Final Project work
I was put in a group with Timmy and Jonathan to come up with a theme for our final animation project. We all put down ideas on a whiteboard and we looked over all our suggestions. Some ideas included aliens, another was a homage to Micheal Mann’s Collateral and various other themes. I suggested a western setting and vampires because I thought it was something a little different and it would help play with genre-bending, with showing action scenes and horror through animation, as well as help us look at different sources to get our ideas from, whether it be through the setting or character design. The other two liked my idea, so that’s the theme we went with. I was inspired by From Dusk Til Dawn 3 for the idea, as that film was an old west setting that featured vampires as the antagonists. The others bought up the computer games, Red Dead Redemption and Dead West as an inspiration for the visuals, with the setting of Red Dead and the stylized visuals of Dead West.
I was tasked within my group with designing various props that would be seen in the old west, with color references coming from various images they found. These images were derived from various sources. With these, I played with the colors depending on the location from the source images, seen in the drawings of the carts. One of the sources I used for the colors of the carts was from an article about the gravesites of famous cowboys like Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. The other was from an AI prompt of an old western train station. I didn’t realize that it was an AI image as the image that was put on the miro board was very small. I thought of various things that would be seen in an out west setting and drew those whether it be the vehicles or the vegetation. The drawings below were concepts as we knew the locations would be in 3d. We were originally going to do a 2.5d thing with objects being in 2d, but it was decided against, because it was the first time doing something like that and we weren’t sure of how it was going to look, as well as my drawings looking aesthetically inconsistent with the look of the locations. We did decide on having some of the characters being 2d, as 2d is my preferred way to work. The 3d characters are being rendered in cel shading, so the characters in 2d and 3d wouldn’t stick out as much.
This is a storyboard that I drew based off a scene that was written by Jonathan, where the protagonist enters a saloon and goes up the stairs where a vampire resides in one of the bedrooms. They both get into a fight when the protagonist shoots the vampire. This is what I imagined the scene would go like, though it was stated in the script that the protagonist stays in the bedroom to fight the vampire.
These background sketches were drawn by Jonathan, to show the perspective of shots, the layout of the locations, where the backgrounds take place, where characters are placed, etc. I did a sketch to show the layout of my finished version of the background.
This is a finished version of the bar location where we are introduced to the bartender character.
This is the background of the bedroom. I did 2 versions of the bedroom, as I had an idea where the first image is what you see before the protagonist opens the door and the second image is what you see when he actually opens the door, showing a light source from the open door and revealing a grisly sight on the bed.
Since Tim and Jonathan are more involved with CG animation and modelling, I try to incorporate as much 2d as I can while still keeping with the aesthetic of the animation. I have drawn some animatics to show my group mates ideas for shots. The first animatic I did was of the POV of the protagonist entering the bedroom in the saloon. He would look across to both corners of the room and realize that there is a vampire hanging on the ceiling.
I’m also working on 2d animated shots alongside the CGI. I was waiting for the look of the characters before fully working on them. I’ve started a shot where the protagonist shoots a vampire through a window.
I was tasked with background design too. Jonathan asked me to draw a sunset for a background and he would design mountain assets. I suggested to Jonathan if I could make an animated version of a sunset and he said it would be alright.
I was tasked with designing the secondary characters in the short, as well as designing a number of background characters. We intended the background characters to be entirely in 2d and place them in the 3d environments. I designed a preacher and a bartender character model in MS Paint. I made a version of the preacher’s head with no hat, just to show what his hair looked like.
I colored the models in Krita. There were no major changes between the initial sketches in MS Paint and the colors in Krita, except that I made the posture on the preacher character more crooked, due to the character’s old age. I left the eyes blank in the refs as the others in the group were still deciding on an eye color after I designed them. While working on the animation, I gave the bartender blue eyes and I gave the preacher milky eyes, inspired by Father Jack from the television series, Father Ted. The team suggested giving the bartender green eyes, but since his shot was going to be green screened in front of a 3d environment, I changed them to blue. When I finished the designs in Krita, I made 3 versions of the characters, one with no linework, one with linework and one with high contrast shading, just to show how they would look when first designed and how they would look when finished in the animation.
