Month: May 2024

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:

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

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.

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.

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!

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.