This week I aimed to finish all elements of my preproduction elements in order to get ready to start my final animation. I’m very happy that I had been keeping up with a steady workflow up to this point as I wasn’t doing great mentally so having a lot of my work done before meant I haven’t been falling behind.
FINAL ANIMATIC
I didn’t make it into class this week but thankfully Alyssa gave me my notes on my animatic which meant I could make my final version.
So approaching my animatic the same way I took this back into Krita and worked on adding animated elements to the storyboard. This ended up going quicker than my previous animatic did, since I had my new digitally drawn storyboards I didn’t have to draw every frame, however because I didn’t draw this some of the action ended up being quite choppy so I can’t say that I am pleased with the final result that I have. So, I have decided to use both versions of my animatic, one to help me with my staging and placement and the other to help me with the movements and the timing. I can say that this version has the better visual appeal overall, and I removed the anticipation frame to have them go straight into the hug as advised. I may actually end up adding more time as I animate to let the actions breathe more but overall they work here.
NEW
OLD
BACKGROUNDS
When it comes to the backgrounds I have actually been putting these off for a while. I found myself being really nervous about committing to things, mainly committing to anything that would show up in the final animation since that was it, this would be what I am graded on and I just don’t think my work is good enough. So after fighting myself for a week over it, I made myself commit. As mentioned in a previous post I will be using Alyssa’s Blender file of the demon room to use as reference images, and I had outlined the specific backgrounds that I would need in my storyboard so it was just a matter of matching them together and getting to drawing. I decided to draw these on procreate since I was a bit more comfortable with this software.
I went and took screenshots of different frames from my storyboard each with their own backgrounds so that I could take screenshots in the blender file and draw over them/use them as reference.
I also went ahead and looked up what resolution I should draw my backgrounds in and found this forum that discussed drawing a resolution above what you are drawing in so that if you were to zoom in it would still look good, so I decided to follow along with this and draw my backgrounds as 3840×2160, or double the resolution size. I’m not the best at drawing backgrounds but since I decided to have still backgrounds it would mean I can just bring these images in and animate over top on these for consistency.
So I went and drew over my screenshots with construction lines and started to go over these with some sketched in detail. I haven’t used this approach before when making an animation so I was mindful to thinking of my staging and how I planned out my shots in my storyboard. Thankfully I can edit these a bit here as well as when rough animating (using the increased resolution) to get my intended final frames.
I then went and added some sketch detail to the construction lines to have the nice detail, I used both Alyssa’s design and then added some of Ellie’s detail to this as well as inserting something I wanted that was in the same vein. I didn’t want to add too many things into the background or make it too precise so that the main action can be the focus of the animation. These are the backgrounds in number order including an alternate version of the first background, I wasn’t sure how to have it angled so I did both just to be sure.b
Before lining out my backgrounds I wanted to do some research into line art and with that I found some helpful tutorials.
This tutorial in particular is from one of my favourite artists of the past 2 years.
With this I started my line art, trying to use the techniques and approaches that I learnt from the tutorials. Using background 3 I can show how I built up the scene. I took my sketch and followed over with a thick lining pen, then to try the varying thickness I added pressure on the line where the outside line is and defined my shapes. Then I took a fine liner brush and hatched in some lines to create some tone.
With that I got my line art done! This took a long time becuase I haven’t really lined my drawings before, or rendered them out but I think I understand the process a bit more and will try practice this on my personal art to improve it too.
With my line art done I could now apply some colour.
I had a little struggle thinking of the colour scheme for the backgrounds so I talked with Alyssa to try and work on them. I also remembered that Ellie had done backgrounds as well and wanted to see about incorporating what she did with my own ideas.
Taking in these notes I went ahead and made some new cleaner colour tests and shared these with the group as well as some other friends to get an understanding of both animator’s and the audiences opinion on them. The first one was a rendition of Ellie’s colour scheme on my line art and the others are trying to use more expressive colour and differentiate the idea of the bedroom being in a non-earth environment.
Based on the feedback from my friends I decided to go with the last colour scheme, I can always change the saturation of things if I need later, but for base colour these work.
Then I just had to add in the smaller item colours and make some art for the walls. I used some help from Pinterest and what Ellie had done to make my art for the walls and took it picture by picture, recreating it onto all my backgrounds. I finished by adding some quick highlights and shadows using a luminosity layer with some yellow and a multiply layer and a deep purple. I think these turned out quite nicely! I am happy that I chose to go with my analogous colour scheme similar to the one I created a couple weeks ago, it just makes the room seem a bit more magical and rich with nice purples reds and teals.
LAST GROUPWORK COMMENTS
At this point I was very frustrated with one person in the group, they were stubborn and refusing to listen to what I was saying. It gave me a lot of stress in case it affected my part and thus my grade. Unfortunately there is nothing you can do to change others, it is just a natural part of the group work process. I did want to highlight the fact that I have tried to tell her to keep her designs consistent with others, but she just ignored these messages I guess or replied to them quite rudely.
The following are just some instances where I have brought up changing some things from her work, and where she just doesn’t respond despite being active to before or after I mention these things.
With the below screenshot in particular, we had discussed it being chains and she drew her rope so I asked to make sure I wasn’t wrong and Alyssa seemed to agree that it was chains, since the character is in Hell.
Maybe it isn’t that big of a deal but it made discussions quite disheartening when others had worked so hard on aspects and she didn’t seem to take them in, despite her having a nice grasp on art and design. I really wish we both had got along better but there will always be one person that you clash with in groupwork I suppose.
Despite this working with the other members of my group has been really fun and I can’t wait to see how our final animation will turn out together.