LAUAN603 - Wrapping Things Up

Today I got the last few bits and pieces out of the way before submission.

First I wrote my evaluation, which wasn't hard for me to write as I had a lot to reflect upon and talk about (I was struggling to stay in the word count, ended up 50 words passed it or something). Third year has certainly been an interesting finale to everything...

Then finally, I made the press pack for Stupid Question.
I more or less just copied the basic structure of the one we made for AfterLives to be on the safe side (with a few small revisions).

If I find the time (or happen to feel exceptionally bored), I will perhaps make some more translated subtitles for the film, but other than that, I am finished with this module. I'm gonna spend the next few days triple and quadruple checking everything before submission. Most people would think that being done a few days early feels great, but if anything its just adding fuel to my anxiety because, even though I'm confident I didn't rush anything, the fact that I worked entirely on my own for the most part and yet have finished before everyone else I've spoken to just doesn't add up.

In any case, it feels good to breathe again.

Cameron out.

LAUAN603 - Art Book

Yesterday, I made the official art book for Stupid Question.
It took awhile for me to relearn everything I heard during the InDesign lectures, but eventually I got the hang of it and was able to make a decent looking book. It's a shame we aren't gonna be able to make them physically anymore, at least for the time being, but I'm satisfied with how it turned out. To be honest, I'm kinda surprised that I had so much to talk about in the first place. Maybe it could have done with less words?

In future, I think I will do more preplanning when it comes to creating visual journals like this. I was pretty much just winging it most of the time, so having a structure in mind before heading in would definitely be beneficial, especially when it comes to visual appeal and readability.

LAUAN603 - Editing

The last three days have been some of the most infuriating in recent memory.
Editing a film with software that chugs along so slowly, sometimes dropping close to 20 frames and stuttering all over the place, is a complete and utter nightmare. Somehow it got finished, and it actually looks alright. I don't know how.

After finishing a "rough draft" of the film, I showed it to my housemates to get some feedback. Thankfully, they didn't have much to recommend, just a few minor tweaks related to the audio levels and timing of certain shots. At long last, Stupid Question was finished.

Today I focused mainly on the subtitles, which were very easy and straightforward to do.
My housemate, Carla, is going to make some spanish subs for me later.

LAUAN603 - Final Bits and Pieces Before Editing

Today I installed After Effects and completed the parallax scrolling sequence that plays at the start of the film. It was a very straightforward procedure and only took my about 20 minutes. It looks alright. I'd insert the actual animation here but the file size is too large - enjoy this screenshot instead!

I also drew the close up shots of the books on Ben and Rover's table.
It took way too long to come up with unfunny book titles and references.

LAUAN603 - Of Sibilants and Normalisation

Today I began working on the audio.
Truth be told, there wasn't as much to work on as I had expected - TVPaint made a lot of the audio files sound worse than they actually where after being imported into the animation software.

Nethertheless, I first took to Audacity to tweak the voice files of Ben (James Hare) first. What needed doing mostly with his audio files was the sharp S sounds (also known as sibilants). I could only get so far with Audactiy, so eventually I took my work to Adobe Audition.

This proved to be a wise idea because Audition provided more options, and generally just did everything better. After some slight complications when it came to how exactly I was gonna go about putting everything together (and my laptop crashing... twice...) I think I'm content with what I managed to accomplish.

The end result is far from perfect but with little to no experience when it comes to cleaning up audio and sound files that range in quality, I think I did the best I could do. I have given the final cut a subtle effect that makes it sound as if it was recorded in a small room. While this doesn't make the voice acting sound crystal clear and perfect, it does make it sound consistent, and I'm hoping that alone will be enough to pass.

I will revisit this a little later with fresh... ears? to make sure it actually does sound okay, without having just spent close to six hours hearing nothing but "percipient polymath" over and over and over again.

LAUAN603 - It is done.... almost

Today, Sunday 10th May 2020 at 15:07pm, I finally finished the animation for "Stupid Question".
Tomorrow I will colour the last sequence, and with ten days left to do everything else, that gives me plenty of time to sort out the audio and edit everything together.

My fingers deserve a rest...

LAUAN603 - Feedback Session (WiFi Edition)

After joining the online class mere moments after waking up, having the sound not work for my presentation and eventually showing everybody what I had done so far, I was surprised by how positive the feedback was.

