At the end of this module, I can say that I have grown more confident in my animation ability. However, things were not without its difficulties.  

Firstly, the group project. I really enjoyed working with my group and overall, I feel that we worked well together. But there have been some rough patches such as minor disagreements and a serious communication issue outside of class or therefore lack of. I learned that teamwork was about compromise and that sometimes you need to sacrifice an idea you feel strongly about for the good of the group. If I were to start this module over again, I would put more effort into maintaining regular communication with my group outside of class. But inside, my group really connected as, despite our different interests and preferences, we all managed to find a way to include everyone’s ideas in our world in a way we were all happy with.  

As for myself, I am very proud of how far I have come since the beginning of this course. I believe my best work had been character designing as it is something that, even before this course, I have loved doing and have always been interested in. However, I surprised myself with storyboarding as, before this course, I always believed I was bad at mapping out movement through drawings alone, but I really like my storyboard and I think it really conveys my ideas clearly. Furthermore, I believe my first time animating properly went extremely well. Once I knew the principles of animation, I found following them to be quite easy to implement when animating.  

One place I have noticed I have struggled with, though, is timing. In my animations, every element is acting on the same time and I plan to work on this going forward into my next module by simply practicing animating things on different times. Another thing I have struggled with in this module is colour theory. This is something I have always struggled with even in my own personal drawings and I knew it would be an issue for me. When learning about it in class i struggled to recognize each different type of colour scheme – e.g., Analogous – was and how to implement them in my work. This is something I need to work on for the coming term to improve my animation by trying to be bolder and more precise with my choices of colour rather than just picking the colours that I personally like. 

Overall, this module has just been a blast to be a part of. There is not one section I disliked. I have really impressed myself with my work as I did not think I was capable of producing work to this standard and honestly at the beginning I was worried I would fall behind in a class where most people have prior experience with animation. But everyone, students, and teachers, have been very uplifting. I am excited to see what next term brings! 

-Orlaigh :D!

Due to bus strikes this weeks class was online. Our class exercise was to show us how to clean up lines in our animations and once that was complete we divided into our groups to work out the last couple details of our project before we started animating.

We got feedback from our animatics in the second portion of class and i was told basically what i was expecting, that my section was very long and would most likely take a long time to animate. Due to this i have decided to cut out the dance sequence in my final animation as i feel it would be the most time consuming and difficult part to animate.

As i had never properly animated before our bouncing ball exercise, i wanted to try my hand and make sure that i could actually achieve the target i was setting up for myself so i made some rough animation tests from two scenes from my animatic. They turned out like this.

I really like this one. I used some smear frames for the faster sections such as the arms flailing and her falling to the floor so I could get the timing right and i love the effect.

This one….i like less. The timing is off and overall it just looks a bit clunky and messy so I will definitely have to work on this one.

-Orlaigh

After nailing down our storyboards we headed onto animatics, another thing i was very excited to get into. In class we were introduced on ways to use After Effects to create our animatics. We did this through a short exercise to get us used to the software.

Then for homework we obviously had to make our animatics. We worked together as a group to nail down our transitions between scenes and i worked especially with Owen and Aj as they are who come before and after me in our sequence.

In the end, my animatic turned out to be quite long and I will most likely be cutting things down when I start the actual animation.

-Orlaigh

On to storyboarding, which was the main focus of this week. We started off with an exercise where we had to draw the frames for an already scripted storyboard. The script was about an evil wizard mixing up a potion but – and here’s the kicker – we had to draw the frames with a flour bag instead of an evil wizard.

I feel like i did ok on this exercise, the only critique i got was that i left a frame out as i didn’t know how to draw a flour sack using its non-existent hands to add ingredients into a bubbling cauldron but this was a total brain fart moment because it was then pointed out to me i could’ve just used it’s tassels. I had fun doing this exercise and i enjoyed trying to convey the expressions on a faceless sack.

For homework we had to do our own storyboards for our projects. I started out by drawing some – extremely rough – thumbnails just so I could map out my story. My story is basically told in three parts – Bridey, my character, gets pulled to the dancefloor by her friend, she spins out of control when dancing and knocks into a guy, he helps her up and out and she electrocutes the two of them.

This week we got to actually animate. I was quite nervous as I had never animated before this week but first we were introduced to the 12 principles of animation and this eased my nerves alot. I had always heard about the principles but i’ve never actually had them explained to me in any detail.

For the class task we just had to animate a bouncing ball to practice the squash and stretch techniques and then for homework we had to animated balls with different weights. I chose to do a bowling ball and a rubber ball.

I feel like a stretched my bowling ball a bit too much in the animation but overall im proud of myself for my first try.

-Orlaigh

This week, I got moved groups!

I was briefly moved into Group 1, whose project was about Space Cowboys which i was very excited about. Even better this is the week is the week we get to design characters – which i love doing!

