Category: Animation Studio

I feel as though my skills in all areas throughout this module have improved and I have learned new things along the way that have helped make me more confident in the animating process. Character design was my favourite part of the module as I learned so many new things about how to use basic shapes to create a character. I also tried different exercises that I have never done before, which improved my skills and confidence immensely. I also enjoyed animating with forms. This is something new to me as I had never animated with such detail before, and before this module I had never used Krita. I now love using the software and used it to complete most of my final animation.

I found creating storyboards more difficult than I thought I would. It took me a while to create to my final storyboard as I had to make many changes such as taking out unnecessary panels and changing other ones to make the scene flow better. Through the feedback I received on each draft, I feel as though I have learned a great deal about storyboards and will find it much easier to create one in the future.

Working in a team with people I have never met was something I was scared about before starting the module. However, I found it extremely enjoyable throughout the semester. I was able to meet lots of different people with different styles and ideas and found it very useful when creating my animation as there was always someone who could help me solve any problem I was having. It was also great to hear constructive criticism from so many different minds as it made me a better artist.

If I were to start the module again, I would spread my work out more and do some every day rather than spending a whole day doing nothing then the next cramming in all of my work. I was ill during November; therefore, I fell behind and always felt I was a bit behind everyone else in my group and found myself cramming frequently. At the start of the semester, I was much better at time management, and I would like to have continued that throughout the module.

I think I need to do more background designs in the future to improve my animation practice. I focused more on other designs than background designs as I have drawn many landscapes in the past. When it came to drawing backgrounds in my final animation, I felt a little out of practice, so I would want to practice different scenery more. I would also spend less time on storyboards as I often made each panel a little too detailed, therefore, it took me longer than it should have to change it when receiving feedback.

I feel as though when doing topics I was already familiar with, I would focus on them less and practice other aspects of the module more. Looking back, I would have liked to have the same attitude about everything that was covered and try out everything as if I have never done it before. When I had that attitude, such as when learning about colour or designing characters for the first time, it made the work much more fun.

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I am very proud of my final animation. I felt a little short on time near then end, however, I finished it with enough time to make corrections where needed, which was the most important thing to me. To create the headmistress’s poses, I made the poses myself in the mirror and watched how my arm and hand moved and was then able to create that same movement on screen. I am also happy with the movement of the zombie. Watching the walking dead zombie school definitely helped me achieve this.

Animating with more than two people in the shot was definitely challenging. I much preferred animating the first two shots, however, I am happy I included the final two shots as it made me practice something I wasn’t comfortable with.

In my first final animation draft, I had music playing, as well as the other sound clips I received from freesound.org. However, I felt as though it took away from the sound effects a little, so in my final animation I took out the music audio.

Like Cloe and Eimear, I included Cloe’s portrait of the headmaster in my animation in the background of shot one. I love her design and feel like it brings our scenes together.

Draft before tones and backgrounds:

Final Animation:

Shot 1:

Shot 2:

Shot 3:

Shot 4:

So far, I have completed 2 shots of my animation, both being 4 seconds each. Shot 1 took me longer than expected to finish as at that point I was still getting used to using Krita. Shot 2 took me around the same length of time to complete (around 2 days from start to finish) as I was much more familiar with the software yet there is much more movement in this shot. I added colour to shot one, however, I am going to change my scene to mostly grayscale with the eyes and magic of the characters being in colour as I feel as though it will highlight the ‘good vs evil’ element in the animation more. To complete my animation, after Christmas I plan on watching the walking dead zombie school videos again as they will help me greatly when animating the zombies in the rest of my scene.

 

This week our homework was to prepare a short presentation on our animation/blog progress. Last week during my one to one feedback tutorial with Sarah, she told me to include my storyboards and my progress with my animatic. I talked about my first storyboard versus my final storyboard and the feedback I was given to improve each draft, and the improvements Sarah gave me for my animatic. I find presentations very difficult, even recording them, so I feel as though I could have talked a little more about some of my other work and the inspirations behind my designs. However, I think the topics I did talk about were well explained and I showed how far I have come with my work. We were told that our animatics worked well together and we have good understanding of timing which was amazing to hear.

My Presentation:

Group Presentation:

group presentation – YouTube

Throughout the week, our group had a final meeting to talk about the colour schemes in our animation. The only ones who could attend were Cloe, Jasmin, and I, however, we were able to get much work done. Each of us sent in photos of inspirations for colour palettes and I used adobe colour to create them. Jasmin originally used Jude Law as a reference for her design of the headmaster in human form, so I used him as a reference for the headmaster’s skin tone. I then used Zendaya for Fern’s skin tone, however, we then decided we wanted her skin to be a little warmer and darker, so I ended up using Leigh Anne Pinnock as inspiration. I also wanted the headmistress’s skin to be very cool toned and pale, yet still realistic, so I used Aurora as a reference for her skin and Yzma for her clothes. Cloe created a document with the characters’ ‘magic’ colours and Jasmin sent us the exterior and interior images. I then created a word document of all the colour palettes from everyone’s references.

