Category: Animation Studio

I spent today smoothing out animation in the first three sections of my animation, I thought I would show the progress (apologies for the GIF quality, they won’t flash in the final animation):

Improvement in candle flickers:

Improvement in candle flickers, added six in-between frames during reading and turning the page:

Finally, added two more in-between frames for reading on the big book:

Really happy with the changes I’ve made here, and think I’m ready to start the hefty task of colouring my frames. I think if I were to continue to analyse all of my scenes any further, I might never be satisfied fully! I will edit up the new, smoother, frames to my completed MP4 and send it in for review once more before I start the colouring process. I’m sure there are probably many areas in which I could improve timing and pacing, but as of right now I’m not really too sure where these improvements could be made.

References used for the candle flicker can be found here, I wanted to be sure to choose something not too dramatic — this is a sealed, warm, cosy castle room for study and star gazing, and as such there’s no substantial wind coming in and the candle would be burning quite evenly. I also didn’t want anything to distract from Hyacinth, who should be the focal point in these scenes.

I will be putting animation work on the back burner over the weekend in order to finalise and proof read my essay, which is due on Monday night. After that, I will have just over a week to finish colouring up my frames — as previously said, I’m very positive about my progress, my improvement in animation and my time-management for this project. I’m looking forward to getting my colouring done, and seeing what it looks like finished up.

Edit: I also wanted to include the presentation put together for this class, in which we presented our project so far and what we were planning on working on:

This week has been mainly focussed on finishing the animation fully, and getting it timed. I first finished the animation without the camera movement up to the sky:

With that out of the way, I wanted to focus on getting my camera movement to the sky sorted, as it was the part that was one of the things that was concerning me most:

After this, I was watching and rewatching the animation in order to pin point what other changes I wanted to make: I mentioned in my presentation today, Thursday the 9th, that I wanted to do more with my wide shot during my animation. I ended up making Hyacinth and Jinx interact in the end, as I wanted the audience to look from Hyacinth to Jinx during the scene. I decided to have Hyacinth ask Jinx a question about the spell she is reading, but he’s unsure:

I’m really happy with the addition of this, and I think it adds a lot – I think the viewer will be able to see the scene a little clearer, and by forcing their eyes across from Hyacinth to Jinx, they have time to register Jinx and take the setting in too!

The next steps I want to take over this coming week are mainly in cleaning up the smaller, less noticeable bits of bad (in my opinion!) animation:

• Fix the movement of the candles in the first scene – Alec had suggested that the candles should flicker and that their intensity should bloom at different times and this is definitely something I want to apply as I really do feel that it’ll make a huge difference.
• More in-between shots at the points where Hyacinth is reading, as they feel very choppy – I’ve already started working on a more fluid motion for her hands and eyes on the opening reading scene and it’s already looking a lot better. I need to apply this to when she is reading on the big book too!
• I need slower movement on the initial pull around the table and crystal ball — I need to slow it in and slow it out, which will mean holding more frames for a little while longer. At the moment the movement feels too fast, and I’m trying to keep ‘slow in, slow out’ in mind!
• I think I could use holding the star animation for a little longer, making it sparkle for a bit.
• I need to fix the hand in the final shot, as Alec thought it looked a little strange with the two middle fingers unseparated. This is a usual stylistic choice for me in my illustrations, but perhaps isn’t great for this project!
• When I’m happy with the animation itself, that’s when I want to colour it.

I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to get all of this done before deadline, and I’m really proud of my work for this semester on this animation. I’ve never animated before, and I feel so pleased with myself and can’t believe I’ve animated something this long and – in comparison to my previous experience which is none – this complicated! I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but I have worked so hard to learn as much as I possibly can to make it the best animation I can. I just hope it shows – I’ve sincerely enjoyed this semester and this project. I’ll be so satisfied when it’s submitted and I can have a well earned break over Christmas!

This week I have been working to line the sections of my animation that I currently have — admittedly, this is to avoid having to try and figure out the 2D camera on After Effects…

This is the first 3 sections of my animation with completed lineart: (To clarify, this is just the frames that I *need*, they have not been properly timed as there’s a good bit of looping animation in my animation).

