Intro
For this Final Year of University, I was given the choice between making a short by myself or with a group of people or to create a few more animation pieces for my portfolio. In the end I decided to create a project with my best friends for our Final Year assignment. This blog will act as a journal, documenting my successes, failures and learning new art skills. From the being stages of Pre-Production such as brain storming ideas, to Production stages where we had to develop the assets of the short and finally towards the Post-Production where we added any final touches to the film.
Pre-Production
Right before the Final Year of University was about to start , EJ, Jess Rhys and myself decided to be a group and to begin brain storming ideas for our final project. This took place around August as we wanted to have some idea of what we were going to. We also decided to present these ideas at the end of August like a pitch presentation to each other to get a better idea of what the story is going to be about.
With that I began brainstorming a lot of ideas for what could our final project be. I had a lot of ideas of what we could be doing. However, I did have to create a rule set that I had to follow due to some of the ideas being to large to be able to be executed in a 5 minute short. These three rules were:
- It had to be a short story. Anything that had too much lore to it had to either go away or be cut and mainstreamed.
- There also had to be a consideration of the style of the idea. Considering I had in my group three people with different sets of strengths and weaknesses I had to take that into consideration when creating the idea of the project.
- It must have different approaches to the project. This is not only because of the second rule but, also to show to both tutors and future employers that we were able to adapt to using different software effectively.
Sidenote, each of the designs shown here are concept art of what the final year show may have looked like. The designs were not finalized and could always have changed in developed. These were proof of concept.
Now, that the rules are established, it is time to go over the main three ideas I have selected for this presentation:
1. Mirage
The first pitch was about a Golem warrior taking a job from a local town due to ghost starting to show up in the town out of nowhere. It was told to check the graveyard as these were the result of someone digging up the bodies of their past relatives. Now, the Golem has to investigate what has happened there. What will he find?
The inspiration for this pitch was mainly The Witcher was both the games and books always had character with nuance but also had a world where not everything was to be trusted and shouldn’t be taken at face value. I was a bit of inspirated by D&D as the setting of a magical medieval setting had a lot of potential. The art-style or direction of the film would mainly be 3D with hand painted textures similar to Arcane and some background elements being in 2D. Also for the moodboard, I was looking at a lot of medieval clothing styles for the main characters. For him, I wanted to create a more blocky appearance with more rounded corners to communicate it was a tough yet caring being since it was going to be the main protagonist. For the backgrounds, I was looking a lot of different graveyards and very old castles to an idea of the atmosphere I wanted to convey in the project. For the ghoul, I wanted to look at already existing designs of the creature and try to mash and create different ideas for how it may look. Mainly, I wanted to keep the skinny and sharp look of the creature and use a lot of triangle to communicate that it was dangers being.
2. Couped Up
The last pitch was about mental health and the experience of a person. This would be taking place in the current day and it would have tackled things like depression and anxiety in a dream like sequence and the importance of self-esteem.
Since this one was going to be a more grounded animation yet with stylized character design. For this I also wanted for the background to feel and have a more cozy atmosphere akin to a LOFI background so it can serve as an easy contrast for when the room becomes more of a horror or unnerving atmosphere when the main character goes into the dream world. When it came to the dream world, I wanted to keep the LOFI feel but instead use more contrasting and harsher colours while keeping the somewhat cute aesthetic. So i looked at creepy hallways and also found an artist on the internet has a similar feel with what I wanted to go for. For the design of the main character, I wanted to give her as much of a round silhouette as I could to convey her friend personality. I also took into consideration her cloths as well to enhance the idea. As a double function, her clothes could be also used to hide self harm to reinforce the idea of the film being about mental health. For the animation it was mainly going to be 2D but with a few 3D elements thrown into to mix up the process in contrast to the first pitch.
