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