Some insight into our group project ~

So, last time I posted, I promised I'd talk today about our group project about The Sea, in my next post, so here it is I guess :3

I covered a little about what the project entails in my "The Sea Project: An Introduction" Post, so for anyone that missed that post, I'd suggest taking a look at it now, so you can get a general overview of what we're up to with this project.

Since writing this post, we have done an awful lot of planning and liasoning with our mentor for this project, Kathy. From the chosen storyboard that we created combining all our idea's, in the last post. My team mate Beverly drew up all designs digitally and passed them onto Katie, another member of our team. Katie then worked with these to construct the animatic, allowing us all to have a better understanding of the timing we were going to be working to.

The completed animatic can be seen below  -



We still may be adding some tweaks to the beginning and end, in particular a small plot twist, which I won't talk too much about, at least not before it's finished ^_^

Seeing as a lot of people were going to be taking a more literal and serious stance to this project, we decided to go for more of a foolhardy, comedic take on it.  The style we've chosen for the project is, for the interview shown at the start and end of the animatic, a Waltz with Bashir cutout style animation, and for his 'flashback', a very cartoony 'chibi' like style. The backgrounds will be handled by our team mate Georg who will be working in Maya to produce a semi-realistic ocean and building for the interview to take place in, for us.

To make things easier for us, for the interview Beverly has drawn the symbols and I will be animating these, we chose to do it this way to keep this part of the film as consistent as possible, the flashbacks however are something we will need to work hard on to keep the consistency and style similar between all of us.





We've had several meetings to try and practice the style to get it as consistent as possible.






At the end of the day, there will probably be a small amount of noticeable change between our styles, but we'll try and work to minimise this as much as possible.

We're pretty much all set to start production now, It's taken us a while to iron out changes in the animatic and to come up with a consistent style and backgrounds but now, all there is left to do is start work on it.

Our production log is below, detailing who has which part on the project and showing how much has been completed so far :3

I'll be updating more on this project in future blog posts, but here's how much we've got so far at least c:

~Char

Urashima Taro and other updates :3

It's been a little while since I updated, so I figured I'd come with some news of things I've been working on lately :3

This past week or so, I've been quite involved with a second year project, by the name of Urashima Taro, their deadline was yesterday and I was approached by one of my friends working on the group to do some cleanup animation for the project, as they were putting a heavy load of 2D animation on just one person in their group.

So anyways, I've spent the last 8 days working to a tight schedule in order to get this stuff done for the group, It's been quite an enjoyable experience actually :D Their team leader is very good at being specific on what he wants you to animate and it was nice to be given updates on the film and see it progress :D Plus, I've found that it's pretty nice to be able to push myself with the 2D animation and I feel I have learned a lot more about flash after working on it. (Alpha shading in particular)

Below is the team 'activity log' showing the progress on the film and who worked on each part, this logging idea is something I've transferred into the sea project, which I'll talk about at a later date.

My job was mainly 'cleanup' animation, the majority of animation I did was animating the hair on the main character 'Urashima', but I also worked on some extra animation, in places that lacked it and on inbetweening some other parts.

I compiled a short video of the shots I worked on, seeing as this work isn't going towards a project of any kind, like it is for the 2nd years, it's nice to get work that I've done up on my blog :3 seeing as the blog gets marked, so yeah, this could be helpful :D

Below is this video, I explained what I did for each scene marked and included 'before' and 'after' shots of it.



There's quite a few things I would've added and improved if I had more time, such as animating the silhouetted woman in 1's not 2's and also adding shading to the tilt hat scene, but alas, it's already been handed in for them and I have my own projects to be worrying about now xD

As soon as this project gets put up on youtube officially (it's unlisted now and not complete) I'll probably link it in a new post :D This could be anywhere between a week and a month though, as the guy editing it is putting it on his 'professional' channel and wants to perfect it to the best of his ability, for obvious reasons :D

 I promise I'll talk about the Sea group project real soon! I know I've been putting off saying much about it, but I shall write up a really big post about it soon c: We're just heading into proper production on that right now, after spending a long time planning shots, re-working our animatic, sorting out styles and influences and meeting up twice a week to discuss how we're gonna approach it, we've finally got it to a standard we're happy with :D

So yes, farewell for a little while :3
I'll post some more information about my other projects tomorrow or possibly Monday, I have a lot to talk about and some pretty exciting idea's I'm wanting to share!