Once we showed our presentations to each other, we decided it was best to wait for university to start and ask our tutors for feedback before selecting and finalizing out idea for the project as we were uncertain if any of them would be liked. Not only that, but this gave us time to come up with ideas until we were back in university
In this week, our group went and asked the tutors on which one of the ideas we were going to approach. After heavy consideration with feedback from both students, tutors and ourselves, we went ahead with an idea of Jess nicknamed “Ghost Hunting with the Kardashians” which would later become “Keeping Up with The Apparitions” . The main idea for this project was mixing together, ghost hunting shows and imagine if the ghosts were the Kardashians. Not only that, the animation style was going to be a mix between 3D and 2D. The main inspiration for this was The Amazing World of Gumball due to its interesting blend of different styles of animation such as 2D and 3D. With that information at hand, I firstly gathered reference images for myself and put them in a Puref file. This acted as more of a moodboard and a point to at least start from before I begin sketching. For images I naturally looked at the Kardashians while also looking at people in Drag and Male Celebrities. I also looked into movies like Ghostbusters or Reality TV Shows like Ghost Hunters for inspirations. Immediately we set up a Google Drive for the team to easily share our projects and a Discord server to be able to keep track of them.
Concept
With the image references assembled, I begin to sketch really rough ideas of body types by doing thumbnail sketches. The reason was so I had a starting point creating characters and wanting to show off a character’s personality through their body shape and body language. Take for example the different body types that I have created I tried to give them different shapes. Whether it be making a body shape more rounder, more square or more triangular and even mixing two of those properties together. Since this was going to be in the style of a cartoon, this also meant exaggerating the shapes of the characters as well.
Originally, our team had the idea that each ghost would have had an outfit that would indicate or at least give a clue to how they would have died. One of the ideas was a celebrity that got stung by bees. For the design, we wanted to give that character massive lips which made it similar to people putting botox on. Since the person would have died from the bee stings, I also wanted to create bee themed clothes to reinforce the idea of the way they died. At the beginning my main list of reference were a lot of drag queens and the Kardashians themselves. Also with this theme, I decided to do two more iteration to try and brainstorm potential designs.
The second image I also wanted to sketch a concept of the ghost hunters. For these characters, while with exaggerated proportions, I wanted to give them much normal cloth that you would wear in your day to day life in contrast to the clothes of the ghosts that have interesting and unique designs. In this sketch I also wanted to start to incorporate interactions between the characters as a part of the experimental phase to get an idea of how some of the personalities may react to a situation.
Here is another example of a similar interaction with another character where he takes task of turning on the lamp in a quite literal way. When the team saw this drawing, they really loved the idea of the character so much that, they wanted to include him as a part of the cast. So, with that said, I immediately begun creating reiterations of this character and reiterations for his design.
When doing brainstorming for this character, the main inspirations for him were Big and Muscular bodybuilders us as Mike O’Hare and Handsome Celebrities such as Ryan Gosling, not only for his looks but also for his appearance in Barbie as the character of Ken had a lot of costumes that were used as an inspiration for the 80’s style of fashion. Personality wise, the dad ghost takes huge inspiration from Steven Segal as he is a very infamous actor in Hollywood for his poor treatment of staff and workers, while also trying to look like he is a larger than life character.
During the sketching phase of his face, I tried to play around with his face shape. At first I tried to lean into the Drag Queen look with big lips and pretty eyelash. However, this quickly made me scrap it as it did not match the type of personality that my team has established. Then I started leaning a lot more towards a lot more Action Hollywood Star look with sharper jaw and a lot of square shapes to give him a sturdy look.
After a lot of facial sketches, I showed this to my team and they decided on this face as it simply represented everything that I was trying to go for. Now, all I was doing was trying to get an idea of what his glasses would look like. i tried to do a few designs. I ended up going for the last option on the right as it looked simple and effective.
For the clothing of the character, I mainly looked at how Male Actors would dress up. Whether it be in action movies or going to an event on the red carpet. With the clothing choices, I tried to make sure it complimented his body shape and generally highlight or bring more attention towards his square like shape. After brainstorming outfits for quite bit, I ended up choosing the leather jacket in the middle in the last image to the right. This was due it fitting him perfectly with his personality of an action movie star. Lastly, I tried to created 3 different colour pallets for the character with different colours applied to them. However, none of the colours really ended up feeling like they stood out or even felt interesting. Then, I decided to create one last pallet and immediately fell in love with it and so did the team simply because it stood out and help the design not only be slick but also be fashionable.
Lastly, we came up with the name for the dad. We ended up choosing Michelangelo as it sounded like a person larger than life to us. All that was really left to do was to create a character sheet for my team, using the style guide for how the art style should look like, to use when it comes to animating him. During this part of the project, we were also made to use Krita as it was the simplest program to animate and it was free to use. So, as a test, I drew these 3 different Michelangelo sketches so I can get used to not only drawing in the program but to also get used to drawing the character itself.
