- At the start of this unit we got to choose our groups so me, Jamayne, Christine, and Jack all decided to come into a group together. Despite not knowing Jack very well beforehand I got to know him over the course of the project and I felt that as a group we worked rather well together, we were all pretty easy going and generally I enjoyed working with them.
Storyboarding and getting the ideas for the short was initially quite hard as we messed around with different ideas before nailing it down to a who-done-it story. I did some research on old noir films by watching some clips and a variety of youtube videos on the topic and looked through my old notes from moving image arts to inform my decision making when it came to crafting our short film as to try and put in film noir techniques to further show our original inspiration. Such youtube videos included What is Film Noir – Private Detectives, Corrupt Cops, and Femme Fatales and Defining Film Noir. What we did is we wrote down the basis of the story then we each went away and sketched up a storyboard for it. I tried to use my knowledge of film noir when it came to compositions and camera movements. From the beginning we were going to make the film in black and white and once the punchline hits we switch it to colour to emphasise the punchline and to show the film noir inspiration. The next lesson when we all met up we then went through all our storyboard ideas and combined them to create one storyboard, choosing which of each others looked better and would make them flow nicely together.
With character designs we each choose a character and design them, sending the work in progress to the group to get feedback and to keep us all in the same lane of design with a cartoonish look. We took a lot of inspiration from the likes of Veggietales and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2. I chose Madame Red, who is a lollipop. I thought it would be fun to figure out how to make her look sneaky but cute with her being a lollipop, I wanted to challenge myself by creating the shine and texture of a lollipop in a 3d program with her head. Because she’s a simple lollipop I went through many ideas on how to give her more personality despite it being such a limited design, i kept in mind the fact i would have to model it and also the rules that we can create hands but no legs. Eventually after brainstorming i thought of giving her a candy wrapper as her clothes, this put me on the right track and brought me to my final design. I decided to give her floating hands as in designs. When I gave her arms it felt like it complicated the design too much or they would be hidden by the wrapper. Also during my design process i chose not to give her a mouth as i quickly realised that with the circular ring around her, the addition of a mouth made the face too cluttered and confusing. The knife was to help show her as the criminal in the story line and to make her more suspicious to the viewer despite her short screen time
When i was modeling her i had to redo her head quite a few times to try and get the shape i wanted as i wanted her eyelashes to be visible This changed how I make eyes. | Blender Anime 3D during my research i saw this video on making eyes and using it i created her eyes as i felt that having more traditional eyes wouldn’t look right with the shiny lollipop head. I created the texture for them in procreate and went through a few different colour ideas as I wanted to keep the pinks and reds in the design while also having the eyes stand out enough to be noticed. The dagger also had a few variations, the first one taking inspiration from this video -insert vid- before i deleted it and decided to go off what i had learnt from previous semesters as to create one that i felt would fit better as the dagger i had initially created looked more like a sword than a dagger. Also early into the process I decided to create a black outline around her as to give her a more cartoonish look https://youtube.com/shorts/vRliBJrPx_M?si=X6gTxf63oY8cZO-e i took inspiration from this video as it helped me create the black outline to the thickness i needed for her. I also used this Create Curtains in Blender in 1 Minute tutorial to help me make the wrapper as i couldn’t get it to fold as i wanted with manual movements
Initially I created this environment and used a Low Poly Tree | Blender Tutorial tutorial to help me do the trees. I encountered an issue however as when I hit play to animate the camera pan down, all the leaves would fall off so I had to try something else. After talking to my friend Hurley I managed to create a tree whose leaves didn’t fall off and I believe they also look a lot better than the old ones and this means we were able to create the pan downs. I ended up having to redo the buildings near the end of the project as they looked too realistic in comparison to the cartoonish characters, and due to a uv issue it was just faster to remake them. So I remade 3 buildings with a more cartoony texture that I created using adobe substance painter. Whilst making them I frequently sent them to Christine to help make sure I was keeping them cartoonish. When I finished the three I sent them into the group onedrive folder and Christine helped me place them and I let her know that if more were needed I would be happy to make more. I’m glad I remade them as the original uv’s were oddly squished and would have taken forever to fix. Also because I had to remake them later on I was able to use what I had learnt from the first time so as to not repeat the same mistakes. Despite many of my environment models not being used in the final render, my trees were certainly used and overall it was a good learning experience for me.
