ideas and concept:
brainstorming
pre-production plan
The plan for my animation was to simply have a character complete a run cycle and different jumps running through the ulster university, as the character runs he goes through different classrooms such as thee art studio and animation studios. This was my idea to advertise the different courses within the university, with this ident however focusing on my animation I realised I made too much of a complex plan and an aim to complete to many scenes that would take too long to complete in this short piece of time. In order to fix this and to meet the deadline I shortened the animation and ended it with the character doing its first and final jump. Then as he lands he creates an explosion which I originally planned to have at the end of the animation but changed to end the animation at around 9 seconds the universities logo playing afterwards to amount everything to around 10 seconds long.
My main goal was to focus on form, movement and learning rather than traditional outcomes of pre-production like character design. I knew I would possibly be tight for time and so started off with a box and shape based character that was simple to animate which I could use to learn from rather than trying to fully outline a human concept with features while animating as I knew that would be complicated in the earlier stages of animating key poses and in-betweens. it would have put me at a cost of time so I decided to focus on the action rather than the design element purely for my own fascination in learning. though thinking on it I did have in plan to design and create more of a character for the person who is running if I was able to complete my schedule earlier than expected. the concept was to have the character represent the logo running through the university. I planned on having the character dressed in a suit with the universities colour pallette.
storyboard
storyboard development and time cuts
final storyboard:
Animatic
Theory:
2D Animation is the sequence of images or frames of drawings/images played alongside each other fast usually played on 24 frames per second. The fast sequence creates movement due to the human eye not able to process each individual drawing every second. This allow the images to slowly blend together creating an illusion of movement to take place on a page. 2D animation is presented in many different styles however for my piece I wanted to use a 2D animated style that was more expressive and loose something that can show a lot of movement in a cartoon like way and that was easier to animate. I used Spiderman into the spider verse a 2D and 3D animated movie as a reference for the style I was going for however I used anime as a main influence of movement and scene compositions that were themed around action.
Idents are a form of animation that is briefly played between scenes of typically tv shows. An ident usually advertises the company or business/channel.in this case we were asked to create an ident advertising the university of ulster or the art foundation course. This brought me to the ideas of the courses such as what am I advertising -art and animation
it made me think about how would I exercise this advertisement clearly. although my aim was to advertise the university I took this time to practice on underdeveloped skills with animation that I have and decided to practice on some fundamental animation skills and sequences such as a run cycle. Doing this allowed me to combine a lot of learning into the process rather than just creating a product overall I still believe it advertises the university well but not as I first intentioned either way I am proud of my outcome.
Reference and inspiration:
For my animation I decided to use anime as my main reference due to the high level of action scenes. These scenes were a base reference as to how i would compose my character running. I used the BNA anime title opening as inspiration for the fast pace running the characters do. I hoped to also use the same colour scheme of bright neon colours like the anime but due to time constraints I was not able to colour the animation.
An animator I follow on YouTube typically works on anime scenes and I used his animation reel of his work to figure out what kind if movements and camera angles the character would have in my animation I heavily based my work of this artist animation and learnt many skills and techniques form him such as using motion blurs in the running sequences on the hands and in the jumping sequences using squash and stretch with motion blurs on the body twists and leg movements.
For the end jumping scene I planned to do in the animation it was going to be based around the Spiderman into the spider verse scene where miles Morales jumps of a building. Ina similar way I wanted to re-create that however after cutting the animation shorter I was unable to do the jump but still used this animation style as a reference for motion blurs and pops of actions in scenes which can make the movement more noticeable and direct to the audience.
Process:
My process started with planning a simple idea. I knew I would be short for time and i wanted to dive in fast so I took of fast and gathered resources and decided how I planned to animated. I started by animating the scenes I knew I was definitely using such as the running scenes. alongside this I developed the storyboard and made changes to it as I figured out what I would have time to animated and not to animate almost creating a mini schedule.
I created the animation on adobe animate a software I typically use for its easy accessibility to creating blank keyframes and arranging them along a timeline. This software has a feature I love which is adding a camera movement layer. this feature saves time as it allows me to directly frame a camera separate to the canvas which I can control the movement too. it can help add bounce and direction to the animation however I did not use it this time.
Although this is a very helpful feature I typically use I decided I wanted to be more elaborate with how I animated I wanted to learn complex scenes and in doing so hand animated the movement of the camera my self by using scaling on the animated character, slowly overtime making the character get larger and moving down the canvas slightly to appear if the camera was zooming in to a close up shot and moving closer. This is mainly shown when the camera is behind the character as they run. this taught me a lot abut how to use scaling more efficiently in animating although this part did not save on time. It allowed me to learn something very interesting and new. overall my process was rather simple frame by frame and shape by shape with different key action poses the only downside was because of how complex it was it did take up more time. this all helped keep everything in production and i enjoyed it a lot.
The aim was to fully animated what I could in adobe animate. Because of the simplicity the software has to colouring it was not exactly accurate to creating art and I knew this. My main goal was to roughly create the movements, cameras and animation faster in this software as I can work frame by frame with onion skinning. After finishing I was planning on exporting everything as single PNG images of each individual frame and put it into photoshop onto a timeline. From there I would be tracing each movement i made and giving it line art tidying everything up then I would start the colouring process. After picking a style and colour pallet I would fully render everything and add shadows and finish. I would then export everything again as PNG image sequence and composite everything into adobe after effects along a timeline to fully edit the timing, scenes and composition with the background art completing the animation, rendering it as a movie file.
I made many changes throughout my animation, I started out by animating different scenes from the storyboards as to not get bored animating the same scenes one after the other. this kept things interesting however animating some of the starting scene and then animating the finishing scenes although it was a good idea as to keep my motivation up it was not affective with time as when I realised I needed to cut things out of the animation to keep things shorter in order to complete everything by the deadline I had animated some scenes I was no longer going to be using so in that regard some time was lost animating things I did not need although I still learnt a lot in the process.
reflection:
The animation overall does not look completely finished as it is not the character is still in rough and I was never able to fully making to final rendering outcomes with colour. I believe however the animation ident turned out well allowing me to explore more in animation and gain more knowledge which will better influence and upgrade my work to another level in the future. I still do believe that the animation needs some more work and tweaks but I am satisfied with what i was able to achieve in the time I had.
SCENES
FIRST RUNNING SCENE
JUMPING SCENE- later cut for time
FINAL ANIMATION