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. 

Visual Language: 21st - 27th November 2016

When starting on the character design task, I was a bit unsure of what to do. Using the scenery of the train as inspiration, I was trying to think of a type of character I could create from that. I saw the typical businessmen kind of people who commute and thought of doing something like that.

I messed around with basic geometric shapes to try and communicate this idea. I was going for creating a salesman that was overly enthusiastic. Trying to communicate this wasn't really working for me. I didn't feel very good about any of these ideas or shapes. None of them really stood out to me. 

Using this method of creating shapes to influence the characters design is a very common thing throughout animation and film. By creating a character that resembles a certain shape, you can instil certain feelings and judgements about them. This video covers this topic in quite an interesting way. https://youtu.be/lLQJiEpCLQE The key ideas from this are that if there are lots of circles in the character, it means they are generally nicer and more lovable as they create a soft shape. The flip side to this is that the sharper the angles used, the more dangerous and cruel they usually are. These principles influence how we see a character and what we think about the type of person they are, so I am trying to keep this in mind through the process. 

I didn't do all that much more on my character design stuff this week as I was really crunching on completing my animation skills 15 second animation. I think that I need to come up with a new and more interesting idea for a character because I am really not feeling enthusiastic about this at all. I need something that will give me more to play with with more interesting and with more room for changes and individuality. 



CHARACTER DESIGN USING SHAPES https://youtu.be/lLQJiEpCLQE

Animation Skills: 14th - 20th November 2016: Surprise Animatic and Rigging

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.

Visual Language: 14th - 20th November 2016

Continuing on with my enviroment drawings, I did another in the Leeds station. I went upstairs since this is somewhere that I don't often go because of the platforms my trains usually go to. I sat down at the end of the big pathway and attempted to draw across to the other side of the station. It was very cold here and there were lots of people constantly blocking my view. I didn't spend very long on this because I just wanted to go home. I did, however, later that night, make the main lines much bolder to make the shapes stand out more. 

I did another quick one at my hometown's station. There are no benches here and the only shelter doesn't allow for any interesting composition, so I leant against the fence further down the line. Since it was incredibly cold, I wanted to get this one done very quickly. To aid in this aesthetic, I chose to use a marker instead of a pencil to get more sporadic and expressive lines. I feel that both of these look rather messy because of how my hands couldn't stop shaking. 

After attending Manchester Animation Festival, and seeing Ethel and Ernest, I was in love with the style and use of the backgrounds. This is done in pretty much the same way as I talked about with Treasure Planet, but the 3D backgrounds in Ethel and Ernest have been painstakingly drawn over to achieve the same soft water-colour painted style as the characters. While it is still easy to be able to tell which are 3D rendered backgrounds, this does help them blend with the characters. This technique is used mainly for panning or tracking shots where the background is rather geometric, like buildings and roads. 

Another example is the backgrounds used on the classic Disney film. These backgrounds were all more painted and had a great look and texture. This always makes a great looking contrast between this and the black outlines characters. I like how they will paint a big background that allows them to pan across it as a panorama to create a big scene that can sometime achieve a subtle and simple 3D effect. 

These drawings weren't all as bad as I was expecting. I've never been confident with backgrounds and dynamic angles and compositions but I feel that this task has been somewhat helpful for me in choosing more interesting looking backgrounds. Focusing more on the shapes rather than details will help in creating brand new backgrounds.