Category: Animated Narratives

In class this week, in addition to giving a presentation on our progress so far for our short animations, we were given some activities to complete. I didn’t get to the Jurassic Park activity, but I managed to complete the lessons in camera and animation on the little green blob provided by Alec:

Blobbby qt

 

This was a lot of fun, the camera movement looks funny! I plan to spend my time going over the Jurassic Park activity, and practicing camera movements and importing audio, after my deadline for my hard surface model next week.

This week we were given a couple of exercises, for homework and a class activity, in which we were to get used to animating in Maya. I feel like I probably keep saying the same thing about the activities we’ve been given in both of this semester’s classes, but with Maya animation I feel like I am once again struggling against the unknown! I am incredibly slow to learn this stuff, it took me a full day to complete the class activity we were given. However, I did eventually get both animations to a place where I am happy with them:

It took me a stupid amount of time to get this part right, I’m still not even sure if I’ve achieved it, but I knew I wanted it to act like a bowling ball in it’s density and I felt totally out of control of the way that the bounces looked. However, I’m happy with the end result, I think it looks like a heavy ball – I can almost hear it hitting the floor.

Next, we were given a ball with a RIG and we were to look at working out squash and stretch:

Again, it took me a long time to get this to a place where I was happy, but I am really pleased with it. Instead of the ball simply falling, I wanted to make it look as if it was bouncing along by itself and I think I achieved that by squashing the bottom half of the ball up towards the top when it was at the peak of its jump, almost to give the illusion of ‘legs’. I also wanted to add a little humour to the end by having the wall – that is seemingly stable – fall straight over after it’s wobble on top of the ball.

After lunch we were split up between our groups to discuss our final assignment. My group took the time to agree on a plot:

Ciara suggested ‘The Graveyard Shift’ which we all thought was just so clever, which it was, so we are working with that as our title.

We arranged to speak again the next morning with our own versions of what we thought the story board would look like, as well as some more experiments with character design for the ghosts. This was my story board:

I realised pretty swiftly afterwards that it’s a bit long, and would probably over run the amount of time we have for the animation! The other members of my team had much more succinct storyboards that much better represented the process of our trainee character training! In the end, we each looked at each others story boards, thought about what we liked about each one, and we merged them all together. Whilst we all had the same story, it was amazing to see how diverse the story boards turned out. I volunteered to draw up the final story board so that Ciara could start off her responsibility of getting the animatic done: the rough sketches:

So pleased with all of our ideas, and how they’ve all come together – I really do think that we each brought our own parts to the story board and that our ideas and senses of humour click together so well, which allowed us to very easily blend our visions together. I am really looking forward to getting the animatic done, and getting a feeling for what it’s actually going to look like!

I also roughed out some more silhouettes and ideas for the ghost characters:

I could have pushed this much further, however last night I was up until about 3AM trying to get everything together and organised for my blog update/homework that I really didn’t have the time. I’m super happy with the model on the bottom right, but I really love the long dangling arms of the top left. These were my final ideas, which were proposals for both of the main characters, or, the one on the right would be my chosen design for one of the background character ghosts:

Overall, I am nervous, worried, frustrated but also excited for this semester’s assignment; I feel like it has been extremely intense this semester, in comparison the the previous one. I’m working hard so that things hopefully start to come a little easier.

We made up an animatic for our story, which we presented in class:

Ghost Gardeners Animatic.mp4

We were given pointers on a couple of things that needed changed, namely having the other ghost gardeners in the beginning shot be gardening to establish the ghost’s jobs, and some changes to timing etc.

I wanted to spend the day getting some ideas fleshed out, as I know this week is going to be incredibly busy doing homework for both classes and a commission that I agreed to, which is due on Friday. I followed a couple of tutorials that I found online for creating low-poly environmental models such as rocks and trees:

These were actually amazing fun to do, and super easy following this youtuber’s guides. I really think that if we decide to do an outdoor environment, low-poly might be the way to go – they’re really simple and easy to create, but I also think they’re quite cute and impactful as an aesthetic. These were my attempts:

I think this low-poly aesthetic, coupled with a cool toned palette, could be a lot of fun. I had suggested even having some little fire flies floating, which could be a nice saturated orange or yellow just to create a little contrast with the trees.

I then started thinking about the model of the ghosts themselves – I didn’t model anything, however I did some sketches:

I thought it might be cool to have one feature that relates all of the ghosts – could the body/sheet be translucent, and then a bright and glowing core colour be shown towards the centre of the model? I thought this might be a cute aesthetic, it could also be a way for us to show some personality! The whole thing is giving me 40 Winks PS1 game vibes which I quite like the idea of, but it might be adding complication rather than keeping it simple, I am happy with whatever we do really! I just wanted to get some ideas out whilst they were in my head.

I also did a couple of little doodles of grave stones, and thought about how they might look cared for vs. uncared for. I am trying to get an idea of how we can simplify the graves – the grave slabs themselves will be easy enough to change as they’re essentially just block shapes – but I wanted to show flowers etc.

I very quickly looked up some flowers that grow/thrive/bloom in the night time as I thought it would be really sweet to have the ghosts growing and cultivating flowers that are ‘awake’ at the same time as they are?

I thought models like this would be fairly simple to do, but also that we could essentially copy and paste them but make them look a little different maybe with a different shaped headstone, or different coloured flowers.

Anyway, that is all my tired little brain could muster today! Hopefully my team find these ideas interesting and they’re things that we could possibly work with and come up with more ideas off the back of.

This week, after going through presentations, we were tasked with forming the group we will be working with going forward for this semester’s second assignment – a 15 to 30 second 3D animation.

My group is myself, Samantha, Ciara, Ellie and Will. We spent the afternoon of allotted time concepting ideas, trying to ascertain how we could tell a basic story with the use of simple characters. We toyed around with the idea of vegetable characters, characters which look like rayman (detached hands and feet) until finally Ellie suggested a type of character that we all loved the idea of: Ghosts. Ciara promptly suggested toast ghosts, which I think had originally been a joke but we did come up with a few ideas around that theme. In the end, I am of the opinion that whilst this is very funny and we had a lot of fun drawing with it, it would be a little too difficult to come up with a plot around this theme.

We moved on and I came up with the idea of Ghost Gardeners – These ghosts are responsible for tending to and restoring abandoned graves in their cemetery. I thought that this would be a nice plot, we could make it quite emotional with elements of humour here and there. These are some little doodles I came up with:

This week was our deadline for our presentations, in which we were to analyse scenes in an assigned short film. This was my section of the presentation and my sprites, which were previously used of the World of Animation module:

Honestly, I’m a little disappointed with myself on this. I don’t know if it came out particularly well, but having Covid has made it particularly hard for me to form cohesive sentences or really work very well this past couple of weeks. Hopefully it improves going forward! Unfortunately I don’t have the ability to change this now. 🙂