When I first applied and was accepted into this course after finishing my Alevels, I had only attempted animating once before on Procreate just for fun. Hence, I chose to do a foundation year instead so I could get a better idea of what I might be getting myself into.
During my foundation I found animation to be one of, if not the most rewarding medium as I really enjoyed the feeling of learning something new that was challenging as well as familiar enough to how I draw for enjoyment so as to not drive me insane.
At times during this year, however, I did feel driven somewhat insane and even considered leaving the course.
This was mainly due to the 3D modules as I grossly underestimated how much of my time would be spent on them considering I was a complete beginner and found I picked up the basics much slower than I usually learn things. I felt the most discouraged during the Animated Narratives module when I struggled to keep up with my group at times as I found the class content slow to pick up while also having to go back to previous modules’ class content to refresh what I had forgotten between semesters.
One important skill I’ve improved upon during this year is knowing when to ask for help. From the start of the year I was foolishly working too many part time hours on top of managing chronic illness without informing student wellbeing.
Fortunately, during the last few weeks of the year I got my hours reduced to the suggested maximum of 16 a week and I finally reached out to student wellbeing just in time to get an extension for the Animated Narratives module. On the other hand, having the confidence to ask for help with learning 3D from both staff and peers was a more gradual progression throughout the year as I am a generally shy person. Overall I found the 3D side of the course very humbling as it has put into perspective how much hard work and skill goes into the professionally produced 3D media I enjoy.
Unsurprisingly I really enjoyed the 2D element of this year. Animation Studio was my first time animating as part of a group project and I found it really rewarding to do productive work while simultaneously getting to know my peers. As the class content for 2D animation this year was almost identical to what I learnt in my foundation year, it was pretty much stress free even if I don’t feel I was challenged enough to really improve on my 2D skills.
Art history has long been one of my main interests so I was excited for The World of Animation since none of the books I had read nor the course I took alongside Alevels touched on animation. At first I wasn’t sure if the module was as academic as described when introduced as I found it hard to take ‘Flyworm’ seriously for my group presentation. However I really enjoyed working on my group poster on Soviet animation as I learnt a lot from independent research as well as from my teammates. I look forward to future modules like this so I can research and write more about animation that interests me and that I can use to inspire and inform my own creative work.
Overall I have enjoyed my first year studying animation and have learnt a lot. Have a happy summer! :]
My group began by listing all of our ideas for characters that wouldn’t have legs to see what potential stories we could build around them that incorporated the ‘journey’ theme. As most of our list’s ideas were sea creatures both real and fictional, we decided we wanted to do something following a fisherman’s boat that encounters many creatures on his journey. After this meeting I made a start on designing creatures. I began with a seal as it was my favourite of the ideas. However it turned out during a meeting I couldn’t attend that my groups idea had been refined to just include a siren, fisherman, sea serpent and a fish.The next part I worked on was designing the environment for our story. I began by making a Pinterest board to gather references and research environment artists I could draw inspiration from. I included my favourite artists that I looked into in my group’s week 6 presentation:As I don’t have a lot of experience with environment design or working with landscapes and backgrounds in general, I wanted to be sure I got this right for my group as I hadn’t got to contribute much so far given my seal design wasn’t needed and the story board had already been completed before I got time to make one of my own.
I started with the rocks that would be for the siren(s) to sit on. I knew my group wanted a dark and gloomy sea inspired by Dredge so I sampled colours from the game to try out different colour palettes. Victoria suggested changing the sky to a desaturated orange, which we ended up sticking to as it was the best background for allowing all the characters to stand out against.Now that we had established a colour palette I moved onto the other area in our story, the magical fishing spot. We knew we wanted this area to look bright and tropical compared to the main ocean so I looked back to Shin Jong Hun’s work.
Again, I sampled colours from images to make a new colour palette. At first I thought the contrast between the tropical and gloomy water would be too stark to a desaturated my palette. However I felt something was missing and that the scale of the fishing spot was too big compared to the tiny boat.