I’m really happy with these so far, and I aim to finish the other scenes (which are incredibly simple, thank god!) before the end of the week. After that, it’s a matter of getting the scenes lined and timed, which I think is going to be the most tedious part of the process.

I actually started to get some parts of the scenes coloured over the past couple of days – the first attempt wasn’t great, in fact when I finished this I was quite discouraged:

I really hated the way that the light from the candles in the background turned out — I was attempting to make it look as though it was flickering, but it was so distracting and very unsuccessful in my opinion — in addition, the flames of the candles themselves do not move and it just looks even more odd as a result. I thought that I was going to have to end up colouring this again, so admittedly I was feeling pretty sad about how it turned out — however, after some tweeking I managed to fix it up a little:

 

I also then decided to add a motion blur just to see if that had any impact:

I thought this was subtle but effective to be honest, and it’s something I’ll likely keep.

This is the final, edited shot, just for a bit of fun:

I’m happy with how this is coming along so far, there are some changes I want to make with this when I’m reviewing the timing:

• I want the eyes to blink slower
• I want the candles to flicker slower
• I want to completely change the crystal ball spell

Over the next week I would like to:

• Finish lining the other three sections of the animation
• Finish colouring the other three sections of the animation
• Start to edit the animation, adding in eye movements and blinks, in either Krita or Rough Animator

If I can get the animation finished in it’s basic form I’ll be pretty happy with that, meaning that for the rest of the time we have I can spend editing it to coordinate with it’s SFX and music — after that, all I really need to worry about is getting the transition sorted, which I will speak to Milo about — hopefully they have their transition sorted by then!

Otherwise, I just wanted to stick up a couple of pieces from last week, in an exercise where we were to take our character’s down to their basic form:

Hyacinth Timelapse.

Jinx timelapse.

Jinx’s rly made me laugh I’m ngl. *SASS*

 

Today we were working more on our animation. I managed to get the spell cast mapped out in class and partially at home this evening:

I had a lot of fun with this one, I’m added some little details from the animatic but otherwise it’s pretty similar to the original concept. I added her looking down at the book part way through the spell rune just because I think it added some believability to the character: she’s a student, she’s learning, she’s not quite sure of this particular spell yet. I also added a pause before she hit’s the spell with her palm to activate the rune; again, I thought this added a little believability to the idea that she isn’t quite sure, she’s waiting for a moment before tentatively patting the rune to activate. Reference for spell casting in my animation comes heavily from Owl House, who also use magic to draw runes in the air or on paper, and tap to activate. I really love this idea:

I decided to put together all of my animations so far, just to see the flow. I’m pretty happy with it to be honest, I need to work out how I’m going to navigate from one scene to the other as they’re a bit jarring at the moment, the purpose was just to view it all together so and it’s really fun to see it playing out – I’m really proud of the amount i’ve learned and improved in terms of timing and secondary action and I think that the improvements are evident in what I’m doing – It’s making me very excited to start working on the final product. The video belows consist of the animation above, this animation and this animation:

At the moment I think I’m on track to fit this all in to about 30 seconds. I’ve gotten the more difficult parts out of the way now, bar learning how to use the 2D camera on after effects, and am now just roughly animating the easy looping animations that are left. I’m aiming to have the entire thing finished in its rough form by next Thursday. Then it’s just a matter of getting it cleaned up and coloured for the deadline on the 21st. I know that this is going to be a lot of work, but I’m determined to get this done, I think I’m capable of it and I don’t really want to sacrifice anything from the animation.

All references used can be found on my Pinterest.

My animatic was updated slightly to better incorporate the transition between Milo’s scene and my own — Instead of the smoke rising up  through the floor, the clouds created from the potion explosion will reduce in size and opacity and land within Hyacinth’s crystal ball:

Backgrounds.

This week I have been concentrating on getting some of the bigger parts of the Build-A-World project started (and in some cases, finished). This has included finalising the main background for my segment, the background for the opening scene, and roughly mapping out the most difficult part of the animation.

