Character & Narrative: Week Thirteen: 18th - 24th December 2017

This week I did the sketches for shot 18. I followed the reference video quite closely for the correct weight and speed. I made sure to match up the end with shot 19's opening. For the middle frames of the throw, I decided to add a smear and stretch out the arm and lantern to accentuate the quick motion. 

I did make a start on the keyframe skeletons for shot 12 however I didn't manage to finish them since it is the run up to christmas so I'm still a week behind, however I hope to set aside a good few full days of work late next week to try catch up. 

Character & Narrative: Week Twelve: 11th - 17th December 2017

I started by finishing off the keyframes linework for shot 14. This didn't take too long which let me get on with shot 22. 

To save time and make it easier, I decided that shot 22 could be done as a walk cycle, since he didn't need to be acting much and it was just him walking away at the same angle through the whole shot. I still found this quite difficult like shot 14, so I think it may be that I am not confident animating this character from behind. This shot still requires a few inbetweens to smooth it out but the shot is as complete as it needs to be at this moment in time. 

I later decided, while rewatching this shot, that he looked way too confident. After just being put through this hellish experience, he wouldn't be walking so normally. I now intend to come back to this shot and change or redraw it to be more downbeat and slow.

Character & Narrative: Week Eleven: 4th - 10th December 2017

This week I kept working on shot 7, drawing linework over the sketches that I finished last week. I enjoy doing the linework as it's relatively easy as I have already done the hard work of the sketches. 

Shot 14 took a lot longer than I expected. Even with the reference footage, I found it surprisingly difficult to draw the poses to a level that I was satisfied with. I kept redoing frames until I was happy. I am now in a place where I am ok with the keyframes. I still have to go over and do the linework for this shot but this means that I am running a week behind schedule as I should have done shot 22 in this week aswell. I believe that I will be able to catch up over christmas as I will have some good full days to slog away and get back on schedule. 

Character & Narrative: Week Ten: 27th November - 3rd December 2017

I started the week still working on completing the keyframes for shot 19. I knew this would be a hard one to do, but even with the maya reference this was still taking a long time. Most of the week was taken up with doing this. 

Once I had all the sketches done and checked and double checked, I could move a bit quicker with inbetweens and linework. This was much easier to do and I got through all linework on the keyframes and breakdown inbetweens within a day and a bit. All that is left to do on this shot is final linework inbetweens but I will be coming back to that in a few weeks since I had other shots to do too.

We decided shot 6 could just be a hand that is move across the panning screen since it would save us time. I just drew it three times to give it some wiggle. 


Shot 7 was the other one I had to do this week, but unfortunately I only managed to get the initial sketches done since shot 19 has pushed me behind schedule. I will have to fit that in next week with 14 and 22.

Study Task: Walk This Way

I again really enjoyed this task to practice walk cycle theory. Using moom was straightforward and enjoyable to create this walk cycle. I personally found it easier to make the cycle with the default smoothing on as it would then make an inbetween that was close enough to what I needed, which I could then go in and manually alter anyway. 

When rendering, I also did a pass with the stepped movements to just show the poses themselves. 

In hindsight, I could have spent more time to give the walk more character and visual interest but do still I feel I have a good understanding of the poses and weight in a walk cycle, especially as this project progresses, since the character in our animation is nearly always running. 

Character & Narrative: Week Nine: 20th - 26th November 2017

Shot 19. The 360 spin. This shot is at the major dramatic climax of the animation, which is very important. It is the most complex shot we are doing, as to why it is my only focus for this week.

I created a 3D reference using Moom in maya since this shot would have been too complex to attempt without some form of reference like this. The camera movement is the main point of this shot so it was very important that I got this correct. 

I imported this into Photoshop and started roughly sketching over the top to change some proportions (like the head). I only did this every 8 frames so that I could save time and then just do inbetweens later. This still took a long time however and even with the reference, it still proved difficult to continually understand the way he was turning, hence I fell behind schedule and was still working on sketches after Sunday.

Character & Narrative: Week Eight: 13th - 19th November 2017

This week was Manchester Animation Festival so I specifically scheduled in less work for all three of us, knowing that we wouldn't be getting much done. Therefore, I had one shot to complete this week, a rather simple one, where the camera only zooms out from the gnome and he doesn't actually move all that much. I only got to work on this on the friday, but I finished the sketches and linework for the two main keyframes. It was hard to get the angle looking right with this shot because of how high the angle is. When inbetweens come, it will slow and smooth this motion a bit, and it can then be duplicated and flipped to make him look back to the beginning.

