Production on Backgrounds
After creating the official designs of the furniture and finishing some of the simple 3D models of said furniture, I sent my models to Chloe so that she could put them into the room model she put together with her bed model she put together and her mirror model/table/pouffe she had put together. Chloe would then take the screenshots of the model with the angles that we would be using for each of the scenes in the short film. When I sent my models for the furniture I made however, we ran into a difficulty with Chloe’s blender being in a earlier version as my blender which had been updated unknowingly to myself on my laptop- to be honest I feel like my blender had automatically updated on my laptop however I very easily could have updated my blender without realising I’d updated it one of the times I had opened the application…
Regardless we managed to fix the issue as Chloe also updated the software and I was sent the screenshots to begin working on the final versions of the backgrounds. Once I received the screenshots I took them into the art program on my phone, Ibis PaintX on a 2040 x 1080 which is a preset canvas size I can use on this software which will become more prominent later on in the post when I realise this causes issues later on due to misunderstandings on canvas size and the backgrounds need fixes to deal with these issues. Once I took the background screenshots into Ibis Paint however they were extremely small and as a result I had to resize them to fit both a 1920 x 1080 canvas as well as a 2040 x 1080 canvas side- although once in the software and resized I began by using a pencil textured brush called “watercolor Pencil” which is a brush preset on Ibis Paint you have access to if you 1. Watch adverts to access or 2. pay for prime membership (which is the option I have).
After first lining around the furniture and the panelling of the room over the screenshot I then added the plain colours onto where they had to be, then working on shading the background (using the first scene bg in order to work out how I wanted to make them). I took to shading each individual piece of furniture, the walls, wall panelling and even floorboards however the longer it took for me to work on the backgrounds the more I realised how long each background would take to complete if I were to focus on keeping the pattern on the wallpaper which would be required to be hand-drawn due to how they would look in the different angles along with the fact the placement of the pattern would be important when it came to consistency over the turnaround scene which would be worked on by Chloe originally as she had the model file and therefore the animated turnaround at her disposal as well as having the human animation which would need to be referenced for the background in this scene- this turnaround scene was then outsourced near the ending of the production stages due to time restrictions.
After shading the background and leaving the pattern unfinished when I tried to take a lineless style for the background with the use of many brushes available on the program I chose to put the background work on hold until I was able to finish all of the cat animations I needed to work through for the first scene and ending scenes. This was when I realised that a simpler version of the background with a simple lined look may be best suited for the style of the cat at least- I asked for a frame of Elizabeth from Chloe for the ending scene I was working on the background for with this simpler style in mind after our lecturer also suggested using the simple approach and confirmed that she felt a simple approach would be the best approach to keep our film looking more cohesive.
Thanks to this pivot to the direction of backgrounds it meant my approach to working on the backgrounds which took a lot of stress away from what I had been stressing about with the backgrounds from how time consuming my previous approach to making them was. I then took to blocking out the screenshots in solid colours, lining the backgrounds in the watercolour pencil brush on Ibis and once I added more simplified shading and lighting to the background than I had originally went with, being approached by my lecturer who suggested changing the main colour of the bed to avoid it clashing with Elisabeth’s outfight as it was also green, I then chose to make the bed, Pouffe and rug all to a blue colour as she didn’t have a blue coloured outfit nor was there any blue that would clash with these.
Now if you remember before, that I discussed the canvas size being an issue… this was when the issue became much more prominent and I had to go back to redo many of the backgrounds into the proper canvas size which required edits to lineart, when it came to the first scene the edits to the wall wasn’t exactly to the quality I was extremely happy with with issues near the top towards the ceiling however with the edits I made to it I feel like I fixed the issue as best I could and having caught onto the issue before I was finished blocking out the last 3 or so backgrounds I was relieved to be able complete the backgrounds on the proper size without anymore issues being brought to light which would be required to fix.
