Pre-Production

weng-c1 / / Animated Narrative

We were required to make a short animation for the assignment that focused on food and had a timeframe of one minute to one minute and thirty seconds. We were required to divide into groups of four. Aster, Jack, Jamayne, and I were members of group 4. We begin this project by generating as many ideas as we can in a spider diagram on a whiteboard before starting the animation. I’ve considered a few different ideas.

Inspiration & Research

  • Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 
  • The Heist
  • Wreck-It Ralph
  • Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space
  • Turning Red 
  • Bao
  • Cuphead

The first was a production line where each character plays a part in how they make the food by putting together components of themselves onto the food that’s passing on the machine, and in the end, the food will be made from the characters. These videos had helped me inspiring this concept: 

My second idea was bakery steps, which included baking a cake, combining cream with various mixer machine characters, baking the cake dough in an oven, and then adding various fruits to the cake. The finished product would be a delicious and stylish cake. I thought of this concept by watching the video:

The third concept was a Candyland-style vision in which the characters, the environment, and the props were all made of food and candy. The style would be incredibly adorable and princessy, with pastel colours and bright hues used throughout.

Jamayne, Jack, and Aster also had some amazing ideas. At the end, we had to simplify the concepts into four, one from each of us. According to Aster’s concept, the food that was engaging in the beach activities suddenly gets picked up by seagulls. According to Jamayne’s concept, a honey bear attempts to extract honey from the honeycomb, gets assaulted by bees, and humorous incidents occur throughout the pursuit. Jack came up with the idea of a fake crime scene in which a donut had been murdered, two police officers were investigating the case, and there was an argument. My concept was more equivalent to a setting style, with a vision of creating a food environment like my thoughts of Candyland, complete with chocolate grounds, biscuit tables, chairs, cookie doors, gingerbread buildings, and lollipop poles.

Alec and Lauren stopped by to offer some advice throughout our discussions, which helped us decide. Finally, we chose to go with Jack’s concept for the donut’s fake crime scene, which Lauren saw the donut been murdered was “Whodunnit,” and recommended that we call this animation “WhoDonut.” Jack also created a log line for “WhoDonut” was “In a dark alleyway, a baguette detective and coffee cup partner investigate the shocking murder of a jam donut, only to discover that the killer is still lurking nearby, hiding in plain sight.”

Following our decision of “WhoDonut” as the animation’s main story, each one of us created a storyboard for the narrative. The narrative was the “crime” of the donut being murdered. During the investigation, two police officers, the coffee cup, and a baguette started an argument about the jam flavour. Is it strawberry jam or raspberry jam? When they’re arguing, the donut wakes up and looks at the police officers, then the officers look back at the donut. They’re shocked; the donut gets scared of the policemen, and the police officers get scared of why the donut is still alive. They all faints and fall to the ground. The murder femme lollipop was still hiding near the crime scene, walked out from the trash bin, and escaped away. We also decided to start the animation with a panning scene of the city, and then the crime is going to happen in an alleyway. After the completion of my version of the animation’s storyboard, I also drew some sketches of the four characters’ designs. providing my team members with concepts for character designs and increasing the variety of character possibilities for design. We had our first presentation feedback which was Alec recommended that the baguette should not have arms while also requesting that we should speed the progression on finalising the storyboard and character designs.

Inspiration of  donut:

Inspiration of coffee cup and baguette:

Inspiration of femme lollipop:

Here is some environment inspiration. (City and Alleyway)

 

The final storyboard was a combination of Aster’s, Jamayne and my sketches. Each of us was required to produce a 3D pre-vis after completing our storyboards for “Who-Donut,” using the storyboard as a guide. When I completed my 3D pre-vis, I realized that I had made a mistake since I had struggled to move the rough blocks of the characters because I had forgotten to parent the shapes together, resulting having to keyframe each one of the shapes individually. However, the arm blocks did look like they were floating in the air during the movement. The final decision of the 3D pre-vis was we’ve decided to use Jamayne’s 3D pre-vis to present in our second presentation. The feedback we got from Rachel and Alec was to cut out some unnecessary shots, switch up the speeds of different shots, introduce the murder character a bit more by adding a hint in the beginning scenes, and remove the warning tapes so the crime just freshly happens instead of already having occurred. To create our final pre-vis as the template when we begin animating, Jamayne made any required changes to her first draft 3D pre-vis based on this feedback. 