I feel like I am slightly behind after this week but really when I think about it, I am still on track, since we specifically scheduled just keyframes to be done in these weeks, and because I did the inbetweens for the first few shots, we are actually ahead. I am anxious about this next week however, because I have the 360 rotation shot to do. I have to finish my Maya reference using the Moom model to help me keep the angle consistent. 

Study Task: Strike a Pose

I tried to chose 5 poses that were rather varied in pose potential. I chose:

• Fear
• Awe
• Tiredness
• Pride
• Cruelty

I really enjoyed playing with the moom figure and it was much easier to control than I expected and therefore didn't take as long to do as anticipated. 

From using Moom in this task, we have decided to use this to aid us in creating our 360 spin shot. I plan to use moom as reference to draw over. 

Character & Narrative: Week Seven: 6th - 12th November 2017

This week I had to get shot 4 and 11 keyframes done. Surprisingly enough, I found shot 11 the harder of the two since it is a much more close up shot, meaning I have to be much more precise with my lines to keep it consistent in details. I spent a lot of time sketching this shot to make sure I got the facial expressions right so that they would clearly illustrate what the gnome is really feeling. I did use reference footage to get the basic idea, but I exaggerated and changed details quite a bit from it. This shot is left with many more inbetweens to be done to smooth his motion.

Shot 4 wasn't as hard as I expected it to be. I filmed reference footage of me slowing to a stop and synced that up to the shot. I drew my keyframes based on the contact frames of the video but changing the angle slightly to get it to work with the background. From here I ended up doing most of the inbetweens at the same time since I was getting carried away with this shot. I'm really happy with this shot imparticularly and I am excited to see it finished with all inbetweens done. 

Character & Narrative: Week Six: 30th October - 5th November 2017

This week I had two shots to animate. I think that having the schedule is really helping me plan and see what I should be doing, and will easily tell me when I am running behind on our plan. 

I finished the first shot very fast as it was only a foot with rather simple movement. This was a good one to start with to get me back into the mood of animating. Since it was such a simple shot I decided to do the inbetweens at the same time. 

My second shot was shot 3. This took much longer since it was a more action based shot, with full body running. Not only that, but it was from the front and from a low angle, making it even harder to draw. I took reference video of me running to try to understand the difficult angle however my first sketches looked very off. He looked as if he was more hopping from side to side than running. 

I asked for feedback from multiple sources and then changed a few key things. I redrew the arms on every frame to make it swing much more. This really helped sell the weight of him pulling himself along. I made his body twist a bit more with these more drastic arm movements. I then also changed the feet so that for 1 frame of the cycle, the under sole can be seen. These changes really did so much to fix this shot. After I had drawn over these sketches with the linework and done the inbetweens, I then added the subtle squash and stretch in the bounce of his steps by resizing the frame. 

I am really happy with the result of this shot especially because it was really frustrating me when it was not working. 

Character & Narrative: Week Five: 23rd October - 29th October 2017

This week I continued with the animatic. There were some concerns in the group about the length of our animation. This was because when I had only added about half of the panels to the animatic, it was already 36 seconds long. I tried to trim this down as much as possible here and there but we didn't want to spoil the tension and atmosphere in some of the slower downtime parts. I was worried about it feeling too rushed and it ruining the story.

When I put everything together it came to 57 seconds. We have tried to trim as much as possible but not much was able to be removed without compromising the story. We have gone through and worked out how much work each shot will need and we believe we will be able to achieve what we plan. 


Also this week, we recorded all voice effects we would need. This involved me imitating the gnome with panting, grunting and shouting sounds. It took a while to go through all the audio footage and select the best takes. I'm really happy with all the sound work I did on the animatic. I really enjoy doing this and making certain sounds more prominent in left or right sides of speakers depending on where the sounds are coming from. 

Character & Narrative: Week Four: 16th - 22nd October 2017

We were introduced to the Maya model, Moom. I had fun playing around with this and thought it would be especially useful for planning out our 360 rotating shot at the end of the story. This kind of shot would be very difficult to draw ourselves, but using moom as a pre-vis reference will help tremendously.

As Alex was creating the storyboards, I was scanning them in and putting them together in Premiere to create the animatic. I was doing basic timings based on instinct before I added sound effects. For the time being I am only adding ambient background sounds and I will add more specific detail sounds once I have a much clearer example of timings like footsteps and other interactions with the environment. 

I also created a shot tracker and schedule in Google Sheets for the project. The shot tracker lets us tick off what stage each shot is at, giving us a visual representation of how far along the project is and if anything is lagging behind. The scheduling is then based on how complex certain shots are versus how many weeks we have. I'm strangely proud of these minor aspects of the planning as time management is something I have continually stated needed personally improving.

