Week 10

Week ten’s class returned to the flour sack exercises, this time our task was to clean up our lines and add colour. I think I misunderstood the assignment slightly (…again) as I didn’t realise there was a template krita file to work from. Instead I cleaned up the lines and coloured my animation from the previous flour sack exercise, which may have been giving myself more work than necessary but I still think it was a very helpful exercise.

I think this turned out well as although I still used a sketching pencil for my lines, I used Procreate’s arc tool to make sure my lines were smooth and tidy.

It was now time to finally animate my final product to contribute to my team’s animation jam! As Aodhan advised, I started with the shot I expected to be most difficult to get it out of the way. This shot did prove to be very difficult for me, mainly due to how I struggled to find a reference for a chopper going around a corner from behind. All the videos I could find where of sport bikes which meant the pose was very different as the rider has to lean forward towards the handlebars instead of sitting back in a low seat like a chopper. Any videos I found of actual choppers were filmed by pov cameras on other riders’ helmets and hence they moved around too much.

It was at this point I decided just guessing was not going to work and I would be better off trying a totally different approach to this part of the animation so as to not waste time. Since the key point of this shot was the storm drain sign to explain where exactly Nic is going, I decided to make it the main focus instead of the motorcycle.

I think this was a success as it tells the story just as clearly if not more so, and it’s much shorter and succinct. I also decided to change the background to a sunset sky over the city skyline as the last time we saw the city at this point in the story was the daytime news broadcast on Nic’s TV and I wanted the final shot of Nic arriving at the drains to be at night, so by making this shot look like dusk I think it made the timeline of the story more clear.

The next shot I moved onto was my opening of the breaking news report, since I wasn’t sure yet what the audio would be like for this part I kept the news reporter simple and didn’t worry about moving her mouth. For the animatronic part I used a reference from the FNAF Security Breach game:

By slowing down the clip and taking a few screenshots I was able to establish my keyframes and then using onion skins filled in the tweens. This turned out to be a smoother process than I expected and I’m really happy with how this part turned out.

The next scene I chose to animate was Nic’s reaction immediately following the opening shot. I really enjoyed animating this part as I find animating characters facial expressions to be the most rewarding. I new I wanted to add something to the background to reflect Nic’s emotions but I wasn’t sure how so I looked to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure for a reference as it was the first thing that came to mind when I thought of dramatic accents.

While browsing youtube clips from the series, I found this effect used many times and I thought it would be perfect as the black and white lines would complement my simple colour pallet and I could use a similar frame of only the left, right and top sides to make an arc around Nic’s head. I also added red to reflect Nic’s anger and add more visual interest to this part.

Overall I am really happy with my progress and feel very encouraged after making a group presentation to my class that received a lot of positive feedback (mostly in form of Nic Cage gifs) I’m roughly half way through my section of the animation jam and feel confident I can do the remaining parts to a standard I’m happy with before the deadline.