SPnU - Starting the remainder roughs

I got Damo's help to take some reference videos of me for the scenes I hadn't started yet and finally made a start on them.

Scene 21 - Fire Stomp

Scene 22 - Caught Red Footed

Scene 24 - Profile Walk

Scene 25 - Cracking Front

What worked well:

• The new profile walk scene is vastly improved from the original basic walk cycle
• The character acting in scenes 21, 22 and 24 are much better with the use of reference
• Hair movement needed tweaking while I was animating this but I feel it moves well in all the scenes
• Demon Penny originally throws up her hands too high in Scene 22 in relation to the fire so her arms were tweaked for that segment

What could be improved:

• The scene needs to be zoomed in more at the feet level in the Fire Stomp scene (it is currently zoomed just below the knees)
• Prathik pointed out some mild height discrepancies in scenes 22 and 24, which I'll fix next
• I'll need to make sure the arms/shoulders are consistent in the Cracking Front scene when I'm tying it down
• Hands need to be roughed out properly

Sleep Paralysis and You and Heart of Stone Update

This week I've been mainly redoing Kilo's head in my SPnU scenes to fit the character design more accurately.

What worked well:

• Kilo looks more consistent with the character design now

What could be improved:

• The zoom out scene is a bit too static, I'll need to add some breathing movements at some point and I still need to remove the extra ambulance characters on the side
• Demon Penny's hands are off when she rests it on the face so that will need tweaking

 I've also made a start on Halli's Heart of Stone roughs.

What worked well:

• Overall movement seems to work
• The pause to look around before grabbing the torch

What could be improved:

• Add rest of facial features
• Add a tween when picking up torch
• Finish animating the sword movement

YCN Brief - STA Travel

I was approached by Helen (my roommate from first year) and Grace from the Creative Advertising course to collaborate on the YCN brief for STA Travel. They wanted an animation about a pigeon leaving his nest to travel the world. It sounded like a fun concept and Damo was willing to work on me with this one but as we were only two animators working on a potentially minute long animation, we delegated the roles of Storyboards, Backgrounds and Cleanups to Helen and Grace, leaving us with the animatics, character designs, roughs and tie down animation.

After discussing and tweaking the storyline, we showed them what a typical storyboard looks like and Helen and Grace later sent over their storyboards as well as the source Photoshop file, which I then took it into After Effects and made it into an animatic. As the maximum people that can work on this brief is four, I will have to rely primarily on freesound.org for my sounds as we don’t have room for a musician.

Damo and I played around with some character trait ideas and Helen and Grace picked their favourite ones and passed this on to Damo for the character designs while I worked on the animatic. I also sent over some amended background size suggestions for the final backgrounds.

The guide I sent back to Helen and Grace to make background dimension alterations

The first pass animatic looks like this (I ended up using my voice for the pigeon):

What worked well:

• Tweaking the story so that it bookended with the chimney
• Adding a plane in the background of the last shot to tie in with the previous scene inside the plane

What could be improved:

• Some of the sounds were not free to use and will have to be replaced for the final animation
• The story might be jumping too much but unfortunately we are limited with time and manpower

Update 23/02/2020

Although Helen and Grace initially loved the animatic, they ultimately decided to change the animation after a group critique so that it is now three short animations instead of one big one. This is actually potentially more manageable for Damo and I in terms of actual animation, but it also means Damo will need to do a few more background character designs. As such, I will be doing the roughs for two of the shorts while Damo does one. Their new shorts feature Paul the pigeon doing things like eating noodles while his friends are eating worms, hanging out with flamingos, and cleaning up a beach (as STA Travel also does volunteer work).

I made two versions of the animatic, one which includes a snapshot at the end (using the assets provided by STA for the brief), and they look like this so far.

Version 1

Version 2

Helen and Grace have yet to give me feedback on if they have a preference but they generally like how they look so far.

I also made a rough walk test for Paul (the pigeon) based off of Damo's design before the story changed, but it looks like it'll be needed for one of the scenes anyways so it won't need to be scrapped.

What worked well:

• The new smaller shorts are easier to handle than the one big short
• I found some good free sounds to use for the final animations
• The head movement with the pigeon walk really brings out the pigeon aesthetic

What could be improved:

• The original storyboarded flamingo scene started at the feet and panned up as a side view and then ended with a front view of Paul with the flamingos at feet level, however this was inconsistent with the side view when he wasn’t there - this is the main reason for me making another version where the scene is shot differently and the story is still consistent.
• I think the pigeon walk will need to be slowed down.

