My Animation Sound
I chose a clip from one of my favourite shows ‘fleabag’, I chose this clip as I believe it gives a lot of opportunity for interpretation as it is very humorous and peculiar. after some thinking I decided to completely go off the clip and make it animals. when researching animals as a reference I found many cats dressed funny and took inspiration.
although my designs where much different this helped guide me to my own characters.
Storyboard
here is my story board I made, although basic it was great in helping me stay focused and on track with my original idea. In order to animate I drew rough character designs then broke them into parts such as the arm, legs, head and facial features. this meant I could parent different assets appropriately to create a seamless movement and clear action. although tedious I thoroughly enjoyed this process as I love making my art come to life especially in 2D.
Here I placed my original rough drawings into a basic background to set the scene. originally I wanted to make it like a big show where the cats are showing off their outfits but one hates their outfit as it looks like they are dressed like a pencil. in further planning I decided it would be much easier to follow and go along with the audio if they where getting ready for the show and the outfit has only been revealed hence the distress.
this is my background , to animate my opening scene which is the curtain opening I drew the moving curtain in another layer and using keyframes squished the curtain to create an opening effect to then reveal the cat in its outfit.
Blockout
before starting any animation I blocked out my scenes and color coded them. this proved to be extremely helpful when animating as it made lining up the sound, organizing each scene and scaling my moving assets so much easier.
Then in this process I discovered after effects has a great feature where u can insert the clip meaning the audio would stay in sync with the clip and keep the mouth movements as a reference for the lip syncing.
Here is me using this feature to line the “cool cat” mouth with the correct mouth movements.
How I Animated each Character.
To make the task much more manageable and scope it down I animated each character separately for each scene then put them together this made everything much more manageable and meant I wasn’t overwhelming myself with so many different layers in one scene.
The use of anchor points was extremely helpful as it made everything much more seamless and straightforward.
Lip Syncing And Emotion
as my characters where all animals with little emotion I had to get creative. To create a clear change of emotion I made sure all the facial features where separate such as the eyes which could be scaled up or down depending on the emotion and a jaw which in neutral positioning just looked like a lip but when dragged down looked like an open mouth. for some scenes it is clear I have also drew new facial features to show extreme emotions of sadness fear and anger mostly in the mouse in the end and the ginger cat throughout. shoulder shrugs and head tilts where also extremely handy for characters such as the cool cat as it had accessories therefore limiting options for displays of emotion.
Effects
Here I added a glowing effect to my sign as i believe it is a great addition to the scene as it keeps the humorous atmosphere and displays some uniqueness and creativity.
similarly I have added little details such as the cat toys on the dressing table just to show that attention to detail and personally I believe these make all the difference in animations such as these which are seemingly not as high detail and stylized.
overall I am very happy with my end result as it has very much turned out how I hoped , I displayed my knowledge of camera work also through the use of closeups, extreme closeups, medium shots and my favorite scene of all the over shoulder shot of the cat looking in the mirror and thinking they look like a pencil. these shots really brought the scene together giving the feeling of a real show giving it more comedy and layers to the show even if it is only 11 seconds. however I do believe I successfully made the sound my own putting my own creative spin on it which I am incredibly proud of .
If there’s anything I feel like I could improve on for next time is allowing myself more time to do more complex animations as although I am very happy with the result I do believe with more time I could of included more complex animations and movements throughout the scenes.