My 3D pre-vis:

Jamayne’s 3D pre-vis:

After that, we decided which characters each of us wanted to model. Aster picked the lollipop, Jack is creating the coffee cup, Jamayne wanted to model the baguette, and I picked the donut. I decided on her final design after resketching my donut’s design. I then began to model her.

Research Poster of American Animation

weng-c1 / / The World of Animation

This module offered us the chance to choose a nation to explore and produce a poster detailing its animation history. Irish, American, Japanese, British, Canadian, French, Korean, and Russian/Soviet animation were the nations that could be decided upon. We also divided into groups of five, with Jack, Katie, Gio, Jamayne, and me in group 2. We have decided to study American animation as the theme of our research poster. The first conversation in the group that I had missed Jack, Katie, Gio, and Jamayne had written some notes on the whiteboard after having a brief conversation about what we could concentrate on starting the creation of the research poster. The notes are below.

We chose to concentrate on Disney because it was the first thing that appeared to mind when we thought of American animation, but upon more reflection, Disney plays a significant role in this industry. We weren’t entirely sure how to simplify the components and concentrate only on certain Disney content. I believed that we could focus on how we might contribute by conducting research about how art styles have evolved over time and how Disney’s animation productions have been impacted by developments in technology such as colour, as the animations were in black and white in the early 19th century. As the years went by, more tones were added to the development; in the beginning, there were no sounds at all but later, dialogues, musical backgrounds and other elements were included. We also discussed quickly with Carmen about the idea that we had, and she suggested we should focus on a specific character or studio. This advice and encouragement helped us move forward, and we have chosen to concentrate on Mickey Mouse, the Disney figure with the longest history of appearances. We also wrote some notes on whiteboards throughout the conversation about the aspects of Mickey Mouse research that we could complete.

We arranged the five elements that we believe are most important for Mickey Mouse’s contribution to the growth of the Disney industry. The five elements included the progress of Mickey Mouse’s Disney style and the character’s modification or further development. Disney’s expanded universe included additional creations, such as the Disney princesses, that were developed during the creation of Mickey Mouse. How did Mickey Mouse’s performance evolve or be impacted by Disney’s technological advances? Disney’s success and profits were a result of Mickey Mouse’s contributions to the company, which included the profits that allowed it to continue operating for hundreds of years and the success that helped Disney gain recognition in the animation industry. Disney’s consequences included the development of Mickey Mouse, the quality of its productions, its broad popularity, upgrades, and modifications to the production studio, among other things.

At the ended of the discussion, each one of us picked one element to complete further research for the research poster. Which I took the profits and success of Disney, Jamayne took technological advancement of Disney, Gio picked expanded universe of Disney, Katie picked the style of Disney and Jack chose the consequences of Disney.

 

  • References

Anon., 2024. Ever Edge. [Online]
Available at: https://www.everedgeglobal.com/news/whats-your-mickey-mouse/
[Accessed 10 April 2025].

Anon., 2025. Wikipedia. [Online]
Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises
[Accessed 12 April 2025].

Anon., 2025. Wikipedia. [Online]
Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse
[Accessed 12 April 2025].

Gluck, K., 2012. The Walt Disney Family Museum. [Online]
Available at: https://www.waltdisney.org/blog/selling-mickey-rise-disney-marketing
[Accessed 11 April 2025].

Staff, 2023. The Week – A century of Disney. [Online]
Available at: https://theweek.com/business/a-century-of-disney
[Accessed 11 April 2025].

Stanley, I., 2023. Daily Mail. [Online]
Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12877237/amp/Mickey-Mouse-worth-Disney-creation-century-business.html
[Accessed 8 April 2025].