On my second attempt I added rocks, coral and sparkles to make it feel more magical as well as making the colours more saturated again. I think this turned out well as the stark contrast makes the environment more fun and whimsical.
My next task was to start modelling the fish based on Rachel’s design:
I was conscious that this might be a challenge in that the model would need to be able to stretch big enough to eat the fisherman, so I looked into shape keys to learn how to smoothly morph the fish into a much bigger version.
With this tutorial I was able to expand the fish’s jaw to an extent but as I was still running quite behind the rest of my group, we decided I should swap with Rachel and instead model the serpent as it did not require the use of shape keys.
I started by looking at tutorials on snake models and found a helpful video demonstrating how to use a vert to form the basic shape of the serpent:
At this stage I was happy with how it was going and didn’t have any issues. I knew my group wanted our creatures to take influence from the 3D monsters in ‘Courage the Cowardly Dog’ as I wasn’t familiar with the show I looked for references and decided I should make my design more angular to reflect the dated as style seen here:
At this point I was happy with the medium I had found between too smooth looking and too low poly looking so I moved onto texturing. At first I tried using procreate to texture as it’s what I’m most familiar with to draw however I found it impossible to import my model without faces going randomly missing. I decided instead to just use substance.
It was at this stage I was told my model looked too low poly, particularly around the teeth. I went back to blender and fixed this quite easily however when I went to update my UV in substance (something I had done a few times before) I lost my work and had to start my texturing over again.
At this stage I was quite behind due to this setback as my model should have been completed and rigged. At first I found the rig much harder than I expected since its just a straight spine with a jaw and no limbs. It turned out my normals just needed flipped so overall making the rig went okay and I now had time to go back and fix my textures.
My second time texturing I decided to use the organic flesh material instead of stone as my group wanted our monsters to be similarly realistic and Victoria’s kraken model used the flesh material effectively to create slimy looking skin.
At first I wasn’t sure if I liked the changes made to this version however after importing it back into blender and adding the glowing eyes I thought it had come together nicely in the end.
During the classes throughout this model I found following along to be okay however once I came to animating on my own I felt I hadn’t retained as much as I’d hoped and had to take my time to figure things out again. Fortunately it was around this time I got my extension and since the rest of my group had submitted their finished work I had help on hand.
For most of the process I knew what to do, I was just very slow at doing it as animating in blender was still very new to me. Even moving cameras to where I wanted them around the scene felt tedious. It also took me some time to figure out how to properly set up the textures and outlines for Lewis’ boat and fisherman within the scene.
Fortunately I didnt have any issues with my serpent’s rig. I found the fisherman’s rig more challenging to animate with as it was so much more complex, particularly for the button press as I couldnt get his hands to meet in the middle without his arms clipping into his torso. I managed to work around this by hiding the clipping with my camera placement.
The main challenge I faced with animating was creating a wave when the serpent came up out of the water. Lewis had demonstrated for me how to make a duplication of the sea that could be edited into a wave shape in edit mode or with shape keys.
In theory this sounded like it could work for me so I started by making some simple ripples in shape keys however I found it very difficult to make them flow into each other like water at all. Additionally, I couldn’t find a way to have the foam effect Lewis had put together, also apply to the wave. I then tried using the ‘Animall’ add on to allow me to make keyframes in edit mode however this proved to be even more difficult and seemed to be very intensive for my computer as it slowed blender down to be almost unusable.
At this point I was watching every water tutorial I could find as I only had a little over a day left to animate the rest of my section.
Of all the tutorials I tried this was the only one that worked however it wasn’t able to create the large wave my group wanted, only ripples. At this point I felt I was wasting too much time on one problem and instead focused on the serpent to see if I could do something extra with it, in an attempt to make up for the wave being missing if I couldn’t find a way to make it.
Given my group didn’t have an updated storyboard for my section, I took the opportunity to play with different options. In the end I made the serpent take a second attempt at biting the boat as it speeds away, and then roar before giving up and diving back into the water. I also think this more clearly shows the Fisherman’s active role in escaping instead of the wave being what pushes him away from the serpents reach.
