This week was stressful. I realise now nearing the end of the project that time management was not good this project. I had a lot to do in just this week. The greatest challenge was creating the fight between Blackbeard and Maynard. It was incredibly in depth due to the way in which they had to interact and act off of each other. I believe that the end result is something dynamic and interesting, especially considering the restraints of the style we are using.
I composited everything in the animation. I really enjoy this part of the process as it is so satisfying seeing everything finally come together. Some issues I faced in this were the sheer file sizes of the final segment. Since there was such immense zooms between extreme wide shots and close ups, the file had to be very big in order to preserve quality when zoomed in. This caused the process to take a bit longer than it should have done, but there really wasn't much to be done about it other than using a better computer.
I had some issues rendering the final film in which it would fail at the same point every time. After much dissecting, I discovered that it was the backgrounds characters in the fight scene that was making it crash once they appeared in the composition. Unfortunately I didn't have time to work out the issue and still render in time, so the final film is without the crowd on the ship at the end. This is a shame since I think it really added to the scene, but I will definitely fix this for myself after the hand in. This kind of issue again comes down to time management. If we had been on schedule, I would have had time to fix the issue and keep the characters in. I feel bad because of Andy's hard work in creating the character assets, and Nicole who animated them.
I am really happy with the finished result of our film and I think it really tells the story of blackbeard's death in a very informative way that someone with no prior knowledge would find it interesting and educational.
This week I finally started animating. Andy sent the first of the character rigs, LT Robert Maynard. So I got straight to work on animating him in the office scene.
The method of animation we are using is tweening assets within Adobe Animate. Each limb has been made separate allowing them to be animated individually. I quickly found that the best way to make this style look good is with a lot of follow through and overlapping action, along with very strong easing. Otherwise, it is very easy to fall into these styles of animations looking very robotic. I made sure there was always a delay between each limb moving and the next joint following it.
I think this has made for a really satisfying look, and it is very quick to do. I finished Maynard's first scene in an afternoon. Realising Andy was rather behind on his characters, and with quite a lot to do after he'd done them, I made the decision to take the task of sound design from him.
I went in search of all backgrounds sounds we would need online. Baring in mind that the narration should take focus and so these effects will all be pretty quiet. I started syncing up the sounds I'd gathered but I haven't done any work on properly mixing them yet. I'll do all at a later point.
Nicole sent her big background for the ocracoke section. This is a very wide document to allow for lots of camera movement. The only thing I did with this was add a turbulent displacement effect to the water to make it look like it was waving and rippling. I think this effect was very successful and works well with the aesthetic we are going for.
Once Andy sent the Blackbeard rig, I got straight onto animating his opening title screen. This was more in depth than the subtle Maynard animation and it required a lot of tweaking to get the sword flick and gunshot to a place where I was happy with them. I think I needed to play full tests more in order to get a real sense of time, as the preview window in Animate is sometimes a bit slow in bigger files.
I am happy with how the character animation is coming so far and hopefully starting on these more subtle scenes has prepared me for the fight scene.
I finally finished the animatic in the first half of the week. It took me much longer than I wanted it to, but I'm happy enough with the result. Nothing is drawn well at all, but I believe it communicates the timings and content of our documentary.
I have now been left with quite a quiet patch with not much to do until Andy finishes his character designs. This could have been planned ahead better in my schedule (that we have fallen behind on anyway), to make sure everyone had something to work on at all times.
I did however, do some quick typography inserts for the animation. When each character is introduced, a short fact file will be displayed next to them. I played around with different effects in AfterEffects, looking for something of an inky feel to link with typical pirate imagery of treasure maps and black spots. I ended up using the roughen edges effects along with a mask reveal to create the desired effects and I'm really happy with the result. These can all be easily dropped in on top of the animation once it's done.