Link:

Colour Palettes

References:

A while ago, we had an idea of including ourselves in our animation as background characters. It was very fun to see everyone in our animation world with our different styles! I tried my best to keep my character as similar to Fern as possible by using the same colours and uniform as everyone else, yet I still wanted to add some personal touches, such as boots instead of school shoes and highlights throughout my hair. Eimear is going to include us into her section of the animation.

My Design:

Cloe, Jasmin and Mark’s Designs:

 

 

This week, I had a one to one feedback tutorial with Sarah where we talked about my progress so far with by blog and animatic. I finished putting my animatic together for this session using Premier Pro. Sarah gave me some very useful advice on my animatic, both how to make it better, and how to animate different shots when it came to doing my animation. As for my animatic, the only thing I had to change was the timing of the zombie pushing the headmistress down the stairs as it was too slow. To create more of a shock factor for the viewer, I had to speed up the crashing down slightly.  My animation also turned out to be quite long at 15 seconds, so I took out a couple of frames to take out a camera angle change, making it around 2 seconds shorter.

Animatic Draft 2 (after crash down change):

Animatic Draft 3:

Sarah was happy with how my blog was progressing. I was told to add reference pictures when I was talking about inspirations for characters and to talk more about principals when animating. I have since went back and added these areas to my posts and am happy with the work I have done for every post.

I was also told to do limited animation for the last shot of my animation, where Fern casts the spell against the zombies. There are many people in this shot and if it was too detailed, it would take too long to animate and would be too busy on the screen for the viewer.

This week’s lecture was on animating 2D effects, such as smoke, water, and explosions. I found learning about explosions and flats the most helpful as it gave me tips and ideas on how to end my animation with the spell. I learned to use only around 5 frames for the spell and to have some anticipation before it occurs. I plan on using white star shapes for the spell and have them fill the screen to then transition from white to black. I began the animating process this week by drawing the outline of Fern on Photoshop for shot 1. As I am now used to drawing her, it did not take me long to get her features correct. I am going to export this image to Krita where I will begin animating next week.

This week, I finished the final draft of my storyboard and completed drawings for a rough animatic. After receiving more feedback on my storyboards, I decided to take more panels out. Now, instead of Fern standing up to the headmistress, she remains scared and backs out of frame before the zombie attacks the headmistress. The close up of both Fern’s and the headmaster’s hand was also taken out. At first, I was worried about these changes as the beginning of my animation now conveys a different emotion than we had originally planned. However, I am now happy with the decision as I feel as though the karma that the headmistress receives by being touched by the zombies now works better. Instead of her being scared of Fern, she is still angry and mischievous, meaning that she deserved what was coming to her.

To get the right look for the zombies, I used behind the scenes videos of The Walking Dead’s zombie school where people audition and learn how to play the zombies throughout season 4 of the show. This was extremely helpful to see their movements, even for drawing a panel on my storyboard as I found it extremely difficult to draw a realistic full upper body of a zombie from just images.

Reference Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIHVKm5MMe0

Final Storyboard:

As for my animatic, I have now completed shots 1 and 2 and have finished all rough drawings for the rest of the animatic. However, as I had not used Premier Pro for a while before this, I had to familiarise myself again with the software, and did not leave myself enough time to complete the full animatic. Also, as my storyboard had some changes this week, I started a drawing that was then deleted from my storyboard, leaving even less time for the rest of my animatic. I am happy with how the first 2 shots look and plan on putting the rest of the drawings together this week so I can receive some feedback on timing, so I can start animating soon.

Finished Animatic Shots:

Other Drawings:

Deleted Drawing:

In class this week, Alec gave my group some advice on referencing for our animations. Up until now, we had been mostly taking images from Pinterest or Google Images or videos from YouTube. To get the right movement, he told us to film ourselves doing the actions we require for our scenes. For the shot where the headmistress is pushed down the stairs, I asked Cloe and Jasmin to act it out for me on the stairs on campus.

Reference Videos:

IMG_2744

IMG_2745

This week I completed more storyboard drafts and used after effects for the first time to begin my animatic. After receiving feedback on my storyboards, I took away 2 unnecessary panels to make my animation a few seconds shorter and flipped panels 3-7 so the shots flowed better with the rest of the animation, keeping to the 180 degree rule. Instead of the headmistress being angry before she sees Fern, the turn around was taken out and she sees Fern right away and begins to back away as Fern stands up to her.

I then added more detail to the panels to show the boards as a finished product and changed the placement of the characters as in our group, we decided to keep Fern and the headmistress at the top of the stairs and have the zombies climb them to reach the witch’s.