Eventually I finished my lollipop model, giving her head a nice shiny texture and after speaking with Rachel I increased the opacity to make her expressions more visible, which certainly helped in the long run. I created a variety of riggings for her eyes as because she doesn’t have a mouth her expressions would purely be through eyes and movements kinda like gromit from wallace and gromit. So I gave her controls for opening and closing eyes, tilting them, bottom eyelid, top eyelid and such. Surprisingly I found the process quite enjoyable and rewarding to do.
When it came to the actual animating of the project I had different experiences with the different models. We created a masterfile for the project that contained 3 of our models (jacks wasn’t finished yet so we used a draft version of his model) and this allowed us to start animating. We had good communication with the group which was so helpful as I had an issue with Christine’s model and it was easy to get it sorted. Unfortunately christine’s model was the one i struggled with the most whilst animating as i found the arm controls to influence the body too much but despite this it was enjoyable to animate the donut character. The baguet model was very fun to animate. I really liked Jamayne’s controls she made on the character as I found them very simple to use and user friendly. Unfortunately, after I had made most of the animation on the baguette, I was informed that there was a newer model that had the mouth controls I needed. I struggled to move the animation over to the new model and it took several days before I eventually contacted Rachel after having several discussions with Jamayne. I came into class and mike fixed it clicking a single thing. So I had to work with matching up the new model to where the last one had been which was far more tedious than expected. During this process it caught my eye that my own model looked different than how i had originally designed them, due to me having the armature on i hadn’t noticed that for some peculiar reason the stick of the lollipop did not reach the ground unlike the original model. But due to the time constraint of realising this the day before, I chose to ignore this matter as I knew it was not something I could reasonably fix in such a short time. So it was just something I’d have to deal with.
I liked working with my group as they were fun to be around and we got the work done so well! We worked well together and got our work done quite fast, all cheering each other on and joining in collective suffering as our computers struggled to render. It was really fun working with all of them and I would definitely do it again someday if given the opportunity. I hope I pulled my weight enough but every time I wondered if I was doing enough they were kind enough to reassure me and the positive energy kept us all going and supporting each other.
Christine was our bread and butter of the operation, holding everyone together and keeping us all on track with frequent checkups and quick answers to our concerns. She fixed the issue with the arms on her model that I had struggled with but I only found out after I had finished animating it so I left it be considering that I had worked around the issue and animated it.
42%
Jamayne’s model was the most fun to work with I found and I enjoyed using it thoroughly. Despite the switch over hiccup it was still the least stressful part of it. Jamayne herself was so helpful throughout the animation process, helping me get things sorted and helping me bring in the final environment and lighting and for that I am grateful.
34%
Jack had quite a hard time throughout this project due to personal issues setting him back and general issues with mastering blender. We called a few times over the course of the project and I did my best to assist him through it. Despite his problems and the time constraints he managed to get the model finished and sent to the group with plenty of time for us to animate it which I found rather impressive considering all the issues he had been having throughout the project.
24%
I found my first year of animation thoroughly enjoyable. I met so many great people and made amazing friends. I found the teaching of blender so informative and though and I loved my teachers who were all so helpful and quick to help with any issues I had, their casualness made them so much more approachable and being able to message them through discord so easily made life so much less stressful for me. I found the videos that were sent so helpful and I especially loved the student facing breakdown in semester one as it helped so much with figuring out what I was doing and what to submit. Overall they really helped me get a grasp of blender. I didn’t have the same experience with 2d animation but that was due to already having experience with it so there wasn’t a sharp difference for me to learn but experimenting with different animation software was quite interesting for me although i am still partial to my lovely procreate dreams. Blender was quite the challenge as i hadn’t worked much with 3d software but thanks to the teachers i did manage to get a hang of it far better than youtube tutorials.