't give the viewer time to really process. I could fix this by sacrificing a few frames from the build up in order to let the spaceship take off totally out of frame. I was, however, very happy with the squashing and anticipation in this flipbook and I feel they worked very nicely to really build up the energy of the ship.

Traditional paper animation is something that I've been wanting to try for quite a while and now I've discovered that I really love doing it. It feels incredibly satisfying. We first created a pendulum swinging in order to get a grasp on the timing principle. I feel that my swing wasn't quite as smooth as it could have been. I wasn't too happy with it. I think that the problem came in the frames where the motion ends. The ball stops too suddenly and stays on the extreme for too long.

For my first proper paper animation, I was actually struggling for quite a while to think of an idea. I started sketching the idea for a pencil walking across the screen. I quickly decided that I wasn't as interested in this idea and then changed the idea to a pencil character who was bouncing across the screen. I drew all keyframes on one sheet to plan it out first. I tried to make the motion slow at the top of the arc to get correct timing. When I had actually finished this version, the movement at the top of the arc was far too slow. I asked for some feedback because I wasn't too happy with it and I was told that if I were to make this pencil into a character who was jumping then I should really go all out.

I then started fresh, this time I used the pencil to communicate the idea of legs and joints. I also made sure to do more frequent line tests in order to check the timing was going well. I was very happy with the result of this one. I exaggerated the squash and stretch quite a great deal and I think that along with the legs, this really sells the idea that this pencil is alive and jumping across the screen. 

From this week of doing traditional paper animation, I have found that I really love doing it. I find it incredibly satisfying and I love the idea of creating these clips just like the old time animators did. I intend to do more of these types of animations again in the future.