I had enough of my storyboard finalised to then start my animatic. Before this week, I had never used After Effects. We were given a task to create a 4 second clip for an animatic which made creating the first shot of my own animatic much easier. I learned how to import drawings from Photoshop, how to change the opacity of the images, how to rotate them, change their size and their position on screen. Through this, I was able to edit a plane flying through the clouds and out of shot. I found it easy to follow along with the lecture videos making using the software very enjoyable.

I created the first 2 seconds of my animatic using After Effects, making Fern look smaller as she realises that it was the headmistress who turned the headmaster into a mushroom zombie. This shows her looking scared and less powerful than the headmistress.

I also used Cloe’s final design of Fern as a reference to draw her myself. I used various poses of harry potter characters casting spells to help design a battle pose for her (drawing 1 in image below) and I designed 5 different wands for her using plant and tree branch images. For her final design, we decided to have her hair flat to her head with a curly front piece rather than have it curly like in my other drawings. We also decided wand number 1 would be her wand.

This week, our homework was to create a storyboard for our animation and animate a flour sack character by using a pose-to-pose method. My 10-15 seconds of the animation is at the very end when Fern has realised what the headmistress has done to the headmaster. As karma, she is then touched by the mushroom zombies and turns into one herself. It finishes with both sides at war. I initially took inspiration from clementine from the walking dead videogame and Padma Patil from Harry Potter for Fern. We then went with Cloe’s design for Fern’s Character. The headmistress was inspired by Mother Gothel from Tangled and Yzma from Emperor’s New Groove. We went with Eimear’s final design for her. With these designs finalised, I was able to make good progress with my storyboard and begin the first drafts.

Fern References:

Cloe’s Design:

Headmistress References:

Eimear’s Design:

I initially wanted Fern to be shocked and a little scared of the headmistress after realising she is the reason for the zombies. Then when she sees a hand move in slow motion about to grab the headmistress, she realises her anger, and doesn’t push her away, but lets the zombie grab her. She then turns into a zombie herself and stands with the others. We see a closeup of a wand, then of a zombie hand, and it pans out to the two groups standing opposite one another.

I then changed the order of a couple of the panels. We now see a closeup of Fern immediately going from shocked to angry. Instead of a hand grabbing the headmistress straight away, I wanted to show Fern standing up to her, so it is now the headmistress’s turn to feel small and scared. At the end, when both groups are opposite one another, Fern casts a spell that fills the screen, leaving the animation on a cliff-hanger. The screen then fades out from white to black. I had to change the descriptions in my storyboard as I learned from this week’s lecture that they are not meant to tell the viewer what is happening, each panel should do that on their own. I changed them to describe the timing and camera angle/movement of each panel, as well as character notes for when I start my animatic.

I really enjoyed creating the flour sack animation this week. I had only used Krita for creating animations for the first time last week, so this was my first time animating with forms on Krita. Learning about the principals when animating, such as using arcs, made the movements of the sack more realistic. I found it a little difficult in the beginning using the pose to pose method and drawing the in-betweens, but after a while I found it very enjoyable and am extremely happy with the result.

This week, our lecture was on the basics of animation and our homework was to animate 3 bouncing balls using Adobe Animate and to read chapter 4 of ‘The Animators Survival Kit’ by Richard Williams. I have used Adobe Animate before, so I found this exercise quite easy and very enjoyable. Through our lecture and the reading, I learned about timing and spacing. When animating a bouncing ball, the timing is how long it takes for the ball to hit the ground.  Spacing is how close or far apart the ball is at each frame of the animation. When the ball is in the air at the top of the arc, it moves slower, and the ball overlaps itself. However, when it is falling to the ground, it moves faster and is more spaced out. Spacing can be broken down into extremes and in-betweens. Extremes are the main positions. The drawings in between allow the easing in and out of the extreme positions.

I also learned about ‘squash and stretch’. When a ball is falling, it stretches, then squashes when it makes contact with the ground. When at the slower part of the arc, it returns to its normal state. The softer the ball, the more intense it will squash and stretch. For this animation, I worked on 1s at 24 frames per second, allowing a smooth, fluid motion. We also learned about 2s, which is a drawing every 2 frames, and 3s. a drawing every 3 frames.

During class this week, I learned how to ease in and out when animating and how to draw a ball on a ‘roller coaster’ in Krita. At first, I found getting the spacing right when easing in and out difficult as, unlike the previous exercise, I had no guide for the placement of the ball. However, I really enjoyed animating the ball on a roller coaster and feel as though it made me more confident when it comes to spacing.

This week my group also made some final decisions on our story, and we created 3 basic character profiles. To lay out all of our ideas, before class I wrote a basic plot for our animation with 7 parts, 1 for each person in our group.