I started off with animating the bartender, as the rest of the group have thought of a way to include it in the film. It features the bartender cleaning a glass and then moving his head to the direction of the vampire’s location.
The animation process I did for this was coloring all the parts of the character first before doing the linework, I wanted to see what the cel shading on the models would look like in the 3d environments, so I could replicate in 2d, to keep a consistent look. Since it is going for a cel shaded look, I’m going for high contrast black shading, which I will put in after lining and coloring.
The hardest part of the animation was the glass cleaning animation, as I had to redraw the hands several times. I sketched out the hands first, but since I had to animate several layers and a couple of the layers were transparent, I got them mixed up. I had to draw the hole at the top of the glass several times as I had to have the hand coming in and out of the glass, but on the first attempt, I drew the whole glass on its own, meaning the hand when layered behind it, just looked like the character had put his hand behind the glass. I had 4 frames of a hand cleaning the glass.
While animating this I had set it to 12 frames a second. However, I misread the final project assignment brief that said that the animation was supposed to be 24 frames a second. I re-read the page and to remedy this, I added duplicates of some frames to keep the original speed of the animation.
The way that my 2d animation was placed into the 3d environment was reminiscent to the Parappa the Rapper games with the characters being 2d dimension, though this isn’t too noticeable with the composition and framing.
I used the linework to indicate movement. In the animation, the bartender moves his head to the right, so I made the linework on the side of the direction he is moving thicker than the other side of the linework. Since this animation was going to be put in the 3D environment, I had to put all the frames in a zip folder. All the frames had to have a transparent background, which would turn automatically black when in the zip folder. This would cause the linework of the character to blend in, therefore making the linework transparent as well and cause trouble with how the 2d animation would look in a 3d environment, so I made the linework a very dark grey instead.
For shot 26, it features the preacher coming out of the saloon and tossing the protagonist his crossbow. I split this in 2 shots, the first having the preacher jumping out of the saloon carrying the crossbow and the second is the preacher tossing the crossbow to the protagonist.
There is some secondary animation on the doors to the saloon when the preacher jumps out. I played with smears and facial expressions by having him jump up from the bottom of the screen and having secondary animation on the nose and hat with his nose pointing in opposite directions with him falling and jumping, as well as the hat dropping down.
Afterwards there is somewhat of a 180-degree turnaround of the character to show the vampire and protagonist fighting which is what the preacher is looking at. I did this to try out animating 3rd dimension angles in a 2d space and to test out my perspective skills.
When coloring this animation, I exaggerated the expressions on the character while he’s jumping forward. It helped portray the speed of the character’s jump in a fun way, like it was pushing back on the character’s face, giving him silly looking expressions.
The expressions were my favorite part of animating this scene, as it helped with my expression work and it showed off the definition of the character’s head, seeing it from different angles and the various parts of the face, with how the eyes and wrinkles wrap around the face and how the teeth look while inside the mouth, making the character more animated rather than just seeing him from a medium or close up shot. My favorite frame is the smear frame, as I thought I drew a unique way of portraying speed.
There was an oversight in this animation. In the scene, you can see the hat fall down in one frame, but you can see it fall down from the top of the screen again in a later shot
Shot 10 features the Preacher entering a bedroom and getting a bullet ricocheted into his hat, then jumping away from the doorway.
This is a reaction shot from the preacher after getting his hat shot off. I wanted to play with the expressions and posing of the character with my animation.
This is the background for the shot. The textures of the bedroom in 3d were drawn by me so it was easily recreated. I was originally going to animate a mirror in this scene as the 3d environment had one beside the door or Jonathan would animate what would be shown on the mirror and then green screen/edit that onto a mirror, but it didn’t happen.
To get the character’s fingers to grasp the side of the door, I made another layer to draw the arms and fingers and moved those layers over the door frame.
