Backgrounds

Abbi and I decided to model the room in 3D to make drawing the background for the animation easier.

The colours being used here in the images of the model are not going to be the colours used in the full major project. I just added some colours so that the model would allow me to have a better idea of what the room would look like. I found that the screenshots of the room with colours made it easier to see what I was drawing.  In the animatic of the project, it was more difficult to draw as everything was grey.

I did the models for the base of the room itself (the walls and what’s on the walls) the bed and everything on the bed, the chairs, the different flowers and the flower vase. the carpet, picture frame, the ring bands and the mirror. Abbi did the models for the drawer and the wardrobe.

We don’t need to do a model of the underwater dream world as this can be done in After eEffects in post production once the animations are all completed.

 

Animation progress

The animations were drawn in Toon Boom Harmony with the ratio of 1920 x 1080 which is a common industry standard in 24fps,  using the brush tool.

Initially, when animating for this major project, I started of with doing a very rough animation to get the correct timing and movements.

Once I got the rough animation drawn and was happy with it, I started on cleaning it up. Firstly, I started with the face.  I tried my best to keep the character on model and once I got the face completed, I then went through the rest of the character and did the animations in different sections e.g. dress and hair, until the entire character was cleaned up.   I wanted the movement of the dress to be a different timing from her hair and the ribbon around Elizabeth’s neck. The dress and hair move very 4 frames and the ribbon moves every 3.

I went over these again and did another clean sketch just to tidy the animation up and bit more before I continued.

Once I was happy with the clean sketch animation I then did the line art.

When colouring I duplicated the line art layer and used the bucket tool and coloured each frame.

I added the colours in sections starting with the skin and finishing with the ribbon.

I drew the pupils in on a different layer.

For the shadows and highlights I drew out the outline on each frame for where I wanted the shadows to be. Then I filled them in with the bucket tool.

In the image above you can see how I sorted out my layers while animating. I locked different layer as I worked so I wouldn’t accidentally draw something on the wrong layer.

I finished animating the first part of the underwater scene so I could see what the final project might look like and to get a better feel of how I’m going to do the post production. However I will most likely redo this when I have finished the animation and do the post production all together.

The videos above are examples of rough animations and the clean sketch.

 

I did rough animations of the ending scenes so that I could send them to Abbi so that she can start doing animations of the cat.

Animation test

I had an idea for animating the Elizabeth’s memories in the dream so, I did this animation test.

I drew two pictures then used puppet pins to give the illusion of movement between the two poses.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to complete this so it is not in the finished animation.

I experienced some issues due to lack of processing memory on my computer.  This meant for a few days, I wasn’t unable to do anything as I had no memory.  In clearing caches, some of my animation frames were accidentally deleted from my computer.  Thankfully, I was able to redownload the frames and replace the footage. The memory issues were also resolved and I was able to free up processing memory on my computer and was able to recommence working.

Throughout the editing for the animation I noticed that my characters were either floating or not interacting correctly with the bed.  I didn’t understand why this was happening. I tried my best to correct this with editing,  but the only character I could fix this way was for part of the ending scene. The first scene I tried to fix with editing but the characters were either still floating slightly or you could see the top of the mattress. Once I got to scene 3 I realised I couldn’t fix it with editing. It was at this point I realise that the background ratio was different from the animation ratio. Once I realised this, I was able to get the radio difference fixed which solved the floating problem completely.

For scene 4 there is a camera turn where I had to draw around 11 backgrounds however, I still  had 2 animations to finish as well and the memories to draw so I was starting to get worried that I wasn’t going to be able to get them finish so in the end I ended up get this backgrounds out sourced.