getting feedback on final film and making changes

We all presented our near finished films to the class for some critique. This was very useful especially since we'd been staring at the same thing for so long it's easy to miss little or even large mistakes. A few points on my animation were made which I was able to rectify relatively quickly. First was the throwing motion lacked weight which didn't make it look believable by speeding up the end of the movement I was able to make it look better. There were a few stray bits of colour or sections where the background showed through in a few frames so all I needed to do was touch up those frame. The motion at the end with the final monster took too long for his jaw to close so I elongated the start of the scene and removed frames of its open mouth. I was also told that the font at the end was not fitting for the animation. At the time I thought it was the right decision but looking back it was a poor choice highlighting the importance of 3rd person critique. All that was left to do after that was correct and add the sounds as there were a few missing sound effects and lots of the sound was far too quite.

Adding sound

My animation for the previous project did not feature any sound so creating a soundtrack was a completely new experience for me and I found it a lot harder than I thought I would. Since I decided I didn't want to use music I just used nature sounds and character "dialog" for my animation. Testing/listening to different soundtracks took a while as there are a lot variations that didn't fit. Timing sound correctly was also difficult as I could only move the clips by 1 frame jumps. I was able to fix this by cutting subclips in premiere. overall I'm quite happy with the sound I did all the recorded bits on my laptop but in future I will definitely use the sound booth as the quality is a lot better.

starting to put footage together

I started to put together finished footage to see how all of it runs together. I was happy with how its starting to look however its clear that all the scenes are essential for this animation to make sure its the viewer understands the story.

inspiration and influence

Kristyna Baczynski is an independent illustrator who's work I recently became a fan of because of her really interesting and unique style. It was one of her comics in particular that only used one colour for shading that i thought was incredible effective yet simplistic which seemed like a brilliant combo for animation. I took influence from a few other comic book artists as I have quite a few lying around my room which i like to frequently flick through. I feel this helps shape and improve the style I'm using/creating.

panning with after effects

I had to pan out a shot which I'd never done before but it turned out to be a relatively simple process using after effects. I just made sure all the photoshop layers were linked together and added a scale/position transformation to them which slowly pans out. It was very simple but I was very pleased with the result

walk cycle

Doing the walk cycle was a large pain during this project and although I'm happy with the final result there were a lot of mistakes made before I got there. The benefit of doing this digitally was that it was easy to rectify all mistakes I made relatively quickly. The main issue I had with it was foot placement during the walk cycle. I felt to move the body effectively I had to slide the feet forward but when playing it back the body actually moved far too quickly and the  "slippery" feet looked very odd. I moved each of the frames into the correct place so the feet would not move and it looked a lot better and I should fortunately not encounter this problem again when doing another walk cycle.

linking layers in after effects.

Using what I learnt in the aftereffects tutorial we had the other day I was able to put tother separated animation of different photoshop layers and run them together. In this scene a mud monster lands on the boys shoulder originally I just had him blinking his eyes but it look far too static and there was no weight to the monster. I decided to have the head and shoulder move to rectify this problem. The problem with moving the head was the animation for the eyes blinking was done using separate layer for each of the frames, moving the head would leave the eyes behind. By parenting the eye layers to the head layer it meant they would move at the same rate as the head so they'd always stay in the correct place.

After effects tutorial.

 

This was the final outcome from my last after effects tutorial. I missed the session previous to this one however I'd used after effects a bit before hand so I was able to catch up. This session really opened my eyes to how powerful an animation tool after effects could be. Its most definitely something I plan to use for my next project. In this session we looked at moving different photoshop layers in relation to each other to create an animation. At the end of the session we looked at using expressions in after effects. This is an incredibly useful function which allows the using to command certain layer to perform certain tasks. We used one that looped key frames for the rest of the animation so they would not have to be repeated. You can also link motions or transformations of different layers together using the expressions function so one change in a layer changes another layer equally.

progress

I first started with the simplest scene of the animation since I'm still getting used to the software it would be better to start with less challenging animation. I made the faces of different layers to the eyes which allowed me to use aftereffects to create a motion tween. This method was a lot quicker than drawing every individual frame for the eye movement.

Flash

Today we started to learn the basics of flash. We learnt how to create simple shapes but the main function we looked at were motion tweens. We were able to set where objects move in the software and and what speeds they move at. We looked at accelerating and decelerating the motions as well using graphs. This was a useful session as it was the first time Id used flash before so I learnt a lot.