  • Reference notes

In this research poster project, I’ve focused on what profits and success has Mickey Mouse brought into the industry of Disney. Through the creation of movies, TV series, merchandise products, theme parks, branding and promotions, Mickey Mouse has generated billions of dollars in profits for Disney over the past century. Although it is impossible to determine Mickey Mouse’s exact earnings for Disney, it is estimated that he has contributed approximately 171 billion dollars to the company’s growth from the beginning to the present. On November 18, 1928, Mickey Mouse made an appearance in the animated short film “Steamboat Willie.” This movie brought Mickey Mouse to a larger audience and attracted his first audience. Mickey Mouse has maintained his following since the movie, which has sparked a lot of business opportunities. In 1929, the rights to use Mickey Mouse on a children’s pencil tablet were purchased for 300 dollars from Disney. Mickey Mouse was making an estimated 1 million dollars a year from item sales within five years of his debut in Steamboat Willie. Disney had developed a range of items by 1930 to go alongside the short film series themed around “Steamboat Willie.” The mouse ears, toys, and games were mass-produced in five more years, and the Disney company was earning over 1 million dollars annually from merchandise sales, which are estimated to be worth a total of 19 million dollars today. Walt Disney opened Disneyland, a theme park, in Anaheim, California, in 1955. He quickly promoted and raised funds for the project by making his ABC debut on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” a children’s variety show. Three million people visited the park in its first year, and during the following five years, Disney’s the total income increased from 27 million dollars to 70 million dollars. Disney Since the park’s 1971 opening, over 100 million visitors have visited Disney parks in the US, China, France, and Japan, which has become known as a significant evolving area. As Disney kept expanding, more characters were made and placed in the attention, forcing Mickey Mouse out of the centre and leaving him jobless between the release of his final cartoon short, “The Simple Things,” in 1935 and the 1983 “Special Mickey’s Christmas Carol,” But in 1941 ten of Mickey Mouse’s film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film which one of them has won the award is the “Lend a Paw” then in 1978 Mickey Mouse became the first cartoon character to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Frame. A short memory flashback remaking Fantasia in 1999 has brought in 90.9 million dollars at the office box globally. Even though Mickey Mouse is no longer as popular, I believe that he has increased Disney’s fame.

  • Poster inspiration and ideas

We decided to use Jamayne’s poster design. Here the result of our research poster.

Film Analysis

weng-c1 / / The World of Animation

Together with Jack, Hurley, and Amber, I was in group 12 for this module’s analysis of the short film “Parasomnia.” We set up a few group meetings where we reserved a library room to discuss the movie to start the analysis and get us all working together. To support the group, I completed a simple summary analysis of each scene independently, including camera shots, angles, lighting, sound, and action descriptions. I used Hurley’s notes on scene description, my filmmaking skills, and some research to develop this shot list. 

Shot list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-Qd2ZkiNW1KOiTtPziN0F7SmsGZZXw_fXgIZllCQneE/edit?usp=sharing

 

We finalized the structure of how we are going to do the analysis for Parasomnia. Which we decided to split the film into 4 sections, and we individually analyse the cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, and sound in the section of the film we chose. I decided to take the first section; Jack took the second section, followed by Amber the next section and Hurley the last section.

  • Reference

Anon., 2001. ACMI. [Online]
Available at: https://www.acmi.net.au/education/school-program-and-resources/exploring-camera-angles/
[Accessed 23 February 2025].

Crawford, M., n.d. Filmmaking Lifestyle. [Online]
Available at: https://filmlifestyle.com/what-is-continuity-editing-in-film/
[Accessed 27 February 2025].

Deguzman, K., 2022. StudioBinder. [Online]
Available at: What is a Lap Dissolve — Film & Video Editing Techniques
[Accessed 27 February 2025].

Francis Tuttle, n.d. 2D Animation. [Online]
Available at: https://www.ftanimation.com/resources/camera-angles-actions/
[Accessed 23 February 2025].

Frawley, C., 2023. Backstage. [Online]
Available at: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/high-key-lighting-vs-low-key-lighting-in-film-75630/
[Accessed 23 February 2025].

Gula, D., 2023. StudioBinder. [Online]
Available at: https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/film-sound-effect-techniques/
[Accessed 25 February 2025].

Lutes, A., 2023. Backstage. [Online]
Available at: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/mise-en-scene-definition-examples-75967/
[Accessed 24 February 2025].