The whole plot was kept, however, some parts were swapped as the group decided bringing the flashback to the start of the animation would seem less confusing for the viewer, so the story is now told in chronological order. There are also now 8 parts to the animation as Michael was added to our group.

Final Story:

1. black and white set up shot: the old principle and the new principle walk into the forest. She throws a beaker at him (Ben) the old principle is attacked by the mushroom roots and pulled underground. The new principles face looks menacing. She lifts the beaker and turns it. Curse is written on it. (Lydia).
2. Fern (the student) walks into the dark forest. (Show the school in the background to show its a school) She Is practicing Magic. Her spell misses and rebounds off a tree, hitting the ground where there is a pile of mushrooms. She steps forward to look having heard a noise. A hand pops out of the ground suddenly. Close up of fern screaming (Jasmin)
3. Fade from Ferns face to the principal looking happy. Students walking about in the background. Fern runs in and explains to the New Principle what has happened. They turn to the door. The new principle gets ready and raises her staff (Eimear)
4. Zombie emerges through the door- grabs two students and infects them. The principal and student look scared. (Michael)
5. The students touched have now become zombies. They advance forward. The principle tries to do magic to kill the zombies- it doesn’t work. (Cloe)
6. Fern tries to cast a spell on the head zombie- His hood falls to reveal his face. Fern recognizes him as the old principle. There is a fade shot to show the old headmaster in both forms. (Mark)
7. Fern realizes what the new principle has done and stops trying to help her. The Mushroom principle and the army reach the principle and surround her (Amy)

 

This week our homework was to fill 2 or more pages of different character design ideas, whilst considering the fundamentals covered over the past several weeks (shape, from, colour…). Along with our lecture this week covering this topic, I also found reading up on character design and looking for examples from different artist helped me get started with my own designs. I read various ‘The Art of’ Disney books which was very useful. I have The Art of Up, Brave, Soul, Coco and Tangled, and looking through the different steps taken when designing characters for these animations helped me gain more confidence as I knew where to start with my sketches.

The current theme for my group is a magical academia world where a fungus begins to spread, infecting the magical school near the forest where the fungus began, turning the pupils and teachers into mushroom people. Sorcha, who was our guest lecturer this week, helped breakdown these ideas and characters for us which was extremely helpful. At the beginning of the week, I kept my sketches extremely basic, only using circles and triangles to design my mushroom characters as I wanted their whole bodies to resemble mushrooms in the beginning. I looked at mushroom images as my references.

As the week went on, my group decided to focus on creating taller and slimmer bodies as we wanted them to look more like zombies with mushroom features rather than complete mushrooms. I continued using actual mushrooms as my references whilst making the bodies look more humanlike to fit the theme of the animation.

Looking at the shapes of the mushrooms, I noticed that the bottom of the stalk was often much larger than the top. I decided to keep this in my designs by making the bottom half of the legs larger than the top half, so even though the bodies now are more humanlike, they still have shapes similar to mushrooms throughout them, rather than the head being the only mushroom-like element. At this point, I also researched how fungal infections spread so I could design a more realistic character. Through my research, I found out that fungal infections spread through skin to skin contact, or through infections in soil. Because of this, I tried to incorporate long, thin fingers in my designs so the zombies could grip people easier, causing the spread of the fungus. Also because of this research, we decided to have a zombie coming out of the ground at the beginning of the animation, which is the start of the spread.

Research:

Fungi

Designs:

I also read a couple chapters of ‘The Silver Way’ by Stephen Silver this week. Already I have learned so much from this book as it has taught me to loosen up more with my sketches. I found the exercises in the book extremely enjoyable and useful. I plan on continuing reading this book next week as I start to add more details to my characters as I want to learn more about gestures and what to avoid when designing a face. We also had a character design workshop this week where Sorcha explained many topics in ‘The Silver Way’ such as rhythm and avoiding a stiff, even ladder when designing a character which I found very interesting.

These are two exercises from ‘The Silver Way’. Here I created 12 different thumbnails, splitting the bodies into very simple sections to find a body shape that I liked the most. I only took around 10-20 seconds on each thumbnail so that I didn’t overthink the designs and I could create them more freely and loosely.

Here I did the ‘zone-out’ exercise where I had to blur my eyes and draw with my left hand to create a rough sketch of a character, I then added detail from there. I found this difficult at first however I am very happy with the result and will be trying this again in the future.

References used:

Week 6:

As we did not have class this week, I decided to spend my time drawing a character design sheet for the main mushroom zombie of our animation, the old Principal. We did not end up going with this design as we decided to make him look more human-like, therefore his skin would look less green and instead of having a mushroom shaped head, the mushrooms now grow and appear on his skin. I am still, however, extremely proud of my design and am happy the others thought some elements would look good in our animation, such as his pale, white eyes, which were inspired by the zombies from the walking dead video game.

My design:

References: