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)