production principles – Just another myblog.arts site

Lip Synch

To start off with this project, we first had to choose an audio to be able to animate a lip synch to, preferably something where the words are spoken clearly. I had two audios that I liked:

Voice lines between the characters Pathfinder and Lifeline, from the game Apex Legends.

A TikTok video I found a while before this project that I thought was really funny.

I decided to go with the second video, as I felt like it could provide a better narrative.

mood board for ideas and aesthetic choices/inspiration.

My initial storyboard felt a little bit long for 15 seconds, but I still wanted to create an animation along the lines of this narrative of these two animals being terrified of this harmless young girl in a wolf costume. It was a bit difficult to make sure the storyboard is not too long, so I made an animatic to be able to look at the timing better.

Storyboard animatic

I also made a birds eye view of the animatic to establish the placement of characters and the camera, and to start planning for the backgrounds.

Birds eye view animatic

At this stage, I was ready to start designing my characters, although I was having trouble figuring out a style for them, my tutor recommended that I look at real images of animals and simplify their features and proportions into shapes, and work from there. This helped a lot, especially when creating my dog character, which is based off a bloodhound, and they have lots of little details and lots of skin folds which could be hard to animate.

For the cat and the dog, I really wanted to push the contrast between them, the most obvious being the species of animals, and down to the colours and clothing of the characters. For example, the dog is wearing shorts and the cat is wearing a coat, and the cats main colour of clothing is purple while the dogs main colour of clothing is green.

For the human character, I chose to make her cute using rounder shapes and soft colours. After this, I was ready to start doing backgrounds.

Before starting our own backgrounds, we had some practice in class with shading pre-drawn art to understand texture, mood and lighting. I think its okay, but I could’ve definitely pushed the shadows a little further and darker for greater depth.

I really enjoyed making these backgrounds and I am very happy with how they look!

Since the backgrounds had lots of unique colours, I wanted to have the characters really fit into that colour scheme so I put the original colours under some blending modes and I ended up with these palette that I think suit the mood very well.

This was the final part of preparation for the animation, which was the mouth shapes for the characters and the lip synch charts. these are super important for me to reference back to while I’m animating. This is all the pre production complete for this project.

This is all my keyframes complete, animating on toon boom harmony pro.

My completed in-betweens.

This is the completed version of the animation! I coloured it all on toon boom and then exported the animation of the characters only as a PNG sequence, and composited it all on adobe after effects, by putting in the backgrounds, and adding some soft lighting on the characters. I really like how this animation came out, however I do wish that I had the time to add the fur patterns of the characters in, because they do feel a little bit flat. I also wish that I spent more time figuring out adobe after effects, and played with the ambient lighting a lot more. I do also think that if I could change it now, I would have re done the dogs running, as I think it looks a little off, and maybe make some of the keyframe poses a little more extreme in some points. This was overall a very fun project to do, and I enjoyed the whole process of it!

Monochrome

We started off this project by cutting up various images of news prints, and then categorised them with various words.

Our next task was to try to create a narrative with 5 selected images.

My first test was using various pencil rubbings of different textures of objects and photographing them in stop motion studio while looking for the various patterns I created from it.

Another film done on stop motion studio, but looking at repeating shapes inside my house.

A character-based test animation to experiment with movement as this is my first time trying traditional animation and I wanted to start off trying something I’m familiar with before moving on to more experimental things.

Class activity where we made wacky and weird phrases using words in newspapers. we then wrote paragraphs using those words under a time limit without stopping to think.

In this test, I was experimenting with manipulation of objects. I am still unsure of what I want to do for this project and in what direction I want to go in.

I went to the Hayward gallery, and I was really inspired by this specific sculpture and I feel like this fits under the theme ‘Monochrome’.

I took a walk with my sketchbook to help generate some ideas for my animation, and I drew whatever was in my environment and tried to create some sort of story for my walk.

We went on a small trip with the class to with the topic of psychogeography in mind. I really liked the idea of psychogeography and I wanted to include it for the rest of my project and my final piece.