Granted, I didn't expect to be boo'd off the call or anything, but people seemed to really like it. The writing and the animation especially got a lot of praise which made me feel pretty good. The only point of contention that everybody seemed to agree upon was with the voice cast; I like my actors a lot, not only have they been co-operative and helpful, but they provided the closest performances I had in mind for the characters. While I will respectfully disagree with the tutor's remarks that they were not up to snuff, I can't deny that the audio quality definitely needs work.

This was something I was already planning on tweaking once animation had come to completion, but hearing it all again that afternoon really showed me just how much needed to be done. With the deadline less than two weeks away and the final animated sequence almost finished, the audio will be the first bit of post-production that I will focus on. This will be quite challenging especially in James Hare's (Ben) case as the audio files had been toyed with before. I emailed him about whether or not he can send me the unedited files, but he does not have access to them because of covid. Each day I find more and more reasons to hate this virus.

LAUAN603 - Animated Antidote

I made a short cartoon for Dr Simpo's animated antidote. The brief didn't specifically require the animation to be about a cure for COVID-19, but I thought it would be a fun excuse to do some dry humour which is right up my alley. 

Since this only took a few days to complete, I'm not exactly filled with immense pride and satisfaction after finishing it, but I like how it turned out. It's far from my best animation from a technical perspective, but in all honesty I did put a lot less effort into this than usual because of my commitment to "Stupid Question" taking up most of my energy.

Making a quick animation with not a lot of colouring or background work required made me realise that I could do stuff like this more often, as it cuts out a lot of the things I find the most tedious about animation whilst also giving me more excuses to animate, which is never a bad thing.

LAUAN603 - The Indoors Project

The future seemed a bit bleak for Stupid Question as far as festivals go, but recently I was contacted by "The Indoors Project" who approached me after seeing AfterLives screened at Encounters this year, asking if I would be interested in providing them with a new short. I, of course, was very happy to receive the offer, so after submission the film will be making its official premiere online.

The Indoors Project claims to be an online film festival bringing together animators who are working at home because of the current pandemic. Stupid Question fits the festival quite well as it takes place entirely indoors (this wasn't a required theme, but I find it funny how strangely topical the film has become in recent months).

LAUAN603 - Current Progress (11/04/2020)

Progress slowed down considerably once uni closed but bounced back somewhat during the last couple of days. 'Shot 12' (see bellow) was probably the last of the tricky sequences to animate so getting that out of the way was satisfying.

I got in touch with my music guy to make sure that his work was on schedule - all is good with him, thankfully. When it came to the rain overlay I needed for the first shot of the film, I was surprised at how annoying it actually was to animate rain. After a few tries, I think I got it down. I even made two versions.

For the next couple weeks, I will be going through the remaining sequences of animation as fast as I can. This shouldn't be too difficult as the rest of them are more on the easy side. I'm very determined to get this film finished, pandemic or no pandemic!

LAUAN603 - Shot 11

"Shot 11" took over two weeks to complete.
It is perhaps the most complex sequence in terms on animated acting and one of the longest sequences in the entire film. Despite being a complete pain to colour, I am incredibly pleased with how this turned out. I think this sequence might be the best thing I've ever animated so far - almost everything about it works so well. Hopefully the rest of the film can keep up this level of quality.

The file size of the clip is too big for Blogger, so here is a Google Drive link: 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tk7Shsseq--h2f8Vozk2OE1K7txJ5Wpm

Today I also began the roughs for Shot 12.
Since we lost the ability to use the uni's facilities this Wednesday, I want to make as much progress on this sequence as possible as it is also one of the more challenging scenes in the film and I would prefer to get most of it done in the more comfortable and practical set-up that uni provides, although the rest of it I will do at home with my own copy of TVPaint.

(Update: never mind we're in lockdown)

LAUAN603 - Storyboards for the Mythical Deer

The other day I agreed to help out on Petra's film by storyboarding the opening paper cut-out sequence and providing an animatic (see bellow).

 

I provided 2 versions with slight differences in timing and shot composition.
I also opted to help animate the scene. With the current state of things however, I'm unsure as to what will come of that.

