Category: Workshop 01

On the first day of this workshop I brainstormed words, colours and feelings that I associated with Ulster University. I also decided what Medium I would make the animation in and came up with a couple ideas for the animation itself, using all the previous information I compiled.

After reflecting on all the information I listed I felt the emotions / feelings I most strongly connected with the university was feelings of inclusivity and community because of the great support from teachers, the student union and the weird range of people that interact with each other. I also felt the universities modern feeling was also note-worthy as the other largest university is Queens with a completely opposite aesthetic. Using these two elements as my main elements I came up with 3 main ideas eventually deciding to explore my first idea further. The general idea was a group of people chatting around a firepit / campfire, the smoke or fire sparks then turn into the university logo. I also briefly looked at my second idea as I felt it was a good backup and had potential. In this step I did storyboards for both ideas.

This video shows a rough idea of the ‘campfire idea’, although I thought this idea communicated the message I wanted well, the changes in perspective and movement of the camera was too complicated for me to do. After this attempt I looked back to my second idea and explored it more thoroughly and made a  second storyboard explaining my thought process.

The second idea continued with the theme of community and inclusivity but also added a modern element via a computer. In the animation a person walks in front of a computer screen followed by another three, when the final person walks out of the scene the computer screen in background is seen to have the university’s logo.

To design the background I look at the school computers , desks and windows and based it on them, simplifying them a bit to make it easier to animate.

I then moved onto character design, I had an idea for the first two characters from the beginning as they fit my theme and their shapes and clothes are very easy for me to draw. I did a bit more experimentation for the final two characters, looking at various races, clothing styles, aesthetics and features. After having a couple friends review the designs and discussing it together I added a few more elements, like the stickers on the id, acne, certain pins etc, and refined the designs, I feel that this discussion and the added elements made these characters have a lot more personality however it did make them a bit more time-consuming to animate as I had to make sure these features weren’t lost in some frames.

These two frames show a small part of the animatic / rough storyboarding phase, similarly to the first idea I tested out the storyboard to see if it was possible and if I felt it would meet the criteria for this project. After this phase I felt comfortable continuing with the animatic, the animation itself was simple however I was not familiar with animating people, the program (Clip Studio Paint) and a lot of the concepts of animation. As I worked on the animation I ran into various issues mostly pertaining to timing, spacing and missing frames however I also noticed I became a lot quicker at solving these issues, creating more frames and making use of already existing frames, this meant I could put in a bit more detail into the second half.

(Final animation)

As I became more comfortable with the program and animating I added a final scene, a zoom into the computer screen showing the logo in large then being moved up to show all the characters together. I felt this final scene reinforced the message I wanted to convey and gave the animation a finished look.

(Animation without background)