Character & Narrative: Week Three: 9th - 15th October 2017

This week started with me finishing off the script. We reviewed the script together and decided that with how much time we had and how ambitious some of the shots were, we would have to cut it down quite a lot. We decided that we would take out a world of tunnels and just go straight from the snowy desert to the mars like world.

However we still wanted the claustrophobic feel of the tunnel sequence, so we made our mars world have a much more enclosed and rocky environment to keep the gnome feeling trapped. I took elements from shots and little details from the tunnel and mars scenes and combined them to make the scene we now have in the script.

 

I'm happy with how the script came together and I'm glad that I got to do this part of the project since I really love writing stories and scripts.

We are working very well as a team so far. We have a group chat that we keep sharing ideas and progress on, so we are all on the same page. Commutation is such an important thing and I think that we have that going very well in our group so far.

Study Task: Research 2: Process

If we were to do our animation in stop motion or digital 3D, I think one of the greatest issues would be the sets we would have to make. Since our animation covers 4 or 5 vastly different environments, it would be incredibly hard to create all of them for stop motion puppets to live in. This would take a lot of resources and potentially be more expensive than any other medium. This is also a process that none of us would feel comfortable doing since we aren't sculpters and don't really feel we could just learn as we went with such an ambitious story. We would have to drastically tone down our idea to make it possible with stop motion. 

However, with stop motion, once the figures and sets are built, the process of actually animating is much quicker than hand drawn.

But then again, we would be limited as to when we could animate with stop motion, having to work solely in uni opening times. Stop motion also is much more punishing when mistakes happen, there is no ctrl z and if you notice something is off after the fact, the whole shot will likely have to be redone. 

Digital 3D is something I would be interested in for making backgrounds, but I am personally not as keen on the look of 3D characters. However, this medium allows a lot of flexibility and the opportunity to make mistakes. Again in 3D, once a rigged character is made, the time it takes to animate is drastically reduced. 

Study Task: Research 1: Aesthetics

We have chosen to do our animation in digital hand drawn 2D. For this project I am also going to be using Photoshop rather than Animate, which I have almost exclusively used in the past. 

We have chosen to use this medium because we are all mainly 2D artists and that is where each of our interests lie and what we feel comfortable in. 

Obviously the potential of this medium is only limited by what you can imagine and draw. We are planning a 360 shot where the camera will spin around the character. This will be an incredibly complex shot to pull off because of the constantly changing angle but we are feeling ambitious to try it because it would be really good if we can get it right.

Doing something like this in digital 3D would be much simpler as you have control of the camera and can move it around to find whatever shot you want after the fact.

I also feel that the 2D look will give our animation a bit more of a fairytale and fantasy atmosphere than other mediums could because of so many traditional fairytales have been done 2D (like the classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, seen here).

All of this will rely on our drawing skill, something which I am not so confident with. However I am embracing the challenge and will hopefully improve lots from such an intense and action packed story. 

Character & Narrative: Week Two: 2nd - 8th October 2017

Throughout the week, I thought on my idea more but I was struggling to think of anything new and exciting. I thought more about the idea of the the heroes journey and the return at the end. This doesn't have to be an actual return to how the story starts but it helped me to think about maybe the spaceman bargaining with the aliens to help him go back through the black hole and get home. 

• Spaceman’s ship start getting ripped apart into a black hole. He puts on his spacesuit before the airlock door flies off. He's hanging onto a door frame after the airlock is ripped off. He hangs on as it gets sucked into the black hole. Wakes up crashed on an alien planet. A group of aliens find him. They seem friendly bring the spaceman back to their camp. They have a party and they let him use a ship to get back through the black hole to earth.

I drew these basic sketches to accompany my pitch.

The idea selected by the class vote was Eloise's. I'm actually really pleased with this because I think that it is a better idea than mine which has more scope for animation.

We decided on the roles that we would take. Eloise will be doing character design and background work. Alex will be doing storyboard, animatic and colouring. And I am to be lead on script and animation, taking on the keyframes, breakdowns and inbetweens (though we will be sharing inbetween responsibilities when we get to that part of the project)

Though the idea is Eloise's, we all took it and shared ideas to develop the specifics further. Over the weekend I started to write out a full detailed script for the animation, which once finished, Alex and Eloise can read it through and add, take away or change bits of it.

I'm liking the prospects of this project and am excited about splitting up the job roles like we are. 

Character & Narrative: Week One: 29th Sep - 1st October 2017

These are the dice I rolled in the briefing session.