At the very end of the background making, when Chloe had sent the film to our lecturer for feedback, it was mentioned about adding more flowers into the backgrounds somehow although personally for me, the flowers had been the hardest and most tedious part of the later backgrounds due to the many different shades of blue I would be required to use. As a result I opted to leave the flowers the way they were due to how tedious they are to add. It would annoy me far too much and to save myself the anger and stress trying to make them I would leave them the way they are…
Production on Cat animations
Once I received the initial sketch animation for the ending scenes of Elizabeth and as a result the place and timing of both the bed covers and the movements of Elizabeth respectively. I then began using this sketched out animation to guide the timing of the reactions of the cat in these scenes, beginning with the scene where the cat wakes her up. For a while this was the only reference animation I had and so I had to wait for Chloe to finish the sketched animation for the petting scene and send it to me before I could begin on my own sketch however I digress. For the wake up scene I wanted for the cat to start of, standing pretty much on top of Elizabeth’s chest the way I sometimes got woke up by my own cat, and once Elizabeth sat up in the bed it would cause the cat to back up and stumble back on the bed where it would then sit down like any normal cat would- like absolutely nothing had happened and it had totally meant to jump back like that. After backing up the cat would then focus on grooming it’s fur, yet another normal cat behaviour I remember from my own late cat doing many a times. Elizabeth would look at the clutter on the bedside table and then the cat would stretch across the bed, closer to her and it’s original place on the bed before looking at her again when she looks at it. This was the breakdown of the very first scene I had worked on with the cat and it was around this time that I began shifting my focus from being split between backgrounds and animation duties to being completely animation driven with a focus on sketching, lining and colouring the different scenes with the animation.
I used a much thinner brush in the colour of blue in order to be able to see it easier against the background and the sketch lines Chloe used for her own animation. I used both my own previous practice with cat animations as a reference point along with some references I picked up along the way to aid me when I needed them. Most of my reference points however was animations I had completed previously such as the jumping day, the walking, the tail flicking from side to side… After finishing the sketch for part one of the end scenes I moved onto sketching the animation for part 2 so that when it came time for lining I could remember what size of brush in ToonBoom Harmony that I used. The perspective was a little more difficult to wrap my head around as I had to account for how the tail would look in a back facing pose although I feel like in the end it came out rather well. I had never tried animating a cat from behind like that and it was an enjoyable experiment and gave me the confidence and skill I would need to take that into my own style and be able to apply to my own characters later on down the line if I wanted.
At first I split the animation time between background work as well as time to create walk cycles of other cat characters I have from a roleplaying ground on DeviantArt. I would sketch the animation and during times when I wasn’t at my laptop I would work on shading the backgrounds (before the pivot) or I would work on animating a walk cycle for one of my other cats with more complicated markings than this one, just to ensure that when it came to colouring I would be able successfully animate the markings on our cat without it looking off. These test walk cycles were just done on my IbisPaintX on my phone just for ease of access and due to the fact I was much more comfortable working on my phone due to having used the software for longer than being in University. I was concerned about how I would be doing the animation for scene 1 due to not having a sketch version of the human animation to reference from for the timing of events (eg. Simon coughing, when the table was supposed to fall over) so instead of working on that scene I chose to go back and line and colour both part 1 and part 2 of the end scenes. After lining and colouring I was left with the below animations which I was quite proud of in my own way.
I had put the backgrounds on hold around this time to allow for more time to focus on the animation and after talking with my lecturer, I decided to just split the animation for scene 1 down into 3 separate animations that could be slotted into place where they needed to be. The first of these three animations was the cat sleeping animation which I used a reference from a previous work I produced of another cat character around a year maybe 2 years ago? I had originally used my late cat Jinx as a reference for the breathing and tail flick/ear flicks in the original animation found here on my YouTube and when it came to making the sleeping animation for our cat I altered the pose and made the breathing just a slight bit quicker as I felt the original animation was too slow when it came to the breathing. The process for these animations was a little different however as I sketched, lined and coloured both the body and tail separately, meaning that the body was fully animated before I had the tail sketched out.
For both versions of the walk cycles I used, (both the end walk across the bed and the walk off screen) I referenced from the walk cycles mentioned in my previous blog since I already had the skills now and it was just a case of translating what I know into this unique style I had went with for out cat character.
Jellyfish
When it came to animating the jellyfish it was very much just a case of learning how to draw them and coming to a conclusion about what way I wanted our jellyfish to look in the project, then finding plenty of reference material of jellyfish moving so I could figure out how to animate the squash and stretch of the main body to elude to the movement of the creature.
My main reference was an animation I found from Pinterest which I took into sync sketch so that I would be able to look at what key frames were used for the body of the jellyfish and could then translate what I learned into drawn key frames on a page and taking that to faint in between frames to fit with our style of jelly fish.