The character I came up with is an outlaw robot, with an old radio for i head. I chose a radio because I thought the typical design of one already looks like a face (if you squint). I took inspiration from old Clint Eastwood Western films for the outfit, along with the characters from Red Dead Redemption.

For the colour scheme, i mainly used different shades of brown to make him seem very old-timey like the radio he’s based off and then red for the cape to make him seem dangerous and very like an old western mobster.

Unfortunately, as much as i enjoyed being apart of Group 1, I wanted to go back to my original group so I made a character for the Monster Bar as well.

My Character is the Bride of Frankenstein on her Hen-Do – i’ve been, appropriately, calling her Bridey to myself. For her design, I took inspo from many Horror Icons including: The Bride of Frankenstien (shocking!), Morticia Addams, Elvira and Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas.

Going into drawing her, I knew i wanted her to have two things; A white dress, to reference a wedding dress and black hair with a white streak as a nod to the original Bride of Frankenstein movie. As you can see above, I tried out four different dress designs but ultimately my favourite was the second one on the left as it reminded me of Jessica Rabbit. Then, the hair. In the end, I ended up not liking any of these hair styles and ended up just going with long, down hair as you will se below.

Next was her colour scheme. I did four colour tests as seen above. I started with the colours many would typically associate with Frankenstein and his bride, the different shades of green, and this is what I originally saw in my head when I thought about this character. However, I felt this was too boring and predictable so i tried out other, more unusual colours which i ended up liking a lot more, especially the blue and pick as i thought it would contrast the black hair and white dress nicely. 

This is my final character design.

Overall, this week has been my favourite so far as I really enjoy drawing and creating character work. I’m really happy with my Bride of Frankenstein and I cant wait to animate her!

-Orlaigh :]

Week 4 – Colour 

Today in class, we were asked to come up with some potential colour schemes for our project. As a group, we decided that we wanted a darker colour pallet for outside the bar, lots of purples and blues, and then for the interior we agreed on a bright neon lighting to add to the Halloween vibes.  

For the second part of class, we went around the uni to hunt for specific colour schemes – such as monochromatic, analogous and complimentary. Here are the ones we found.  

This week in class we studied tone and value by creating props for our animated worlds. As my groups world takes place inside a Bar for monsters, I chose to draw and study a skull and a headstone as I thought it would be considered appropriate decoration for a club frequented by Dracula.

I’ll be honest, I struggled with this task as shading is not my strong suit. I found it difficult to figure where the shadows would be placed without looking at the reference image. But the more I practised the easier it got for me (though, I still think I could do better)

For homework, we had to then create atmospheric thumbnails using what we learned in class and for this I knew I wanted my thumbnails to highly contrast each other. For my first thumbnail, I drew the entrance to the bar which was inside a crypt in a graveyard (an idea which we later scrapped). I wanted the entrance to be bright, showing the vibrant atmosphere from the bar below while still giving off that eerie ghostly glow. I feel I did this pretty well and this is my favourite out of the two.

Next, I drew a dark stairway that would lead down into the bar. Here I relied heavily on dark tones because I wanted to convey a feeling of unknowing which fit perfectly with the vibe we wanted the beginning of our short to convey – dark, spooky, thriller before revealing the lively, jazzy atmosphere of the bar.

I’m happy with these thumbnails because they helped me to flesh out the atmosphere of our world using tone and value.

-Orlaigh

Made it to week two! Go me!!

To recap this week’s class time, we went over Composition and Perspective. We were taught different techniques to help with our composition and layout for creating our shot, such as the Rule of Thirds and The Golden Ratio. Composition is important for any media type as it helps to appropriately and effectively set the mood for the story you’re trying to tell.

We were tasked with choosing 3 screencaps from different pieces of animation and illustrating the geometry and/or symmetry of the composition. I chose scenes from Scooby Doo, BatmanTAS and TMNT Mutant Mayhem as they are some of my favourite animated works.

Next, we learned about perspective. I was excited to lean this as in the past I struggled with properly adding perspective into my work. We were shown how to do 1 point perspective and 2 point perspective. Below are my practices. I struggled a bit with 2 point, but I’m sure after some more practice I’ll get the hang of it.

2 Point Perspective

1 Point Perspective

Finally, we were given our Group Homework, which was to develop 6 compositional thumbnails for our world so that we could practice the techniques learned in class. I wanted to lean heavy into perspective as it is something I’ve struggled with in the past.

Here are some of my initial sketches!

As our world focuses heavily on monsters and the macabre, I wanted to keep a very monochromatic colour scheme to get across the eerie atmosphere.

Final Thumbnails

In the end, I am happy with my thumbnails. The composition is definitely elevated from my previous work although I still need to work on perspective. Additionally, my tonal work and over all colouring still has a long way to go, but were learning about that next week so I’m very much looking forward to that!

-Orlaigh 🙂

[^Form and Shape Warm-Up Exercises^]

[^Spider-Man – Into the Spiderverse Form and Shape Study^]

[^Batman and Catwoman – Batman: The Animated Series Form and Shape Study^]