I was struggling to think of these images as anything not literal. I see them basically as Spaceman/Astronaut, Galaxy/Black Hole, Alien/King. 

My favourite idea so far is as follows:

• Spaceman’s ship start getting ripped off into a black hole. He's hanging onto a door frame after the airlock is ripped off. He hangs on as it gets sucked into the black hole. Crashes on an alien planet. A group of aliens find him and have never seen a human before.They hit it off and have a party.

I was struggling to think how to end this and I'm still not totally struck on the idea. I will need to think and develop it further before the pitch on friday. Some of the other ideas I had and wrote down are below:

• Spaceman is in his spaceship, door flies off and spaceman is sucked out into space. There is a black hole in the distance. He is flying towards it but an alien flies past and saves him.
• A spaceship is hurtling towards a black hole. He is putting on his spacesuit and all that as the ship is falling apart. He goes through the black hole into another world and is greeted by the alien king.
• Spaceman and alien traveling around the galaxy.
• Spaceman fights the alien king to become king of the galaxy.
• Spaceman falls through a wormhole / blackhole and turns into a blob
• Spaceman crash lands on a distant planet after being sucked through a black hole. Aliens save him from the wreck and take him to the king. 
• Spaceman shape shifts into an alien
• Alien kidnaps spaceman with a wormhole/teleport

Applied Animation: 15th - 18th May 2017

This week was an intense one to finish everything off. The main thing I started with was finishing off the monkey's second swing. This didn't take too long since I was keeping it simple as to move on and get everything to an even level of completion. I kept the swing itself as just one drawing with the monkey reaching out toward the tree. There were then some little finishing touches like adding the vine and making sure the vine the monkey was swinging on was more visible.

The spaceman was the next big thing. I looked at many different types of spacesuits, but gathered references for the type I wanted to go with since it is the most iconic style. I created the keyframes first but in order to get the really smooth, weightless motion I was looking for, I actually opted for tweening him in the end. When he is floating through space towards camera, I had each limb as a different symbol layer so that I could tween it. I am very happy with the result and think that it achieves the weightless look I wanted because I made sure to offset the motions to make it feel more natural. Easing curves also helped to make it feel natural.

I then had the frame by frame movement of him grabbing onto the square. I did as many keyframes as I had time for but in the end I think it could have looked better. The motion goes too quick and breaks the slow and weightless feel of the rest of the movement, which could have been solved with more inbetweens.

I then got onto adding sounds for all the idents. I downloaded all the other idents in whatever stage of completion they were in and put it all together in Premiere. I searched online for many different sounds that I needed. I really tried to think of any sound possible to really make the ambient sounds feel alive. I really enjoy playing around with sound effects, changing the way they pan from different sides on headphones and changing pitches to fit the scene. I find this sort of thing really satisfying which is why I volunteered to do all the sounds.

After finishing up with adding sounds, all that was left to do was to replace the unfinished ident footage with the final finished ones and then render the big compilation.

Applied Animation: 8th - 14th May 2017

This week was continued work on backgrounds and animating. I was upset to find that the document I'd started for the jungle background had corrupted and wouldn't open, so I had to start this background again. 

We then had the critique on tuesday. It was unfortunate that any feedback we received was either about it simply being unfinished or things that we already planned on adding. So this crit wasn't as useful to our group as expected.

The most time this week was actually taken up with creating the jungle background. It took a long time to make all the many different layers of trees, though a few nearer the beginning were duplicated and flipped or otherwise distorted, as I got closer to the camera I didn't think I'd be able to get away with doing this. 

Once I had finally finished this background, I imported it into After Effects and displaced all these layers in 3D space. I separated them all by quite large distances to ensure that I got a great feel of depth in the jungle. 

I then finally got into actually animating, I only have 2 characters to animate, the monkey and the spaceman. I thought I should start with the monkey since this is what I'll struggle most with. I'm not confident with drawing animals at all so I knew this would be a challenge. I gathered reference pictures of monkeys swinging but started to narrow down to a chimpanzee. I found a few videos of chimps swinging through trees too. This proved very helpful.

I struggled to draw the chimp consistently. I think I found it hard to draw because it is so close to being a human figure that it makes everything feel wrong and out of proportion. Though I'm not happy with the monkey itself, I am very happy with how it moves and pulls its weight throughout the swings.

The second swing was more difficult because I wanted to have him swinging in a different way but this was hard to work out the physics of how it would actually work.

Going into the final week, I have quite a lot to still do. I need to finish the monkey and composite him into the scene, then do the spaceman floating in space and finish compositing all of that. I then also have to do sound. It's going to be a push but I think I will be able to manage it.