I had the character’s face be covered in blue to show the character’s head peeping through the door and into the darkened bedroom. It doesn’t make sense from a lighting perspective, but it helped as a way of showing the character’s neck moving forward rather than it just looking like his head was growing. I also colored the colored linework on the face as a dark blue to also indicate shading.
Smear frames to show the speed of his hand sliding up a wall.
The scene has the character’s hat suddenly fly up as soon as it gets shot by a ricochetting bullet. When animating it, I wasn’t sure of how to indicate that better, as the flash of the bullet would’ve already been finished due to it already being shot. So I decided to animate several bits of fabric flying out of the hat to indicate that it was being partially ripped from the bullet.
I added the coat on separate layers and moved each side of it along with the character’s movements, an example of this being by animating the character’s coat coming up when the arms move up. I did this as a way of not making the movement of the character’s coat uniform, by having the 2 sides of the coat, giving the clothing item more weight. This is the first time I tried to animate this effect, so I don’t think I got the movement of how that would go down right, but I believe it looks good within the animation and makes it look more interesting, as well as making the character less static. I made the undercoat red to make it stand out more, so it doesn’t blend in with the rest of the outfit. I could have made it orange, but then I realized that the background was orange so the effect came off fine.
When lining the character, I used line art that was wavy and had no consistent size. I used this to show depth in the character, such as having the hand that the character slides up the wall drawn in a bigger, heavier linework, compared to the rest of the character. I also used the linework to showcase speed and direction in the character, such as when I had the character jumping up, I’d have the line art thicker further down the character.
One of the problems I had was with the hat. I animated that when it gets shot, it jumps up from the preacher’s head and goes out of frame. I didn’t know how to visualize how it was shot chronologically, the bullet from the protagonist’s gun had already been dispersed in the previous shot, so I couldn’t do something like having a white flash on the screen or something similar. I originally had in the sketch version of the animation that there would be a fire effect to show that the bullet hit the hat, but it didn’t really come off like that due to it being a single frame in a 24 frame-a-second animation. I had an idea that fragments of the hat would come off the hat and slowly fall onto the ground.
One of the scenes in the animation had the protagonist get thrown out of the top room of the saloon through the wall and out into the street. I was tasked with animating this. One of the ideas that Jonathan gave me was to have the moment where they both crash through the wall be in slow motion. This gave the scene an action movie-esqe style, almost like a John Woo film. To get across the slow motion in the scene through animation and not just slowing it down in an editing program, I moved the characters with the transform key in Krita and moved them by 2 pixels each frame. I also drew in some debris from the destroyed wall to get this across too.
I had an idea to animate a perspective change while the characters are falling as I thought it would show off a stylish directional idea. This wouldn’t be included however when I changed how the animation would show the fall.
I had changed how I would animate this scene. Since my 2d characters were going to be placed in 3d environments and it would be too time consuming to recreate the outside of the saloon in 2d, I had the idea to animate the characters falling out of the saloon by means of placing the 2d animation in the 3d space. I did this by using a screenshot of the saloon as a reference and animating the characters over it. I originally had the idea to just use the screenshot as a background in the Krita file, but it was noticeably low resolution. I started off with drawing in the hole that the collision from the vampire’s attack had made and then drawing some falling poses for each character.
I had drawn the background of the bedroom in the hole to give it continuity from the last scene. When drawing the characters, I was originally going to make them silhouetted, but it didn’t make sense as it showed sunlight in the scene. As the 3d models are super detailed, I made the drawings of the character simplified. The protagonist drawing doesn’t have a face because his face is kept in profile in the falling poses. You can see the vampire’s face and the size of the pen tool is so small, the line art was reduced to pixels, so the drawing of the vampire’s face looks like an old 3d game texture, like a Quake character. I still kept the slow-mo idea from the previous version. The debris from the crash in the wall were just simple doodles that were drawn with the select tool and then filled in with brown. I also used the transform key to make them longer to emulate the speed of them flying away. The transform edit makes the images blurry and more pixelated, which would be a problem, but since they were made to look like they were going fast, this actually helped with the visuals.