Continuing with the animatic, I unfortunately still haven't got it totally finished. I've been struggling for motivation to draw it out and feel bad for holding my teammates up. I believe I have given them enough to work with for now. Andy already knows which 3 characters he is creating rigs for. Nicole knows what environments to be looking into and from the sticky notes, knows where to start with them.
I think that I could do better to force myself to work in designated time slots. This all comes down to my time management. I feel I have been getting easily distracted from doing the animatic because it's not one of the parts I enjoy the most. I am giving myself a personal deadline to work towards.
This week we did our presentation detailing what research we had gathered and how we were going to be proceeding with the animation. Feedback was all mainly positive, with the main point being that we really need some primary research to back up our animation. We are going to try some more options to contact university professors to check our script.
Andy made the initial designs for our characters and Nicole has done a water colour background test, though she has decided to do the final ones digitally.
I have made a start on the animatic after we gathered together to plan the animation on sticky notes. Through this process we ironed out any kinks in the flow and came up with many interesting transition ideas to make the animation feel exciting. As I am starting to transfer the sticky notes to animate, I am refining some ideas and changing a few little bits and pieces as I go through (main how things transition and composition of the frame).
Over the easter holiday, I didn't get as much done as I had hoped. I did a lot of research into our chosen subject by reading a selection of books and youtube videos. I read The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodard which was a very good read to understand the pirate and the events of his death.
I also read Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly which was good to cross reference the research I had gathered.
As well as this, many YouTube videos were very helpful as it gave us some context for what had already been created regarding Blackbeard's death. Many of these different videos were animated or just voiceovers with some basic illustrations.
We want to go for a relatively serious tone and make sure we are being faithful to the history. I have tried to make sure that my teammates are clear on what they need to do. For example, I told Nicole to be researching into the environments like Virginia and Ocracoke and Andy has been looking into the three main characters of our animation (Blackbeard, Governor Spotswood and LT. Maynard).
Toward the end of the holiday, Andy and I both wrote a script each, based on the research we had gathered. We have tried to contact a few experts so far but no response yet, we will keep trying. We combined the best bits of both of our scripts and then had to trim it down quite a lot to make it fit into 90 seconds.
This was a challenge because there is so much important information to get across but we made sure it was all said in an efficient manner in order to trim it as much as possible.
Andy has a voice actor friend who will be recording this voiceover for us.
After finishing the competition project, I quickly got excited about the documentary project. While we didn't manage to really get much done about this project for the beginning of the week, we met up after the COP hand-in to discuss the documentary.
I am working with Andy and Nicole. We all decided early on that we wanted to do our documentary on history. In the past, Andy and I had already discussed that we would both like to make a pirate history animation. This is something that I am very passionate about as that era of history is fascinating to me. I thought a crash course video on the golden age of piracy could be fun to do. However we decided that doing a video about a specific event would be much more realistic and manageable, while also allowing us to go more in depth on that event.
I suggested that we cover the events of Blackbeard's death, and the others agreed. To gather research for this topic, we will be looking online for accounts telling of the events. I also own a book called 'The Republic of Pirates' which has a chapter dedicated to the life and death of Blackbeard.
Andy suggested styling the animation like an old 18th century illustrated book, which Nicole and I both really liked. Doing this, we then decided that making the animation 2D tweened would fit that style the most. An example I used was like the Horrible Histories animated sections.
Neither Andy or Nicole wanted to direct this project and suggested that since I am the most passionate about the idea, I should direct it. I am really excited to direct this one and make an interesting documentary on Blackbeard. Andy will be in charge of character designs and character assets, while Nicole will be working on backgrounds and background animation. I will then be doing most of the animation, though we will all be doing bits of the animation.
This week was stressful. I realise now nearing the end of the project that time management was not good this project. I had a lot to do in just this week. The greatest challenge was creating the fight between Blackbeard and Maynard. It was incredibly in depth due to the way in which they had to interact and act off of each other. I believe that the end result is something dynamic and interesting, especially considering the restraints of the style we are using. 