Applied Animation: Maya Modelling

This is something I have been really excited for because it's something quite new to me. I have played with 3D before but never in Maya and never with such complexity.

Despite the tutorial, I actually didn't start with making the truck, I just went straight onto the 'Do it yourself' task. This wasn't really done intentionally, I just found myself making the TARDIS after loading up the program and playing around with some of the tools. I really loved playing with a new program like this and feel I picked it up pretty quickly and am excited to explore it further and learn more.

The colouring was a part that I found a bit challenging. I couldn't get the colours to apply properly. I think I made it more complex for myself than it needed to be since I was also trying to add a wood texture along with the blue. I eventually worked it out by just continuing to try many methods and options and just experimenting with it. I didn't manage to get the texture working but this is something I will try to do in future.

If I were doing this again, I would be able to make it much neater. I experienced some issues with the edge loop tool not detecting the mesh all the way around. I had made a lot of the initial indents using new cubes, whereas if I were doing this again I'd just make extrusions to keep the mesh tidier and easier to manage.

Although the brief didn't ask for it, I really felt like I had to animate this. I had made a 3D model of the TARDIS... it just needed animating. I played around with trying to group all the different polygon elements I'd made and animating them all together. This however still made everything rotate around their own anchor points so I instead combined the mesh into one object and animated that. I used the graph editor to get a natural feel to the TARDIS landing and give it some weight to which I'm really happy with the result. This animation can be found in the 'Animation Skills' folder.

I then came to making the truck, this didn't take very long since I had already made the TARDIS and the spacestation models and was really starting to get the hang of it. The only issue I encountered was when the program just crashed when I tried to bevel an edge, so I had to start again, but it still didn't take very long.

I was having trouble lighting and rendering in both of these tasks, but for different reasons. The TARDIS rendered properly once I was shown what to do with lights and render settings and I could do it myself again and again on many different angles. Doing this also worked first time when making my spacestation. The truck however simply wasn't working with lights. I went about it in exactly the same way as my other 2 models but everytime I created a light, it was just a blank object with no lighting attributes. I tried copying the truck into a new document and the same issue occurred. I tried copying lights from the TARDIS file as I knew that they had worked fine, but when moved to this document they stopped working and wouldn't actually light anything. This was incredibly frustrating. 

The issue turned out to be something to do with my computer at home as it worked first time when adding lights in uni. I will have to look into this in future to try correct this issue so that I can add lights on my own computer.

I have really enjoyed getting started in Maya. I feel that I've learnt quite quickly. I'm happy with what I've created and am excited to see where I can continue to take it in future. I feel like the way I am most likely to use it is to create backgrounds as reference for 2D animation so I want to get some practice in over summer. 

Applied Animation: 1st - 7th May 2017

We started work on creating assets and backgrounds for all our idents. I started work firstly on the jungle one since I knew this would be the most work. I knew I had to make many layers of trees to make the jungle feel much deeper and full. I want the monkey to really feel like it is swinging forward toward the camera so therefore I need more depth. 

I also started on the backgrounds for the space ident. While thinking about this one, I decided that there wasn't much visual interest with things happening on screen. To make something of interest in the background, I started to make a 3D model of the international spacestation to draw over afterwards. This is a very efficient way of drawing such a complex shape moving. This lets me not worry about having to keep proportions on different angles. I really enjoyed creating this 3D model too. When I added the many different lights it really made the whole thing pop and I am so happy with the result. The orange lights I added behind the spacestation, to act as the sun, reflect very well on the panels. I also added a blue/white light over the top to add some ambient light in the way of light bloom from the earth. This adds contrast to the shapes metallic structures and makes them stand out. My original intention was to use this as a reference to draw over but after adding all these lights, we agreed that this model itself could work in the final thing. It will require maybe adding a filter or something but I think it does fit very well. 

The earth was quite fun to make, I used google earth as a reference for the part of the world I wanted in frame. I am really happy with the result of these elements, I think I've struck the balance between realistic and stylised. 

The background for the city ident is one that I am really proud of. I went into more detail than I was expecting. It also took me way longer than I intended because of the amount of buildings I added. I also am very happy with the buildings further in the foreground since I made them more 3D. I added all these layers together in Animate and displaced them in 3D space. This allowed me to move the camera to create the parallax in layers. I only had to copy the animation from my animatic over onto the new elements since I was really happy with that movement. 

Applied Animation: Maya Animating

I very much enjoyed doing the Maya animation tasks, it's a very easy thing to get used to with the interface being incredibly intuitive.

