For this module, I had to join a group and create a 30-second animation. I was terrified, to be honest, blender was difficult but making an animation seemed impossible but I was still excited to get started. I loved how we were allowed to pick our own groups for this project, it let me team up with my friends and people I knew were reliable so that the process would be as smooth as possible.
I teamed up with Ellie, Robert, Malcolm and Daniel and we started brainstorming as soon as we could. The process of coming up with our idea was fun, we shot ideas around and eventually as a group came to a final decision. The theme was ‘Escape’ so we pulled inspiration from Disney Pixar by making toys come to life. We each suggested toys that would suit the environment and chose one each, mine being a push toy duck that was damaged from overuse and neglect from a young toddler. Getting the story to make sense was our next task, I knew that with a limit of 30 seconds, the story had to make sense and still be effective, we followed guides on storylines and made sure to keep it simple and easy to understand. Next, the hard part came, storyboarding. I have found from previous modules that storyboarding can be frustrating and long, to help myself with this process I made a voice recording of our idea and slowly made a storyboard, I was really proud of my work, I had learnt a lot from the first semester and it really showed in my work. When we all finished we figured no one’s was perfect but we all had really good parts so we made a ‘Frankenstein’ storyboard, a storyboard that consisted of sections of each of our own that suited our idea perfectly.
First, we had to make an animatic to display our storyline and something we could base our animation on. This in itself was stressful, I had barely animated before and if I found an animatic difficult, how bad would my final animation be? I was stressed but knew I needed to wait until my lecturers taught us more because I still hadn’t been taught all the skills needed. I was happy with my animatic but we agreed that Daniel’s animatic best suited the storyboard.
When it came to modelling I struggled to get the shape right, I had made sketches of different shapes and styles which I knew I could achieve but I needed some more skill. I asked Alec for some advice and he was super helpful, I wanted my character to be simple with no sculpting because I knew there wouldn’t be time to retoplogize it. Eventually, I achieved exactly what I wanted! I am super proud of my model, it’s a side character so it didn’t need to be super detailed but I still made it as detailed as I could to convey the skills I’d picked up throughout the year. For texturing, I didn’t use any colour taken from substance painter because I felt the blender colours best represented the style I wanted. I made several textures and asked the group for advice and I finalized one with no wood grain to keep the model simple yet effective.
To help us understand the process of animation the lecturers made tasks and tutorials which helped me so much with this process. I had rigged before for my Christmas assignment but that was just using bones and armatures, initially when learning and practising on sample models I didn’t know how I’d do it on a model of my own. Mike brought the idea of competition into our lessons which in my opinion inspired me to learn much faster, I was dedicated to understanding the tasks and completing them as fast as I could. I began rigging as soon as we were taught how to, it was definitely harder than I anticipated, I think I was overthinking things and overcomplicating rigs for a model that didn’t have a lot of screen time. I initially didn’t add shape keys because they were so confusing but came to the conclusion that I wanted to display what I’d learnt as best as I could so added them to my model. Next came the hard part, animating. I had booked a room in the library so that we could agree on a room layout, Ellie made a sample room, and with not much time we kept it as our final room. I changed the layout to match my designs and suggested we add more props as it didn’t look like a child inhabited the room. With time running low, I didn’t have enough time to add my props into the room because my group wanted to start animating as quickly as possible, this was really frustrating, I wanted to show more of my work in the room but I didn’t want the hold the group back and they didn’t want to wait much longer so most of my props weren’t added. Because I couldn’t add more I took over lighting, something I knew needed to be right, I made sure to add the main source of light to the roof, this was important because lighting is a major part of the final product. I added lights reflecting off the exterior plane so the light would shine into the room. Once the file was completed we each decided on what parts of the animatic to animate.
The animation process was a lot less difficult than I thought it would be, don’t get me wrong though, it was incredibly time-consuming but the riggs were so well made that it helped speed the process along a lot. To get used to the rigs I did animation tests and when satisfied I got to work. I finished after a few days but when it came to feedback I knew I had to change a lot, I kept it as simple as I could, which meant I had to change a lot from my original render. I needed to convey the bunny’s injuries in a simple but effective manner, it took time and a lot of feedback, it upset and frustrated me but I knew feedback was so important so I changed what needed to be changed. Having the ear and tail rip off was difficult to portray because they were parented to the bunny so whenever it moved, they would also, to combat this, I added a second model of the bunny and switched out those body parts so they’d stay still, and not be affected by any movent of the bunny rig. Rendering took time out of receiving feedback and after my final session of feedback I knew small things had to be changed but nothing major which was really rewarding. I learnt that any feedback is good feedback, after all, because I stare at it for so long it’s hard to point out my own flaws.
Compositing the final animation is a frustrating process, everyone wants it to be made in a different way when it comes to audio. I had mentioned that the final part of the animation didn’t wrap around the way we had intended but having the animation make sense was the most important thing. It was difficult to figure out how to fix this without Ellie having to remake her entire section but we eventually came to a simple conclusion, add voice audio. It’s an easy way out but with this time crunch, it was all we could afford. I wanted the lighting to become darker when the bunny is in distress but the group was completely against that idea, I decided to make an example of what I meant on my iPad in a free app but it was turned down.
Overall I really enjoyed this project, it did get frustrating at times, I didn’t want anyone to get frustrated or unhappy which I think was hard to avoid sometimes. I was terrified stepping into this, I never thought I would be able to produce my own animation before, I loved the entire process although I did have moments of doubt.