While doing the character concepts, I also wanted to do concepts for the objects in the house. Sadly though, none of these were ever used since my team decided to put our 3D artist for it. Because of this, it did cause a bit of a hard time when it came to creating the models themselves which will be addressed later. This disappointed me as there could have been a lot of story telling in the environment. However, I did not want these designs to go to waste and decided to talk about them in here. When it came to the house concepts, the main inspirations was to look at old abandoned house that were left in quite an awful state from the 90’s.
Here are also concepts of chairs for the place. Again, I looked at 90’s interior design and tried to find objects that would have been present during that era.
During this project, I was in charge of creating a Texture Style for the animated short. For this, I wanted to replicate a much more painterly or drawn on kind of style. I firstly opened up Maya, and created a simple cube as a mock test for the textures. My first experiment was to use Krita to paint the textures by exporting the UV of the object as a png and draw under the layout so, when exporting the texture into Maya, it will be easier to make more variants for testing. For these textures, I wanted to force lighting as a style choice due to the characters being cartoony.
However, as I imported these into Maya, they ended up not looking the way imagined them to look and was quite disappointed with the result. Not only to mention if this was the go to option for making textures, it would become the most time consuming method of doing. So, immediately this idea was scrapped. I tried to also use the inbuild cell shading system that was in the program. Not only that, the cell material has a lot of nice and changeable attributes that I can mess and experiment with to the desired results such as the ability to change the thickness of the linework on a model, how sharp or how prevalent can the line be and how many colours can be used to identify the different levels of shadows. While also experimenting with this, I also tried to use different lighting whether it be like the regular Maya render lights or the Arnold lights in the program. This has caused me to create two different files with the different lighting and different material assignment.
During that test, I ended up going with going to experiment further in the Arnold file as it had a lot more customization for texturing materials. I also decided to download an asset used just to test how would the shader look on a complicated object like say for instance, a chair. With this I was able to experiment with the texture and adjust any settings of the objects of how I wish they would look. During this phase, I also looked at additional tutorials on how to create a cell shaded material. Before I replicated the style, I showed the texture results to my group to see which one of the materials would work. The end result was that people didn’t really enjoy the cel shaded textures as we ended up deciding the ghosts in the movie were going to have that look, while the characters in the real world would have a painterly style.
Link to 3D Chair: https://skfb.ly/os9RR
With that information at hand, I decided to look up on how I can at least try and achieve that kind of effect. This led me to search and find this video of a lemon in Maya being textured and imported into the program while using the MASH tool to be able to scatter images of paint strokes on an object to give it that kind of effect. However, the issue with it was the tutorial was stuck behind a paywall. The only way I could get access to it was if somebody already had it. Luckily, one of my tutors had the files for the Lemon file and I was able to learn a lot of how to achieve such a texture. For texturing the material this time, I used Substance Painter as it was much easier to paint on the object and to give me the effects that I really wanted of a hand drawn texture. Alongside that, used a second video of how to do a more stylized style for it while also changing a few steps of the process along the way, such as as using different brushes that emulated paint and also using the filter built in Substance to apply a paint like filter to its object.
This is what the final result looks like. For the way I coloured the texture was by making the edges of an object darker to give it the feeling of a shadow, while for the lighter areas to indicate the light of the surface. Lastly, using the blur filter to make the colours are transitioning from light to dark. With the texture done, I showed it to both my team and tutors and all of them agreed that it fit the style of the short. With that, I then moved on and started the production phase of this project.
Production
Modelling
Firstly I began to work on some of the object for the interior scenes. During this phase of the production, it was quite hard to create objects as we did not have any finalized designs for the props in the scene. Instead, we had to rely on finding images online of objects such as couches, fireplace and vans.
One of the easier items to recreate was the tablet as it was a very thing piece of a rectangle. For this, I firstly create a plane surface, of which I first extruded out the edges forward and afterwards side ways. This create the front of the table. With this I then extruded it again backwards and fill in the gap for the back. The last few touches was to bevel the side edges of the tablet and to use tiny cylinders as both camera and buttons. Before long, then moved and fixed the UV of the object by rearranging the faces in the editor and cut and restitch any other parts to make sense of the object.