LAUAN603 - Much ado about Music

When it came to the soundtrack for 'Stupid Question', I had a plan and three backups:

Plan A: Get in touch with music friend from home to see if he'd like to do it.
Plan B: Contact a music student.
Plan C: Look on Fiver.

Plan A fell through, so I'm currently attempting contact with a music student I met the other month. Hopefully they won't be too busy, especially since the film doesn't need much doing for it.

LAUAN603 - Full Speed Ahead

With the voice actor situation finally coming to an end, I wasted no time when it came to knocking out some more animation for the film. The following clip is the first time I've animated Ben and it was completed in just a few hours:

Much like I have done with Rover's close-up, I will redraw the background in order for it to look cleaner. I encountered a strange issue when it came to the audio file of this clip. where it would randomly make a sharp clicking sound at around the 1 second mark. After some research, this was resolved by converting the file from .mp3 to .wav. Hopefully this problem doesn't come up again, or at least not too often.

The next major hurdle to tackle is the film's soundtrack.
Stay tuned...

*UPDATE* Done another one. I've still got to get the hang of making the books appear consistent because they're a bit too wobbly at the moment. Also, the audio file in this one sounds off - will need to work on that.

LAUAN603 - Ben is here!

In a surprising turn of events, Ben's voice actor delivered his lines a couple days early!
I was very pleased with what he gave me, so after compiling all the voice lines I'm gonna use into one soundtrack and splitting all of it up by shot, I am finally 100% ready to animate the whole thing. Took long enough, but I'm glad we got here earlier than I expected to.

LAUAN603 - Where in the world is Ben?

Current update on the Ben's Voice Actor situation...

I have two actors in consideration: one seemed at one point to be asking for money after giving me an audition reel, but I think he was just doing the whole "you don't know if you don't ask" sort of thing. He's currently "in consideration". His audition was fine but...

....the other guy I found was better.
He showed interest in the project after I reuploaded the job ad to Mandy, and he was pretty close to what I had originally had in mind for Ben's voice, so after getting in touch with him, he will be sending an audition file this week. Hopefully I can convince him to send a reading of the full script as early as possible, after we've talked about the approach to the character via email.

LAUAN603 - 11 Second Club

For the past three weeks, I have been working on my third live brief for the 11 Second Club competition. The source of the audio was from a movie called "The Velocipastor", which had a synopsis so bizarre on IMDb that my friends and I just had to watch it for ourselves. I had wanted to do an 11 Second Club challenge for quite a while now, because animating dialogue is something I want to specialise in.

I wanted to animate this sequence in the shortest amount of time possible, so I bit the bullet and decided to mainly use keyframes with tweening in-between to give it bounce and energy. While I would have loved to go frame by frame the old fashion way, I really wanted to get this out of the way so that I could return to animating "Stupid Question" and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

For my next live brief, I may do another 11 Second Club entry, since its the kind of thing I really enjoy animating, but for the sake of keeping things interesting I might do a different animation competition or even a character design challenge instead.

LAUAN603 - LoopdeLoops

Here are my entries for the "Instrument" and "Whoops!" LoopdeLoop themes.
Pleased with how these turned out. The next two live briefs will be for different competitions.

The loop I dd was based on old 40's era cartoons. The design of the pied piper specifically was heavily influenced from adaptations of that particular era. I was originally gonna leave it at that, but I was encouraged to add some filters via After Effects, and I think they turned out quite nicely - I'm very proud of this one.

This loop is actually not the first time I animated a baby in pain. I had animated something for their "Stairs" theme from a while back but never got around to sending it. This one is okay, I think the frames are a little inconsistent and the loop back around isn't that smooth... but I guess it's funny so whatever. Another masterpiece to add to the collection!

LAUAN603 - Close-up Background and Ben finds a voice

With 250 out of commission and the cintique room full, I wasn't able to do any animating today.
However, I still got stuff done. Firstly, I redrew the background that you'll see in the close-up shots of Rover. This will hopefully make it look cleaner.

Secondly, I believe that I now have my 2nd voice actor!
After listening to his audition tape (or audio file to be more accurate), I sent some feedback and he should be giving me the full script by this weekend. I'm very excited to have both Ben and Rover fully voiced, because then I can compose a full soundtrack for the film and there won't be any obstacles in the way of me animating.