My last shot was quick to animate as I just wanted a simple nod reaction from the fisherman to acknowledge his success while keeping in character, as my group wanted him to remain stoic and deadpan throughout the short.
Unfortunately I ran out of time to find a way to make the wave but I think my section still turned out well for my first 3D animation project.
Given I already had an interest in films, music and art history of the (former) Soviet Union, I chose to research animation of the USSR as animation was the only form of media from here I hadn’t delved into yet. My only pre-existing knowledge of animation from the USSR was ‘Nu, Pogodi!’ as a friend of mine who grew up in Lithuania showed it to me last summer.
After making this decision, over easter and before we had been sorted into our small groups, I started by watching whatever soviet animation I could find on YouTube and compiled my favourites into a playlist that I could refer back to when I got to meet my group.
During my first meeting with Sasha and Marnie (Group 12) we talked about why each of us chose to research animation of the USSR and what we already knew about it. Sasha also shared a useful list of relevant films and shorts on discord:
After meeting on discord and deciding what we wanted to cover in our poster, we landed on something along the lines of describing a golden age of animation in the USSR of wholesome and fondly remembered shows and films that are underappreciated by modern and especially western audiences. I volunteered to cover the initial development of animation in the USSR and what little propaganda was produced in comparison to this ‘golden age’.
Unfortunately I missed what would have been our second class together but I already had a (very rough and barley punctuated) first draft of what I wanted to say during my portion of the presentation:
During our second discord call we worked on Canva to decide on the overall composition of our poster and choose what images and simple bullet points we wanted to include, as well as exploring different ways we could make the poster visually appealing as well as clear and informative.
Between this meeting and the day of our presentation, I made a final draft of the points I wanted to make which I unfortunately forgot to save. However the cue cards I made are almost identical:
Although I was nervous as usual with presentations, I think it went well as we all spoke clearly and managed to successfully condense a lot of information into the short time we had. I really enjoyed this project as it gave me an opportunity to dive into a rabbit hole of underappreciated media.
Bibliography:
Pikkov, Ü. (2016) On the Topics and Style of Soviet Animated Films [online] Available at: https://intapi.sciendo.com/pdf/10.1515/bsmr-2017-0002 [last accessed May 5th]
‘Simbasible’ (2021) The New Gulliver (1935) [online] Available at: https://www.simbasible.com/the-new-gulliver-movie-review/ [last accessed May 5th]
Joshi, T. (2024) The Humpbacked Horse (film) [online] Available at: https://alchetron.com/The-Humpbacked-Horse-(film) [last accessed May 5]
Going into this assignment I felt I had a good foundation of understanding film analysis thanks to my own interest in film and Ryan’s classes during the first four weeks of the semester, each week introducing a couple fundamentals of film analysis: the hero’s journey, cinematography, art direction, sound and editing.
I was part of group 7 which was allocated the short film, ‘Flyworm’ to analyse for our presentation. Upon my first time watching Flyworm I was a little disappointed that I didn’t as interesting or complex a film to analyse as I was expecting after Ryan’s classes which featured a lot of well acclaimed films as examples for illustrating the fundamentals of analysis. However as I got to working on my part of the presentation I found that Flyworm was a good film to analyse in that it is very simple and straightforward; hence, I knew my presentation would be easy to follow.
My section of our group’s presentation was on editing, so I began by simply watching the film again while making a list of each time I noticed an editing technique throughout the film:
– establishing shot moving through forests, several short cuts to show vastness and introduce the worms
– title sequence ‘floats in’ as main character worm comes into focus
– short cuts of about 2-3 seconds each transitioning from the worms peaceful day of climbing trees and eating leaves, into the scary storm > fast paced, chaotic
– cuts to black suddenly and fades to after the storm > another fast paced juxtaposition
– regularly spaced cuts as he builds and flies the leaf plain > hope
– slowmotion as he falls off and flash of white before cutting to black on impact > humour
– eyes opening effect > establishes the worm is flying now before showing us how
– quick zoom out to show bird > humour and another fast contrast
– zoom into worms head to show his dream, white vignette around 2D sequence, fast paced cuts show to chaos of his backstory
– fades to black again before showing the works transition into a fish
– one king uninterrupted cut at the end to show the worm swimming away > peaceful ending
After reading a helpful article about editing analysis I made a revised list of what I saw as the most important devices used in editing throughout the film. The linked article used 6 ‘masterpiece’ films as examples of various devices in editing, many of which I found comparable with moments in Flyworm, this really helped me flesh out my analysis more and made my list feel more complete. I still kept the format of a bullet point list as I didn’t want to overcomplicate my analysis and make it confusing to recount during the presentation:
– Opening shot of forest and frequent cuts to show all the other worms and succinctly establishes setting.