Until next time,
~Char

Experimental Animation - A Production Report

So, the past couple of weeks, I've been working on my experimental animation project, due at 12pm today (It's currently 3am here).

This project involved making an animation timed to one of 6 sound clips given to us. Our rules for this work were only, that it had to be done without the aid of a computer (other than post production) and that it had to be imaginative, in terms of technique. (My final piece is below)



I began by experimenting using lots of different techniques, some of these were Pixilation, Plastercine, Drawing with pastels, moving objects and using a whiteboard. I made 5 or  6 second test animations with all of these techniques and really enjoyed trying out all of these new ways of animating, but I needed to choose one that I really, really enjoyed, for my final piece, as I was going to be animating about 40 seconds of it, and didn't want to get bored with it.

During A Levels, I got given a lot of plastercine by the art department. In my first few years of College I attended a small stop-motion animation club, which sadly ended when the teacher running it moved departments, they had little use for all this plastercine, so my A level art teacher gave it to me a few years later, knowing I intended to go into the field of Animation. I really enjoyed all of the techniques I tried but I felt plastercine was my favorite out of all of them, mostly because how easy it is to deform and play around with - I felt I could make my animation seem more fluid and free that way. :3

I started planning on paper, coming up with ideas, whilst listening to my chosen track (a 40 second piece named Ruta and Daita which I chose due to the obvious beats in it, that I could use to time the animation efficiently) and jotted down some small storyboard-like frames. Once I was happy with my idea, I made a Dope sheet, deciding how many frames I would need for each part of the sequence and deciding what would be going on in said parts. When practicing with the plastercine, during my trial animations I loved how smooth some of the dot parts of the animation turned out, and I really liked the idea of using dots in this animation, to help with the timing of the beats in the song.

I had quite a surplus of blue plastercine and decided, unlike my practice animation, I was going to do this animation inverted, using a glass panel covered in blue plactercine and animating by using a craft knife to cut out shapes, revealing the glass below. I set up a makeshift line tester, using a jam box with a rectangle and a square cut out of it. I attached this to the shelf on my room-mates desk and weighed the back down with a heavy book. When the camera was on, the lense would pop through the square, allowing me to animate underneath it, on the plastercine, without need for a tripod. I chose to use a powerful desk lamp to keep the light consistent, seeing as I was to be animating this piece over several days and didn't want it to give the appearance of flickering. 
A picture of my final setup is below.

When animating this, I tried to stick closely to the dope sheet (especially at the zigzag line parts, as this was essential for my piece to work properly) Capturing this project took me 3 evenings to do, I really enjoyed working with the plastercine even though I found it a little bit fiddly (especially with the 'flute' spikes in the music, that were very difficult to animate and work in time with, and quite fiddly to cut out).

For the most part, the animation comprises of different sized circles, being used to portray the beats in the music, the spikes along the bottom (kind of symbolizing audio spikes in recordings) were used for the 'flute' sound in this music, and finally, the zig zag lines were used for the 'coohing' sounds made. One of the things I found particularly difficult about this project was the timing of the zig zags, I wanted them to be played at a higher frame rate than the spikes and the circles (which were following a beat) so my task was trying to keep the circles to the beat, whilst allowing myself to speed up the movement of the lines. This ended with me animating one circle for every 3 frames of the line and although it may have worked in some ways, I feel it didn't work as well as it could've or as well as I'd have liked it to.

Once I had taken all of the photos I needed for the film, I imported them into vegas where I pieced them together in time to the music (of as best as I could in time...the zigzag scenes sometimes show opposite) The only real editing I did to this scene other than that was to flip the video (like a normal line tester would do, so that your work is the right way up) and to zoom in a little bit, so less of the table was showing, something that I couldn't do during the production due to the height of the shelf.

The things I like most about this project was how free the plastercine looks and the timing of the circle scene. Some things I think should be improved on is the steadiness of the camera (due to me taking it in several shots and having to re-position the camera, it does seem a little shakey in parts) and  the tidyness of the piece itself, plastercine is quite rough around the edges and I think I could've worked harder to ensure that it didn't look so rough.

Overall  I am moderately pleased with the final outcome, although it wasn't what I was expecting from it. I really enjoyed this project, trying out new techniques and working with different forms of animation and feel it has helped me a lot when studying movement and learning how to match it to music. 