My final two tests were a bit more character based, and the theme was to make something ugly, however I ended up really liking this character I created so I made a few tests based off it.

My final piece revolves around this character and its point of view of its environment, using psychogeography ideas from the class walk we had. I wanted the visuals of the environment to somewhat mimic the surroundings of the walk, but not exactly replicate it, so its more of the feeling of the walk than the walk itself.

Out Of Your Head – collaborative project

Group members: Akilah Fahad, Safia Choukah, Alfie Dennehy Vazquez, Amelia Fell, Ian Lu

For our collaborative project, we got into a group of 5 and started brainstorming and coming up with quickfire ideas for a 20 second animation using the words we chose from the word bubble provided to us: greed, decay, forget, awaken, commotion, silence.

We decided to go for a bittersweet and sad story where the main character is a doll who is chipped and broken, and she tries to put herself back together but ultimately fails. We then came up with a logline together as a group to solidify our idea of our animation- Broken and forgotten, a small doll awakens after years of loneliness in an attic and desperately tries to put her fractured self back together, accompanied only by her memories of a better time. Our next task was to start coming up with some designs for the doll, and I created a detailed design for our main character based on all of our brainstorming.

My groupmates liked the design, however this design had far too much detail to animate easily, so I simplified it a lot more.

My group members seemed to like the simplified design, so we all started drawing the doll in our own styles to see what would be the ideal way to draw her, and what parts of the doll we should keep into consideration when drawing her and what rules to stick to.

Next, we started coming up with a storyboard for the animation, and we each made our own, and then compared each others storyboards and pointed out what we liked from each version and compiled it into a video so we could see how well it would play out.

After making a really brief draft of the story using everyone’s storyboards, Amelia and Saf made a second draft of the animation.

second storyboard draft

After this, Saf and I made a cleaner animatic of the storyboard and put it together, and this would be used as a reference for the animation. I had done the first 10 seconds of the animatic.

animatic and final draft

Before we started animating, we had to choose the colour palette for our doll, so I played around with a few different colour combinations for our doll. We all agreed to use the first colour scheme, but a little less bright.

We also had to come up with a design for the doll’s owner, which Amelia took charge of. She also made us a range of colour palettes to choose from, and we all liked the colour scheme labelled ‘1’.

Then, Amelia gave us a few variations of that colour palette but in different ways, and we chose the variation labelled ‘3’.

alternate colouring for the doll’s owner

From this point, we assigned different parts of the animation between all of our group members, and we will all be using toon boom for animating.

Alfie: sound effects, backgrounds, title screen, and post production.

Ian: music and first quarter of animation – doll waking up, looking around in confusion and spotting her arm.

Me: second quarter of animation – approaching the arm, and reaching out to it, and attempting to attach the arm.

Amelia: third quarter of animation – flashback of the doll’s owner crying and gluing her broken arm back on.

Saf: fourth quarter of animation – loop in the credits where she is trying to put her arm back on but it keeps falling off.

All of us had a sightly different way of working, but I had started off with a sketch, to rough out the shapes and establish the shots and composition, then did cleaner lineart using a vector brush. Once the lineart was complete, I bucket filled the colours of the doll with the colour pallet we collectively agreed with on a vector layer. I had finished my section of the animation pretty early on, so I offered to do some of Ian’s assigned section of the animation as they seemed to be struggling with the workload. Amelia, Alfie and Saf had finished their assigned parts of the animation (and in amazing quality!), and we started compiling each animated clip together. Unfortunately, Ian failed to provide us with any of his section of the animation, and as the submission date was getting near, Saf volunteered to do Ian’s share of the animation as well as their own. Once the clips were all together, and edited slightly on premiere pro, we started adding the music and cropping parts of the song so that it would fit with the animation.