Notes from the reference:

Parasomnia Analysis – Section1 “Set-up” (Scene 1-9/Time 00:10-00:53)

  • Cinematography

Camera Shot: Extreme long shots were used in the opening of the film to show that it was set in the MC’s the house, with the MC working in his office while seated in front of his desk. (Scenes 1). A medium close-up shot was then employed to provide the audience additional insight about the MC’s tiredness as he sketched a black monster creature (SCENE 2). Long Shot was employed to show the scene where the MC brings the audience to a different location as he enters his bedroom. This allows the audience to observe the MC’s entire movement as he enters the bedroom and sits on the bed. We can also view a few elements of the room while the action is taking position (SCENE 3).  A Point of View Shot was used to establish a connection between these two scenes by revealing to the audience what the MC is looking at and where the clock is in the Close-up Shot of the MC turning to the side and viewing it (SCENE 4-5). The MC is shown sleeping calmly in a Medium Close-up Shot before waking up (SCENE 6). Immediately after, a Point of View Shot is used once more to show the audience that the MC is staring at the door when a sudden string of fear approaches, followed by a scene from the MC’s thoughts (SCENE 7-8). This Point of View shot, in my opinion, is more realistic than the other since the creator included natural blinks that reflect the eyes opening and closing when they awaken. A Medium Close-up Shot was used to reveal the MC’s shocked glance as he conveys to the viewers his confusion regarding the circumstances (SCENE 9). Long Shot addressed the MC’s confusion in the previous scene by fully presenting the circumstances. In this scene, the black monster creature crawled on the wall and used its smoky legs and pointy fingers to enter the room (SCENE 10). Since it’s difficult to see the monster creature and not enough atmosphere was created, I don’t think this would terrify the audience as much. Instead, I think they would be more confused.

Camera Angle: As I watched the movie, it seemed to me that the MC’s vulnerability and loneliness were mostly communicated through high angles. In wide shots, it gives us the impression that we are seeing him as a ghost floating in m deair. Frequently employed in point of view shots, low angles allow us to see the scene from the MC’s perspective, creating a sense of empathy and a connection between the audience and the character.

  • Mise-en-scene

Props: Many props were employed to emphasize the MC’s emotions at the beginning of the movie. While the MC is working in his office, there’s lots of post-it notes on the wall, giving the viewer the impression that he is a chaotic worker. At the same time, there are many crumpled papers on the floor and table, which indicate that he is disoriented and irritated.  The time on the clock and dark lighting tells the viewers its very late at night, also the character is wearing pyjamas which leaves the viewers curious about why he is not sleeping or he’s just a hard worker that loves to work. Attracts the viewer’s attention wanting to watch the film.

Lighting: To evoke tension and a sense of unease, low key lighting was employed. Most of the scene had been set in a chilly, gloomy approach, which evokes a sense of emptiness and loneliness. The lamp, which emphasizes to the audience that it is “the only hope in the dark,” was the only source of warm light, giving us the impression that we are in urgent required of warmth in the depths of the cold.

  • Editing

I believe that the continuity editing of the Parasomnia short film was an important factor for the creators, as evidenced by the naturalness of most shot transitions. Our group didn’t even realize the MC was moving between two rooms during the opening scene of the film, when he was walking from the office into his bedroom, until we did extra research and watched the movie a few more times (SCENE 1-3). This is because the editing was so seamless. Another editing method employed was lap dissolve, in which the double exposure effect of SCENE 8 appeared several times in SCENE 7, creating an unsettling and uneasy viewing experience for the audience. The extremely unrealistic effect this technique creates also informs the audience that the MC experiences hallucinations. Other sequences before that ran seamlessly one after the other, making them easy to watch, demonstrating natural and realistic editing.