Update 06/02/2020

I made a rough flamingo walk for one of the scenes based off of Damo's final flamingo design, but it ended up being more refined than I intended so I passed it over to Helen and Grace as a cleanup for them to colour. I also made a quick tutorial png to show them how to colour in Photoshop as they won't have TVPaint.

What worked well:

• The graceful character of the walk
• Intermingling the flaunting poses with the walk to save on animation time
• Adding the subtle overshoot when the poses change

What could be improved:

• Could potentially use one more pose if I have time
• Poses could potentially have been exaggerated further

Update 16/03/2020

Helen and Grace have been busy with their own deadlines so haven't passed over any cleanups or backgrounds to me yet. Meanwhile, I've added some tweens to Paul's walk cycle and made a choice of walks for the carnival where he can have his wings poised up or also have his head bouncing with the beat.

Everyone liked Option 2 better so I made this into the Carnival Walk rough:

I also altered the walk to slow it down and add more head tweens for the regular walk cycle on the beach scene:

For the same scene, I made roughs for him walking to a stop and picking up the trash.

From my side, my roughs and tie downs are done and all that's needed is Helen and Grace to finish cleanups and colour and to pass them back to me so I can composite them into the animation.

I put the existing roughs and flamingo cleanups I've done into one of the scene to see how it would look and everyone is happy with it so far:

What worked well:

• Changing speeds and poses between the pigeon walk cycles for the beach and carnival segments
• The head turn in the picking up trash animation
• The follow through with the tail feather

What could be improved:

• Follow through looked odd on the wings when experimenting, but could potentially add some subtle rotation on a couple of frames
• Could potentially make the head turn look more pigeon-y by offsetting the pupils more to the sides, which I can ask the rest of the team about later

Update 24/03/2020

The deadline for this brief has been pushed from 27th March to 9th April, presumably due to the pandemic situation. I am anticipating a possible need to do the cleanups and colour myself if Helen and Grace have too much difficulty with it, but only if I have time between my Extended Practice projects.

Update 08/04/2020

As expected, the Creative Advertising students have limited creative resources with university being shut down and as I had a bit of time between projects, I cleaned up and coloured in my scenes out of courtesy (and because I wanted to submit at least one finished animation). It's unfortunate that Grace and Helen couldn't really give me some refined backgrounds and as it was something I didn't end up having time to help out with, so I labelled them as rough backgrounds on the final exports.

I also composited Damo's roughs into the animatic and added an extra sound effect for the worm but Creative Advertising won't be able to clean up or colour his parts. The compiled animations with my 'Find Your Flock' and 'Beak the Change' parts and Damo's rough 'Upgrade Your Worms' look like this:

While there have been some issues with communication between team members with this project, I have generally enjoyed practising walk cycles and feel my final outcomes do look good (given the circumstances). This project has provided me with something of an insight on what I might expect in the professional world when it comes to being commissioned or collaborating with potential clients not from an animation background, and also what to expect when unforeseen circumstances (like a nationwide lockdown) affect the progress of a project.

SPnU - figuring out hair movement and vertical slice

This one rough has been taking me surprisingly long to figure out because I couldn't quite understand how the hair was supposed to move:

I ultimately redrew a version similar to the first one and I'm finally happy with how it moves now and I think it eases well:

I sent a version with some quick colouring and some added teeth (as a joke) over to Prathik to check the hair movement and we ended up altering linework and colours and turning it into a vertical slice of sorts as Rob suggested during a class.

We collectively decided that the character looks better with all linework a dark grey instead of erasing the linework that's in contact with the background.

SPnU Roughs update

I have started the majority of my SPnU roughs but haven't finished any to my own satisfaction as of yet. We met up as a team recently to give each other feedback on each other's roughs.

Scene 5 - Getting into bed

My issue with this was the framing and I wondered if we should be including more bed in the background so that more movement comes across, I had a rough rotoscope overlaid but the majority of it went off screen. After playing around with the Maya file and doing some experimentation, Prathik and I realised that the movement wasn't important and the focus should be on the dreamcatcher and photograph. We also swapped the original zoom out camera movement for a zoom in for the extra focus, so I'll be altering how I animate this scene now.

Scene 8 - UWU

I may have redone the hair in this scene a few times as I'm unsure how gravity is supposed to work on a sleep paralysis demon. The feedback was to take artistic license for this scene and animate the hair as if gravity was at her feet level (she is actually floating above the bed so her hair would normally go towards the camera but this would look awkward in shot).