-Char

Love of Loss, End of Easter and the Art of Walk Cycles

One of the best things about being on a degree course like this it that I'm constantly learning new things, whether I'm learning them from good things - Like lectures or tutorials, or bad things like the fact that my computer deleted half of the work I did over Easter. :I

......so yup, at the beginning of Easter,I learned to save often, when I lost close to 4 hours of flash work on my MAP....and now I've learned to back up...which should've been obvious to me, but I'd only had the files about a week, so it completely crossed my mind, that and the fact that I lost the files whilst organizing my PC into folders for first year (to make it easier to locate work for my new show reel/website) ...so I thought I was doing the right thing .__.

Either way, I've found out that the problem was the fragmentation on my computer (caused by transferring about 800gb's of fraps footage across hard drives), and luckily the only things lost were raw flash and SAI files of work I'd completed....not including my group work that was uncomplete, but I have AVI's of the unfinished work, so I have proof I've done it...I just need to re-do it, so I can add in backgrounds and colour it and stuff.....which really sucks, but I've learned my lesson :3 Hopefully it won't happen again xD

....On a more happier note however :D We are now back from Easter, which means no more working only from home :3 One of our tasks over the holidays was to animate a simple walk cycle for a character of our choice, I used Adventure Time's Marceline for this and animated her walking in Flash.

Below is the final animation

 

I got to this point by asking for feedback from a friend who had graduated in Animation a few years ago and I fixed it up based on the tips he gave me (such as in my original, there was some boiling on the back arm and on the front arm there was an occasional wiggle when it came back)

Unfortunately this file was one of those that I lost when my hard drive went wrong, but I still have all the final files in video format, I just can't add the paralaxing I was going to practice on in the background now, but it's all good, I'm just glad I had the .avi files and didn't loose it completely :3

In other updates, I've spent the last few days working on experimental animation, so you'll get to see this real soon, it's due on Friday :3

That's all from me for now ~
I'll update you all with progress on my group project work at some point, when I've re-done it and have a decent amount of work to show c:

-Char

MAP updates, easter break, deadlines and moree ~

Time for another update, because it has been a while c:
It's been Easter break which means I've had no lectures and a lot of time on my hands for experimenting and practicing with animation techniques :3

First off, the MAP I talked about in my personal projects post was finished last week and everyone got their parts in this time, so it turned out awesome :D The person hosting it had real trouble getting the parts in for a few people, so the original animation crew got switched around quite a bit o: but I'm glad to see it complete c:



At the beginning of Easter, after playing around with experimental animation quite a bit, I decided to take a break from that and join another MAP, so I could improve my skills in flash. I had a lot of motivation for this project due to the fact that the MAP was based around one of my favourite songs and I was having a super productive week :D

My part was 11 seconds long and took me almost 60 hours to animate...proof that I need to practice speeding up the process a bit....and saving more often, after Flash crashed and I lost close to 4 hours of work xD but I'm really, really pleased with the outcome, probably one of my best animations to date and definitely one of the pieces I will be putting on my end of year showreel.
But yee, here it is

 

Once again of my dragon character Saffie, I payed quite a lot of attention to how the hair moved when she stopped, one of the things we were told recently in motion studies about hair/fur/clothing always following a few seconds after any major movement. I also looked at references of birds landing/hovering to find out how I should be animating the wings :3 Probably the first mini animation I've been able to focus my full attention to :D another reason easter holidays are great ^_^
There is still plenty I could find to improve this one, but for now and for a MAP at least, I'm quite happy with the finished piece c:

The Saga of Rex production blog that Michel Gagne is posting his progress in, has also proved quite useful lately, I've learned a new inbetweening technique which I will probably try out in the next MAP I join, or the next animation I do :D The blog has been a really great insight into the production of 2D animations and I'm really enjoying reading updates from it.

Another thing I've been able to do with the extra time is some more model making, I used to do this quite a lot, but haven't found much time since being at university, so I took a day out of my group project schedule to model the character Discord from the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series.

Basically this fellow here :3 I'm looking forward to the stop motion workshop I'll be doing once back too, and I guess modeling things is good practice for more hands-on forms of animation! I'm kinda trying to keep my fingers in all pies right now and not rule out any form of animation, I can't really think of a type of animation I don't enjoy doing, so until I've practiced a bit more, I don't want to narrow down and choose one to specialize in for next year c:

I took a few photos of the process I went through to finish this model, photos below :D

I started off by making the skeleton for the character, I used galvanized wire for the main frame and then thin florists wire to twist parts of the skeleton together, strengthen the overall thing and give the clay more grip for when I was coating it.