LAUAN603 - First Sequence Completed(?)

Today I finished my first sequence of animation.

It took me just little under a week to complete (Tuesday - Friday)
I love how it looks and I am pleased with how it turned out for the most part. However, I am a little frustrated with how jittery it is, but I hope I'll produce smoother stuff as time goes on. Also, I am currently not including any details on the book as not only was it a pain to draw but keeping them consistent was next to impossible and it looked pretty bad in motion. This is something I will look into.

I will also consider redrawing the backgrounds for close-up shots like this. I think zooming in on the pre-existing one looks fine but you can tell that its been blown up when you analyse the line work, so redrawing them to make them look cleaner would probably be a good investment of my time.

LAUAN603 - Rover Has a Voice

This afternoon I received Rover's lines for the film.
To be more precise, I got three takes of the script, which was incredibly useful, as I can now select the line deliveries I like the most and splice them all together (which I will do later today).

I also organised my Google Drive in preparation and divided the film into 13 shots; this will make things easy to keep track of when I'm animating sequences out of order. Since I only have Rover's lines for now, I'm going to focus on his close-ups.

I'm very excited to finally start animating - this has been long overdue.

LAUAN603 - VAs Acquired?

Throughout the last couple of days, I've managed to get in contact with two actors via Mandy.com (one for Ben, one for Rover).

Rover's VA will deliver his lines this weekend.
We had a brief discussion regarding how to approach the voice of the character, and I think the result suits him well.

The other actor, who is trying for Ben, should send his lines over the coming week. I haven't heard his take on the voice yet, but I was pleased with certain parts of his demo reel which I think suited the kind of personality I had in mind.

LAUAN603 - Establishing Shot

Yesterday I completed the establishing shot of Ben and Rover's house.
I originally wanted them to live in a good old fashioned Yorkshire terrace house, but for the sake of composition, I separated them from their neighbours.

I'm really pleased with how it came out - the colours are brilliant and the linework isn't too bad either. I was suggested by Prathik to seperate the image into layers so that I could include some parallax scrolling to give the scene more depth. We also shared additional ideas in regards to the picture itself.

LAUAN603 - The Hunt for Voices

Much like with AfterLives, I've taken to Mandy.com to find voice talent for my film.
I can't lie, this has been a very, very, very daunting process for me. I've received 7 or so applicants so far, which is great, but I do hope more come in soon. I really wanna find the perfect voices for Ben and Rover, and I'm afraid that I might just have to settle with something I'm not happy with.

Time shall tell.

LAUAN603 - Storyboard and Animatic

I completed the storyboard for the film, which wasn't really a difficult endeavor considering the simplicity of the plot (or lack thereof), but it still proved to be a very useful asset to pre-production.

I converted these frames into an animatic, voicing Ben and Rover myself so as to give one an idea as to how I envision the delivery of the lines. It made Matt laugh which is a good sign in my books.

LAUAN603 - Final Script

The script has been finalised.
After running it past a few close friends whom's opinions I trust, I think I'm satisfied with the jokes. I've timed myself delivering the dialogue and it comes out at just under 2 minutes which is perfect.

LAUAN603 - Forever Tweaking

The living room set has gone through many, many tweaks and adjustments throughout the last couple days. Today I've gathered some more feedback from my piers that I intend to work on later today.

Overall however, I am very satisfied with how it looks. I think the short will be very visually appealing if this is any indication as to how the final product will look. Hopefully it will look just as good in motion.

LAUAN603 - Backgrounds and Aesthetics

For "Stupid Question", I knew what kind of look I wanted but not how to execute it.
My first attempt at creating a living room set for Ben and Rover to have their asinine conversation fell flat in many areas. I wanted grit disguised by style, and what I had done so far simply didn't cut it.

Over the following weekend, however, I collaborated with Prathik (who I had previously worked with on AfterLives) to get my muddled vision down. I gave him some notes pertaining to the qualities I wanted, along with several mood boards and sketches.

Prathik in turn gave me some sketches of his own and we discussed where certain things should go and what colours should be used until I had finally rendered my own version (see below).

