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.