This post is a recap on the production of my animated group project and act as summary to how I believe it went. Overall I found this project to be quite enjoyable and found it quite helpful at teaching me the basics and requirements of animation production and what to expect from it.

When it comes to the teamwork of my group, communication between members was sufficient and I was easily able to keep up with any changes of context and or direction conducted by other team members, thanks to a fellow team member “Tiernan O Donnell” The entire team was given a sense of direction and each team member was given a synopsis to follow and animate accordingly. overall the direction of character design was well managed by fellow team member “Anna Farmer” along with myself  and we all agreed as a team on what designs would be best suited.

If there was any aspects I could improve on how I handle the production it would be how I timed the animation. Initially, I intended for my segment of animation to be 8 seconds long but I found it immensely difficult to create my segment based on the synopsis I was given within the targeted time frame as a result of this difficulty, my animation has exceeded nearly double the initial target time, but as a result, this project has taught me how to perform a considerably large animation production independently within a tight deadline as well as showing me the utter importance of communication in the animation industry in order to make a project work.

Overall this whole production was a great experience in producing 2d animation and I intend to use what I have learned from this production to progress further and help me with future animation projects and allow me to perform the requirements of an animation production Competently.

Group 7 Scene 2 Storyboard   Group 7 Scene 2 Script

 

This post will mark the end of my coursework for the first component of the Animation Studio module. This post will remark what I thought went well in this module and where I think I need to make improvements. As a collective experience I found this module to be very enjoyable and in-depth about some of the essentials regarding animation and the theory behind some of the aspects of animation that could easily be overlooked.

 

• What worked well? & Why?

I found the transfer from using Photoshop to Krita relatively simple and I have benefited greatly from the tools the software provides which Photoshop didn’t have. These advantages I have found with Krita makes me want to use it over Photoshop for not just animation but also general 2d art from this point onward.

 

• What did not work well & Why?

My use of time management was too extreme to the point that it messed with the quality of my finalized work, This was to such an extent that I felt it was necessary to redo some of my pieces to be up to my standards which wasted more time and effort than if I had done it with more time before-hand.

 

• What did I learn about creative team work?

I learned that communication is key to a successful production and without it, it does not just cause confusion but also results in wasted time and work for all team members. Regular communication means that all team members are aware of the changes that are occurring in the production and allows for all team members to make the necessary changes and alterations to their current work to meet a consistent standard across the entire team.

 

• If I were to start the module again what wold I do differently and why?

I would try to use much more referencing when developing designs for animations. My practices before the course used little to no referencing as it was my belief that it was plagiarism to some degree and so, I barley used it most of the time, I would pay for these practices dearly due to having to redo some works because they didn’t meet my standards. Due to this, I plan to reference regularly when developing assets I’m not familiar with.

 

• What do I need to do more/less of to improve my animation practice?

I need to take more consideration for timing in my animated production as I personally believe that my animatic was too fast in pace to easily convey what was going on, in later practices I plan to use proper timing sheets in my productions to prevent this issue from occurring again

 

• What might I change? and How?

I am planning on changing my habit of diving into a project head first without any prior preparation to give my ideas structure as well as try not to go for the first idea I think of so that I can come up with stories and narratives that have more depth and with multiple ideas it will allow for the final story idea to be far more fleshed out.

 

• What should I keep? and Why?

I should keep my consistent input of making sure every weekly homework is completed before the lecture for it, to ensure it does not create a back log of work which may interfere with my working momentum and develop this into a habit.

 

• Final Conclusion

overall I found this part of the module relatively enjoyable and has given me a lot of insight into the does and don’ts of animation preparation and production and has taught me to be aware of some aspects that may be easily overlooked like colour and composition theory and how to use them when telling stories and communicating my ideas.

With the Animatic completed for my Group project, I decided to create a set of Character Turnarounds for the main character “Emmcee” and the dragon to use as a reference. The previous week, my group and I held a debate on what character designs did the entire group like and we narrowed down to the two final designs where my design for the dragon was chosen and Emmcee’s final design was designed by Anna Farmer. these two turnarounds show off the character’s final designs and how they will be portrayed from this point on wards, these will be my main source of referencing for the character’s angles and colour direction for them.

Ref: Original final character design                  Ref: The first example finalized design for the  ,Created by Anna Farmer.                              Dragon.