I began covering and getting the main shape of the character, covering up all the wire, but not adding too much detail this far, I used Fimo polymer clay for this as it is easy to use, doesn't require a kiln and bakes to become hard and plastic like. Plus, it is much, much less messy than clay!

I then worked on adding more details to the character, including claws, the tongue, beard, eyes, ears and hair. After doing this, I inserted two extra pieces of galvanised wire behind his shoulders, to allow for me to build wings on.

I baked him for the first time, meaning these pieces of metal stayed in place and then began adding extra details to him such as the horns and both sets of wings.

Once I had finished and was happy with all of the details, I cooked him for a second time, hardening up all of the details and allowing me to paint him.

I used acrylic paint to paint him, the only disadvantage I've really found with Fimo is that sometimes it is very difficult to get the paint to stick to it, so I have to use it quite generously, but other than that I'm pretty pleased with the finished project ^_^

The rest of the holidays have been dedicated to my motion studies and group project :3 I'll have some more stuff to put up about that at some point or another :D  Including a walk cycle and a lipsync animation c:

But yushhh, Until next time ^_^
~ Char

Experimental Animation

We've had a project for a few weeks based on experimental animation :3 We don't have much of a brief for this project other than, 1. we have to animate to one of six, 40 second sound clips and 2. We cannot use a computer other than for post production purposes oh and 3. It has to actually be animated of course c:

We've been told to conduct experiments into different types of animation before actually animating the 40 seconds, so this is what I've been doing the last few days c: 

So anyways, what a cool project :D I've been having a whale of a time just experimenting with whatever I have lying around the place c: My digital camera is such a battery gobbler though >.< I've gone through like £6 worth of batteries and only done a few experiments so far ^-^; Should probably invest in some rechargeable ones or something 'cause I'm pretty sure the environment hates me right now...

BUT ANYWAYS ~

I started off in a small group, experimenting with a style of animation called Pixilation, this is, in basic terms, stop motion animation but using humans instead of puppets. Norman Mclaren's animation 'Neighbours' was a very popular example of this form of animation.
 I worked with a few others in my animation group to practice with pixilation animation and we came out with the two animations below.



and

 
 
This was actually SO much fun to do xDD I really, really enjoyed it, especially the table race :3 I think they both came out really well ^-^ and small animations done with a group of friends? what isn't to love? :D

okay, then I went home and practiced with some stuff around the flat :3 I bought a mini octopus tripod so I could set up wherever I wanted and have a stable workspace. I started out using plactercine and just playing about with shapes and ripples and such with that. Plastercine was something I really enjoyed working with ^_^ But I think a few more frames for this animation could've benefited it a lot, especially at the beginning. That and I found it really difficult to get my camera to be consistent, sometimes it'd flash, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it was out of focus and other times the frames were crisp and clear. I think if I do choose to work in plastercine as my final Experimental medium, I'll need to work on my camera a bit >.< But for a first try, I guess it wasn't bad c: 




My second, I used mostly myself and a ring I tend to wear. I experimented with pastel pens and giving the illusion that my ring was drawing :3 There's a slight jump in it unfortunately because my camera ran out of batteries half way though and I had to replace them, taking the camera off the tripod and changing the frame a bit D: I'm still pretty pleased with this though, and would love to work on a similar technique soon, when I have batteries xD



and finally, my latest one :D I bought a cheap whiteboard and messed around with morphing animation using it c: I actually really enjoyed this, but it ended up being quite painful on my wrist, seeing as the only way I could find to photograph it properly was when it was on a vertical surface :3 I think it'd be nice to use this as my final experimental animation, but I'd like to find a way to have it on a desk or something (similar to a line tester) if I was to animate 40 seconds worth of animation in this technique :3




But yes, that's pretty much all I had to say so far c: Ima continue experimenting with different techniques ^_^ One thing I'd quite like to try again would be animation using seeds and lentils, during A level art I had to do a project advertising a healthy fast food company and did it using lentils and such on a lightbox. Unfortunately though, this lightbox was A5 in size, so was difficult to work with and I had no idea what I was doing editing wise, so it isn't at a particular frame per second 'cause I imported everything at once an painstakingly resized every frame itself instead of importing frame selection >.< So yeah, a bit jumpy, but it was a pretty fun project c:



