SPnU Animatic

This week I was able to make the animatic. Prathik had some free time on his hands so was kind enough to do the writing part of the storyboards while I finished off the animatic, which we showed during group critique.

What worked well:

• The horror section when the demon first shows herself on camera had the intended effect on the audience (though it had placeholder sounds)

What could be improved:

• The timing could be better in the last limbo section of the animatic
• Prathik belatedly noticed I accidentally drew the cigarette backwards, but we’re all aware of it now
• Changing the time when the Kilo starts tearing up to earlier on in the limbo sequence

I’m taking a hiatus from this project for now to focus on COP as I’m starting to fall behind and there is a deadline coming up.

SPnU Revised Storyboards

Prathik, Damo and I sat down together and reviewed the boards and made some changes so we were able to cut out a few unnecessary backgrounds and scenes. I started writing down the notes on the side but my handwriting’s not the best, I’ll neaten it up at some point.

The revised boards looks like this now:

What worked well:

• Cutting out the boards that had the drawer zoom-ins

What could be improved:

• The thumbnails will need writing
• Animatics with placeholder sounds will be the next step

Monkey Jam! Loop De Loop

I made a looping monkey playing the steel drums for this month's LoopDeLoop which was themed 'Instruments'. The follow through movements took me some time to figure out in the roughs stage:

This is also the first time I fully animated something in TVPaint (though I did use After Effects to add some subtle moving leaf shadows) and I'm pleased with how it turned out! I'm hoping this marks the first of many TVPaint animations as I believe it'll be useful to me as a 2D animator.

The loop made it onto the site

What worked well:

• As I'm not strong with colours, I colour picked a Rayman Origins background which I thought worked really well for this background
• The use of arcs and follow through on the monkey movements
• The smears when the monkey swaps sides

What could be improved:

• An extra frame or two might've helped the transition clearer between the sides when the monkey swaps his legs
• A few extra background sounds could've been added for the jungle ambience and the monkey swapping sides.

SPnU Storyboards first pass

This week I’ve started boarding the animation properly.

I’ve been trying to minimise how many backgrounds are needed where it’s possible but it’s looking like a lot so far. Halli has kindly agreed to make our backgrounds and in return we are helping animate his Medusa project.

I’m also starting to worry that the story will go well over two minutes and might be too much work for us as I the whole storyboard comprises of 66 panels as it is. I’ve raised this with Prathik and we’ll all sit down together at some point and tweak the boards.

These are the thumbnails so far:

 

 

The time spent into making the Maya room was well worth it as it’s taken considerably less time than expected to draw out the boards with the layout done.

Main Project - Sleep Paralysis and You

Over the break, Damian, Prathik and myself decided to try to continue our Schwa collective into this year and after graduation. Prathik had a list of ideas he thought would be good to animate as a collective and the one that stuck out to everyone was about a sleep paralysis demon that craved intimacy. The original script had a comedic twist ending but after getting some feedback from Dotty, we changed it into a horror-romance-tragedy story.

My role for this project is storyboarding, animatic, animation and some post production. I started drawing the storyboards and then realised almost immediately I didn’t really know where the furniture was in relation to the character so I thought it would be easier to block it out in Maya and take screenshots (which would help the background artist too). I started a Maya file and then realised I didn’t know what the layout of the room was supposed to be.

After going through a few potential floor plans with Prathik (who is directing), we picked one and I spent about a week or so making a basic room in Maya. I was a little rusty with the program but Prathik and Rory were kind enough to remind me how to do some basic actions.

Floorplan

Room blocked out in Maya

What I learned:

• Sometimes more creative planning is needed before the storyboard stage
• Making a floor plan and blocking out in Maya helps out both the storyboard artist and the background artist in retrospect

The next stage will be getting the storyboards done.

Documentary Weekly - Final Submission

Here is the final animated documentary trailer, 'For Freedom':

Updates to this version:

• Adding and animating the ships
• Adding and animating the last background
• Altering the style of the subtitles to be more consistent
• Adding some subtle movement to the brown cow in the Village Long Shot scene

The final background took a lot longer to finish than I thought because of all the tents and people I had to draw for the refugee camp. The boats were comparatively easier to pull off.

Some reference pictures for the boats

Completed boats for the River Long Shot

Some reference pictures for the refugee camps

Last background with character

The only thing I'm not entirely happy with in the animation is the crowd in the Village Close Up scene which is inconsistent with the realistic characters used in the rest of the animation but on a whole, I really like how this turned out and I really had to exploit some new techniques I'd never used before in After Effects.

