Telling Tales - Final Week

Over the break both Natalie and Emily sent me parts of their animation and I gave them feedback on a couple of things that looked a bit off after I updated the animation. They made the alterations and re-uploaded them and it looks much better. Natalie wrote an updated script before the break but I had to re-write it so that it read in a script format (which took a bit of learning from Google and YouTube), although I tried to use her words where I could.

In the mean time, I cleaned up the storyboards and made the preproduction booklet which Emily really likes the look of. Following Dotty's advice from before the break, we're overlaying the credits over the last mirror scene of the animation.

It was a last minute scramble to finish the compositing because I received the final animated parts and music the day before the deadline (and I had to manually edit the music because it was actually too short for one part). So without further ado and in all its glory, here is the final completed animation of Treasure!

What worked well:

• The animation is finished!
• The editing on one of the music tracks sounds surprisingly seamless
• Emily's extra animated bit with the hands at the end look great
• I like how the aesthetics of the preproduction book turned out

What could be improved:

• Time management between all members of the team
• It would've been better if I had time to contact the musician to fix the length issue from the source
• Some parts of the animation are a bit inconsistent in the character animation

Telling Tales - Week 12

This week I've taken a break from this module to focus on COP which I've started to lag behind on. While Emily and Natalie are working on finishing their parts of the animation, I will work on getting the pre-production booklet done and clean up any other parts needed for submission.

Telling Tales - Week 11

I wanted to finish my parts before the final critique and try to enjoy my Christmas break so with a great amount of effort, I managed to finish off my part of the character animation.

These were the roughs for the walking parts:

The most time consuming part to animate was the stepping stone segment but I really liked how it turned out in the end.

The final animation with Nat and Emily's parts added looks like this so far:

What worked well:

• The boiling title
• The subtle map folding and easing in the map movement
• Limited animation on walk cycles to fit the cut out style
• The stepping stones part worked well
• Extending the time on the split screen segment

What could be improved:

• Movement of Shireen's hand offering coin to peasant may be too subtle

Telling Tales - Week 10

Emily finished the character designs for the elderly Shireen, giving us all enough to make a start on the actual animation. I did the character animation for the very beginning and this was the results of the test:

What worked well:

• Paper cut out style looks great against the textured backgrounds
• The boiling works well
• The character is consistent with the character designs

What could be improved:

• Making the map movement less linear
• Folding the map slightly as she's pulling it down
• The title doesn't quite fit the style - I'll try animating it by hand and boiling it too

Telling Tales - Week 9

Following this week's group critique, we were advised to complete the character designs as it is the only thing needed now to start the actual animating. Emily took over the task of completing the character designs while Natalie's main focus will be sounds. I also took some videos of Natalie for us to use as a reference later.

Dotty gave some insight into the ending and we've decided to change it to something less depressing and she advised that it was better to keep the scarf texture static otherwise it was too distracting. while Emily focused on finishing the character designs this week, I made the treasure map asset and edited Emily's ending storyboards to fit the new ending (belatedly realising I drew the hands from the wrong perspective but the team are aware of this) and this has been updated into the animation in progress.

The treasure map asset (There is space at the top for the title)

Emily also made a suggestion to suddenly cut off the music near the end and the resulting ending is now effectively far more dramatic. 

Original version with placeholder music continuing to the end

New version with dramatic music cut off at end

What worked well:

• Changing the ending storyboards
• The dramatic version of the animatic works better

What could be improved:

• The split screen segments need to hold for longer to give more time to absorb what's going on in the scenes

Telling Tales - Week 8

This week I made a couple more backgrounds and added some placeholder sounds to an updated animatic. It took a few attempts before I got the textures and colours I wanted and Emily's advice on this was very helpful.

Testing out different textures for the back wall and the pillars

Final background with a purple theme

I particular had a lot of fun with the mirror long shot. After much experimentation it boiled down to four mirrors and we picked the one that suited the setting the best.

All four choices were substituted into the animation but the fourth mirror was best suited due to the mystical feel

I also experimented with the colours and Emily and I decided on a goldish mirror to make it stand out

Following this I tested out some alpha matting effects for this background within the animation with the following results.

I added some blurring to the foreground for some depth and Emily really liked it too

I also made two different versions of the animation in progress with some added placeholder sounds, and people seem to be veering more towards the style of the second version.

First version of the animatic with sounds

Second version with different sounds and placements

What worked well:

• Purple colour scheme of cave interior backgrounds
• The mystical mirror design and colours
• the blue fire alpha matting

What could be improved:

• The title should fade out before the map goes down

Telling Tales - Week 7

This week I was mostly in MAF, however before I left I was able to sneak in another background for the animation.

We also applied much of Dotty's advice and the animatic has been cut down substantially since its original size.

We got the lineart character turnaround for the elderly Shireen and Emily played around with some flowery textures that we all chipped in on. I wanted to use an effect to keep the scarf texture static while the character moves and Emily made a boiling lineart test for me to test the effects in AfterEffects.

