Story boarding-

I made my story boards by making simple sketches and for me it was easier to understand my process if I compiled those into  a video format and from that point I kept adding potential sequences onto the video and stuck with scenes that I thought worked best.when story boarding I really wanted to try and use more interesting perspectives and angels.

Animatics

I have never attempted to make a 2d short by myself before so I wanted to try to challenge myself and make it look interesting. I’m not very experimental when it comes to animation and I tend to go for a very sketchy unpolished style when animating so I really wanted to switch things up. For my first animatic I was trying to make things dramatic and give the shots interesting angles with Intend, for example there is a shot where the stoic woman walks up to the rotted man, for this shot I specifically wanted it to be from a higher angle since that would give the effect that she is taller and more powerful then he is.

In the first animatic I did I had the two main characters roll up to the tavern in a horse drawn carriage, in the carriage I wanted them to be discussing exactly why they are at the tavern, having a conversation on what they where hired to do, they would then shuffle the cards and find out hey they are looking for , then entering the tavern, a shot of them walking out of the carriage and walk into the tavern, everyone in the tavern turns to look at them and they walk on in and sit down. A fly flies by and draws their attention to a corner of the tavern they haven’t seen yet, the stoic woman walks in and find the rotted man surrounded by flies. She grabs him and he pushes her off, and runs out of the tavern . They chase each other through the alley ways untold he meets a dead end, she grabs him and punches him in the face to subdue him and then he is used into the card that was pulled. The card is turned around and shows his face trapped in the card.

I was told by some tutors and classmates  that this first animatic was going to be a lot of work so I decided to cut it down and instead make it so that they are both already in the tavern and it is in the tavern that they begin to shuffle and pull from the cards, I thought that the beginning of the film being them shuffling the cards was a better start off to the film. I also wasn’t sure exactly how I wanted to illustrate the rotted man being sucked into the card, so I then decided to make it so you could only see his shadow on a wall being sucked into the card which I incorporated into my final animatic.Looking back at the animatic planning Stage I would have included more of the two main characters interacting like in the first draft of the animatic.

I was also unsure how the dialog for these animatics was going to work, I knew I wanted to animate tow characters speaking and interacting but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have voice actors, in the end I decided to go for a silent animation that only incorporated music, and used exposition text that can be seen on screen.

while doing the animatic I was trying to make sure it was syncing up to the music choices I was implementing which surprisingly wasn’t very difficult and only took adding a few scenes here and there or just making different scenes slightly longer than others.

Animation

For the animations of the film I did most of the animations on Procreate, Procreate is the program I find easiest to use and I know a lot about the program. Procreate allows the ability to have a background and also have objects in the foreground, it also uses onion skins and allows me to hold frames when needed. I struggled slightly with the animation style I had chosen, I wanted to challenge myself by trying out a style I really liked which was more semi realistic with realistic proportions, I regularly draw this way but animating in the style was a whole different experience, trying to keep the characters on model was very had at times since there wasn’t a lot of wiggling room with some of their designs and through this process of testing out the animations I realised that the stoic woman’s gauntlets where far to big to allow the animation I wanted, so for the sake of making it easier for me to animate I decided to make her gauntlets smaller.when animating I made sure to animate the scene I knew I would find the easiest first so I started with the card shuffling animations since it would just involve me animating hands. I would then try and move on to the animations I thought would be a bit harder like whenever they are running out of the tavern and jumping over chairs or even the lip syncs.

rendering process 

When it came to rendering out my animations I would first sketch out what I wanted very roughly, then colour and then clean it up , I would then line the animation and put in the colour, then the hard part which was adding in the shading which I had to go though every frame and draw a new shading layer since to achieve the style I wanted every shading layer had to be different to govern that wiggly effect. After all of that was done I would add my background and anything that needed to be in the foreground.

example –

 

video references
For most of my animations I took video references with the help of my classmates and also just myself at home, sometimes taking references was frustrating because without a prop for the camera it was very hard to be able to film myself from certain angles, so in a few of my animations I would of just had to try my best to figure out what would look correct myself and not rely on any references .I would also speak allowed in the video reference in case I decided I did want to use audio dialogue and also just to make sure I was definitely lip syncing the words being said correctly

There is one animation in my project which I really struggled with, the animation where the stoic woman grabs the rotted man, I rarely ever animate characters interacting so closely which is why I wanted to incorporate this type of animation into my project to push myself. I took multiple references of myself and tried my best to make it look like a realistic interaction even though I couldn’t get the EXACT reference I wanted to.

 

In a few shots of my animations  the stoic woman is missing her shoulder armour pads, this is because it was very difficult to continue animating with those shapes in the sketching process so I decided I would add them later on in the process of finishing io the final touches of my animation, it was a challenge I didn’t expect to be difficult but it makes sense since her shoulder pads are unchanging hard objects and they don’t have much wiggle room for any flaws.same thing can be said for the rotted mans glasses which are also sometimes missing.

 

I made a short intro for my film that would show what the film is called and then it’s “episode title” I thought this would help give a little more exposition to the audience who is watching so that they understand the animation is all about the cards and what they can do.I also added an ending title just to top it off because I thought it would help it look more complete.

Editing

When it came to editing I did very little, for the types of shots I have used I didn’t see any reason to use much editing in the animation, I put the music in time with the shots and every now and again I have the film cut to black then to the next shot then to black again to give it a dramatic and suspenseful feeling.I also edited in the dialog to be timed whenever the characters are saying anything.I assumed I was going to need to edit the cards texture in an editing software however that was not the case and I found it easier enough to just edit  in the cards in Procreate itself.

music 

 

for the music I had the idea in mind that I wanted to use classical music that was suspenseful and intense , and I was aware that a lot of classical music is not copyrighted so it would be acceptable for me to use and submit my film wherever I wanted.I was originally going to use Bizet habenera as the music that would play for my film but I realised the more I would watch the clips over and over again the more I thought the song didn’t go well with my animation even tho I managed to get it synced up, the tone just didn’t feel right. I searched for more classical music to see if anything else would fit and I found the song flight of the bumble bee which is iconic but has no copy right. When I added it in and synced it up with the timing if my animation I thought it worked really well so I decided to keep it.

scheduling

 

whenever it came to the scheduling of the project, in the first semester it was the planning process, planning the story and making the characters then making the story boards and animatics, the  semester two was going to be getting into the actual animation part so sketching out the animation, drawing and finishing up backgrounds, rendering and editing the animation leading to the final submission.

With my schedule I got slightly lost around Christmas as I was still unhappy with my animatic but after I little more tweaking I was happy with it and could finally move on to actually animating.

 

 

Conclusion-

I’m happy with my final outcome however I am bit disappointed with some of the animations in my project and I think I could of left my self more time to put more effort into some of the scenes. The project became something very different to what I originally had in mind.if I had done things differently I may have went for a different style choice or have far more character interactions, I definitely feel like I pushed myself for the project but I probably would of pushed a little bit harder if I did it again.I definitely think I have improved from my project in first year, I understand the animation pipeline so much better now and before I would have been afraid to jump into a project and try to see it through till the end but now I feel so much more confident I have the ability to do it.I also think I have a better understanding of what it means to polish an animation which I said before is something I rarely do.

For the end of year show I plan to have the project fully fully finished, I am very close where I am right now, but there are some final touches I’d like to add and more shading In a Few scenes.