Scene 15 - Deep Smokey Breath

I'm actually happy with how this scene looks so far, feedback was to make the head a little bigger and finish adding the neck. Prathik is in charge of most of the effects so he will be animating the actual smoke.

Scenes 18 to 20 -Cheek caress to Fire reveal

I initially roughed this out on my iPad on my way to London and then traced over it in TVPaint so there are a few inconsistencies to deal with. Feedback was to change the eyes in the first shot and the amount of lines around the eyes and mouth in the last shot to match the character designs.

Scene 24 - Profile Walk

This scene is meant to have the camera panning up a profile walk as the cracks extend up the body. The original shot framing wasn't clear however so I'll be redoing this walk with acting reference and with more character showing in the shot.

Scene 26 - Cracking Profile

Prathik pointed out that there might be a discrepancy in the cracks between his and my scenes but we decided we'll just crop scenes where necessary. Kilo's face here will be changed as the facial animations don't quite fit the character designs.

Scenes 29, 31 and 32 - Final scenes

I will need to resize Kilo's head as it is a bit too big compared to Penny's. Prathik also wants to help with the tears animation so the style remains consistent with the tears he has animated on his scenes. Finally, the last still shot will have the ambulance crew cut out so that the focus is on Kilo.

We realised one of my scenes (which I haven't started the roughs for yet) overlaps with one of Damo's scenes so I volunteered to take over that one too as it's basically a zoomed in version of my scene. This next week, I'll continue to work and improve on these roughs.

Meowch! Loop De Loop

The Loop de Loop theme this month is Whoops, and I thought I'd use this opportunity to recycle an old rotoscope from first year that I never ended up using. This time I chose to keep it a cat.

Original unfinished rotoscope animation

The finished loop looks like this:

It made it onto the site (though Neil temporarily misspelled my name to everyone's amusement before it was corrected). This is the first time I tried out the aesthetic of blurring the background and I like how it turned out, I think I'll end up applying it to more animations in the future.

What worked well:

• Taking out the outside linework on the cat
• The simple bird animation in the window
• Cutting down the actual movement compared to the original rotoscope
• Using a colour palette created from pixellating an image of a kitchen
• Blurring the background for focus

What could be improved:

• The tail seems to curl from the wrong part of the tail at one part near the beginning
• The ending smear turned out a little messier than I'd hoped

Epic Battle - January 11 Second Club

I wanted to do an 11 Second Club but interestingly enough the sound file this month is a cinematic piece, so I thought it would fit an epic battle of sorts. I also wanted to try my hand at making a monochrome animation, inspired by the music video for Siames The Wolf.

This is the first time I tried my hand at effects animation and I had a lot of fun with it and even though it's not something I want to specifically specialise in, I would like to dabble in it more if it adds to my animations. I also learned how to use some TVPaint features to get the monochrome effect I wanted which I think might come in useful for future professional projects. All in all it was a good learning experience.

What worked well:

• The effects animation in the beginning
• The trumpeter twist at the end
• Using the invert effect in TVPaint to help with the monochrome shading
• The shots

What could be improved:

• Some more movement could've been included here and there
• Possibly adding more detail in the absence of movement to make the shading more interesting in certain parts of the dragon

Update 06/02/19:

I came in 7th! :D

SPnU Musician update

Over the break, we went over the musicians we met during the Leeds College of Music and LAU Animation student meetup and decided on Eleanor Baker as she was happy to do some horror music and foley. I dropped her an email and she kindly agreed to be our music person.

First week after the break and everyone sat down together while Prathik altered the After Effects file and tweaked the animatic to implement the changes we discussed earlier. I sent the updated animatic to Ellie and we all picked out our scenes to start making roughs on.

The next step is to make a start on the roughs.

Adventure Pirate Axolotl! December Character Design Challenge

Happy New Year!

This month's CDC challenge was to create an axolotl adventurer and I noticed there were no pirates in the submissions, so I made one!

I decided to go the cutesy route and also try out drawing with Procreate (which I recently bought) and overall, I think it turned out alright.

My submission was accepted onto the Facebook page

Although I don't intend to specialise into character design specifically, I think it's still good to keep it in practice for any general work I might end up doing. I liked the Procreate app - it's something I can see coming in useful in the future for professional use.

What worked well:

• The cutesy look came through well
• The base colour and shading was generally good
• I had a little trouble drawing the rope but it turned out alright in the end

What could be improved:

• I think more contrast on the skin would make it look better
• In retrospect I feel I should've shaded the leg so that it doesn't look separated or behind the torso part
• I could've exaggerated the pose more.

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.