I found the graph editor so useful and also very easy to pick up because it uses the exact same principle as graph easing in Animate, Premiere, After Effects and many others.

I really like how each polygon object has it's own path. Especially when doing the segmented pendulum, it was so useful to break up with movements and even edit them from the graph editor. I can see so many great uses for this and I can see it making refining movements so simple and effective.

Obviously, I also animated the TARDIS and spacestation, the TARDIS was a bit more complex because I was trying to get weight in it's landing but I found this exciting to try.

I did have some trouble when I came to exporting these final playblast videos. Whenever I did it, it would just export as a blank green screen. I was really confused by this but it turned out that this was something to do with the default player it was opening in as when I opened the video file from its saved location, it was working just fine.

I think that I actually enjoyed modelling in Maya a bit more than animating. Maybe because it was more of a new feeling that the animating as that feels very familiar and comfortable. I did really enjoy animating though as it was great to see these elements come to life and it's so easy to do not having to redraw anything if you want a different angle or movement. I am very excited to further explore 3D modelling and animation in Maya.

Applied Animation: 24th - 30th April 2017

We came together and viewed all 9 animatics we had. Main changes that needed to be made were to do with framing and compositions. We had to make sure that every ident ended with the square in the right place for the final logo to show. I had made a basic document with the final logo sized on a plain white 16:9 document. This gave some proper proportions and a consistent position and scale for us all to work to. 

The biggest change was probably to do with Alex's dinosaur animatic. We thought that it simply had too many shots in it which made it feel very fast. All of the other idents have been rather slow and calm with very few hard cuts. Alex redrew and re-edited this one to be much more in keeping with the pacing and style of the other idents. 

Chloe's excavation had been done with a panning birds eye shot, whereas we had previously discussed it being a zoom out from the woman to end with the logo being in full frame ready to transition. This was an easy fix since she had already drawn the most zoomed out version of the shot so all she had to do was change the keyframes to scale instead of pan.

For the rest of the week we all started working on backgrounds and starting actual production. For this, Alex and I recorded 2 reference videos. He filmed me walking up and brushing off the logo as the caveman in his second ident. He then also recorded me 'floating' in space and then grabbing on to the passing logo which I will use quite loosely.

Applied Animation: 17th - 23rd April 2017

This week I started work on making my animatics. Before this though, the group and I discussed the issue with the city ident. The problem being that this one didn't really gel with the others since it was an illusion of the yellow square instead of a physical thing in the environment.
To fix this we have now settled on an idea that is in a construction site with one half of the logo being lifted by a crane to fit together with the other half in order to form the square. This still keeps the individual modern and technological feel and theme of this particular ident while making it fit better in the group of idents we are creating.

So after changing the idea I had to remake the storyboard for this ident. I added a little extra interest by making the crane accidentally bump into the other half and then having to go up and over it otherwise I think it could have looked a bit boring. 

To make the animatics, I simply took the assets I had drawn in the storyboard and exported them separately. For the jungle animatic I placed each layer of trees on a new layer and enlarged them over time at different rates. This creates the parallaxing 3D effect. For the real thing however, I think I will have to make many more layers of trees to get much more depth and I will also be doing this in After Effects to allow for more flexibility and ease with the camera work.

The city and space animatics are both a bit more simple and also I can more or less take the animation from the animatics and replace the assets with the final painted ones. The physics of the half square hanging from the crane took a while to get right since I wanted to add the swinging and realistic looks to it. The space animatic is very simple with only the camera pulling out. In the final thing however, the spaceman will be drawn frame by frame as he is floating and then as he grabs onto the square. I want to make this very smooth to look natural and also just give the scene a bit more interest with something actually happening. 

While I'm happy I got these animatics done, I didn't manage to do as much work as intended over the holiday because of the immediate COP deadline and also because it was the holiday. This week we will review what we have made with animatics and then go forward onto production.

Applied Animation: 10th - 16th April 2017

This week I was mainly working on creating my storyboards. The first of these, the jungle, was rather simple since it was more or less just the same exact idea that I made in my sketch. I first made the complete image and then worked backwards because then I could simply hide other layers to show how the camera pulls back through the layers of trees. One small change that was combined was an idea from Chloe's sketch where the monkey was swinging from it's tail. 

The second storyboard was made in a similar way. I created the finished image where the crane, buildings and train are all in line to create the square, and then I moved them further down in earlier frames to show how they move into line. I really like this idea but we have also had doubts about it because it is the most different to the others. The other idents have the square actually involved in the scenery, whereas this is just that there is an illusion of the square from other objects. We will talk about this as a group and see what could be done to make it feel more included.