  • Sound

The background music was tense and eerie, creating a very mysterious and intense atmosphere that makes the audience curious about what will happen in the film. However, because it isn’t a real sound that would naturally occur in the real world, this non-diegetic sound makes the scene less realistic. The creators employed a lot of diegetic sounds to make the sound more real. The Diegetic Sounds of pen scrabbles on paper (SCENE 1-2) in the opening scenes of the film, which show the MC working in his home office, inform the audience of what the MC is doing before they even see the scenes. Before a scene is shown, diegetic sounds of the MC yawning are used to inform the audience that he is exhausted (SCENE 2). Additional diegetic sounds, including the MC’s breathing, footsteps, and clock beeps, might provide the audience a more genuine impression by forming an image in their minds of the film (SCENE 3-6).  The audience may be surprised or frightened by unexpected sound effects, such as lion roaring and machine error, in addition to the background music, which was one of the non-diegetic sounds used (SCENE 7–10).

Final Power Point slides:

     

Week 12 – Self Reflection

weng-c1 / / 3D Digital Literacy

There was plenty of enjoyment and awful pain involved in completing the second assignment. I’ve gained a lot of new knowledge and increased my Blender and Substance Painter practice. Although it takes a lot of time and effort, Blender’s sculpting mode now has a new component that allows me to experiment with different approaches to applying textures. I’m still working on strengthening my skills and becoming more comfortable using Substance Painter. Although I had a lot of flexibility in the beginning when it came to character development, I found it difficult to keep to Genndy Tartakovsky’s style. I’m still not entirely certain if my character suits his style till the very end. I don’t believe I made any mistakes that I couldn’t fix when constructing the character, which is, in my opinion, an improvement beyond the last task. There is room for improvement in this assignment, in my opinion. Since I feel like I haven’t done enough for this assignment character, I would like to add more sculpted texture and experiment more with the brush tools if I decide to complete this assignment or one like it again. To make the prop more appealing, I would also like to make some improvements in this area. Instead of using basic hues and boring textures like I did for this assignment, I should have sculpted it to make it appear more eerie and scary to add more atmosphere. I should have also uploaded it into Substance Painter to add a higher quality texture.

Week 12 – Self Reflection + Assignment

weng-c1 / / Animation Studio

The progression of my animation video in the animation studio module was stressful during many enjoyments. Stressing over getting my work complete in its best version and showing my ideas clearly and successfully was something I worried a lot about. Enjoyment in expressing my thoughts and being able to freely experiment with different activities to help me to perform better in my work. Also, learning lots of new knowledge about 2D animation that I didn’t know about was amazing. During this project, I think what I’ve done very well was sharing my ideas when developing the world, and our group worked very well together because we didn’t argue about having different ideas; we all just went with the flow. Every new good idea was developed, and we were always trying to fit them together. and giving each other suggestions on the individual section. I think the part that didn’t work best was on my own, completing the animation, because I was having trouble with having too many scenes that were moving too fast, which I’m still not sure if I’ve fixed the problem until the last stage. I was also having problems with the proportion and the shape of the character in the frame that are right after each other to perform a smooth transition between scenes. Working as a team, I’ve learnt that it’s very important to have connections with each other, which I feel like is something our team needed to make improvements on. If I were to start the module over again, what I would do differently is play around with the angles of the scenes more and give more tries before getting to the final stage of the animation video. This is something I needed to improve on as well, trying and exploring more variety of style and ideas instead of just picking one and staying with it the whole time throughout. Before completing the animation, I should draw more storyboards until I know that the shape and proportion are right and practice on drawing it. Also, I need to sketch out more different drawings instead of staying on one. design and keep changing the details based on the first draft. I should have more drafts of practice for my animation. If I were to change something in this project, one of the things I could do is change the colour palette, maybe have the background lighter and make my characters in more vivid colours. Another thing I would change is the story of my animation; it could be more interesting and more engaging. The last thing I would change is the setting of our world because at the very beginning of the development of the world, I pick my idea of Barbie, but we kind of just kept the idea of dolls, but I wanted the world to be brighter and wonderfully rather than a horror haunted house world. Even though I would like to change the world setting to a more positive and girly setting, I still really liked the design that I’ve created for my room doll. I got inspirations. from the Joker, he’s something I will create a personal story just for him.