Competition Weekly - Final Submission

Here is the final animation for The Perfect Present:

The corrections I made:

• Adding the back of the partner to the bedroom scene
• Adding a bounce to the scene where the main character moves forward to pick up the mirror
• Changing 'Retail Therapy' to 'Appliances' on the sign inside the store (Eleni forgot to change this earlier)
• Minor alterations to timings to make the animation fit the beat of the soundtrack

I tried to correct the bedroom scene animation but once I started, I realised I would have to redo the whole scene which I didn't have time to do, so I left it as it was.

I was surprised and happy that this animation managed to win a D&AD pencil! Granted I had to cut out the bedroom scene completely for D&AD but still, it was a nice way to sign off the year.

Documentary Week 10 - Semifinal Submission

I spent this week trying my best to finalise the compositing and post production for Petra and El to submit the best possible version.

I replaced the end wobble with a slight pan out but I kept a very mild wobble on the fact cards because I liked the subtle movement effect.

El sent over her final scene which was the village crowd, however it looked far too cartoony and out of proportion for the realistic style we were going for and the discrepancy was really noticeable. I told her this and she offered to redo the crowd. The remake was better than the original but still a bit too cartoony but unfortunately there wasn't time to improve on this anymore before the final submission so I updated the new version into the animation as it was.

Luke our musician sent us the track and I was absolutely blown away by how good it sounds. I also asked Dotty over email if I should be aiming to make a trailer type of end credit screen and she responded saying it was a good idea as it would stay in keeping with the style of the animation, so I googled out some trailer credits for reference and put one together in Photoshop.

I also finished off the press pack including a poster (which unfortunately I had to redo when my laptop crashed and corrupted the original file):

With everyone's parts together, this is how the version of the animation that Petra and El submitted looked like:

What worked well:

• The music
• The 3D layer transitions and camera movement in general
• The general style of the animation with illustrations drawing themselves up
• The subtle motion in Petra's Sheikh Mujib scene and El's boat scene
• The end credit screen

What could be improved:

• Finishing off the river scene with the boat
• Finishing off the last scene
• The proportions of the crowd
• Adding some subtle movement to one of the cows in the village long shot

I was overall really happy with how this semifinal version looked. Now my priority will be to finish off those two scenes before my deadline.

Competition Weekly - Semifinal Submission

I updated the final animation with Eleni and Damo's parts. I added a cheeky silhouette/back to Eleni's bedroom scene to help her out as she didn't have time to add in the back of the partner behind the main character in bed. I also added some credits.

The final animation looks like this now:

What worked well:

• We now have a finished animation!
• The smooth standing up and turning movement in Damo's part
• The looking back movement in Eleni's part as well as parts of the blanket animation

What could be improved:

• Altering the movement of the main character going forward to pick up the mirror so that there's some bounce in his step
• Ensuring the bedroom scene is animated on twos
• Some lighting on the blanket
• Positional and facial discrepancies of the main character in the bedroom scene
• Making the first hand in the phone scene look a bit more natural

I'll try and address some of these issues if I have time before my own deadline, but for the time being I'm happy that my team were able to give me a finished product in time.

Documentary Week 9 - Final Critique

This week I made another background and made the decision to leave the last background for now and finalise the backgrounds I already had to start creating animated assets out of them in After Effects, as we didn't have any actual animation to show for the final crit and I knew I'd need time to employ the splatter/stain effect I had learned to recreate from a YouTube tutorial.

The finished backgrounds with all the improvements in place:

I have greatly underestimated backgrounds in general. It probably took just as long animating all the layers (which I created separately as I went along) as it did to draw them. I considered at one point handing over some of the background animations to my team but it felt inappropriate as I knew my layers well and it would probably delay things to ask them to take over.

Every asset was animated to look as naturally drawn as possible, with a mix of a stroke mask effect and a stain/splatter effect.

One of the masks on one of my layers looked like this
(Halli walked in on me making this and wondered what I was doing)

The result of that masking made it look like lines on the boat were being drawn out

I didn't finish animating all the backgrounds but what I did finish I took and compiled everything into a rough animation (minus the transitions and with a placeholder track), including the scenes I got from El and Petra.

