Week 9 – fixing the animatic

My animatic was created and I took this week to try fix it up and give it more shots to smooth everything out and fix the timing, as mine was very off and you could tell straight away something wasn’t right.

To fix the timing, i added in even more shots, such as a side view of the Anglerfish Child’s eye at the start of the animation, looking down at the creature infront of her, before cutting to her reaction to the creature.

above is my animatic fixed a little and below is just a random test i wanted to do with fire

i also drew a background, but had to change its colour pallet to a warmer tone as my first attempt was using too many cold colours and didnt fit the pallet of the animation


In the image below, I added grass, textured glowing mushrooms and other little details, as well as starting on a tree in the foreground that the character will come from behind into the scene.

My background like my Nyxer was also inspired by Warframe’s Deimos update with the infested and glowy look of the environment. I’d played a lot of this game since the new update so it was my first choice of inspiration when I heard the word “bioluminescent” as everything in this update glows and gives good examples of how to stick to a limited colour pallet.

Week 8 – rough storyboard animatic

After getting all our storyboards sorted out and everyone was on the same track, we started to rough out our animations with a storyboard animatic. This included sound effects, movements of the characters and/or environment and starting to piece the whole story together with your group.

My group, the bioluminescence world, decided we’d use a side angle shot so it’d be easier to transition into everybody’s animatics. We all used a “fancy” transition of something either falling, swiping or just blocking the camera lens in general to transition to the next person’s scene, done by adding a greenscreen at the end of each animatic and adding them together in after effects, chroma keying the next scene onto the green screen and adding an opacity timer.

For my personal storyboard, i had to change it quite a bit as when Alec and Sarah jumped in to give us feedback, i was made aware that my initial storyboard was too long and complicated and it’d be a hard task to draw out all the frames necessary for it to work. I took this feedback and changed the story to a more simplistic and interesting storyline, where the child is no longer scared of the creature and her sharp teeth are incorporated.

I used procreate on my iPad to draw everything out, but since we’ve been advised to invest in something like “Rough Animator” I’m going to look into it. I do however have it on my phone, so I know a little bit about how to navigate it.

Above is my animatic followed by my revamped storyboard.

Week 7 – storyboards and flour sack animation

Above is my storyboard draft for our group world animation project. I wanted to try and go for something that would be interesting and make sense, so i thought since the character I’ve chosen to animate is a child, why not express that through her curiosity and fear of the creature.

I wrote notes alongside each shot as i went to keep things easier for me to remember and to describe the important details to whoever was reading.

Below is my flour sack animation that we were tasked with as a warm up for next week. We had to take a flour sack and try to animate it with weight and form in mind.

My flour sack was initially too small, so instead of erasing it i let it add to the animation and made it bigger through the use of “growth” from a super Mario like mushroom. The flour sack then gets eaten at the end to represent my hatred for the shape and form of the sack, because i find it very difficult to draw and maintain and thought it’d be an interesting way to end the animation but also let me get my sort of revenge on it.

Week 6 – Animating different weighted balls

This week we started moving away from the fundamentals and began to touch on animation. To start with, we were told to animate 3 different weighted balls bouncing and given advice to animate a bowling ball, tennis ball and a ping pong ball as they vary greatly in weight, giving each their own unique bounce.

I did my animation on my iPad in Procreate, using the animation tool to enable onion skin and to be able to play back my animation so as to edit the frames. During this task i found that each ball varied greatly in number of bounces, movement and the time it took to fall. The heavier balls were quicker to hit the ground and the heavier the ball, the less bounce it had though it did still actually bounce. The lighter balls were a lot more sporadic in their bounces, for example the ping pong ball went crazy whereas the tennis ball was more controlled in its movement.

I found the bowling ball and tennis ball easy enough to animate but I couldn’t get the ping pong ball to look right so i thought it would’ve suited a more lively appearance and gave it a tail, making it seem like the ball was alive and actually hopping forward to move.

I looked up a reference for each ball on YouTube, and surprisingly there’s quite a lot of people who upload references just for animators to follow, which I really appreciate.

Below is my animation.