Jonathan wrote in the script that the preacher would be introduced by coming up behind the protagonist while he is mourning at the grave. My idea for the preacher’s introduction is that he would be blurred by the field of view and then unblur when he started moving. My idea for how to do this was that I’d screenshot the protagonist’s 3d render, import it into Krita and then gaussian blur it to give it a field of view effect. I would also blur the preacher and background when the protagonist was unblurred. Jonathan suggested instead that I just animate the preacher, with the other two animating the rest of the elements in the scene. I agreed with Jonathan.
The protagonist would tell the preacher that he wouldn’t do the job for him, so the preacher puts his hat back on and walks away. I tried my hand at animated acting here by playing with the character’s facial expressions and body language, by having the preacher take his hat off as a gesture of appeasing the protagonist and then frowning and putting his hat back on when he refuses. I enjoyed pushing those elements.
More detailed versions of a couple of frames to get a feel for how the character would look when I start lining and coloring the animation.
Working on the colors in this scene chosen from the character reference.
This scene shows the preacher putting his hat back on upon being rejected by the protagonist. I animated the preacher’s arms and hands with him holding the rim of the hat and placing it back on his head. I did a smear frame where the preacher’s hat and hand look enlarged to show the sense of speed of him putting his hat above his head. The hand’s placement on the hat in relation to how it would actually look if you would be holding a cowboy hat looks a bit bizarre, as it was hard to get a sense of how to hold a cowboy hat when I don’t have a reference for it and the posing of the hand ( a pinching pose for holding the rim for example) and how it would interact with the material would be difficult to get down, but since the frames would go by very quickly, it’s not too noticeable, as well as if I had drawn him holding it in a more realistic fashion, it might mess with the framing and blocking of the shot.
The posing of the hands in this shot shows off some character acting. I had also animated the other hand separately from the hat hand in this shot, showing it clenching into a fist into an upward movement and then the preacher placing it into his hip to show his annoyance.
There was a coloring mistake in this scene, as while rendering the arms on the character, I accidentally chose a lighter blue from my color wheel. This happened as I had a lower opacity on the character’s coat and that made it blend in with the other blues I had on the wheel. I decided against fixing it as the frame rate wouldn’t make it too noticeable and it was a common mistake made in 2d animation so it wouldn’t be too egregious to leave it in.
I first started sketching out this scene, the character started off further in the distance compared to where is posed in the shot where puts his hat back on. This wouldn’t make sense so I just removed the first 2 frames.
While drawing the hands in this scene, I had to draw them in views that I hadn’t really drawn them in before, such as the fingers pointing towards the camera. To get across the idea that they were pointing forward and that they were not just flat 2d drawings, I rendered the wrinkles on the knuckles and fingers. To get the fingers to go behind the hat, I just drew the fingers on a separate layer and placed them behind the hat.
In this shot here, I had the character put his thumbs on the front of the hat’s rim, but when he takes it off, the thumbs are at the back. I did this because the pose that I had drawn with him holding his hat, the thumbs are placed that way. I tried to draw a frame where the hands are positioned correctly, but it didn’t come out right. I believe that while it doesn’t make sense, it helped with the animation in terms of posing and energy.
There are some reused poses that I included due to time constraints when the preacher gets closer to the protagonist and then moves away from them. I did change the facial expressions to match the script though.
The scene concludes with the preacher turning around and walking away. I drew the preacher turning and started off with drawing his head in multiple angles and studying different profiles. I started off with his head because I had to layer his long hair as well, as I didn’t want his hair to mesh with or be layered behind the body drawings. Since he was being drawn in multiple angles, I had to think about how certain details would be placed on his face when facing a different direction, such as with his facial hair and how his bone structure would look in a profile view, with his long nose and protruding chin.
The movement almost looks rotoscoped with how the arms and clothes look, showing the preacher walking away, though I didn’t use a reference for this shot.
I did some perspective shots of the hands when they’re swinging while he’s walking with them going back and forward.