Week 10’s exercise was taking the exercise from Week 9 and adding colour and line art. This process as quite simple for the most part but it was rather time consuming and could be confusing keeping on track with multiple layers which I plan to resolve by naming each layer individual which is a practice and habit I’m yet to implement which I believe will be essential for professional production.

The second exercise of Week 9 consisted on adding Secondary action to  Pre-Prepared animation. In the case of this exercise I needed to add a tuft of hair to a flour sack and animate it accordingly to the Principle number 8 “Secondary action”, this basically details how secondary objects react to the movement of the primary object. In this case a lot of squash and stretch was used especially in the quick-paced actions in the sequence and the movement of the tuft followed an arc to appear more natural

For this week I was introduced to Animatics and how to develop them for use as the basis for the final animation. This process was quite simple, by using my slides I developed for my storyboard I was able to use them for the majority of the shots and it was just the case of duplicating frames and slightly altering them to create movement. the hardest aspect of this process was timing the sequence as it initially was exceeding over 15 seconds (with the recommended maximum being 8 seconds) so a lot of time was spent cutting unnecessary scenes as well as timing down the frame count as much as possible.

During week 8, one of my team members Tiernan O’Donnell created a plan and listed all of the scenes required for the animation and the entire group selected the scene they wanted to work on with the basic synopsis to work off of , I wrote a basic script to elaborate on the synopsis which could then be used to develop the storyboard. I found this process to be rather interesting as it acts as the essential scaffolding of an animation and I’m eager to learn how to develop scripts and storyboards effectively so that it will leave it easier when it comes to developing the animatic following this process. If I was going to do this again I would try not to add as much detail to my slides as this is not required to covey the basic message as well as the basic composition of shots and storyboards are not final which also makes it even more unnecessary as time must be allocated to the final animation’s detail rather than the storyboard/animatic.

Script and Storyboard Link

Group 7 Scene 2 Script

Group 7 Scene 2 Storyboard

For Week 8, I started with further animation practices involving animating a sack of flour and how it should behave physically when manipulated in dynamic ways. I found this exercise to be rather enjoyable. however, I did need to come back and add extra frames to certain aspects of the animation to make it more clear to the audience on what is actually occurring on screen but aside from this, I didn’t find this exercise to be too difficult. For the second half of the lecture, I focused on storyboards and how to use them. I was given a prompt and had to design a storyboard for it, in this case using the flour sack as a mage, I also found this exercise to be rather fun when working with a rather unusual prompt and I found it rather fun creating a setting that could possible be utilized for an animation.

 

For week 7, I started my first practices with 2ND animation with Krita. The practice consisted of animating different bouncing balls of differing masses to show an understanding of how different objects behave physically. Following this, I had to use different framing techniques to show how it affects the movement of objects including the use of principles such as slow-in and slow-out and squash and stretch. I found this exercise to be rather interesting and enjoyable for the most part, the only aspect I struggled with at the beginning was starting the frames of the animation of creating new keyframes. However, after some experimentation i was able to get to grips with the software and found it very reliable and was able to navigate the workings of the animation tools Krita offers.

 

 

For the 5th week, I took look into character design and how to use even random shapes to create characters as seen in the first class exercise. I found this to be slightly challenging and if i were to do it again, instead of thinking of the shapes as a potential head design, I may want to consider creating a full-body pose for a character within the proximity of the shape. For the second class exercise, I had to stylize 3 iconic American actors to understand how to simplify the shapes as well as maintain the emotion evoked by the actors in question who were Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and Orson Welles respectively. I found these exercises to be rather enjoyable and I aimed to utilize mainly one shape for each of the actor’s designs to convey shape language and theory. As for the homework for this week, I was tasked with creating some sketches for potential character designs for my Group project (Group 7). This was a rather long process and required quite a bit of thought on how the characters where to be designed. for the main character, I wanted to create a young yet matured and mischievous look but found it hard to convey this first time around, although with the help of referencing as well as some inspiration from some iconic western movies, particularly Arrigo Colombo and Giorgio Papi’s 1964 film (A fist full of Dollars), and further consideration on the features of the character’s design, I can say I’m satisfied with my progress so far on the main character. The dragon’s design was even tougher however, as old western themes tied in with dragons is a rather unorthodox combination, it was eventually decided that the dragon’s design would be based on multiple desert-dwelling reptiles like the desert horned lizard and the horned rattlesnake. However, I found my designs that used the lizard as reference to not be too intimidating and not very appealing and so I decided to look at other media as reference in this case the Game of Thrones prequel series “House of the Dragon” which had the type of designs for dragons that I wanted my design to resemble. and so with these references along with using attributes from the previous references, I was able to finally get a design I was satisfied with as shown below. If I was to do this again, the one aspect I would improve is my use of referencing. This is due to the fact that I feel I should place much more emphasis on using references when designing characters rather than working from instinct as this exercise has proven to me that it is impossible to draw new characters just from memory alone as it can leave out subtle details and make the character seem unappealing and empty and will not evoke what the character should be correctly.