My second hardest object to make was the couch. In the first picture, while it had the form, it ended up looking quite square-ish and it was quite hard, to soften up certain sections, as using the bevel would cause for some of the parts to clip which resulted in an ugly finish. Once again, I looked on YouTube to find examples of how people would approach the creation of a couch. This is an example of one of the videos. However, I also improvised on some of the parts. For instance, to get the handles of the arm rests to look like a curve, I used a mixture of a curved wire in the path of how I wanted the curve to be with a cubes faces selected alongside the line. Hitting extrude on it, causes the face to follow all the way to the end point of the curve, with the ability to add more divisions to it creating a much more solid object.
For the back of the sofa, I used another square and shaped it into a long and thin part, with divided sections, so I can model it and give it a unique shape. However, a lot of the times, it ended up either looking uneven of just horrible. So instead of approaching it like that, I created half of the design, deleted the face where the back piece would be connecting with it the duplicate of the object and used the mirror feature to merge the second piece together which ended up looking great in the end. For the rest of it, I used a lot of beveled rectangles to make it look more round and comfortable.
The actual hardest part of model making was the van. This was massively due to there not being any finalized design for it. So, a lot of the times, I had to look up at realistic vans to get an idea of what I am trying to make. Since this was a bigger and more complicated model, I had no idea of how to start the model. So as a helping hand, I used this video to get the idea of how I would model this van.
The idea behind this strategy was to use the curves as a rough guide for the object. So, to get the shape right, I had to lay out these images in such a way that both of the cameras would line up with the respective side. After the curve object was done, I went to create mesh of it by using the topology tool in combination with the magnet tool which allowed me put my points onto the curve to create the first bits of mesh. After e few minutes this was the mesh that I got out of it. While at first, it didn’t look so bad, it was then I had to straight up quit on this object and make something new as the object, started to create clipping issues when extruding.
This second attempt wen much easier as I started with a simple cube and then just created divisions on the square and using a lot of extrusion and beveling. For the lights, wheels and rear mirrors, I mostly used cylinders alongside extrusion and beveling to create the end result. Once it was done, I put the model and moved on to texturing.
Texturing Work
Texturing was the easiest part of the process as mostly it was about paint the object like you would with a drawing. Like for example drawing shadows on designated spots on an object like the crevices’ of the sofa or giving the wood textures by using height maps to give materials depth like the candle in the bottom right image, and slightly changing the material whether it be a shiny object like metal or a very non reflective material like wood.
The only real problem was that some models had overlay UV’s stacked on top of another UV causing baked textures to look like the image on the left. Luckily the solution was just to move the UVs away from each other.
Animation
With the textures out of the way, it was time to animate, starting with VFX of the short. Mainly we needed a lighting effect for the opening and a fire being made in one of the scenes. Before starting, I quickly found reference images for both fires and lightings alongside videos giving tips on how to do effects in general.
Firstly, I began creating the lighting. It was probably the easiest effect to create while also being a bit hard to get right, so I create versions and allowed my classmates to choose between these three since it has different timing to every single one of them. The main frame of rule when creating lighting was make a line and a ball that moved from beginning to end on that line. This was the main foundation to get the idea of the time. Afterwards I drew the lighting going in different directions, while also making sure it ends up making contact on the ground.
In the end, I went with this one right here, as it had the right timing for it. I then went and added colours to it and below is the final result.
For the fire, I took a similar approach to animating it, while also asking for feedback for it. The somewhat tough part was making the fire look like its coming together into a big fire. For that, I simply asked for feedback. While the teacher was okay with the animation, the only thing I had to add was for the begging where the two small fires join together and make one massive fire as it didn’t look like fires. So, I added trialing points to suggest fire. Below is the end result of it.
Next up, I moved onto animating the characters. Before that, I had to first take a reference video of myself performing the action. This will act as a reference point for my animation so I can easily understand the motion my character will be doing instead of guessing timing and spacing in the animation. Once, it was recorded, I create a Kirta file, with a still background of the shot set at a low opacity. This is so I can see the animation when I’m working and setting the frame rate to a standard of 24 frames per second as this is commonly used in productions.
