My Final Blog
Our final assignment of the year, to create an animated short film based off of the prompt “journey.”
Before starting our task, I looked into the typical animation process to apply it to my own work. Animations go through pre-production, production and post-production phases before completion, pre-production including creating the concept, writing the story, designing characters and settings, completing the script and storyboard, producing an animatic, and deciding upon animation style. Then to production, which is modeling, layout, texturing, rigging, animation, 3D VFX, lighting and ren
dering. Then finally post-production, so compositing, 2D VFX, colour correction, exporting and encoding.
Pre-production
We were put in groups, and started pre-production. I set up a discord server for our team, and we started discussing ideas. We met the first Tuesday in class to get on the same page and make some good progress. We were told we can’t give our characters legs, and after suggesting a few things- snail delivery services, epic robot quests and an octopus looking for a home, but we landed on ghosts. No legs to worry about! A classic haunted house, but with a spin- the ghosts are the protagonists, and to tie it in with the “journey” theme, they go on a journey of character building. We left off that day to do some concept art and kept each other updated in our discord. I made a channel specifically for the ideas that we had, and the chat was soon full of different drawings and styles for our characters.
Here are some of the things that inspired my designs!
After meeting and discussing again, I wrote down the outline of our story, as we had fleshed it out at this point. “Ghost Problem!” Our story would be that a group of not very threatening ghosts living in an old house were scared by ghost hunters breaking in and kidnapping one of them. Initially they try to scare them away but fail and so run to their neighbour- a demon- for help. He gives them encouragement and sends them back to try again, and with their newfound courage they manage to scare the investigators away. A lot of this we later cut out to save time, after some feedback on our first previs. In our final story the investigators come in and the ghosts run to the attic and summon the demon who then gives encouragement, the ghosts go back downstairs and try to scare the investigators away, but then the demon comes out of the shadows behind them and they’re scared away by him instead. The ghosts still go through their “journey” of finding their confidence, so the updated story still fits with the prompt. Each of us submitted several ideas for character designs. We had mood boards, concept art, and reference pictures for what we wanted our settings to be like. We decided on a cartoony animation style with Tim Burton-esque settings.
Admittedly, I didn’t put in as many concept designs as I would have liked as disaster struck, and I shattered the iPad I used for drawing. I was trying to work around my broken screen but it was very difficult, and I didn’t want to risk cutting my fingers. Nonetheless I made simple designs for the ghost hunters, two ghosts and the “mentor” ghost, which would later become the demon. They are simple sketches as working with my broken iPad was very difficult and I just wanted to float the concepts before fully colouring.
Here are our final designs!
The demon ended up being a mash of two designs, as our characters couldn’t have legs. We took the teddy bear and had the demon as a trail coming out of it.
Two of the initial ghost designs were later changed to make the designs more coherent style-wise.
We divided our story up into sections, and each picked a part we were going to create a storyboard for. I let everyone else pick which parts they would like to do as I didn’t mind, and ended up with the demon encouragement scene. I had yet to replace my iPad at this point, but tried my best to create a storyboard nonetheless. I made another channel for our storyboards in the discord just so we could have them easily accessible for the previs and not get lost buried under new messages. Here’s what I did for my part:
We sent all of our parts in and looked through them all, and gave our approval. They went through some changes, some had a 3rd or 4th iteration, and I think we all overestimated how much we could fit in a minute long animation. We soon figured that out however when we made our 3D previs. We each focused on our own sections, and put them in a PowerPoint to present the following class. Here is mine:
We got feedback for our previs and overall story. It was too complicated and too long, we could simplify it massively, which is how we settled on our final story mentioned above. Making the demon scene happen in the attic means we only need to worry about minimal setting changes, and it meant it would be easier to have everything fit within the time limit.
I wanted to update my previs and storyboard, but sadly as I was spending a lot of time on my models, I didn’t have time before the deadline. I had a very clear image in my head of what I wanted to go for, and so I jumped straight into animating. Looking back, I would have tried to produce even the most simple storyboard to reference, but I think I did ok without one. Had I had more time I would have made new ones to use as reference.
Now with our pre-production done, it was time to start modeling.
Production
I chose to model the demon and the attic scene. I drew a very simple head on A-posed reference to use to help me make the model, referencing the concept art we had for the character. Using what I had learned making the monster model from a previous assignment, I very quickly and easily made the demon, and after getting my teammates to review it and presenting it to Mike and Alec, I made some tweaks to both the model and the topology, and ended up with the final model. As the characters are quite simple, especially the demon as it is just purple, we textured our characters in blender and used Substance Painter only for the backgrounds and props.