– A comparison is drawn between the other worms and main character as he’s introduced along with the title sequence that floats in; reflecting theme of flight.
– …As well as the shift of focus from a ‘normal’ worm in background to Flyworm in the foreground to further set him apart.
– Editing music synchronicity helps emphasise the contrast when switching between the cheerful intro music and the suspenseful music of the storm that begins on the lightening strike.
– Cutting and fading to black is used several times to create juxtaposition between different stages in the story and reset the pacing.
– For example the pacing changes after the chaotic frequent cuts during the storm to longer ones while the worm builds his glider. This builds feeling of hope.
– Montage is used during the 2D sequence to succinctly fill the viewer in on the worms past.
– The film ends on one uninterrupted cut of the fish/worm swimming away, peaceful and happy ending.
For my section of the PowerPoint I made one simple slide featuring a shortened version of my list of devices and one large image of the forest from the opening shot of the film.
In hindsight the only things I would change if I were to do this project again would be to spread my points across multiple slides and add gifs of short clips from the film to illustrate each device as I explained it. This would have made my part of the presentation more engaging and in depth. Nonetheless I’m still pleased with the outcome and I think my group presented our analyses eloquently overall.
Going into this assignment I felt somewhat intimidated by the jump from working on objects like helmets and swords to full humanoid characters. On the other hand I was excited to do some character designing as that’s something I always enjoy. Getting to draw 2D designs and think about how they would be translated to 3D was something new to me and I found it really interesting, as drawing the design ideas while incorporating influences from Tartakovsky was something I didn’t have to think very hard about, but to think of ways to use what I learnt during assignment 1 to make my 3D character reflect the same stylised look I wanted was a fun challenge.
The jump in complexity wasn’t as bad as I thought, as although I felt I was behind after spending a long time working on my character’s head, in hindsight I worked at a good pace as I didn’t rush any stage. However I could have payed closer attention to small details when it came to UV mapping and texturing as I made a few mistakes that seemed small but turned out to make the process of texturing much more tedious than necessary. Overall I’m still pleased with my progress as I think my final model looks well and does my 2D design justice, as well as the book character it’s based off of.
This week I wasn’t present to follow along with the demo using an example character to create an armature and upload to sketchfab however I still followed along the videos when I came to do the same for my character.
first I had to make whiskers for Behemoth as I realised I had forgot to last week. This was very quick as they were simple cylinders with tapered ends.I had some difficulty with unwrapping as I didn’t realise at first that part of my map was still overlapping after my first attempt. I only realised this after I started painting in substance following the tutorial I found last week. I realised when I noticed my brushstrokes appearing in multiple places at the same time. As I didn’t want to start over again at this stage, I looked for a tutorial on how to update a UV map while maintaining the work I had in Substance Painter.
This video was very helpful as it quickly showed me how to do this, but unfortunately the new map didn’t line up very well and I still had to redo some work.After fixing up the base colours again and moving onto painting more details, this happened yet again when it came to painting the teeth as I hadn’t added a seam to the cylinder that forms the mouth. After updating the map again I was worried I would have to redo a lot of work again. I was right.If I had just done my base colours and hand painted details on separate layers it would have been much quicker to fix up again but alas. One thing I couldn’t find a solution for was that when adding the outlines and irises, my brushstrokes looked more pixelated than details on other parts and often created strange unwanted lines that couldn’t be painted over.After a lot of patience I managed to get the result I was looking for minus the small details I didn’t know how to fix.I then moved onto painting my prop with the same process. Fortunately this was a much smoother process however I wasn’t sure how to create the glass despite watching a few tutorials I couldn’t get it to work however I remembered from the milkshake task in assignment 1 how to use alpha blend to achieve transparent textures so I decided to try that instead.