I am very pleased with how this is looking so far, although I will be messing with the colours and lighting for a while to see what works best. This has inspired me to look into backgrounds more, as it is an area in which I lack a lot of skill, but doing this has given me the enthusiasm to learn. I have picked up "A Primer of Visual Literacy" from the library and will soon be reading "Animate Landscapes" as well.

LAUAN603 - Turnarounds Once More

Redid the turnarounds, much happier with these.
Will do some good dynamic pose sheets at a later date.

LAUAN603 - Obtaining Wisdom

I have borrowed "Acting for Animators" by Ed Hooks and "Animated Performance" by Nancy Beiman from the library. Both were useful resources of information but I found Beiman's book more informative as it contained tidbits more relevant to the kind of film I'm making.

LAUAN603 - Ben and Rover Cometh

I have started the development of turnaround sheets.
Here we see the film's protagonists: Ben the person and Rover the rabbit, who are also featured in my COP practical this year as examples of characters who were developed from the personality and animation aspect first respectively.

As far as these turnarounds go, I think they'll suffice for now, but I am left a little dissatisfied with them. To me, they look a little stiff and lack the 'soul' and energy that I usually see whenever I draw them casually, so I'm most likely gonna redo these before attempting the dynamic poses and other such reference material.

LAUAN603 - Script Writing

To date I have written two drafts of a proposed script I've been working on.
I'm going through different versions of the same general story/set-up in order to get as much possible material out of the concept before writing the final script.

Next week I plan to have some turnarounds of the characters completed.

LAUAN603 - The Beginning of the End

Well, we're here: the final year of uni, and with it comes the big extended practise project.
I am very determined to make something I'm proud of this year, even more so than I was with AfterLives. I want to focus once again on lip sync and gesticulation by writing and animating a short which features two characters engaging in an odd conversation.

I was recommended that I watch some clips of "Alas Smith and Jones" - specifically the sketches where they play two dim witted characters who simply talk to each other about something. I made some notes as I watched. I especially enjoyed the one about the sperm bank. Good stuff.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Eight

Not much work was required of me during the final week, although I ensured to stay as productive as possible. I completed our press pack, created my visual journals and scoured the internet for usable sound effects, and spent Wednesday with my trusty editor to make sure the film came out as good as it could be.

I am tremendously pleased with how AfterLives turned out.
Not gonna lie, this is the first student project that I am truly satisfied with. The animation, the backgrounds, the interviews, the pacing... virtually every aspect of the film is perfect in my eyes. I'm very proud of both the team and myself,  I think we did a great job.

This was a fantastic way to wrap up my 2nd year at Uni, and it only makes me more eager to come back in September.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Seven

This week was quite hectic, but in a productive way, rest assured.
I coloured the characters I had been working on over Easter (the dolphin, the pig, the peacock, the chinchilla, the bird of paradise and the parakeet), then took on some of the characters that Prathik planned on doing but couldn't due to his workload (the dog and the ram), which I also managed to colour during the weekend.

We also had our final crit - which had us presenting an unfinished version of the film to the class. I was very surprised by how positive the reaction was; lots of laughs and compliments towards the animation really boosted the team's confidence, and we all worked doubly hard to make sure that all the animation was done on time.

However, we still do not have a voice actor for the interviewer. In the W.I.P version of AfterLives above, the voice you hear is none other than myself, acting as a stand-in. There's still time to find someone, but I think we really aught to have given this side of production as much seriousness as we did with things like the animation, character designs and backgrounds etc.

Never the less, I am fully confident that we will have not only a finished film on Thursday, but something worthy of submitting to film and animation festivals.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Six

Another productive week.
I finished my animation ahead of schedule and only have the colouring to do. I also offered to colour Prathik's scenes if he didn't have time. In addition, I wrote a comprehensive blog post/guide to help Damo animate beaks for lip syncing since he was having trouble (https://cameroncookart.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-to-make-birbs-speaketh.html)

Here is my work so far. I unfortunately cannot show you the first half of the girl gang scene as the video file size is too large to insert into the blog.

With all that said, we still haven't heard back from the voice actor we contacted last week. I should have probably contacted either him again or other potential actors during the mean time.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Five

A lot of good progress was made this week;
We held a group meeting via Google Hangouts to discuss character design, voice actors and scene allocation (among other things).