Ian had told us that he had previously composed this piece of music when we were still coming up for the plot of the doll, and we thought this would be a great, however much later we had found that he did not create this piece, and it is actually a piece from a royalty free music site. The name of the piece is called “Comfortable Mystery” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to create a new piece from scratch as it was too close to the the submission time, but we spoke to Ben about it and he allowed us to use the piece for our project. Lastly, Alfie had then added the final touches to the animation, and the title and credits. We are all very happy with how the animation came out, and I like that we were able to indicate such a clear narrative/story in such a short animation. 😀

the final piece for the out of your head project

the section that I animated (not sure why the quality is so low)

Stop Motion – Rotation

WEEK 5

For this rotation, we were taught the basics of stop motion animation and how to use dragonframe. We started off by doing an animation in a large group where we all selected a random paper shape each, and then we had to create an animation where we would make a transition from the previous persons shape into the one that we chose. I cannot find our groups animation, but I have all the pieces that I used in the animation – the previous person had a square, which I then transitioned into a circle. I made it as though the square sinks into the ground, and then rises from the ground as a circle.

the pieces that I used for my animation.

WEEK 6

For the next activity, we were shown a series of sounds and made markings onto paper from how the sounds made us feel. I really liked the first page of markings that I did.

sketches of the impressions that different sounds gave me

We then got into small groups of 3 to create a short stop motion animation of our sound of choice (4 sounds provided to choose from), using dragonframe and any materials of our choice. We started off by sketching out a storyboard of what we could do for our animation.

After we made decision on what to do for the animation, we collected materials and cut out the shapes for it. We chose a café/restaurant sounding audio, so we cut up lots of newspaper into speech bubbles as though they are lots of layered conversation in this area. After we were finished, we started shooting for the animation.

process pictures of the animation in the studio

I quite enjoyed shooting this piece, and I like the contrast and variety of textures, colours and shapes and I think it represents the audio really well.

the final piece of our stop motion.

Storyboarding – Rotation

WEEK 3

During our first week in storyboarding, we were shown some examples of storyboards and how to create a successful and cohesive story using angles, character designs, and composition.

We also did a few very short and quick observational sketches, where we watched a movie and paused it in a few random spots and drew what we saw using an understanding of values and contours of the scenes. these would be for about 5 minutes per drawing.

Another activity we did in this rotation was we drew our classroom without taking our pencil off the paper, and I decided to do a panorama styled drawing of the class.

WEEK 4

We went to Tate Modern to do some observational sketches of people and artworks, and tried to get many different angles of the people there.

While still in Tate Modern and in the area around, we did more observational sketches but keeping in mind everything we learned in our first week of this rotation, such as composition and what different angles could mean.

storyboard-like panels – observational drawings

I then developed one of the drawings from these 3 sketches into a short 3 panel storyboard.

The last activity we did in this rotation was a 20-60 panel storyboard, of two characters having a conflict, using all the information we learned from the previous classes. I designed my two characters, a father and his daughter in the setting of a café for the daughters birthday, but they get sent into a creepy magical forest and get chased by monsters. I tried to focus on very intense and dynamic angles to tell the story a lot more, and I really like how it turned out, I think this was my favourite piece in this rotation. I love my characters and I’d like to animate this storyboard at some point. 🙂

2D motion graphics – Rotation

WEEK 1

We were taught the basics of after effects, with creating shapes and learning how to transform them with movement, squash and stretch, while also learning about easing.

easing

arcs

squash and stretch

WEEK 2

Using these techniques we learned from week 1, we created a 5 second abstract animation of a self portrait. We started off by sketching some designs for the portrait by using only simple shapes and tried to keep it to around 3 shapes maximum, and making sure we used the ideas of how shapes can represent a characters personality.

I then translated the design to adobe after effects and played with proportions and colours, and then started figuring out how I wanted the shapes to move. I decided to have the shapes topple over, and have them all be different materials to show the different skills we learned previously, keeping in mind how gravity would affect the objects.

After I had established the movement of the shapes, I used certain blending modes to create interesting effects for the animation, and added a paper boil animation for the background of the animation.

final piece for this rotation