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