The space storyboard was very simple since the main thing that is happening is the spaceman moving towards camera as the camera keeps backing away too. There wasn't too much to show in the storyboard other than camera and framing actions. The interaction of the yellow square bumps into the astronaut and makes them both float through space. I like this idea though the action of it is rather simple. I will add some subtle movement to the character as he is floating through and also some frame by frame action when he gets hit by/jumps on the square. I am very excited to do this. 

Next step is animatics. I will do this by taking the layers I have made in photoshop for my storyboards and using them as assets to animate and show the movements. 

Applied Animation: 3rd - 9th April 2017

I continued gathering research for my 3 idents. This was very helpful I think as it helped me to get accurate references for the types of scenery I wanted to create. 

Jungle. I looked for examples of many really deep jungles because I really want to bring a focus on the depth of this ident. If the camera is pulling back through the trees, I need many layers of trees to sell that 3D effect. These images have really helped to refine what I and the group have been thinking. Also here is research into the monkey. I'm not totally confident in drawing or animating animals so I am going to have to pull a lot of references in order to make the monkey look right. I really want to challenge myself to do things that I'm not always great at doing. Creating the jungle will also be a challenge, but one that I will keep trying at because it is something that I know I need to improve on. 

This parallax city idea is one that I'm so excited for. I am really interested in creating this effect as it is more dynamic camera use. I think it could be quite a challenge to make it look good but I am very excited to try. I was struggling to find exactly what I was thinking for the look of the city in the background. I am very keen to try to make the timing of each element creating the rectangle very satisfying. 


This idea is one that I originally thought of but then we have chosen to go forward with Alex's interpretation of it. It will be all in one shot that pulls back as he comes closer to the screen and further from his shuttle. I am excited to animate the weightlessness in the character and the impact on the logo itself. 


Chloe brought up the importance of using a colour scheme and sticking to it, in order to keep consistency. This will be good to make sure we keep them all in a similar feel by restricting us. We also decided to try to avoid yellow as much as possible in all of the environments and characters, in order to make the rectangle really pop. The next step is to create the storyboards for my selected 3 idents. 

Applied Animation: 27th March - 2nd April 2017

This week we came back together on the Monday to review our sketches. The versions we had were generally quite similar which made it easier to decide between. The major differences between ideas were to do with shot framing and timings. A few ideas were thought about from different angles and using a different number of shots.

We went through and decided which version of each ideas we liked the most or if we should combine them to create something better. This method worked really well to be able to satisfy each of us with the different interpretations of the ideas. From this process, we decided that the ideas of the spitfire flying and the city lights flashing just weren't really working. The spitfire just seemed a little out of place and the city lights sounded like a good idea when we thought of it, but none of our sketches were anything we really liked visually. The caused us to adapt our ideas. The spitfire idea was swapped out for the idea of a volcano erupting and the lava running down the cracks into a square shape. This ties in more to an environmental idea. The city lights idea was adapted into an idea that still keeps the city theme but instead has a view from a car passenger window driving down a motorway or big bridge. Then the buildings, a train and a crane to parallax into view to create the illusion of the shape of the rectangle. We all very much prefer this idea and I am really excited for it.

We decided that we would each take 3 idents to lead more than others, but this does not mean we will be just doing them on our own. We will still be doing little bits on each ident but we will just focus more on our own 3 idents and how we split up the workflow within them. I am focusing on the ideas of the jungle, the city and space. These are the ones I want to focus on because of how each of them play with interesting uses of the camera and less character animation. We are now setting off on doing more specific research into each of our idents and their scenes.

Applied Animation: 20th - 26th March 2017

I chose to do the ident brief because I wanted to focus on something that wasn't just character animation. I usually animate characters so I want to do logos or objects in order to break out of my comfort zone a bit.

I am in a team with Alex and Chloe, since they both also liked the ident brief. We started off by working out which of the 4 channels we wanted to do.

We looked into each of the channels and tried to determine what the focus of the channels were and if any ideas sprung out at us. We decided upon the National Geographic channel because it had a very wide scope of options to explore.

We looked at the types of programs on the channel and also looked at many examples of the idents they currently use. We chose to go more in the direction of involving the yellow square into the actual scene of the ident rather than it just being an overlay like on some.

We quickly thought that we wanted to have all 9 idents link to tell some sort of story. Through the process of coming up with ideas this became the idea of a much looser story as we needed to make sure each ident worked on it's own and telling a more complex narrative across these 9 scenes would be very hard to implement.

We narrowed down the ideas to ones that we were each most interested in and which worked well together. Originally more of the ideas involved mostly environments and scenery but then more ideas with characters came into the mix.

