January 2024 – production principles

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