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/

Study Task 3 (Process)

2D animation was by far the most popular form of animation throughout the 20^th century and it’s easy to see why; whatever one can draw, it can be animated. In this sense, the possibilities when using this method are endless, limited only by the skill of the artist. When traditional animation was pioneered, it was done so by using cells and paper. It wasn’t until the dawn of the new millennia that studios traded their expensive physical equipment for digital workspaces and graphics tablets. Despite the freedom 2D allows, the process requires a steep learning curve. Not just when it comes to artistic skill, but also when learning and taking full advantage of computer software. Programmes such as Photoshop, TVPaint and ToonBoom can take a lot of time to learn, and all offer different features and have their own share of flaws. This in turn might have caused 2D to become less accessible.

Sources:
https://www.bloopanimation.com/types-of-animation/
https://learn.org/articles/What_is_2D_Animation.html

Character and Narrative - Week Four

I made the animatic and at first it was 2 minutes and 15 seconds, which clearly meant that it needed some work done. The following day I spent most of my time trimming it down and speeding up/improving the pace of the film, with help from Rory. We're now at a reasonable 1 minute 30 seconds. Our film doesn't have that much intense animation, so the length hopefully won't be an issue.

I have also began work on the swan's turnaround sheet.
Overall, progress is running smoothly and animation should commence in the near future.

Character and Narrative - Week Three

When we met up this week, we mostly agreed that the storyboard was fine, only minor alterations to specific panels had to be made, so I adjusted them accordingly. I also planned on producing an animatic over the weekend. However, I only have access to Sony Vegas, and it does not allow me to render video in h264, so I'm opting to wait until I'm next in uni to get it done. I have, however, "cut out" the panels of the storyboard, ready to be inserted into Adobe Premiere.

Shadows, reflections and compositing in Maya

Today's Maya lesson taught us how to composite a CGI animated object into live action footage by making use of convincing shadow and reflection effects. I managed to follow along quite easily this time around, and a lot of the steps made sense. Maya is still somewhat of a daunting challenge for me, but this session helped me out a lot.

Character and Narrative - Week Two

When my team and I met up again this week, we compared our storyboards and combined our ideas together. While the other two went ahead to focus on potential character designs, I made a 2nd draft of the storyboard and wrote the script.

Character and Narrative - Week One

This week was when our second year really kicked off.
After being organised into groups, we were tasked with creating a simple story idea based on what we ended up getting with story dice to turn into a short animated film (around 30 secs ~ 1 minute in length). My idea won... somehow.

I was made director of our group and decided that, after finalising the plot of the film, we get to work on creating a basic storyboard. When we next meet up, we will compare and contrast our storyboards to see which ideas we like and what we'll keep. After this is done, I will handle writing the script and a "final" storyboard will be produced which will later be turned into an animatic.

Finished Short

Here's the finished version of the Beryl the Peril short film that I submitted.
In other news: I won a DNAD award for it. Wowzers!

Walk Cycles

Walk cycles are hard.
I've re-read the section for walk cycles in the Survival Kit over and over and they still prove to be a pain. I am getting the hang of them though, and here are two examples: one in 2D and one in 3D.

Beryl: In the Flesh

Here is the puppet of Beryl I made in ceramics.
It is awful and I hate it.
She doesn't move very well and her leg is falling off.
That being said, I am glad I at last tried - experience is always cool.

A Pencil... made in Maya

Yeah this is a bit late, huh? I honestly forgot to upload this when I made it.
Here's an object I created in Maya, a pencil to be precise.
It's very basic, but for a very early practise, it's fine I suppose.
Could use some shading and colour though.

Presentation Feedback

Today I showed my animatic to some of my peers. Here was the feedback and suggestions they gave:

• I need to work on the Teacher's walk cycle some more in a W.I.P piece of animation I showed off.
• I need to prioritise getting the characters coloured in once the base animation is finished on them - the backgrounds are fine if they're left blank.
• I also need to consider remaking the title sequence and making it more exiting and relevant to the rest of the film.

Animating in Maya - Walk Cycles

Today we learned how to animate a basic walk cycle in Maya using the Moom character model.
I still find the programme to be quite daunting and complicated to use, but I think that I am slowly getting the hang of it.

The walk cycle bellow is nothing special, of course with it being a test. It needs some more "personality" (i.e. more bouncing, flipping of the foot, dynamic head movement etc). That, and one of the hands is a bit fidgety (possibly due to some slight confusion I faced when trying to rotate certain joins). Aside from that, you can easily tell that Moom is walking, so as a first try, it's fine.