This was the progress shown at the final crit:

Feedback from the final crit:

• Need to try and add some more motion in places, it’s too still in parts. Can use puppet too to fix this
• End title should be still at the end. People don’t like the wobble.
• Might need to add white noise to make parts without a voice over less quiet
• Subtitles should be in a regular font that’s easy to read
• Need to work on timings and transitions
• Backgrounds and background animations looking good

I had already intended to put transitions in (I didn't have time to add them at the time), however I was a little surprised people didn't like the wobble because I was actually a fan. Regarding the silence issue, I'll address it if it's still a problem with the actual soundtrack in place when our musician sends it over, which he told me would be soon.

Documentary Week 8 - More Backgrounds and Fonts

This week I made more partially completed backgrounds for my teams to use.

I learned that ropes were more difficult to pull off than I gave it credit for and ended up using a few reference pictures to get the right look for the boat background:

It ended up looking something like this with the guides:

Everyone I asked about the green bananas (although a common sight on Bangladeshi boats) didn't necessarily recognise them as bananas at all, something I'll need to fix with a bit of artistic licensing.

The other partially completed background was for the sneaking out scene. I used a mud house as the main reference:

This is how it turned out:

I'm a fan of the goat and the little pots. And now, everyone now has a background to work with for their scenes.

I also searched out and tested some fonts and everyone was of the agreement that the 6th option was the most readable. We now have the font for our fact cards.

What I learned:

• Artistic licensing is good
• Ropes are hard

What went well:

• Composition of everything in the boat scene
• Ropes in the boat scene
• The addition of the goat and the pots in mud house scene
• Picking the third party 'Daniel' font for the fact cards

What could be improved:

• Making the bananas yellow and refining them so they're more recognisable
• Adding a background wall to the boat scene to make it clear that the scene is taking place in a boat
• Adding more texture to the roof of the mud house.

Documentary Week 7 - Starting the backgrounds

I have been having a hard time starting these backgrounds and I've been scrapping and restarting them a lot. My main focus is to finish the backgrounds my team needs first in case I have to drop the project and run for personal reasons, but after a few tries at the village close up background I ended up starting with the simpler river background to get a feel of the style I'm trying to achieve.

The visual for this background is based on a "huge sailing boat" that was mentioned in another part of the interview (that we opted not to use the audio for but just the visual to mix it up). I ended up asking Arin (the daughter of the interviewee) about it and she sent me a picture of what it would've looked like (as they're not common anymore and I'd never seen one in person) so I knew what to look for. My reference pictures consisted of both paintings and actual pictures:

The river background with the boat guide looks like so:

Now that I had a style down I started on the village close up background. These were the references:

And this is how it looks with a rough guide of the villager crowd:

I ended up redrawing the hut about three times and I was not as happy with how it generally turned out so asked my team if they had any suggestions. In the meantime I've uploaded this to the drive for El to use as a guideline for her scene and I'll improve on it later when everyone has their rough backgrounds.

What I learned:

• How to simulate a watercolour painting in Photoshop by using a mixture of watercolour and smudge brushes
• The usefulness of using both watercolour and real life references to help with the backgrounds

What worked well:

• The general washy style of the river background
• Simplicity of river background
• The trees, hut and hay of the village close up background
• The general blending of the colours in both backgrounds

What could be improved:

• More trees in the village close up to add more interest
• Possibly extra grass/ground details in the village close up background

Possible change in leader dynamics

Due to some issues I'm having at home, I've assigned Damo and Petra, from the competition and documentary teams respectively, as my second in commands in my groups. They have kindly agreed to step up and help out if needed.

Documentary Week 6 - Animating the Flag

I tried to test out the paint splatter method I found on an attempted background but I scrapped the background on account of not liking how it looked. I did manage to make a few assets that were a mix and match of third party and Photoshop brushes and try out the effect on an ending title card for the animation using the Bangladeshi flag.

The current Bangladeshi flag - the green represents the field and the red represents the sun as well as the blood of the people who died for its independence, which seems appropriate for the documentary

An image I found some time back that I used as inspiration for the animation test

The first flag of Bangladesh had a yellow silhouette of the country and I thought I'd use these colours for the paint smear that would reveal the title

The end title card test looks like this:

The title might change and I think I'll search for a more suitable font, but I generally like how the effect looks.

In the meantime, El finished the storyboards and animatic and we split all the scenes between us. As El and Petra were interested in doing some of the 'fact cards', I made a fresh set of white animated assets in a separate After Effects file that they can use to keep the animation consistent and made a reference sheet on how to edit the assets when they're placing them in the animation.

My cheat sheet for the team to reference when making the fact card scenes

We are now ready to start production and I'll be doing the backgrounds at the same time.