My initial storyboard and animatic had this scene from the side, where Fern casts the spell. However, I quickly found that it was difficult to find a good reference for this. I decided I would try to change up the angle and see if I liked it better. I ended up finding a reference for a front view angle from Harry Potter which I thought worked better. I also thought that it would be easier for me to create emotion from the character if I did the shot face on.

I am much happier with this angle and the shot worked very well in the end.

I also decided that It would be better If I included some more camera work in my final animation as I thought it was lacking it a little. I am not very used to working with different effects to create different camera movements but I think that adding in the second shot where the camera pans down the forest was a good way to make the animation a bit more visually appealing. I ended up really liking this shot and it was a lot of fun to complete the detailed background.

The other members of the team were also a great help for building up references and getting inspired for the project. We were able to share ideas and suggestions among each other, including films and tv shows we thought might be helpful as well as thoughts on shots and colour palettes.

My groupmate Amy put together colour swatches for each of the scenes, after we had discussed in a group and looked at colours we thought would work. This was very helpful as it made it easy to colour drop from an image when it came to adding colour to my final animation.

Animation Studio – Magical Academia Animation

https://blogs.ulster.ac.uk/cloemalard/

https://blogs.ulster.ac.uk/b00835256/

I find Pinterest is a very good place to get lots of ideas from and so I always make sure to create boards at the start of a project and keep them updated as ideas develop. I have included a link to some of the boards I made for this project.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/jazzy_121/magical-academia-world-building-references-outside/

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/jazzy_121/design-a-world-group-6/

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/jazzy_121/build-a-world-character-references/

One of the ideas we had that would make our animation a little more fun was to have each of us guest as students at the school! It was very fun to create a character for yourself which Eimear was going to include in her scene as limited animation. I tried to keep the style of my character consistent with the style I drew Fern in and as close to Cloe’s original character design as possible. I was happy with how it turned out and I think you can see that my character is definitely from within the same world as Fern as there is consistency in the character design.

All of my scenes are set outside the building and so I wanted to keep a very mysterious colour palette, but also have it fit into nature. I looked up various different magical palettes from forests. I put together a collection of ones that I liked so that I could discuss it with the team and get their opinion on what they liked best.

After a discussion we all agreed that the bottom one would be good for the outdoor palette as it is still mystical but the greens and blues provide a sense of nature exactly like we wanted. We also discussed as a group what the inside palette should look like and one of the group members suggested owl house:

We all agreed that this palette would work well and it wouldn’t clash too much against the characters clothing.

Once we had decided the colour palettes our group member Amy made a helpful document containing palettes (By using the adobe colour picker software) which is helpful for us all to get the correct colours.

I used a couple of different references for movements, including both scenes from already existing media and scenes which I set up myself to photograph. This was helpful for scenes which I could not find any reference for as it allowed me to think about the composition and how to make the shots more accurate in terms of character placement and poses.

For the scene where Fern does the magic i used a reference from Harry Potter where Hermione casts a spell. I thought that this would be an accurate way to make it look like she was casting a spell with a full range of motion. I really wanted to capture anticipation in this shot, one of the 12 principle of animation so I think this was a good solid reference to use.

For these reference poses I set them up myself in order to fix the perspective which was a big issue in some of my shots. Particularly the shot above, where the hand goes out of the ground and reaches towards Fern as in my original animatic it was not immediately clear that the hand was in the foreground of the shot, and Fern was in the background- this made things look as if it was a giant hand next to a normal sized person. By posing these scenes with my teammates I was able to improve the shot a lot.

This shot was difficult to animate smoothly so I was luckily able to pose a family member to help me with animating the shot. I took a burst of shots and edited them together (See above) which was really helpful. Then I was able to look at the video and my timeline at once.

For this scene I wanted to use as close a reference as I could find because I thought it would be tricky to get it accurate. I found a reference from ‘The Black Cauldron’  which shows a skeleton hand and not a zombie hand but I still liked the motion of the hand clenching and unclenching and I wanted to try to capture this. I had to change the angle which made things a little bit difficult but I think it went quite well. Next, I just have to fix up the line art of the animation and add in some tonal values to give the piece more depth. I will also add more detail into Fern but as she is far away and she will be done in limited animation this won’t be too difficult.

Week 8: When we were starting with our animations and storyboarding, we were given a task of creating a storyboard based off some comments such as the storyline, camera angles and shots. This exercise was very enjoyable as we had the freedom to be totally creative and it was really interesting to see everyone’s different approach to the same brief.

I was really pleased with how mine turned out as I think I made good use of different poses and camera angles to tell the story, while adding a strong sense of character into the flower sack.

This was the final draft of my Animatic, cut together with my completed shots. I made this for our progress videos to show the lecturers where we were at. The feedback we got was very encouraging as across the board everyone could see consistency in the characters. However, there was parts which I noticed which I want to fix, such as changing the timing on certain scenes. I also decided to remove the scene where Fern walks forward as I think it is unnessicary to the story and I can spend time making other shots better instead.

I took the advice given about my last animatic and decided to make another version of my animatic. I do still have the problem of the layers not exporting correctly from after effects but I will discuss this further with my lecturers. I have finally been able to export my videos in a way in which they will play on my blog so I am happy with this.

For this version of my animatic I removed the clips which Aoden and Alec pointed out as being unnessicary, such as the spell leaving the wand. I also adjusted some of the timings to make it better. You could not really see some of the action such as the hand coming out of the ground as the clip was too short so I adjusted this.