Today we focused on walk cycles in traditional and 2D animation.
This was the practise Haraldur and I made in Adobe Photoshop.

Animating in Maya - Getting Started

Today I was taught the basic tools for key framing, easing and object manipulation (squash and stretch) in Maya.

I would have liked to include the short bouncing ball I made but I couldn't get it to render properly. Baby steps, I guess.

LAUAN404 - Week 7

During the final week before submission, I animated two sequences from my animatic in TVPaint.
This was my fist time using TVPaint properly, as I had only casually dabbled with it in the past. This week was a good educational experience for me, as I learned more about the programme as I animated; in future, this will be my tradigital method of choice. The intro of the short film was done in stop motion via Dragon Frame. It was a small and quick addition to the finished product but I feel that it adds a lot of character.

I added the animated segments into the animatic, and after adding a few finishing touches here and there, it was finished by the following Monday.

LAUAN404 - Week 6

I spent this week working on my storyboard and animatic.
The storyboard was fun to make and it was satisfying to put it all together in Adobe Premier with all the proper timing to see how it will play out. However, I think I have gone overtime and it needs to be edited and trimmed down, which may be a problem.

I also produced a brief powerpoint presentation based on my development process during this module.

LAUAN404 - Week 5

This week we created a character profile in our sketch books in order to properly solidify what our character's personalities were and what they're all about.

I decided to make Beryl a troublemaker that craves the attention of getting caught as whenever she tries to make the lives of those around her a misery, she only makes things better for them instead without them even realising.

We also jotted down ideas for our short film and organised them into sections which would help us with story boarding during the following week.

LAUAN404 - Week 4

This week I worked on the backgrounds for a hypothetical Beryl reboot.
I wanted to not have any black outlines for the backgrounds so as to help the characters stand out more. I also made sure to give each location a distinct colour scheme to match the tone of the environments. With the examples I gave in the sheet, the classroom is in blue and purples and the street has different variations of green.

I also drew two supporting characters: a teacher and a friend of Beryl's.
Both of these characters will play a role in the short animated sequence I will eventually produce at the end of this module.

LAUAN404 - Week 3

After finishing the turnaround, I went straight to work on creating a dynamic poses sheet.
We all received some practise in drawing dynamic poses by studying line of action and drawing a set of poses we made from a live model (thanks Ben).

A lot of this helped me with my final poses sheet and I also included some exaggerated facial expressions that were a ton of fun to draw. Additionally, we had to include a silhouette of our character to see if the design was eye catching and unique enough.

LAUAN404 - Week 2

This week I decided on a design for Beryl that I liked and developed a turnaround sheet.
Classic Beryl seemed to be wearing a school uniform from the time period so I have given her a more modern look, complete with a shortened tie to match her trouble making personality. Her shirt is dyed pink after a failed attempt to turn it red in the washer, and she has scribbled all over it with notes and plans for various pranks she wants to pull off.

LAUAN404 - Week 1

Our new assignment is to "reboot" a female character from either the Beano or Dandy comic strips for a new audience. We were allowed to be as different from the original character as we so wished as long as we kept the name.

From the list of characters provided, I decided on doing "Beryl the Peril", mainly because the others didn't grab my attention all that well. I spent the week researching and analysing old pieces of Beryl-related media and made a few initial sketches of what my redesign could look like.

Truck

LAUAN403 - Apply the 12

For the final task of this module, we were required to apply all 12 of the principles of animation into a short sequence around 10 seconds in length. I chose to do a short scene where a biker takes off a little too fast than he anticipated.

Pros
- good secondary animation with the scarf and helmet straps
- effective squash and stretch
- good feeling of weight and motion
- my first fully coloured animation with a background
- accompanying character model sheets provide a solid understanding of the character

Cons
- first two shots (close up of hand and helmet) could have been better refined
- line work could generally been better
- timing needed some work
- a bit too fast?
- animation didn't begin until the last week, could have been better with improved time management

Character Sheets and Story Board

LAUAN403 - Solid Drawing

For this task, we needed to demonstrate our understanding of solid drawing by sketching people we saw out and about on the streets or in cafes etc. I mainly sketched people in train stations since I go in and out of them a lot.

 Pros:
- sketches were quick
- I noted down the time it took me to draw each one
- didn't fuss about quality
- prioritised my understanding of form and anatomy
- filled the quota of 20 sketches

 Cons:
- not enough sketches of movement
- I clearly need a lot more practise
- could have gone to a more varied selection of locations to get more unique poses