I began, last week, by creating the background for the opening scene of our animation:

This was based on the original thumbnails that I made last week. I’ve first included the version with the foreground trees to show the full colour scheme, in the opening scene the trees will move to the sides a little as the camera zooms in on the school. I didn’t get this colour scheme from any specific place, I started with the original colour scheme I used in the thumbnails, but I ultimately decided against it – it wasn’t giving me the magical, eery vibes I was looking for. After that, I played around with the colour wheel mainly, looking at both complimentary, split complimentary and analogous colours  until I found a colour combination that I liked. I knew I wanted it to be unusual and magical, bordering on a little spooky, and I wanted the school itself to be bright and noticeable; I think overall that I achieved this and I’m happy with how the piece turned out! I sent this into my team’s discord and they were all happy with it. I am going to wait for feedback from class this week before continuing to do anything with this. See below the version without the foreground:

Opening Scene Timelapse.

I then moved on to drawing up the main background for the bulk of my animation:

Astrologer’s Library – Timelapse.

The aesthetic for this was based off of my original design from the beginning of the year, and I’m still really happy with it — It was one of the designs that stuck in my mind from thumbnailing at the start of this semester and I’m pleased to be getting the chance to use it now. The colour scheme was inspired by: Reference one. I really liked the red lights that were cast in this reference, and thought it would be perfect to play it up in order to ramp up that magical, ominous feeling in the Astrologer’s Library. These were the colour schemes I got linking this piece on Adobe colour wheel, and ultimately what I ended up working with:

Overall, I’m happy with both pieces but will re-adjust with feedback on Thursday’s class.

 

Animation.

I also started to work out the more difficult part of my animation segment, as I knew I definitely wanted to have this done for feedback on Thursday — it was a total challenge to get this to look even remotely close to correct and I really hope it translates.

First I started by drawing up the camera rotating around the table, which happens at the beginning of the animation:

I really wasn’t happy with how the crystal ball and table were reacting with each other — the crystal ball looks as if it’s sliding all over the place when it should remain stationary; I decided to try and fix this by making the crystal ball the same shape the whole way around, and trying to keep it vaguely in the same place:

Again, I wasn’t happy with this at all – it still looked to me as if the crystal ball is sliding around as the camera rotates around it. So, after much thought, I decided to look at the animation as having a separate table and props, and started again:

I realised part of the issue was that both the crystal ball and the table were not stationary: because I was unable to see the table and it’s legs, it was less obvious to me that this was part of the issue. By keeping both stable and starting again working on a brand new layer, I could really see the improvements on the first re-draw. I also added some detail on the base of the crystal ball, as well as a couple of little scratch marks on the side of the table, as I thought something moving around the base of the items would help further communicate that the camera is rotating around the table, which I think helped it to read better:

This is the final version of the animation in background only, which I am super happy with. I’m sure there are probably a million things I need to fix,  but me doing this on my own with very little experience was challenging and actually really fun once I got over the frustration of trying to imagine my own eyes as the camera, and repeatedly circling round my coffee table so I could figure out what direction the wall was supposed to be going…:

Camera Rotation – Timelapse

The inspiration for this shot came from the opening of Owl House, the segment from 22 seconds to 30 seconds. The camera movements are almost 3D in the opening, and I love the way it looks — this is a simple, baby version of it but I was heavily inspired with how those shots played out.

After that, I made the animation an image sequence and imported it to rough animator, which I think is much easier to use when animating fluid objects with secondary actions, and it is where I plan on doing my first rough pass at animating my character. I also find it much easier to handle when there are separate timings for separate objects. Once the rough pass is done, I’ll import the character’s image sequence into procreate to clean up the lines and to colour the scene. I managed to finish this scene, which I’m happy with as I have a good bulk of work done and ready for feedback – in my practice study last week doing this scene very simply, Alec had commented that he thought there was maybe a little too much drag in my character’s hair – I agree, it made the hair look quite heavy, so I tried to tone that down a little:

Edit: Spent today slightly fiddling with the timing of this scene. I sped up the eyes but changed the finger movements to 2’s. I wanted it to feel like she’s reading enthusiastically and rapidly, however having the hand movement on 1’s doesn’t read like she’s skimming the page to me as it’s a little too quick.

I’m much happier with this edit than the original, but we will see what’s recommended with feedback! 🙂

I also had a little time to work out the basic frames of the second scene:

It’s super basic and needs smoothed out, which I will work on in class tomorrow.

Overall, I think I’ve had a pretty productive and educational week — I’m looking forward to getting some feedback in class.