When it comes to motion, I firstly plan on adding the main key frames of the animation. This will dictate the action of the character in the animation. On top of that, I also have to consider the audio as I want to make sure it syncs with the animation. If not synced properly, this could lead to the scene feeling strange and taking you out of the experience. After finish the keyframes, I begin adding the in-between to smooth out the motion. During this phase, I also play around with the timing of the in-betweens as well until it is brought to a satisfactory level. Below you can see the result so far. The reason the drawing looks so plane is simply to figure out the timing of the body mechanics before adding in the extra detail.
Once, I’m satisfied with the result. I begin to add in the details of the character such as hair, sunglasses and clothing. Sometimes, these details will be put on a separate layer like the eyes and mouth while other details like hair and glasses will be drawn on the base layer. It really does depend on if I want that part to move on its own or not. With the tasked finished, comes my part of doing the lineart. This is the most simple step as I can use the guideline I have create and put everything under one layer.
Now comes the colouring of frames. For this I will use a different shot to explain. Usually it heavily depend on the person’s way of doing things. Since we were starting to rush the animation due to the upcoming deadline, we had put the colouring in a single layer. Mainly I split the body of the character, mouth and eyes into separate layers. Using the character sheet and the style guide sheet created by EJ, I coloured each individual frame until I get the result you see.
On top of this, I was also in charge of helping Rhys finish some 3D animations as he was mostly the only 3D animator on the project. For this, Rhys and Jess had to show me how to set up Google Drive as the 3D files were on it. However, we quickly came at a dead end as one of my hard drives had an initial that the Drive had. If I changed the initial of my hard drive, it would have caused for many of the programs I have installed to either corrupt or to stop working. Not only that, since the textures were tided to that specify letter we quickly had to change my role. So, instead I was put in the position of helping with roughing out animation movements for the character so that Rhys and Jess could go over and fix. While the process was different for 3D, I could still apply the techniques of 2D for planning out the motion. With 3D it was easier to pose the character and make the movements but at the same time difficult since I would not know how the computer would react. That was a quick fix as Rhys showed me how to make the animation stepped by going into the graph editor and changing the attributes of the animation. Now it was much easier to animate. Here are a few examples of what I have made for them.
Post-Production
As the deadline was approaching we had to quickly rush the production. This sadly meant that we had to render out frames even if they were not do. So, I went into Kirta and rendered every frame that we had, done or not. Since there was also things like placement scheme and Creative Futures in the background, our Editors asked me and EJ to turn our sequences into clips in After Effects. When I was putting in the frames, I had to make sure that the footage would be transparent both when in composition and rendering. Luckily, Rhys had a video that explained to us how to do it through the QuickTime format.
However, we quickly ran through an issue with the audio not syncing with the animation. I tried looking for everything to see if I didn’t do anything wrong, but everything was set right on both sides of the system. The only think that was wrong was the shot sequence as for no reason it was set in After Effects as 30 frames per second. I found out through the use of Interpret. This allowed my to change the frame rate at which it played to 24 frames. The only reason I can think this happened was simply because Krita may have a bug of sorts as we were using an older version of Krita.
With everything sorted, I send out the footage into the Google Drive for the team to add it their After Effects scenes for editing.
After editing, here is the result we have:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zo4q58zIs12Mgxak-yxAcrlS4leZkKJR/view?usp=sharing
We will continue work on this until EOYS as we want to finish it
Reflection
Personally this project has taught me a lot of things. In the good side of I have managed to find techniques that can help me be productive for a consistent amount of time such making to do lists and using timers as to not lose track of time when working. However, during this time it has also taught me that I need to trust more in myself and to try and not rely on people constantly as sometimes I have to do things myself. While I am trying my best to build up my confidence ever so slowly, I do have a problem as a perfectionist as I feel the need to always try to get it right on the first try. However, this does come at the detriment of learning. I now know that I have to let go of whatever fear I have and to try experiment and get result that are either desirable or not so. I think its time to learn how to love myself one step at a time. While I had my ups and downs in Ulster University, I will never forget the time that I spend here and the valuable lesson that it taught me.
If we were to redo this project again, we would firstly need to cut down a lot more on the product so we can have more time when it comes to creating the short. I would also want to improve communications as there were instances where an individual was not clear with a task at hand. As ambitious as it was of a project, it did give me more experience in animation such as having an eye for detail and also introduced me to new situations that I needed to find a solutions to. Also I really enjoyed working on this.