Extended - Wrap up of the project

I am now ready to hand in my animation. I feel dissappointed with myself for not properly finishing it but i felt like developing my skills more in the areas i want to specialise in is more important. The main reason i didnt finish my project is because i didnt really have any idea what i was doing and had to teach myself everything so obviously this took a long time. As a result of this however, i have learnt alot from this project. The part i'm most unhappy with is the animation, i have tried hard to research and teach myself how to animate well but unfortually i just need alot more practice than the time i have got for this project. Idealy i would have just focused on the pre-vis and modelling and texturing and lighting and got someone else to animate my scenes but unfortunately there isnt anyone willing to take upon this task. Overall i am dissappointed with the quality of my work, however i'm proud of my progress over this project. I need alot more practice and need to learn alot more to improve the quality of my work.

Extended - Helping to animate

I helped animate a scene for YiXing Luka and Guys animation. I did this mainly because i really wanted to do some 2d animation one day and so i animated one of their scenes.

From doing this i actually learnt alot. I learnt that every movement is just a variation on a bouncing ball. I'd heard this before from research but it never really sank in untill i was animating this scene.

Modelling practice - 2

I learnt alot about fabric also from doing this study. I am not happy with the result because i feel the forms are quite messy. Despite this though i'm happy that i was able to realise this and alot of other mistakes i have make whilst doing this because it shows my knowledge of modelling is improving.

 

 

Modelling Practice - 1

For one of the live briefs i decided not to do a competition brief but instead use this brief to improve my modelling skills which is much more relevent to what i want to do and my specialised practice.

From this i learnt alot. I learnt more about posing, anatomy and detailing in zbrush.

I started by blocking out the general shapes of the design because i think this is the most important stage.

After this i refined the shapes and then started to focus on the details

Game - Link

This is the link to our game

Projection mapping - overall

Overall i enjoyed the brief mostly because, working with YiXing and Luke was very easy and i got to practice my animation skills.

Projection mapping - my individual part

My individual part of the animation was the animation. I tried my best to get something out of this brief. Therefore i used it to try and improve my animaiton skills. I learned more about tv paint and how to use it. More importantly though i learnt about making decicionsin shots to more them more interesting. For example i could have just made the scene very boring and straight forward but i created some opportunities in the animation to make it abit more interesting.

Projection mapping Ideas

We each came up with ideas and discussed with each other to find out which idea we should do, we also discussed this with Jimmy to find out what he wanted.

We settled on an idea of a snowman coming out of a present and then melting.

Projection mapping research

For the projection mapping brief i knew the theme was christmas and the limitations were that it had to be projected on a building with a window or something in the middle. Therefore we had to design our animation around this.

Game

For one of the live briefs me, YiXing and Luka made a game for a game jam challenge on itch.io called the heart jam. We only had 72 hours to complete the game.

To plan the game we met up and discussed our ideas for the game, we decided on a game about an austronaut in space who needs to collect oxygen and avoid monsters.

To make the game we all met at my house and we all helped make the game.

The main thing i took away from this project was the potential for making games in the future as it is alot of fun and perhaps in the future i could use my modelling/rigging skills to help with a game project.

https://itch.io/jam/heartjam/rate/238747


 

YCN Dogs trust brief

I cant say much about the ideas because Jay and Tess came up with them. All i did in this brief was modelling the dogs. I started by blocking the biggest and most important shapes and worked my way into the more detailed shapes

I wanted to use this as an opportunity to practice my modelling skills. Also to use xgen hair abit more. 

In the end i created four dogs in total, all slighty different breeds.

Projection mapping - Summary

working with YiXing and Luke was good, everything went fine.

I did the animating and YiXing and Luke did the colouring and cleanup. As this was a very small brief there wasnt really much point splitting up the animation work.

I would say it was easy to work for a client but this didnt really feel like client work.

During the project i realised that i really enjoyed using tv paint to animate with.

Extended - Environments

Environment modelling:

-Research
For the environment modelling i had alot of trouble because i'v never really modelled an environment so i did alot of research. This research consisted of photographs i took on my way to uni of trees and plants and screenshots from films such as tangled.
 
I made some rough concepts of the environment in pre-production so these helped alot when it came to modelling the environments.



-Modelling
I started modelling by blocking out all of the shapes and making sure they all worked together nicely. I then started to refine the shapes and then later refine the forms further through the use of displacement maps.





I decided to make two seperate environments for the different scenes as this was an easier way to fine tune the details without effectng the look of the envionment from a different angle.









These are the Final environments:

Applied Animation - Week 16 (Final week)

This week i was mostly working with premiere, compositing the animation and making sure everything is put together right.

This week was very busy because we didn't realise how much we still had to do in terms of getting the animation fully completed and putting everything together. I find this is always the case so maybe next time i will account for this more.

In terms of blogging i started off blogging a lot and making sure i explained everything well but as i got into the production stage i spent a lot more time actually practicing my craft which instead of putting lots of effort into blog posts which don't impact me at all really. Whilst learning and practicing animation is what's going to improve my skills and therefore get me job opportunities. Therefore i have sacrificed my grade for my practice, obviously these should be parallel but they are not.

Anyway moving back to the project, below is a demonstration of all the animating i did for this project. I did the majority of the animation work, so i did all the keys and alot of the inbetweens and clean ups. I also did all the audio except the sounds from the internet and the interviews which we did together.

Applied Animation - Week 15

This week we started putting everything all together, i captured all the frames using dragonframe as this is much faster than scanning them in. Then using photoshop we all cleaned up the frames, removing the white colour of the page except for the characters. Then whilst Guy and Meg finished cleaning up the frames, i began compositing the frames in premiere.

Before compositing in premiere we needed to get the backgrounds finished, to a standard we were happy with. I used research from a few layout books and used inspiration to create the feel of the backgrounds. I wanted to keep the backgrounds very abstracted and minimalist as to not complicate the scene and not to take away from the focal points of the characters.

I took inspiration from flicking through the book "The Noble Approach". This book had some interesting background designs. It showed me that using maybe only two or three colours can still form a very suggestive but abstracted background, which is what we wanted.

After we scanned in the background, Guy edited them on Photoshop and added additional light/shadow, which was a huge improvement and by this point we were very pleased with the backgrounds.

Applied Animation - week 13 and 14

I finished all the keys during these two weeks and since guy was bogged down with other work I've started doing the inbetweens also. I have managed to organise my time very well over the past few weeks. We have had deadlines for COP and responsive but i have still managed to set time aside for working on applied during this time, this is something which Guy and Meg have not done. However this is alright because i don't mind keeping the project on schedule whilst Guy and Meg sort out their other work.

I wouldn't say I'm the most organised person, I'm quite messy and i have never thought of myself as being organised. But i have managed the deadlines this year very well and have set myself more projects which i have done in my spare time as well as the set work. Due to this, i have naturally mediated towards the director role for our applied group.

I really like being the director because i like having control over the project, this isn't to say Guy or Meg doesn't, we all have an equal say in everything. I just feel like I'm naturally taking charge of the project, i think this is because i am organising my time well.

When animating the girl, the motions had to be more fluid than the other characters because she is younger. I really tried to get the anticipation and the arcs in there and i think i did a good job with the child's animation but it could have been better through more subtle movements of her face, more accurate and intricate expressions which narrow in more on what the character is thinking about.

I used reference for the girls motions, especially for her shuffling back into a comfier position.

Applied Animation - Week 9

This week our priority was the character designs and the animatic. For the animatic we needed to get the voice of the grandmother recorded. On Thursday we went to the sound studio with a member of student support who had a slightly raspy voice. When thinking about the right voice for the grandmother we realized we didn't need an old person to voice her but rather a raspy, tired voice. This is because there's nothing really that different between a youthful voice and an old voice except from a more tired, raspy, mature tone.

Whilst in the recording studio, the words didn't sound right and sounded very forced so we told her to just imagine herself in the scenario of the character and just say what comes naturally instead of acting out these specific words. Instead of saying "nice weather today isn't it?" which was in the script, she said "nice weather today" which felt much more natural and believable.

To make the animatic i was working with Guys storyboards. This was quite challenging as there were way to many storyboard panels for the first scene. The subtleness we discussed before was absent in the storyboards but guy was open to changes to make parts more subtle.

I understand it's hard to get the story across clearly in the storyboards as our narrative is very subtle and needs very acute attention to detail so guy has had a hard job with the storyboards and although they still need some improvements they are good enough to work from.

Understanding the way people think about things and how different people have different approaches to solving problems is important when working together collaboratively. Guy takes quite long to do tasks but he usually produces good work. Understanding peoples weaknesses and my own weaknesses is very important also, being honest about weaknesses allows a greater workflow. For example in our project the idea of our narrative is to be subtle, Guy cant do subtle, but that's ok because me and meg can help out as we have more of an understanding of how to be subtle.

Another instance of this principle is when i took over the character designs from Guy. I thought i could manage to think of a good, well designed character but unfortunately I'm quite poor at design work in general. I am more technically proficient, therefore i was struggling and Guy took back control of the character designs and produced some really nice designs which i will come to later.

This is why acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses and being clear about them helps collaborative workflow a great deal.

On Tuesday we had another crit. I was glad there was another crit before Easter because we were still quite unsure about a lot of things. I showed the inverse hand drawn tests and some character designs which me and Guy had been working on and also a design Guy came up with about 10 minutes before the presentation.

Most peoples favourite design was the one Guy drew just before the presentation, i began to like the design, i thought it was well designed and could work well with our animation. The design does not fit in with the more realistic hand drawn style we were going for previously but i think we can still make it work. Just because an animation is more 'cartoony' does not mean it has a less serious message. It might even work in our favor to display our narrative in a more personal and warm way.

Below is Guy's final character design for the grandmother:

 Below are the final character sheets for all the characters:

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Also in our crit most people found our animatic humorous instead of being emotionally effected by it. This is because of the "nice weather today" being repeated too much. Therefore i trimmed it down so she doesn't just sound like a parrot.

We also removed the key hole shot from the animation because this was too generic.

Below is the final animatic:

I wasn't confident in the watercolour background Meg made. I didn't think it worked very well to tell the story and set the scene. I didnt think watercolour was the right medium for us to use, we thought of using cut out card to make the backgrounds. We were unsure of the result and if it would look good or set the scene but it worked quite well and added a nice consistency of aesthetic between the backgrounds and the characters.

At first i thought because of the block colours of the card it might look too much like a motion graphic or something of that sort but when compositing the scene together on photoshop my worries were diffused and i was happy with the result.

Applied Animation - Easter holidays (week 10, 11, 12)

Over the Easter holidays i was mainly working on responsive and COP but i still managed to get started on the key poses for the grandmother. I wanted to make sure these were perfect as the grandmother is the most important character to get right. There are so many subtleties which can be easily missed when animating her character.

The backgrounds weren't finished yet so i had to work from a template drawn up from the backgrounds. I wanted to try keeping to model as much as possible and having nice arcs of motion and squash and stretch but most of all i wanted to communicate to the audience what the woman is going through and what's going on in her head. I was comfortable animating hand drawn but animating the woman was a challenge. Mainly because there were no distinctive movements except from head turns and the limited dialogue. However i imagined a good animator could add personality and appeal to even the simplest and basic movement, therefore i thought a lot about this and how i could approach making the simplest movement still interesting and beautiful.

I think the key to solving this problem is to really get inside of the characters head and control them, in other words act out the movements as if you were that character. I took some reference of me acting out the movements and looked for subtleties in the motions that are interesting and add character.

To keep on model with the character designs and to keep consistency of the forms, i used a few sources of reference whilst drawing out the keys. I used the character sheets guy drew out from his character designs, i also used a zbrush concept sculpt of our grandmother character which i created quickly when i was playing around with getting to grips with zbrush. This is an example of implementing computer generated workflow into traditional hand drawn animation, how i see it is making the most of the technology available to improve my craft.

Responsive - Evaluation

I really enjoyed this project and leant a lot from it. Because the module was organised and executed so poorly it taught me to use my initiative and to think for myself instead of relying on estudio for the information. Besides this, I developed my hand drawn animation skills and also my animation skills in general. Also I did something unconventional for one of my personal competitions, I competed in a programming competition. The reason I did this is because rigging/technical development is an area I am very interested in and would like to explore further.

For the first study task, we were instructed to apply to competitions relevant to our practice. The competitions I submitted entries to were 11 second club, loopdeloop and codechef. 11 second club was my favourite competition, which made me consider doing hand drawn animation more often. My favourite roles in animation are essentially polar opposites, hand drawn animation and CG rigging, my plan at the moment is to pursue both of them, I don’t think this is too ambitious because I am very passionate about both and love to learn about both of these practices.

In line with this subject, for 11 second club I did one hand drawn animation and for another submission I made the models and rigs and another member of the class animated it. Although this is still the individual task i believe this was an intuitive and professional way to approach this submission. This way we both gain experience in the area we want to specialize in and also doing the bits we are best at will make the final animation better because we each stuck to what we’re best at. If a storyboarder or set designer was making the rigs, the rigs would not be a good standard and damage the rest of the project.

For the codechef competition I didn’t really know much about programming before entering the competition but I realized that this was the best way to learn, through reflective practice. After the competition I used this new developing skill when rigging character, for example I used programming to help with my COP practical rig and it has really opened up more complex rigging solutions for me.

For the loopdeloop competition, I submitted twice and both were 2d photoshop animations. In my opinions these were my weakest entries, this is because I am not a big fan of this medium and have little interest in it. At least these entries made me realize to focus on the areas I am best at and have the most interest in. I believe these things go together, Passion and being successful at something, but the passion always comes first, the success is a side effect.

The second study task was to work collaboratively with students from other courses. Unfortunately, the execution and organisation of this was awful but I made the best of it and found a group with 2 other animation students and an illustration student. Me and the 2 other animators worked hard on this brief and learnt a lot from it. The illustration student hardly did anything compared to us but it didn’t matter because we’re not here to do the minimal amount of work. We’re here to learn as much as we can.

The brief we chose was the thirsty planet brief, we chose this one because it seemed like it was for a good cause. We decided to do a cut out animation because this would suit the branding and message of the product. One of the main things I learnt from this project was in a way unrelated to this project, it was that rigging is quite common in general animation practice, not just 3d animation. I realised this when making the card puppets and thinking about the requirements of how they need to move and thinking about how I am going to implement that into the puppet with the tools I have available to me. This is exactly the same process as making a rig for 3d animation.

I also learnt a lot about personality of the characters. In the first scene we animated together, I was animating the baby elephant, as I was animating I realised who the character was and based on this how I would make it move. I think this is very important because to make a character animation believable, the animator needs to have an understanding of who the character is and their personality.

In conclusion I really enjoyed this module and learnt a lot from it, to improve I would elaborate on the things I have learnt such as considering the character’s personality before animating them and extending my knowledge of rigging by learning as much as I can and putting it into practice. I found working collaboratively really enjoyable and much better than working alone because different people have different skillsets and the project required lots of different skillsets which we had when we combined our skillsets.  

Responsive - Project Report

Responsive - Collaborative Art Boards

These are my collaborative art boards:

Responsive - Individual Art Boards

These are the art boards for the individual responsive competitions. These sum up my journey throughout each of the competitions.