Visual Language: 16th - 22nd January 2017

This week was quite heavy with finishing off all my character design stuff. I loved doing the animated character turnaround. I loved to be animating again.

I did some research into industry turnarounds and character sheets. I love looking at this kind of thing because it's really interesting to see how the characters started out and what the animators used as reference to make sure the character is consistent. The most important thing from any of these kinds of character turnaround sheets is the proportions. The character needs to always look like the same person. 

I used Adobe Animate to create this as it is a program I am comfortable with and it allows me flexibility in my drawing. I can still tweak and edit things much easier. I used a circular guide on the ground to base my perspectives from. At first this was a bit tricky but being able to tweak proportions as I go really helped and I did soon get the hang of it and all my guides were incredibly useful and really sped up my workflow. 

I planned this out quite extensively by first creating a shape skeleton version, then a sketch version and then the final line work. This let me make sure that everything looked correct before moving on to more detail. This worked really well for me as I believe I have managed to create the three dimensional look of the character staying in proportion. 

I'm really happy with my finished turnaround. I've not done an animated turnaround before now. I've usually just done front, 2/3 and side as my turnarounds so this was really fun to make. Also it was just great to actually do some animation again. 

Through the rest of the week I started work on the pose and the expression sheets. I found it difficult to think of poses that this character could do. With him being so big and round, it made it hard for me to actually create poses because there isn't much room for him to move. This is something that I didn't think about when designing him and I think that while is immovability does tie in with the kind of character he is because of his shape, it does restrict him rather a lot. His face is less restrictive allowing me to create a greater range of facial expressions though I feel like his character would be grumpy most of the time so I wanted to also try and communicate that in different ways too.

Process and Production: 9th - 15th January 2017

After we got the briefing for this module, I was immediately excited. I’m excited to just work on producing animations. I want to animate. What was tricky was thinking of an idea. As the brief wants a comical piece, this makes it more difficult. I was struggling to think of many ideas linking to the available titles we were given. I couldn’t think of anything funny. I came up with a few different ideas from a mind map corresponding to the choices of titles. Only about three of them were ones that I liked. The first of which was of a blind date where the two people open their eyes to be people that would stereotypically be enemies, like a cop and a robber.

I quickly started to dislike this idea. I think this was due to the fact it would be difficult to communicate the ideas of the contrasting personalities without it being a bit too nonsensically stereotypical in order to make it obvious. I started to prefer the idea of a proposal gone wrong using the ‘restaurant’ title. I started thinking he could put the ring in the champagne glass and the woman just drinks it and starts choking. This is a bit more darker humour but I think that I could make the contrast of the joy and love and happiness of the start and the panic at the end quite funny. I will keep thinking about this idea and try to develop it more as I go.

Visual Language: 9th - 15th January 2017

Over the Christmas break, I'll admit they I didn't get as much done as I would have liked. I did some more research work and a bit on my character design. 

I started to refine my character much more. I still wasn't completely happy with it but I stuck it out and I am actually growing to like him the more I draw him. I moved on to creating my sketches on Photoshop. This was I had more freedom to play around and tweak as needed. I can just keep playing around with proportions to create something I liked. 

Doing this worked so much better for me and I quickly started to like my character. I did try a slight costume variation but then decided that I didn't really like it as it didn't look as identifiable as a train conductor. I am very happy with the small detail of adding a ripple chin. This was something that I just started adding in my last few sketches but I really like it. It gives some more visual interest and adds to the silhouette of the character. 

Once I was happy with my design, I then started working on the t pose character sheet. This is something that I always really liked doing because it's the first time that the character comes together properly. I did this in Photoshop to again give me more flexibility. I started with the geometric shapes, then a sketch version of the character and then the final line work. 

The colour was added layer by layer on a clipping mask that filled the shape of the character, this let me easily alter any of the colours of individual elements. By also creating the shading on a layer above on 30% opacity, I could still play around with the colours and the shading would automatically change with the base tone.

The final colours are actually the ones that originally came to mind. This is influenced by the uniforms the conductors on the northern rail trains that I get on. I did a hand full of colour variations to try and see if I liked any others but in the end the first was still my favourite.

For creating the other poses, I copied the base shapes from the original sketch and created the profile view first. I find that doing the front and profile views before the 2/3 or 3/4 views is much better to manage and keep proportions. This is because I can then create the middle pose as I would do an inbetween frame. I lowered the opacity of the previous angles and just drew in between. 

I am actually really happy with how this design has turned out. I think was hard for me to get into to begin with because I felt like I was doing the process backwards since we had to create a character from the backgrounds we drew. I grew to like it the more I drew it but I do still think it would have been more natural and easier to be invested in if it were done in the order of thinking up an idea for a story before starting to just design the elements outright. I am looking forward to creating the animated turnaround next.

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.