Testing the Alpha Matting effect with different textures

Testing the same effect with the boiling lineart

With the backgrounds in place we've come to the agreement that the reddish scarf suits the animation better.

What worked well:

• The new background being consistent with the other backgrounds in the animation
• Changing the beginning to shorten the time
• The reddish scarf texture
• I liked the alpha matting effect on the scarf texture

What could be improved:

• Adding placeholder sounds to the animatic

Telling Tales - Week 6

Emily started using my storyboard panels as a direct guide to make a start on the backgrounds and play with some textures.

Original storyboard panel

Emily's background using my storyboard as a guide

We decided to use the animatic as the skeleton for the actual animation by swapping the storyboard assets for the final ones and we tested this out on one part of the animatic to find that it worked well.

Animatic with updated background and Emily's storyboards

Natalie was unable to come in for the group crit this week and Matt made a point to iterate that we should be concerned about the lack of a definitive character design, so we later managed to catch up with her and give her a nudge in the direction of the character design we wanted. Meanwhile, the class suggested using real materials like clothes as textures for the backgrounds and Emily's test on this looked superb in my opinion.

The same background with overlaid textures from scanned clothes (thanks to Emily!)

Later over the weekend, I managed to imitate Emily's style well enough to chip in with the backgrounds, which are all coming along quite nicely.

Original storyboard panel

My attempt at making a background consistent with Emily's style

What worked well:

• Storybook style of backgrounds
• Overlaying real textures on backgrounds
• Using storyboards as direct guide to backgrounds
• Consistency with Emily's style

What could be improved:

• Personal time taken to make backgrounds

Telling Tales - Week 5

While Natalie was in ceramics class, I touched base with Emily and showed her the animatic in progress (which she loved) and the issue with the timing. She came up with the brilliant idea of split screening one section of the animation effectively cutting six panels into three. 

Original storyboard panels from second page

Updated panels now split screen

She also showed me her boards which I also loved except for a part that was essentially a flashback within a flashback. After we collectively picked out things to cut out and edit, I spent the rest of the week re-editing and cleaning up the rest of the boards and made my segment of the animatic, minus the sounds.

What worked well:

• Split screen montage is looking good

What could be improved:

• Will need to update the animatic with Emily's segment

Telling Tales - Week 4

I bumped into Emily just to make sure we were all on the right track. At some point I decided to clean up a few of my storyboard panels to make them easier to edit as an animatic and I tested out the first few panels in After Effects and I really liked how it looked, but I can already see that timing is going to be an issue and it's looking like the animation will run well over a minute. This is something I'll bring up to the team on our next meeting.

Telling Tales - Week 3

We've made some changes to our schedule this week after discussing the script and adding some fine tuning here and there, with some general advice from Dotty. Natalie's networking powers got us an interested music student from Leeds University who wants to make sounds and music for our animation. As Dotty pointed out, the animatic should be sorted pretty quickly to give them something to work with, so Emily and I are focussing on getting storyboards finished while Natalie focusses on the character designs.

Telling Tales - Week 2

This week we met up as a group and made a general plan of when we should get everything finished by. I made a rough script that Emily really liked but will need some tweaks regarding the mirror scene near the end of the animation. We also experimented with different styles on the computer and now have a general idea of what kind of background we're looking for, but our personal task for this week will be to do some research.

I made some doodles to bounce off some ideas of a possible character design for the main character

Telling Tales - Week 1

A new year a new module! This week we were introduced to group projects, with our teammates and story ideas being picked by chance. My new teammates for this project are Emily and Natalie and I'm looking forward to working with them on our first group animation! We had to use story cubes as the source of inspiration for our pitch and my cubes were a baby, a mirror and an old lady.

The die that fate dealt me

I ultimately decided to pitch the story of an elderly lady who goes on a quest to find a magical mirror to relive the memory of her lost child, and was surprised when it got picked by the class. As Emily is good with organising deadlines and was generally eager for the part, she was dubbed the director.

Study Task 1 - Timing (Pixilation)

Our first assignment required us to make a pixilation to better our understanding of timing. The main thing I realised during the planning of this project was how difficult it was to ascertain how many frames an action should take, and I found myself acting out motions “frame-by-frame” just to put a number down on paper, but ultimately it was easier to improvise while filming and taking a good few snaps so I could figure out the speed of some of the actions with some leniency when I was stringing it all together.

Death by Apples

I couldn't help notice how it was nearly impossible to re-pose for a specific frame without redoing the whole scene, and although there were a couple of things that could have been done better (I felt I didn't have enough frames of actual "flying" off the ground), overall I really liked how the animation turned out. It felt surprisingly easier and quicker than what I assume stop motion with armatures would be like.

Also I had an insane amount of fun during the filming process and I felt the little bloopers here and there on some of the scenes, though unintentional, added to its charm and character.