Interestingly, I'm still using the same camera for my current experimental stuff xD Hopefully the editing will be much better now I've learned how to do time saving stuffs though x__x

Oh and finally, just as a teeny update, even though it's not relevant to Experimental Animation c: I've been practicing with digital painting a bit more, and painted my cat this morning c:

I'm not such a fan of backgrounds yet though, so I did leave that a little plain >.< but yeshh, I worked from this picture

I'm quite pleased with it c: But I can see quite a few places where improvement can be made on it c: Especially on the front paws and the back :3 But ima leave it for now and get on with other things, like my group project and experimental ^_^

but yush, this is all for now :D I'll post some of my test shots for the Sea project at some point c: I'm currently working out the best ways to get them done in flash, because Flicker/Animation Boiling is driving me crazy right now :3 But I guess this is part of the learning process ^-^

Until next timeeee 

Working with Emotion

As usual with our Motion Studies sessions, we were given a task at the end of the week/two weeks, using LAV tests to portray something in our choice of either 3D or 2D animation. I decided to use 3D this week as I want to alternate between the two.

We got feedback for all of our first semester work last week too, so I'll talk about that a little here as well c:

Anyways, our task for this week was to animate a shot of a character changing emotions, we were told to exaggerate this by putting them at different ends of the spectrum (eg. Happy to Sad or Grumpy to Excited). We were told to perform this in person and film LAV tests to work from. Our whole class went through a 6 hour acting workshop a few weeks ago to help us with LAV tests and the performance we portray in our work. This workshop was actually really fun and ended with the whole class doing a half an hour improv bench scene :3 It really helped me a lot with a sense of exaggeration when it comes to walk cycles and character, ect c:

 

Above is my LAV test, I chose to go from sad, to happy, acting as though I'd spotted someone and was happy to see them. I think I still need to work on my acting quite a bit, because this is rather cheesy xD but it helped me with what I needed it to help me with c:

 

and below is my final animation ^-^ I used the Eleven rig for this once again. I don't think I did too badly, but I think more movement in her body would've been helpful and I feel that her movement, especially in the shoulders was rather robotic at times. I think loosening up my animation, especially in 3D is something I need to work on a lot. I plan to do at least half an hour of CG animation a day and I have purchased a set of col-erase, non-photo blue pencils from Ebay (like the ones we were given at the start of the year, but I ran out) as I feel my animation is a lot looser and free in 2D when using these to start out my animations. (Interestingly it's the same in flash o-o If I begin with a light blue sketch animation, when it comes to cleaning everything up, my animation seems a lot more loose and free).
 

So yeah o: My second motion studies animation c: I'm actually really enjoying this unit and working more from observation and hopefully this unit will be another thing that will help me improve my human anatomy/animation skills as I know this is something I need to work on quite a bit. We have another motion studies session tonight, so no doubt, we'll be given another task to work with.

 

On another note, we got our feedback for all first semester work last week ^_^ My main points were that I need to work on timing, and when working with tests, I need to stop trying to tell stories and focus more on the animation c: Luckily I passed all units in first semester, so I won't need to retake anything thus far, which is good news :D But yeah, I will work on my timing and hopefully be able to improve on all points made by the end of this semester c:

also, the Iris map is on 29/30 parts now, so one more part and it'll be completed and I can put it up :D Exciting stuff c: and I also have some experimental animation and some tests for the sea project to upload at some point ^-^

 

But yes, until next time ~

 

 

Personal Projects :3

I thought I'd update everyone on some of the personal projects I was working on and have been speaking about in previous blog posts but never actually put up xD

The Iris Multi Animator Project, which I talked about in my Moar Updatesssss post is done now, or at least the deadline was extended to March the 1st and there's still 3 parts missing, so the final animation isn't up yet unfortunately, but I'll make sure I post it here as soon it gets put up c:

My part is hereee



I decided to try and experiment with camera angles to make it more interesting and I really can't wait to see this whole thing done >w< I've seen some of the other parts people have posted and It's looking awesome :D I'd have liked to add some more shadows and stuff to it, seeing as the scene is back lit, long stretching shadows in front of her, onto the grass would've been nice. But with Uni deadlines and the MAP itself having a deadline, I couldn't really afford to put that time into it, when my degree matters a lot more. The back leg on the last frame is also bothering me xD but ima stop nitpicking this and leave it now. I actually really enjoyed experimenting with the camera angles as I think it makes the scene a lot more interesting and it's just nice to bring Saffie to life in this way, as she's something I've only really drawn on paper until recently.

