Reflection on Animated Narratives + First Year of Animation

Animated Narrative

For this module we were put into groups to work together and make a 30 second animated short film based on an idea, our year was given the idea of ‘Escape’. I was a bit nervous going into this one. I had never done any type of animation using Blender this long, or worked with a group on a project like this. Still I had enjoyed working with others in the last module so I went into this optimistically. I still did not know many people in this year but I was able to find a group with Al, Chris, Corey, Patrick and Padraig.

After introducing ourselves to each other we began brainstorming ideas for the idea of ‘Escape’. We got a whiteboard and started writing down any ideas we could come up with, which was pretty fun. It was fun hearing how everyone else interpreted the prompt and even though we had to narrow it down I did like a lot of the other ideas. Afterwards we did a little group vote on our favorite ideas, crossing off ones none of us were very enthusiastic about until we had narrowed down the suggestions to what would be our main story. Sentient puppets escaping from the workshop of their cruel and sadistic puppet master. The puppet master would be experimenting or working on another puppet, while the main character attempted to escape, but was eventually caught. Once we had the basic plot beats laid out we decided as a group to all do our own storyboards, after that we’d decide whose interpretation of the story was best. I like my storyboards but looking back on them they were a bit basic. We eventually went with Padraig’s storyboard since his were detailed and had a good showing of character action. We had a few discussions afterwards about timing, this was important since we only had 30 seconds to fit our story into and we needed to make sure all the action we had planned out would fit.

We made some basic low resolution models to work on the previsuals, which I thought were very helpful in testing out how our characters would move and how the shots were composed. We were not allowed to have our characters walk or have legs so we needed to figure out how to make them move around the scene, we agreed crawling would make the most sense. I volunteered myself to do the model and scene for the environment of our animation, the workshop itself. I wanted to do it because I have always preferred doing environments or props over characters since it’s something I have had more practice with in Blender.

Modelling the character went alright. I didn’t want to rely on any sculpting because I do not like doing retopology. I asked Padraig for some help on how he made his model to make mine better, such as making the eyes and pupils and applying the bones for the heads. I am happy enough with my model, it’s a side character so it’s not meant to be overly detailed. I think the rigging went well even though it took some correction in weight paint. IKR rigging was a bit tricky, I made some mistakes with mapping parents and controllers, but it did work in the end. I didn’t use any substance painter for textures, since I’m more familiar with Blender and it looks better for what I wanted the animation to look like. I went through a few attempts at texturing the walls and floors, needing some touch ups to make the textures look less shiny. Once the Workshop was modeled I uploaded the file to Discord so the rest of the group could use it for their scenes.

The new lessons and lectures were very helpful in bringing new ideas and techniques to the project. Learning how to apply armatures and rigs onto models using vertex groups was important for the models that needed animating instead of just posing. I had some issues learning how to use shape keys. I did not like the competitive elements brought into the classes, I found them off putting. I didn’t understand them quickly and felt like I was falling too far behind everyone else. Being put under time pressure in the classroom, with a reward for the student who finished first/fastest, made me feel a little stressed. I did get the hang of shape keys but I didn’t feel good about using them, and so I didn’t use them in my animation

After we had all done our previs and got out models mostly finished we all started to work properly on our scenes which we had divided up beforehand, I was doing the opening scene where the puppet master tears the head off of another puppet. While working on the animation I wanted to add more props to make the scene more visually interesting and make it all feel like a proper workshop. I worked on refining the prop textures and changed some of the lighting to make the scene darker and more ominous but still visible. I did end up doing a few cuts of my animation, with changes to character speed, the quickness of cuts and changes in lighting. While this was going on the group was giving each other feedback and advice on how to improve the animations. A huge issue for our group was that a couple of our member stopped showing up in person a month before the deadline, as well as rarely communicating on the Discord. This put the rest of the group under pressure and caused stress. For example, we didn’t have a finished knight puppet for the opening scene so I had to make one.

Chris was the one who did the editing as he was the only one who really got After Effects. He did an amazing job but I think he got saddled with too much work in retrospect, just needed some adjustment of framerate for the final render. We had some issues finishing music, we wanted it to be copyright free, eventually found one that worked pretty well and I think fits the mood.

I enjoyed the project but I did find myself quite stressed a number of times. It would have been nice to have more of the animation process laid out to us before the start to better schedule things in the group. I liked working in the group and think we did a good job overall but it was annoying when Al and Patrick did not join the online meetings we scheduled, or communicate about their assigned work. Chris and Padraig did some great work, they gave lots of feedback and kept the group updated with things like the final edit. I’m overall satisfied with the final product but I know there’s a lot of room for me to improve. I really hope to improve my technical and group work skills over the next few years.

Thoughts on First Year

I started the year with some basic knowledge of Blender, I had been using it casually since February and I did a short week long course over last summer using Blender. So I went in with some knowledge but I was still astonished at how much I didn’t know.

The first module was 3D digital literacy, learning the basics of Blender and how to use some of the modelling features. I felt like I had a decent start. Mike and the other lecturers were very helpful with the stuff I didn’t know. I do feel like we could have had a few more in person lectures during the week, I feel like we could have spent more time on each topic. My biggest problem for the first semester was that I did not keep up with the weekly blogs. By the time the Christmas deadlines came up I had to do around six in the last week which meant the quality was not up to par. In January I got my feedback. I agreed with all the criticisms but it still felt bad. I tend to take criticism a bit personally but this time I tried not to. I made up my mind to try to give myself a kick and actually keep up with the blog work for the next semester.

The second module was a group 2d animation project which I was not looking forward to. I have never been very happy with my drawing skills, and I was not really expecting to do 2d animation. I went into this course expecting to use Blender or Maya. Still it was very helpful using the skills I had learned from 3d animation in this project, using the practice I’d had with timing and weight of objects helped a lot. I am still not very happy with my 2d skills, I am a lot more comfortable with 3d, but I am hoping to improve going into next year.

At the start of the next semester we started on the 30 second animation task, I was looking forward to it, getting to put the things I had learned from before Christmas into an actual production. This project really opened my eyes to how important communication in the team is. I think our team worked well together but those times when we had members not communicating did set things back. I also learned from my mistakes in semester one and have not fallen behind with the blogs this semester. I am looking forward to how much more I will learn to do in Blender over the next year. Already this year so much has been opened up that I had no idea about, I can only imagine what other tools I’ll learn about.

The other module in the second semester was another group task, looking at animated shorts, and animation around the world. I liked a lot of the lectures, again I was helped by my experience with A level Film Studies so I found the short film analysis decently enjoyable. I liked doing the research into the animated short, our group worked well to divide up topics for us each to cover, and we had a collaborative PowerPoint we could all work on at the same time. I enjoyed the final poster task although I felt like we spent far less time on than we should have, we only had a few weeks to do everything for the poster despite it being 60% of the final grade. The group I worked with was great. Tori was especially good since they make the document for the poster for us all to work on, and printed out the final poster.

Looking back on things I did enjoy this year but there were quite a lot of time were I felt very stressed. The lecturers were very kind and helpful. The people in my groups were friendly and I enjoyed talking with them about both the modules and animation outside of University. It would be better to have more on-campus lessons, as well as more access to things like Photoshop.  I can not always get into university and I can’t get it on my computer. I am amazed by how much I learned already this year even with my past experience. Even though I know I’ve made some of mistakes I think I am improving, and I am excited to see what else I will learn next year.