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.
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