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.