Making the attic scene was very straightforward, I used reference pictures of spooky attics online to get a feel that I thought would fit and experimented in blender. I spent a day making the setting and props, getting feedback and suggestions the whole time, and after making a hatch, carpet, boxes, lights, pentagram, candles, bedframe, curtain poles and curtains, I started unwrapping.
The UV creation process was very easy and went very smoothly for me, and getting everything textured in Substance Painter also went very well. I experimented with a few different looks, trying to see what would work with our cartoonish visuals, and after a silly mistake where I had forgotten to make everything the same material before exporting to blender, I had everything in a place where I was somewhat happy with it. I wasn’t sure what was making me unsatisfied with it, until we showcased our settings in class and it was pointed out to me how the attic didn’t look very abandoned and run down. I had had issues with my textures looking too shiny when applying the roughness map from Substance into blender, and I think that’s what was causing it. I went back into Substance Painter and brushed dirt where I could, turned up roughness and added things like rust on the bed frame, rot on the wooden ceiling, bloody handprints on the walls and general dirt and weathering. I think the effect after these modifications is much better, and much closer to what I was hoping for.
A lot of people were working on their models and rigs at this time over Easter, however as the university was closed and I do not have my own laptop, I couldn’t make any progress during these weeks and I fell behind. I hadn’t started my rig when others had finished theirs, and this is the first time I didn’t feel confident in my work and my progress. I had a few long days in class just after the break working as fast as I could to catch up, an thanks to the help of some of my wonderful classmates, I got back on track, and ended up with a fully rigged and weight painted model, with some shape keys done for my section as well.
Animation went smoothly, and as we were behind where we had hoped to be at this point, I was very motivated to get as much as I could done as fast as possible. I went from start to finish with animating in less than two days. I find it difficult visualising realistic and dynamic movements for both the characters and the camera, and I think that’s clear in my work, but my team was happy with my final product and that satisfied me. This also took a lot of tweaking, in adding extra movement to make the shots feel more organic, and also in cutting things out and speeding things up in order to stay within my 15 second limit, so that our project doesn’t run over the 1 minute limit.
I am quite proud of the 3D VFX that I added to my scene. I fixed one of the ghost’s “blobby” effect, I made the flame on the candles flicker, and I did a realistic cloth sim for the curtains so that I could animate them blowing in the wind. Something else I’m proud of is the lightning effects that I created by animating light emissions into the backdrop of my set, and achieving a rim light from the lightning flash with a spotlight that I adjusted in synchronicity with the emissions. I think these effects look good, and really come together to add to the scene. Between the light from the candles, lightning, lightbulbs and soft scene lighting from the back of my set, I am happy with how the lighting turned out.
It took 4 renders to get it right, as I kept noticing small issues that I had to fix while reviewing each render. I imported my frames into Adobe After Effects and combined them into a video, but I had to play about with frame rates a lot before I found a speed that looked natural.
Post-Production
As we were pushed for time, we started post-production with little time left to go. I thought to make sure that the music and effects flowed nicely between scenes, we wait for everyone’s animations to be done, so that the music wouldn’t change jarringly from scene to scene. This left us very under pressure though.
I decided to add all of the music myself, as I was going to be in university anyway and if we need to do it all on one computer, I may as well, to allow my teammates to focus on their blogs. Everyone was super responsive on discord and as I searched on YouTube for possible sounds and music, I got feedback from everyone on what sounded best. I added in music and a few sound effects, taking them from YouTube, converting to MP4 and exporting them to iMovie, as it is very simple to use and I knew how to use all of the features already, and as I wanted to save time, I didn’t want to have to sit and learn how to use a more complex editing software. After several hours it was done, and I quickly made a short credit panel and it was done.
This is my part!
And our full final animation.
Reflection
I learned a lot throughout this project. Rigging, weight painting, IKs, and a lot of the more technical stuff was all fully new to me, and so interesting to use. Going through the whole production process put into perspective what my future could be like in the animation industry, it highlighted my strengths and weaknesses, and being able to work in a team also gave me many valuable skills and experiences. Things I would have done differently is discuss the techniques we were going to use a lot earlier, and also I would have updated my previs and storyboard while I had the time. I think our project turned out really well nonetheless, and I really enjoyed this project.
Research References
Frantic. (2021). The 3D Animation Process. Frantic. 19 July. Available from: https://www.wearefrantic.com/blog/the-3d-animation-process/ [Accessed 28th February 2024]
Delgado N. (2023). 3D Animation Pipeline – A Complete Guide. the explainer video company. 8 November. Available from: https://thevideoanimationcompany.com/3d-animation-pipeline/ [Accessed 28th February 2024]