T5, ANM230 – WEEK 4

Main Project:

During the week our team had a lengthy Skype meeting in order to get a better understanding of the visual style of the animation. This issue rose as many of the team members weren’t really sure of how Steve, our now appointed art director, was visualizing the animation. Most of the issues and concerns were raised and discussed thoroughly though, so at least the air was cleared with that.

The sequence of scenes has been finalised now, and although I initially though there would be a lot more scenes with the light characters, the scenes we do have will be relatively slow so that we don’t have an extremely short animation. Tim and I began work on a very rough colour script, although that will need to be further worked upon.

Mitch and I also produced a second round of light character concept art, with mine focusing on some of the designs that everyone in the class preferred. I also played around with different colours that could work together well, although I think Steve is leaning more towards just having a blue and white character. We decided upon one of Mitch’s light character designs.

 

Independent Research Project:

I’ve been looking at some tutorials on integrating 2D animation with live action, with the most in-depth tutorial focusing on 2D Photoshop animation. I’ve played with a bit of Photoshop animation in the past, but I’m pretty against using it for animation as it’s not animation-friendly. I think I’ll stick to what I know, and animate my character in Flash. Although motion-graphic animation could work, I’m thinking about using limited 2D hand-drawn computer animation.

I began to reconsider whether my character should be a monster or a human. A human could make it easier to interact with real world objects as I could get an actor to stand in for the animated character and thus remove the need for puppeteer work. That means I’ll basically be rotoscoping in a character over the live actor though, and not animating the character from scratch. While this isn’t bad, it does restrict the actions of the character to a degree.

On the other hand, a monster character could be more appealing and fun to work with as I wouldn’t have an actor standing in for the character in the footage. It might require some backplate cleanup and creative use of puppeteer work depending on what shot sequence I go with though. I think I’ll going to go ahead with a monster character, and at this point I’m leaning towards a little devil character. I did a more refined design of said character, which I named Nyles.

My shot sequences have also been narrowed down to my top three in order of preference:

A:

1. Character slides down the staircase bannister (moving shot)
2. They run amok in kitchen (making a mess/jumping around?)/scurry to the fridge
3. They open the fridge and grab an object (shot from inside the fridge?)

 

B:

1. Character is jumping around in bedroom
2. They slide down the staircase bannister (moving shot)
3. They land on a wheelie chair, then try pushing it forward while sitting on it

 

C:

1. Character is summoned into shot (how varies depending on monster)
2. They slide down the staircase bannister (moving shot)
3. They exit the house (open the front door and gate)

T5, ANM230 – WEEK 3

Main Project:

Everybody revised their project documentation so I only had to make minor adjustments before I began compiling the documentation. There are still some minor parts that need to be tweaked, but we still have a week before it’s due.

Mitch an I started working on character designs for the light characters. I tried to keep my characters looking fluid and elegant, looking at a lot of ballet videos and ballet poses to help pose my character concepts. I really like my first design as it conveys elegant movement with a really nice figure. Plus, the flame on it’s head would be really nice to animate as a 2D visual effect. I’m also quite fond of the texturing inside my fifth design, with the idea that the lines would appear to be rushing through the character, although that might be difficult to make visually appealing as the characters are probably going to be moving around relatively slowly and could contrast their actions.

 

Independent Research Project:

I’ve started to plan out some ideas for my shots that I’ll be using for this project, mainly considering using locations at my current house and area since I’ll likely need plenty of time to set up for shots by myself. I’ve mainly come up with ideas such as having my character getting ready for work, watching tv/planning video games, walking down the street, etc. as these won’t be too out of scope to animate, especially since I’ll be using a moving camera in at least one shot. I’ll have to keep coming up with ideas though.

I’ve played around with a few character designs and got caught up on designing a bunch of little monster characters. I think they could be really fun to animate and are basic enough in design to be achievable. I’ve also had a look at more human characters, although I’m not leaning towards them at the moment.

T5, ANM230 – WEEK 2

Main Project:

I’ve gone through all the uploaded project documentation and given feedback to everyone with things to fix up or consider since our project idea still hasn’t been finalized yet. Everyone’s documentation is on track though, so there aren’t any real concerns there.

We’ve also now decided on a director – Jacob, so I’ll be working closely with him from here on.

We came into class on Wednesday with a moodboard each in order to help us figure out what we like and want to strive for visually in our production, with a lot of us leaning towards dark blue backgrounds and light blue characters. I ended up going through a lot of Adult Swim ‘Off The Air’ videos, looking at some really surreal and trippy films and animations. I don’t think our animation will get that bizarre though.

After discussing the likes and dislikes of the moodboards we were all tasked with coming up with some concept art for either the characters or the environment. I came up with some rough 2D character designs since that’s my preference.

 

Independent Research Project:

I’ve done some research into how animated characters were composited into live action shots in films such as Who Framed Rodger Rabbit (1988), Space Jam (1996) and The SpongeBob Movie (2015), and it’s some pretty impressive stuff if you want to make it looks believable. The author of The Animator’s Survival Kit, Richard Williams, worked on the former, and stated that interaction was the key to making the toon characters believably exist in the real world. It was also interesting to see the mechanical structures and use of puppeteering that went into making real-world object move that would later be covered up by animated characters.

Although I would like to try out having a character interact with real-world objects, unfortunately I don’t have a strong background in mechanical engineering, so I’ll have to stick to simple puppeteering.

T5, ANM230 – Week 1

Main Project:

This week begins our main project for this trimester, which involves the whole class working towards producing an approximately 5 minute animation. We began work quite quickly, with myself being appointed producer, and therefore the scribe for brainstorming ideas.

Our team came up with a list of keywords, genres and culturally relevant topics that could influence our project, then came back to pitch a couple of ideas each to the class. Unfortunately, my ideas were slightly preachy and more narrative based, where our executive producer/facilitator was wanting us to lean a bit away from this. We’ve decided to follow an idea where a person begins daydreaming and escapes their dull reality, which is  a more creative and imaginative route to take instead.

As the producer, I was in charge of creating a Slack group, Google Drive folder system and Asana project. These will be used by the team to communicate, store project files and assign tasks to be completed. I also had to assign team members to parts of project documentation to complete. At the moment we can only produce drafts for some parts of the documentation, since documents such as the Synopsis and Project Overview rely on our idea being solidified, and we still need to decide how we want our animation to unfold.

 

Independent Research Project:

For this project, I’ve decided to learn how to compose 2D characters into live action shots. To do this, I should probably start with composing a 2D character into a still shot first to get a feel for it, before trying to go to the next level to a moving shot.

Some of the things I’ll need to keep in mind are:

• Colour correction
• Lighting on the character
• Shadows on the character
• Shadows from the character
• Overlapping objects
• Interaction with real-world objects
• Animating 2D characters to moving camera angles and/or shots

I’m sure this will be an interesting, practical and potentially complex project to complete.