 

Image ref links:

• https://www.google.com/search?q=cowboy+bandits&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwi9-N-SkaL7AhULWxoKHQIfBNkQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=cowboy+ba&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQARgAMgQIIxAnMgQIIxAnMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQ6BAgAEEM6BwgAELEDEEM6CAgAEIAEELEDUPIuWPc-YOpHaABwAHgAgAFciAHSApIBATWYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ&sclient=img&ei=zSdsY_3dIIu2aYK-kMgN&bih=961&biw=1920&rlz=1C1CHZN_enGB999GB999#imgrc=8qMEPy6gANbZ6M
• https://www.google.com/search?q=young+cowboy&rlz=1C1CHZN_enGB999GB999&sxsrf=ALiCzsYmVLOylVFuehZixFTjmoMnxL1HAQ:1668032459662&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiei-2RkaL7AhWPhv0HHfMiDT8Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1920&bih=961&dpr=1#imgrc=Pg2Vf798bKt5pM
• https://www.google.com/search?q=young+cowboy&rlz=1C1CHZN_enGB999GB999&sxsrf=ALiCzsYmVLOylVFuehZixFTjmoMnxL1HAQ:1668032459662&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiei-2RkaL7AhWPhv0HHfMiDT8Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1920&bih=961&dpr=1#imgrc=9djoyUpQAD1WfM
• https://www.google.com/search?q=young+cowboy&rlz=1C1CHZN_enGB999GB999&sxsrf=ALiCzsYmVLOylVFuehZixFTjmoMnxL1HAQ:1668032459662&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiei-2RkaL7AhWPhv0HHfMiDT8Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1920&bih=961&dpr=1#imgrc=KyR7DtTeCjePwM
• https://www.google.com/search?q=house+of+the+dragon+dragons&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwinlfirlaL7AhWIgc4BHT0LCqQQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=house+of+the+dragon+dr&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQARgAMgsIABCABBCxAxCDATIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgYIABAFEB4yBAgAEB4yBwgAEIAEEBgyBwgAEIAEEBgyBwgAEIAEEBgyBwgAEIAEEBgyBwgAEIAEEBg6BAgjECc6CggAELEDEIMBEEM6BAgAEAM6BAgAEEM6BggAEAgQHlCTEliBFmDtIGgAcAB4AIABRYgB8AGSAQE0mAEAoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWfAAQE&sclient=img&ei=NCxsY6erBoiDur4PvZaooAo&bih=961&biw=1920&rlz=1C1CHZN_enGB999GB999#imgrc=2F7HDIYT1BtMWM
• https://www.google.com/search?q=desert+lizard&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwjW2IG5laL7AhVU0oUKHbfzB-AQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=desert+lizard&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIECCMQJzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDoGCAAQBxAeOgYIABAIEB46BwgAEIAEEBg6BAgAEEM6CAgAEIAEELEDOggIABCxAxCDAToHCAAQsQMQQ1DhDliSJGCqJ2gAcAB4AIABnQGIAfQJkgEEMTAuNJgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1nwAEB&sclient=img&ei=TyxsY5b1H9SklwS355-ADg&bih=961&biw=1920&rlz=1C1CHZN_enGB999GB999#imgrc=QVQMswIXxVWLpM
• https://www.google.com/search?q=horned+rattlesnake&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwik3YStlqL7AhWW44UKHcYABB4Q2-cCegQIABAA&oq=horn&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQARgAMgQIIxAnMgQIIxAnMgcIABCxAxBDMgQIABBDMgQIABBDMgcIABCxAxBDMgQIABBDMgQIABBDMggIABCABBCxAzIECAAQQzoFCAAQgAQ6BwgjEOoCECdQigdYoBxg8StoAXAAeAKAAXKIAYoKkgEEMTQuM5gBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1nsAEKwAEB&sclient=img&ei=Qi1sY6S0M5bHlwTGgZDwAQ&bih=961&biw=1920&rlz=1C1CHZN_enGB999GB999#imgrc=ygUAGTBdx2E8IM