Our final outcome was a success – we stayed very late in the uni on Friday night despite the extension which allowed us to really pour out all our last creative thoughts for the project.
(4am. lol)
Working together the entire group’s different animations was difficult as we wanted to remain as faithful to both the 180-degree rule and 30-degree rule as possible. The storyboard really helped as a guide for this and allowed us to mostly stay true to these rules. We made a considerable amount of difficult pacing decisions to let certain shots go, which was worthwhile in the end as it made for a more simple, fluid final outcome.
Sound
Sound was a key part of this edit, to which we tried to match what I’d done in the pre-vis, however royalty free. We added a desert ambiance, grumpy old man sounds for one of the slugs, snoring sounds, wing flapping sounds for my character, sand brushing for Josh’s, breathing for Liam’s, and finally a building crash sound for the foot.
The result was a vast array of diegetic and non-diegetic files, some more pleonastic such as the comedic skid for Joe’s character.
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I feel very proud of how our whole group came together and we had a great laugh working on comedic moments and finding ways to engage and humour the audience as much as possible.
You can view the final film here.
The animations that I created and rendered are in this folder.
The models I made – including some of my animation scenes – are in this folder.
My final character model, rigged, is here.
Reflection
Having missed Semester 1, I really wanted to take this project as an opportunity to tap on all the areas of animation – ranging from 2D visual development elements, to the the pre/production pipeline, to 3D modelling and rendering. I found I was successful in this and found this 10 weeks to be greatly challenging and rewarding.
At the beginning, I found conceptualising very enjoyable. I hadn’t met any of my team before this semester, and they were super welcoming and kind from the start. I really enjoyed sketching out ideas, coming up with visual imagery and writing out screenplay based on said ideas. I felt very excited about where we were headed and believed strongly we would be able to make something funny and rewarding.
When we began delving into 3D work and more substantial ideas, I was ill with Covid, however, my team were super engaged online and I found myself getting excitedly involved despite the circumstances. Kharis also got Covid with me so we improvised as a crew and switched to Discord for meetings, idea discussions and planning for our pipeline.
My 3D model went through a vast amount of iterations as I constantly kept realising what I could do better or what I could improve to be more innovative or advanced using prior knowledge. I got super excited when lighting got involved as it truly felt like you were able to bring something to existence from nothing – which is a great feeling.
I used the animation segment of the process as a means to catch up on principles of animation from Semester 1. I picked up a lot about anticipation, reaction, squash/stretch etc and I hope this is evident in my final animations. Being so still, we had to come up with complex animations that felt right, and I believe we were successful in setting up the actions we chose such as the boot squash (and the consequent reactions), the characters moving and so on.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Animated Narratives Assignment 2, and I can not wait to continue my studies into Second Year on this course. I’m particularly excited to get involved with the virtual production side of things with Unreal and the VP studio, whilst simultaneously improving my drawing and 2D visual development skills.