I also decided to practice on some digital painting techniques. I got some feedback from some artists on Deviantart who told me that I need to work on my light sources and the expressions/emotion in my characters, as they felt my artwork was very bland. I took this advice and put it upon myself to do a picture every day for a week, to the lyrics of the song 'paper tigers' by Owl City. I wanted to work on both the feedback I had been given by them and also improve on my digital painting techniques. Trying to speed up the process, as it takes me hours upon hours currently to do one painting and I need to become more efficient when drawing and colouring for animation :3

With my first few drawings, I concentrated mainly on the lightsource. Giving all of these pieces quite a strong light source to work from :3 I used my character Saffie again for this (I should probably get practicing drawing humans again soon >.<)

 In this one, the light source was the fire, so blended lots of yellows into it, I wanted the style of painting to be quite soft, so I drew my line art in brown instead of black so that it wasn't so harsh against the colouring. I chose to do the background without using lines, to keep with the soft feel of it.

 Once again, another strong light source, this one from above. I think maybe I should've put a bit more shading underneath Saffie, in relation to the light source from above.

 I wanted to focus mainly on the emotion of this piece, so I left the background out of this. I also had a light source, in the form of a small candle.

 My final two lyrics pictures were both done without a specific light source, I'm no so fond of these ones, mostly because it was difficult to find where to put shadows in a diffused light space.

Before finishing the last one, I put some of the pieces together with the song I was working on, maybe at some point I'll have drawn out all of the lyrics, hey, it'd be good practice c: but I don't have any plans to work on it again until the summer 'cause other commitments ^-^

 

 But yushh owo Here is another update from me c: I have some more uni-related stuff to put up soon, but I thought I'd update with personal stuff first :3 I've been practicing drawing humans on a daily basis too, sketching daily to try and better learn human anatomy as it is something I struggle with >.< (quadrupeds y u so much easier to draw? xD)

But yess, until next timeeee ~

The Sea Project: An Introduction

With the new semester, we have started a new project, this time working in groups. Our task in groups is to all plan an animate one of 11 rescue interviews, recorded by a journalism student at our university. Each of these interviews is around 40 -60 seconds in length and explains rescue experiences whilst surfing.

I grouped up with the team I did Cinematography with (Katie, Beverly and Georgi) although unfortunately Chris was removed from this course, so we're one man down (he was going to be our 2D effects artist, so we'll have to make do without him)

Our group was given interview #5 and can be found below. We have around a month and a half for this project and it will be something we have to work on over easter. Our group has been meeting up twice a week to plan and come up with ideas for this, from conceptualisation to the final piece eventually. We are also working closely with our lecturer Kathy to ensure we are taking all the neccisary production steps. I think it'd be interesting to see how we function in a group when animation is involved and how we'll handle our roles and putting our ideas together to make a final piece. 

Week 1 -

Week 1 we spent mostly talking about possible idea's for our project. We talked about the style of the characters, possible programs we could use for the project along with other things, like possible shots. We decided to go away and each storyboard our visualisation for the project, roughly. Each frame on an A6 piece of paper. Our plan was to then, look at all our ideas together and decide which ones would work well together, trying to incorperate all of our plans into it somewhere.

Week 2 -

We met up once again at the library beanbag area and bluetacked all of our storyboard layouts to the walls. We looked at all of these and discussed which would work well together and which weren't so likely to work.

Above is the wall with all of our storyboards on (with gaps for the ones we chose). We layed out our chosen pieces on another wall and once we had all agreed on this, we gave them to Beverly to put them in our chosen style, in the form of a complete storyboard.

So far the project seems to be going alright. All of us will be conducting tests now, to see what works and what does not in terms of animation. From our discussions so far, the most likely course of action will be that our final piece will be a combination of frame by frame 2D in flash with CGI water and waves. You'll probably be seeing some tests from me soon :3

Also, whilst on the subject of the sea. For motion studies we were all given an assignment to animate The Sea using whatever medium we wished. Below is mine, animated using the water tool in Paint Tool Sai, done on different layers and then all saved seperately and pieced together in Sony Vegas.