Using illustrator

Near the tart of my production process I realised problems doing my line work in photoshop. A lot of the lines were coming out wavy and very inconsistent and this made the animation look very rudimentary. I decided to use Adobe illustrator for my line work, since its vector based it didn't matter what size I did the lines in for characters they always had a good resolution in the animation. It took me a while to get used to using illustrator but after fiddling around with tools I figured out how to use it. I first did all the rough's in photoshop to figure out movement paths, I then placed the images into illustrator and traced them. I then put them back into photoshop to paint them and then put them into the image sequence.

making a dog pant referencing

For one of the clips I needed to make a dog pant. I'd never done this before so I used a few references.

Dogs normally pant with little mouth movement as the tongue just moves, however when I animated it like that it looked very odd. I had to apply the exaggeration principle to this movement and make the mouth move as well to create a believable motion. i felt the dog from Pixar's "up" was a good example of an animated dog Pant. 

This is my final clip which will be in the animation.

Finished backgrounds.

These are my finished backgrounds ready for the animation. I made sure when making the background they were all created in 16:9 so they fit the screen perfectly and don't have to be readjusted. I really enjoy creating backgrounds and I feel they're very important. They help tell the story of the animation and set the style/tone as well.

Presenting my pre production work and getting feedback

We all had to present our ideas to small groups discussing what we wanted to do. I found this quite helpful the whole group gave insight into what I was doing right and what could have been done better. The main feedback I got was about the animations sound as I was unsure of what to use for my animation. Most of the feedback was positive about the project the style of it was very well received however the animatic came across as a little jumpy creating a little confusion with the animations narrative so this is a problem I need to address

animatic redo

After talking and reviewing my animatic it was made clear to me it was far too jumpy and there were too many shot crammed into a short time period. I was happy with most of the shots I had chosen and felt they all helped tell the animation's story however I managed to remove or combine a few to make it run much smoother.

Background design

After selecting the a colour scheme for my character I then went on to design background with the chose style/colouring in mind. I tested a few different pattern styles for the trees and different shading styles. I used a few different comics and illustrators as influences (from both online and physical work) for the pattern style I wanted to use. Once I'd got a style I liked I then drew them up in A4 and put them into photoshop. Unfortunatly the pages didn't fit the 16:9 ratio I needed to I had to add extra line work to the original drawing in photoshop.

Further character design and colour testing

 
From my initial sketches I created a character using all the traits I thought worked best.  The top left image was the final outcome from that. I did a turn around of the character, which is standard practice for character design. This means when it comes to animating the character I don't have to spend time coming up how the character will look from a certain viewpoint. I also added a few basic emotions that I'd be using in the animation as this will help speed up the process when it comes to actually animating the character.
After designing the character I thought about how I wanted to colour him. Originally the colour scheme was going to be a standard vivid cartoon colour scheme, I tested a range of different colours and settled finally on the top right image.
During the weekend I attended thought bubble comic convention where I got to read and see a huge range of illustrative styles. A few artists used only black white and one other colour, I thought this could look really interesting for an animation so I went back to colour design and started testing again.
I first started with testing different shades of washed out versions of the primary colours, I then decided I would use green.I followed this by testing lots of different shades to find which would be the best one both for this character and all the other designs that would be featured in this animation.
I took the colours I'd created and asked a variety of people which they thought worked the best a large amount agreed that the third from the left worked thi

Story development

Once I'd finished mind mapping different ideas for the project I took one idea forward and developed it further. The original idea I had was quite elaborate and there was a lot going on within it. After getting some feedback on the project it was made clear to me that with the given time frame of the animation it needed to be simplified. Using this I reworked the initial treatment to make it fit better.

Secondary character design

After designing the main character I went on to design the secondary character. I first designed a dog, which I looked at many cartoon dogs and real ones for references. Learning how a dog sits and moves required a lot of references. I tried many different styles/dog types before I settled on the on which I felt fit this animation the best. I then applied the colour scheme of the animation my final dog design.

I then went on to design the mud monster, the character is in a smaller portion of the animation but is very important so it needed to be well designed. I didn't use as many references for this design in the past I had drawn many similar things and since its not a real life creature there were less rules I needed to conform to make it believable. Once I was happy with a design I went on to colour it. Since earth was the key theme of the animation I decided to make the mud monster the only thing that would deviated from the colour scheme. I tested a few different muddy shades, I wanted the colour to both fit the style of the whole piece but also makes sure it is obviously mud.

creating an animatic

Before this project I had never created an animatic before but I found it incredibly useful. It is hard to tell how the animation is actually going to look from the story board but the animatic gave me a much better overview. I put all my story boards into photoshop and gave them the initial timing I thought they should have. It all looked pretty good but there were a few scenes that didn't last quite long enough so I had to extended them and reduces other to make it work. This found that this is definitely a worth while process to do for a project.