Making the glass texture in blender proved to be much more straightforward as I had hoped so I was ready to move onto making my armature. I forgot to take screenshots from this stage but in short it took me some time to figure out how to pose my character without majorly deforming the shapes, in particular around elbows and fingers. I overworked my first attempt by trying to sculpt the fingers back into shape but my second attempt turned out much better as I was able to hand to actually look like it was holding the bottle.
After uploading to Sketchfab and adjusting the lighting etc. it feels very rewarding to see my first original 3D character finished.
Going into this assignment, I felt comfortable that I had a good standard of beginner skills in 2D animation, however I had no experience of working in a group for animation. For the first couple weeks, I felt a little discouraged as my first group was split on what idea to use and some members weren’t as open minded as others so I felt it was easiest to let them do what they want and avoid awkwardness. Luckily the next group I moved to, which I stayed with, were all approachable people I found to be very easy and rewarding to work with.
Although at first I didn’t feel very enthusiastic about the concept of a Nic Cage and FNAF crossover that hadn’t been planned out yet in much detail, it turned out okay in the end as I ended up writing the majority of the story and making the idea into something all the members felt happy to work on. Overall I learnt that I enjoyed working in a smaller group much more as it was easier to speak up and take the lead at times while also making sure everyone else had an opportunity to do the same.
One thing I would do differently if I were to start again would be to have asked for feedback on our character designs sooner as we ended up having to redo most of them. Although our final designs turned out well, if we had sorted out that problem sooner the new characters could have been designed in more detail as I ended up not having time to create references of multiple angles for the characters I worked on.
Something I should do to improve my animation practice would be to spend more time on various software such as AfterEffects and Krita as I only used them to the bare minimum during this module. Instead I stuck to my comfort zone of working in Procreate which may have been a lot quicker and easier to achieve the kind of final result I wanted, but it meant I didn’t learn as much since I was following much the same process as with previous projects.
On the other hand I felt I maintained good time management throughout this module. Initially I was concerned that being in one of the small groups meant I might have a heavier workload but in hindsight I can see I was prepared for this as I was flexible in finding new ways to make my process more efficient without the quality of my final result suffering. I also felt the advantage of having the experience of my foundation year in art as it meant much of the class content was familiar and the exercises were almost all things I felt familiar with.
Overall I felt that I learnt a lot groupwork skills from this module while also improving upon the skills I already had when working alone. I’m really happy with how my team’s project is turning out as it has had a lot of positive feedback from both staff and classmates, with only minor setbacks along the process.
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.
For week nine’s class exercise we followed along in making a simple animatic in AfterEffects, as I didn’t have my laptop with me I had to wait until a machine was available to work on this exercise. I did get most of the exercise done before we had to move on however I didn’t save it correctly so I unfortunately don’t have something to show. However I did feel I learnt a lot from the exercise as I had never used AfterEffects and this provided a good introduction.
For my animatic I chose to stick with Procreate as I couldn’t use AE from home and procreate is what I’m most familiar with, hence the process would be a lot quicker. As most of my shots were very simple, I only needed one reference. Obviously as the final shot of Nic arriving at the drains is a direct reference to Akira, I looked to the original scene of the iconic drift for reference:
My first version of the animatic had a few issues in that it was much too long due to the timing being off in many places. This was because in procreate I set my frame rate to 1fps. This was easily rectified in InShot by simply splicing my animatic to remove the extra few seconds of unnecessary material.
I successfully managed to half the length of my animatic and make it a lot smoother. I also cut out the opening shot as it felt unnecessary (and I honestly loathe drawing buildings.) Now I felt confident to begin animating as I had a clear reference to follow.
