Category: Animation Studio

Magical Academia: Capybara Academy, Animation Jam.

This is our final animation edited together. I decided to take everyone’s individual SFX out of this version, and just try to time the transitions as well as I could with the natural transitions of the track. The sound tracks in everyone’s individual animations together were a little too jarring and I couldn’t get them to transition smoothly; each member of the group will be able to upload their own separate clips individually with their desired SFX for assessment, and this will suffice for the edited Animation Jam.

I am so pleased and proud of us for making this — I think we all did such a great job, and I am particularly pleased with how nicely all of the transitions came out! ^^

This entire semester has been incredibly enjoyable for me – I have come from knowing the bare minimum about animation, with absolutely no experience in creating an animation, to having made what is essentially a forty second animation that I am immensely proud of.

The aspects of my animation process that I believed worked well were my application of scenery and setting, colour theory, character design, and secondary action; I can’t believe how much my grasp on secondary movement has improved especially. Prior to this, my main concern about my earlier animation attempts was that things felt very stiff and unbelievable, however with my progress in secondary movement I feel I’ve improved so much in this area.

Previously, I had also never put too much effort into backgrounds, sets and scenery: this is an aspect of animation that I had no idea that I enjoyed. Initially I was mostly interested in character design, however after my experience in this module I would also be interested in working more within background art.

Colour Theory had been something that I was apprehensive about. However, after my lecture in colour theory – with additional advice from lecturers throughout the module – I have gained so much confidence in using colour and find I quite enjoy it now.

Despite all of the positive results of working through this module, there are still many things that I would like to improve upon. I feel that my staging throughout the project was quite weak – it was heavily front facing, and there weren’t a huge amount of dynamic camera angles; if I were to go back to the beginning of this process I would try to implement more interesting camera angles.

I also felt that I was very poor in timing, there were a lot of points during this process that I knew my animation was too fast paced, either through my own observations or through the advice of my lecturers and peers. This improved a lot as I was progressing, however they were difficult adjustments, and I struggled a lot with this principle.

A final improvement I would like to make would be using another animation programme. Because of hardware and my own comfort, I used a combination of Rough Animator and Procreate – I am very comfortable with drawing in procreate and did not stray from that comfort zone to utilise better animation programmes; Procreate is not great for animating due to it’s limited maximum layer count, it does not feel very intuitive and is not industry standard.

Working within a team has been a positive experience for me, with five of us returning to our original concept after moving around week-to-week. I believe my contribution to our team animation has been good: I created the opening scene to our animation as well as my own segment.

To conclude, I am very aware of the many improvements I will need to make in future projects. Staging, timing, slow in and slow out are all things that I either was not comfortable with or didn’t afford a lot of consideration. Despite this, I worked incredibly hard on my segment and with my peers to try and create the best animation I could – and with my limited experience and knowledge, I believe I really did achieve this.

Finally finished up on all of my animation. It’s been a labour of love and I’m really proud of what I managed to achieve!

Opening Scene:

Main Segment:

Enjoy! ^^

This is the lined and finalised opening scene for our animation. As you can see, it has been slowed down quite a bit in comparison to the rough version. I plan on making the character all one colour, probably the yellow used in the crest, just to make things easy and quick! After all, it’s just a little opening animation.

I have also had some feedback from Sarah on my animation, and I have made a few changes based on her advice:

“Ah love the background! his is looking great – the main thing that stands out is the timing. The first shot overall feels very fast and throughout her eye movement is very frantic- Id slow this down as it feels really fast and because of this detracts from the main action especially in the finger making the spell. The camera zoom to the telescope also feels fast but overall great work and looking really nice! Very illustrative and cool style.”

I also feel the beginning scene is quite fast, however if I’m totally honest, I’m really not sure how to fix this and as time is slowly running out, I am reluctant to spend much more time on it – I want to have the entire animation coloured by the time it’s ready for submission — I feel that this will really complete the animation, and as my own personal goal I want to get this finished; this is what I now want to dedicate my time to. I did slow down Hyacinth’s eye movements, whilst reading throughout the animation, as well as ironing out a bunch of little glitches here and there for an overall smoother viewing. Hopefully this makes it feel a little less frantic – I believe it does over all. I have also added in my transition scene (subject to change), which I think helps the beginning scene feel a lot less frantic and quick.

Tomorrow I will start colouring my character.

I just wanted to pop my updated MP4 into the blog, showing all of the new, streamlined, animations together. This is without sound and sound effects, and is for the purpose of getting feedback from teachers before I continue to colour.

I also did the rough work for the opening scene and my transition scene. Here is my transition scene so far:

I spoke with Milo and got the last scene they are using, along with the colour they are going to use for the smoke, and used it at the start of my scene. I will spend tomorrow refining the way this looks, and also adding the fog sparkles etc. to my crystal ball throughout the animation. By this point I should have my feedback on the full animation and should be able to make a start in colouring my characters. I think I might also transition the colour so that it gets a little darker in the crystal ball, and also change the colour of the sparkles to the same yellow used later in my scene.

This is my progress on the opening scene: It won’t be anything too flashy, all I need to do with it is line and colour the little character who will be very basic. I will be taking advantage of very quick movements and the small character size so that I can get away with just warping a lot of the character zooming towards and around the outside of the school with the liquify and distort tool.

This is the results without the title:

This is the results when I add the title. I think I prefer the title version more, but I am going to discuss it with my team and see what we all think (Ignore the bad GIF quality, the GIF compression website makes it flash for some reason!):

After finishing my essay this weekend, I am starting to feel much more relaxed and ready for the next stage of colouring and finalising. I feel that the colouring process might be a little tedious, but less stressful than trying to figure out all of the issues I’m having with my animation.