Our character designs went through their final adjustments, refined for the sake of appeal and what's easiest to animate. We sent an email to an actor on Mandy.com who we thought would be perfect for the voice of our interviewer, we're still waiting for him to contact us back.

Animation finally began!
I took the liberty of handling "Girl 1", who is the character with the longest sequence of uncut speaking animation, not to mention the fact that she takes the form of many animals during her scene. Below is my progress so far, I am very pleased with it:

I think my teammates will agree that in future projects we need to have our animation commence much sooner as we are having to rush ourselves a little bit here. That said, I have a good feeling that we will make the deadline with a good quality film at the end.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Four

This week I shot reference material for the Girl Gang scene (as we collectively refer to it). I did this by filming myself acting out the scenes, replicating the camera shot we needed, and showcasing the kind of gestures I would like to see animated with the dialogue.

With my other teammates working hard on finalising the character designs and animatics, I definitely felt as if I wasn't pulling my weight for the majority of the last seven days. Sure, I provided as much detailed feedback as I could when new designs and scenes came in, but in future I would like to improve upon my ability to merely ask for more work to do. Perhaps even attempting some animation tests.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Three

This week, the audio files were trimmed further based on what parts of them we decided to focus on in our storyboards. We encountered a mishap where my voice could be heard during a moment in the girl's interview, which could have had a huge effect on the scene if it weren't for a creative work around; cutting the girl's sentence short to give the impression that she stopped herself mid-sentence in a convincing way.

We also decided on what animals the girls should start of as before they morph into different ones later. This of course required more character designs (sorry Damo) but I feel confident that animation should begin next week.

In future, I would like to improve on my efforts in the pre-production process. Although I handled the longest storyboard myself, I think the team would have benefited from me helping out with character design and/or backgrounds.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week Two

This week we conducted many interviews in and around town with a completed consent form.
We collected around 15 or so audio files with people from a variety of backgrounds - it was a very tiring experience, not gonna lie, but well worth it.

After narrowing down which interviews we wanted to use and trimming down the audio files (removing our voices asking the questions), we created transcripts of them to make storyboarding easier. I took charge of the last interview we did; a group of girls we met in a community church.
There's was interesting because we could have them morphing between different animals all the way through.

I would like to improve on my confidence when it comes to approaching people for interviews in public. I feel as if my anxious nature hindered our research somewhat.

LAUAN504 (AfterLives) - Week One

After proposing our initial idea last week, we spent the last seven days researching and planning our way of going about making this documentary - After Lives: focusing on people's interpretations of life after death.

I created a consent form (that was soon improved with tutor feedback) and gathered a few interviews over the weekend. I also created a test storyboard purely to demonstrate what we're going for.

LAUAN504 (KFC Brief) - Week Eight

I had way less time than I hoped I would to work on the KFC ad.
With many deadlines approaching and only half of one of our Applied Animation classes to animate this, I only had chance to further work on this sequence.

The ad will not be completed in time for the initial deadline.
However, there is a chance that we will be able to get it done for the competition deadline. It's hard to say. Perhaps I need to disregard animation quality in favour of time? I'm not too sure.

LAUAN504 (KFC Brief) - Week Seven

We managed to acquire some background music this week that perfectly fits the tone that we are aiming for. I also began roughing out another scene as you can see bellow. This one is quite ambitious as it involves two characters, a curtain (which is essentially nothing but follow through), lip sync and part of a walk.

To improve further, I want to try and force myself to animate more even when we don't have Applied Animation scheduled. I think I tend to neglect this project too much when it's not placed before me, or I prioritise things like COP instead. I need to give everything an equal balance.

LAUAN504 (KFC Brief) - Week Six

This week we went over our storyboard and made some adjustments to the story. I offered to take care of drawing the storyboards this time as you can see below:

With these changes, I added a simple head turn from Audrey with the employee animation I had already completed - the sequence is now ready for the background art.

With the required background I needed for this scene still in production, I opted to at least rough out the action in the meantime. This scene does have dialogue so I will come back to it once we have the line recorded.

Overall, this was quite a productive week, however I could probably have fit in even more sequences to rough out or even helped with the background art a little - in future, I will give myself more roles to help speed up production.