Week 11 – Posing the Character and Uploading to SketchFab

weng-c1 / / 3D Digital Literacy

 It was fairly simple to add the armature to my character for posing, but I had to do it multiple times because the first time I forgot to extrude the armature to the hair, which caused the hair to perform in an odd shape when I was posing the character; the second time it happened to my dress, and the third time there wasn’t enough armature in the dress, which caused some corners of the dress to lose their shape. However, these were all simple fixes. One mistake was made. I tried to pair them up after I finished extruding one side of my character’s body at the beginning, but it didn’t work. I had to rotate my character so that it faced the negative Y-axis to solve the issue.

Export onto SketchFab was very successful and quickly.

3D models by Christine (@ChristineWeng) – Sketchfab

Week 11 – Feedback + Finalizing Colour Palette

weng-c1 / / Animation Studio

This week, we combined all our animatics into a draft animation. To make it easier for me to sketch later while I’m making the animation, I received feedback on my animatic about some shots I could remove that weren’t necessary and about changing shoot angles. Additionally, the group has talked about the ideal colour scheme for the background and character. The character was wearing a denim blue skirt and a burgundy hoodie. In besides having black hair, she has middle-tone peach appearance that is slightly colder. I thought it would appear like book pages with an aged yellowish colour for the background. I’ve found I reference image was something we could use for the world’s colour palette.

Animatic Link: https://ulster-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/ohare-h3_ulster_ac_uk/EdiLov-RiMdGsHHTuj2JmZcB4yF8bcBj97iuw0CFiU61lw 

Week 10 – Workshop: Adding Detail and Baking Normal Maps Homework: Sculpting Character Details and Baking Texture

weng-c1 / / 3D Digital Literacy

During the workshop we sculpted a provide elephant model and baked it by applying image texture. Then exported it to Substance Painter and applied texture on it.

Since almost all of my character’s body is smooth and I didn’t sculpt many obvious textures, I believe that she should have smooth skin as a doll. Her hair was the only area where I heavily applied the sculpted texture since I wanted to give it a more realistic look. Further, I smoothed her dress and leg and formed her face to highlight her chin. It didn’t work until I tried a few times and rewatched the tutorial after baking the maps for the areas I had sculpted. I discovered that I forgot to apply the multiresolution modifier. When the bake worked the first time, I made a mistake of having the UV unwrapped on top of each other, which resulted in all the maps being on top of each other. To resolve this issue, I baked each area independently and returned to UV unwrap.

 

 

Then I exported everything into Substance Painter and applied textures.

Week 10 – Workshop: Line Clean up and Colouring

weng-c1 / / Animation Studio

The workshop this week focused on colouring and line cleaning. The task required finishing the flour sack’s simple design in Krita with clean lines and adding colour. It was a little difficult to get used to drawing on Krita, but the task wasn’t too difficult.

Line and Clean Up Exercise.gif

For the group work this week I continued developing my animation.

Week 9 – Workshop: Constructing a Humanoid Character with Good Typology Home-work: Sculpting Character

weng-c1 / / 3D Digital Literacy

I started the homework during completing the workshop tasks. Following the tutorial video, I blocked the basics of the face, body, and leg; the building process was simple. I found it difficult to scale and shape them something like my character while blocking them out, rather than doing it exactly like the demonstration. particularly the face, because my character’s eyes and face are quite round, and I also had to extrude out the character’s chain, which was an extra piece.

After completing them during the workshop, as homework I’ve watched more of the tutorial videos and developed more of my character features in detail, referencing from my character design image at the back. One of the difficulties I faced when making the spring the arms, I had to research a tutorial video (http://xhslink.com/a/jn71yw0x1OZ1，复制本条信息，打开【小红书】App查看精彩内容). The waist and neck were other difficulties after making the spring arms. I can scale the entire spring because it was made with a Bezier curve, but I can’t scale just one section of it after it’s been converted to mesh. To solve it, I had several springs, scaled them to various sizes, then arranged them from large to small, then to large. To produce the big-to-small effect by having vertices are joined together. During modeling, the most difficult aspect was building the dress. I’ve spent the most time creating it for my character. During the process of correcting my mistakes, I also received help from lecturers on how to make the dress.

Apart from these difficulties, everything after was simple to make up to the sculpting stage. The prop I chose to make balloon, I simply made with spheres.