This scene had a part where the preacher speaks to the protagonist, asking him for help. This meant that there was dialogue in the scene that I had to animate and lip sync. Since it was in the middle of the scene I was animating, I copied a frame where the character had his hat down and animated some mouths over it, as well as drawing the character’s jaw going down. The lines of dialogue were performed by Tim and they were “We need your help” and “I understand, farewell”.
The tutors suggested that in a scene when the vampire gets shot in the eye with a crossbow, there should be a way to indicate that he had been shot as it needed to be clearer in the shot. They suggested that a blood spurt could be added so I was tasked with placing a 2d blood spurt in the 3d animation. Due to how Krita works, I didn’t really have a way to animate over the footage and properly place the 2d animation over the 3d stuff, so I had to guess where the character’s eye was while using static screenshots as a reference. I drew in some spurts of blood as the arrow enters his eye with blood exploding out of the vampire’s face and laying on the character’s clothes to simulate how it would “realistically” react to when landing on the surface of the character’s body.
Due to the way I animated, it was hard to grasp how it would look in the animation, I shortened it and made it more simplified so I didn’t have to track where the blood would land on the body. The blood was colored to make it stand out against the background.
There were several scenes that I had to cut down either due to time or because they didn’t come out right.
For the intro, I had this idea that showed a hand grabbing a revolver from a holster, spinning it with its finger on the trigger twice and then blasting it, causing smoke to fill the screen, leading into the title screen. I used a scene from Robocop as a reference for the animation of the hand spinning the gun. It was not used and Timmy animated the intro instead.
Earlier on while the story was still being thought up and what scenes we could include, we had the idea where the animation would erupt into a big action scene. I did an animatic for a scene where a vampire attacks the protagonist. It features the vampire jumping out of the window of the saloon and running up to the protagonist, until the vampire gets its head blown off and flies back into the saloon, landing on and breaking a table. I had the idea that the vampire was the bartender or a patron of the bar. I thought it would’ve looked cool, as I applied the action beats and their pacing very well, but the plot didn’t really call for it when it was finished.
In the scene where the preacher jumps out of the saloon door, I had an extra shot where it spins around the character and shows the outside of the saloon, showing the other characters and shops outside the saloon. I took it out, due to a few reasons, as it would mean that I would have to animate the background of the outside of the saloon from multiple angles and I didn’t really have any references of the environment from those angles, as well as drawing the characters that were only 3d models and having to guess where they would be in the environment and what poses they would be doing. From what I did work on in those shots, I drew the preacher spinning and showing the back of his head and showing the front of the general store outside the saloon. While I thought that part was animated decent, I tried to add shading to the character to add a dramatic effect, but the way it was colored didn’t look appealing.
Finally, I had an idea to show the POV of a vampire bat getting the drop on the protagonist while flying over the town, starting off at the top of a windmill, zooming through the support beams of the general store, moving past a water tower, and then flying over the saloon. I did this to test animating perspective and movement. I didn’t finish it as the 3D animators had finished the ending shot.
There are some aesthetic inconsistencies with the animation. I was told that the 3d animation would have a cel shaded look, so I thought that the character models would be outlined. In some of the earlier scenes that I animated, I added an outline to the characters, so that it could blend in with the 3d animation, but when I saw the models, they weren’t outlined (the environments were though), more similar to how it’s done in Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. So, with the later animated scenes, I just didn’t draw the outlines. This led to my 2d animation being inconsistent from both the 3d models and my own animated shots. I also didn’t outline the last animations I did due to time constraints.
My favorite shot that I animated was the one where the preacher runs into the bedroom as I felt as it was the best animated, having a mix of naturalistic movements with the way the coat sways in relation to where the character moves and humor through the smears and facial expressions, as well as being the most appealing looking shot through the use of color and the loose line art.
Aside from a few animation errors, I could’ve made the scene where the vampire throws the protagonist out of the saloon top floor better. Though Jonathan liked the scene, I’m wondering if the slow-motion style was right to go for, rather than having multiple frames of the two characters falling out of the top of the saloon. Also the walk that the preacher does at the end of his intro looks a bit silly.