LAUAN504 (KFC Brief) - Week Five

This week has our first feedback session.
It was greatly appreciated, but it meant that we needed to not only re-do all the backgrounds we had so far, but a complete restructuring of the storyboard is required, which we'll tackle next week. In the meantime, I'm working on my first piece of animation, which you can see below:

LAUAN504 (KFC Brief) - Week Four

This week I completed some dynamic poses for Audrey the chicken.
These are just to provide reference when animating and are based off scenes in the storyboard/animatic.

LAUAN504 (KFC Brief) - Week Three

This week I redid one of the turnaround sheets to refine a few elements.
I also created one for the employee and the colonel himself.

LAUAN504 (KFC Brief) - Week Two

Meeting up earlier in the week, we managed to produce a finished script and settle on an art style. As Jenny worked on backgrounds and Petra handled the storyboard, I produced two turnaround sheets of our main chicken - Audrey, including one where she wears a bathrobe.

LAUAN504 (KFC Brief) - Week One

My team and I have decided to take on the YCN KFC brief.
We need to promote the fact that KFC treat their chickens properly restaurant to offer the best quality food possible for their customers. To do this, Petra and Jenny came up with the idea of having an advert set in a spa for chickens (this is how they approached me to join).

My first task was to come up with some character designs and decide what kind of aesthetic we should aim for. I figured a cutesy feel would work best considering the tone of the setting and the humour of the "story".

Character and Narrative - Week Eleven

This week I finished my final sequence.

Character and Narrative - Week Ten

This week I finished the final sequence.

Character and Narrative - Week Nine

This week I finished another scene which you can find bellow.

This was the first time I had used 3D proxies to help layout 2D movement.

We also produced a half finished version of the final film for formative feedback. We had a mostly positive reaction, although some suggestions regarding music need to be addressed.

Withe the Christmas holidays upon us, my team and I aim to continue working on the animation until we come back in January.

Character and Narrative - Week Eight

Finished another scene this week.
We also adjusted the pacing of the film some more to make it snappier.
Overall, work continues as normal, next week should be when we do sound effects.

Character and Narrative - Week Seven

Things proceeded as usual this week.
On Friday we had a brief discussion regarding art style consistency, but all it resulted in was us agreeing to stick with thinner line work between us. I spent this week working on one of the last shots of the film. It isn't finished, but here you can see my progress so far.

Character and Narrative - Week Six

Animation fully commenced this week.
We all allotted ourselves to various scenes (Jess will be focusing on the important backgrounds before she attempts any animation herself) and got on with it. To start with, I completed the shot where the sloth has a bright idea. I will be using TVPaint, going frame by frame, for this project.

Character and Narrative - Week Five

I spent this week focusing on remaking our animatic.
Reason being is because ours looked substantially poor in comparison to everyone else's; it lacked movement, detail and clarity. It also needed updating to fit in all the general changes to the film we had received as feedback. With this finished, we hope to finally move on to animation next week.

Study Task 2 - Talk This Way

Here's the lip sync I rushed spent some time on using a voice clip of Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I traced over the Preston Blair Phoneme Library to get the mouths. I used a dope sheet to time the mouth shapes with the sounds and, as bad as it looks, I think I understand how to do it. The same cannot be said for After Effects though. We were required to use the programme, and I cannot tell you how long it took for me to get started. I find the software to be difficult and confusing and I personally do not like using it.

Study Task 3 (Aesthetics)

A lot of what makes 2D animation appealing to both audiences and artists is that there are several well established animation styles. It also allows for much more creative freedom than its contemporaries. Hand drawn characters are typically more appealing to people as a whole and tend to age better over time, unlike 3D animation. The traditional process is also just more impressive to most people. The common consensus is that 2D animation takes more time and effort, and the results are more engaging to observe from a technical view point. From a production angle, 2D is easier to storyboard along with being (generally) cheaper to produce. However, 2D has a stigma of people “kiddy” to some groups as it cannot convey realism to the extent that CG can. Also, hand drawn animation has become synonymous with Disney, which is itself a very safe, family friendly brand that everyone recognises.

Sources:
https://www.quora.com/What-benefits-do-you-derive-from-2D-animation-videos-over-3D-animation-videos
http://www.slurpystudios.com/2d-animation-vs-3d-animation/