We are thinking of splitting the work with the types of thing that each of us are more interested in or want to practice in. So most of the character stuff will be done by Alex, Chloe wants to focus more on environments and layout and I want to practice working on the more graphic and object animation rather than character work. I also want to implement dynamic camera animation into the idents.

For next week we are each going to have sketches of all 9 idents so we can bring together each persons interpretation of the idea to play with.

Process and Production: 13th - 16th March 2017

As I was running out of time to finish my animation, this was an incredibly intense week. I had all the shots of the woman yet to do. I first went through with the audio for each remaining shot and set up the documents with timing labels and sketches of the keyposes. I did this so that if I were to run out of time I would still have something to show of the motion. These shots are the most important to keep the story going so I focused on them. I created the linework for these shots but I only worked on making the motion smooth enough to understand, if I then had time I could go back and smooth these out. 

The hardest shot left to do was the shot of the woman coming out of the toilets. This required a lot more time and is something that I wasn't very well prepared for. I originally envisioned this shot as being a full body shot, but due to the time restraints, I instead made it a mid shot to save on leg animation. This was even trickier because of the fact that she was moving angles while walking. I decided to create the multiple angles of her body inside a symbol and then I could animate that from the outside just bobbing up and down. This way, when I was drawing her, I didn't have to worry about how she was walking, just about how the proportions worked through the angles. It is a shame that I didn't have time to animate this shot as I wanted to since I feel that the motion of this walk is quite dull and static because it is using more tweens. In hindsight, I shouldn't have left this shot so late since it was one of the most complex, and it has suffered because of this. 

I was happy with my use of 3D in this shot for the door opening. This was done in Adobe Animate with the 3D rotation tool which is something that I knew was there but had never actually used it. I was originally attempting to open the door using After Effects but was struggling to get the perspective of the door correct with the door frame. This was much easier and more manageable using the 3D tool in Animate.

So while I didn't have the time to smooth out each of these shots with inbetweens, I am glad that I managed to get them all done to a level that still conveys the ideas and motion. The issue is that these contrast with the smooth shots of the man in quite an unappealing way. 

Process and Production: 6th - 12th March 2017

On Monday I completed shot 9 with the jaw slamming on the table. I am really happy with how this one turned out. The shake and bounce of items on the table really help to sell the impact. I did do one to many inbetweens than I thought worked for the drop of the jaw so I actually ended up deleting a frame. This made the jaw slam to the table in just a single frame space. This really makes it much more impact than before. 

We then had the final crit on the Tuesday. As I had not finished my animation, I filled the gaps with the animatic in order to tell the story. Feedback was very positive and people seemed to really enjoy the story. It was said that my animation was very smooth and moved naturally due to my use of reference footage and inbetweens. Other positive feedback came regarding the lip syncing, which people seemed to like. A few things that I was told could be improved was about shot 9. It was suggested that I make the shape of the jaw on the table a bit softer, so that the skin and fat spreads out when pressed against the table. This will make him feel more solid and sell the impact more. I agree with this and think I will do it because it will be quite a simple change to make. 

Another suggestion was on the final shot. Instead of having the man simply fall flat on his back, he should have his legs flung over his head, so he becomes really broken and injured. Since I haven't actually started this shot yet, I can still easily implement this. All this was good useful feedback that I will try to implement into my animation. 

I then went back to animating by doing the sketched keyposes for shot 11, which were quite easy as he will only be glancing a few directions very slightly. I did the linework for these poses before moving on and going back to shot 4. I still needed to finish the keyposes for the second half of this shot where he was fumbling about trying to catch the ring. I was simply struggling with this shot so much and it was taking so much longer than any other shot I had worked on with little progress, that I decided to change my idea slightly. Instead of him reacting and trying to catch the ring, I decided to extend the slow motion part into this shot and have his face frozen in shock as he follows the ring in the air shouting 'NOOO!!'. I thought that this could actually add some more comedy to the scene with this cliched 'NOO!' moment. After recording this extra line I had to edit the second half by drawing an awful lot of precise inbetweens in order to sell the slow motion effect. 

It is unfortunate that I have had to sacrifice the original idea due to this issue but I believe that this version actually works better. I'm very happy with the actual animation within it and it also lets the slow motion section hang for longer, which feels more natural. 

Now that I've finished all of the shots of the man, I am going back through to do all the linework of the womans shots. With only half a week left, I am just focusing on getting the idea of motion across as well as possible and only doing inbetweens if necessary and I have time. Thankfully, most of her shots aren't too complex. The worst is going to be her full body shot of her coming out of the toilets.