Major Project Blog
For the major project assignment, we were tasked with creating a short, animated film to show our artistic, design and technical skills while also demonstrating our research into our short film. This project would cover two semesters and would be important for showcasing the various skills we have learnt over the past two years on this course. I teamed up with Timmy Magilton and Mark Smith.
IDEA
We first started by brainstorming different ideas on a whiteboard. I had an idea for a 2D short story of an astronaut who travels to space, crashes on a planet and befriends an alien. The alien would eventually help him fix his ship and leave only for the planet to be blown up after as it’s deemed a threat. Mark and Timmy also had their own ideas, so we wrote them all on the whiteboard before eventually agreeing to settle on Mark’s idea of a vampire hunter set in the wild west. We decided to go with this idea because we felt it had more potential to grow and incorporate many more characters, styles and themes. While me and Mark were thinking of producing the short film in 2D, we decided as a group to incorporate 2D and 3D. Tim felt he was more comfortable in 3D, I could work in 2D or 3D and Mark wanted to stick mainly to 2D, so incorporating both elements would be the best solution.
Early Research
We agreed that while some of the characters and the assets associated with the scene would be 3D modeled, the various backgrounds and assets which would not interact in any animation, would be in 2D. Me and Timmy looked at wild west concept work online to be able to get a theme so we could work on and a colour scheme for us to base our concepts and backgrounds on. We also researched many different films, TV shows and video games with similar style to what we wanted to achieve. Early in the planning we wanted to do our animation in a cell-shaded style like that of Borderlands or Call of Juarez: Gunslinger.
https://www.ign.com/wikis/borderlands-2/The_Dust
The two games mentioned were good examples for us to base our colour scheme and style off as they had the cel-shaded aspect to them. While our animation wouldn’t be of the same quality, it was a good reference for us. As well as looking at cel-shaded media, we also looked at games and movies that had the wild west theme and the look we wanted to emulate. Evil West was a video game which very closely resembled our story and style. It also features a vampire hunter in a wild west setting.
Evil West is out on Steam! Get it cheap thanks to our price comparison (gg.deals)
Another game I looked at when researching was The Wandering Village. The appeal of this game was that it had worlds populated with 3D assets, but was accompanied by 2D backdrops, which is something we wanted to achieve ourselves.
PRE-PRODUCTION
In week two I worked on the story, and storyboard to accompany it. Mark worked on 2D sprites of some assets and Timmy started work on a 3D model of the revolver. I had written a story based on the bounty hunter coming to town after the war, wanting to visit the grave of a fallen friend and pay respects. A pastor then approaches him in the hopes of convincing him to kill a criminal in the town, concealing the reason and the fact that the criminal is a vampire. It would lead to the bar fight, street fight, the death of the vampire then the conclusion of bats swarming the town.
As well as writing the story I also finished the storyboard soon after.
These were the early storyboards I created to accompany the story. I bounced ideas back and forth with Tim on some of the aspects of the story before eventually settling on an outcome.
As well as this I worked on a couple of 2D assets with Mark, mainly just to see how our styles would contrast. I worked on a wooden road sign and a wagon wheel. At this point in the production timeline, I had planned to work mainly on the 2D aspect with Mark while also helping Timmy with 3D models as well. The main reason being that I was more comfortable in 2D and wasn’t very confident in my 3D modelling ability. Then further down the line, I would work mainly on animating as I enjoy it and am much more confident about it. Below are a couple of early 2D assets I worked on.
I started working on a couple of 2D backgrounds. The 2D backgrounds would be incorporated in the 3D scenes, behind any 3D characters and assets.
I created two 2D backgrounds based on a graveyard, which is in the first scene, and a saloon which features after the graveyard. I researched other wild west landscape concepts online for the style and mainly for the colour scheme too. I wanted to go for a dusk setting as I think it’s the perfect setting for a vampire film. This can be evidenced in many vampire movies. It’s also great for showcasing strong, rich colours through the sky and the various surrounding assets. Before I started the graveyard background, I looked at real-life western graveyard pictures online to get a feel for how it should look. I then used those images to create a colour palette on photoshop.
Six Feet Under: Gunslinger Graves of the Wild West | Historical Landmarks | History Hit
Below are also some references for the dusk setting I wanted to achieve.
Gamer’s Log Daily: Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (actualsimulation.blogspot.com)
I also used the image above to create a colour palette to base my concept on. As well as these images I referenced a couple of other pictures, some real-life pictures of a dusk sky, and a 2D western landscape. These were very good for also referencing a strong colour palette from.
Fantasy Skybox – Sunset Sky | 2D Sky | Unity Asset Store
This was an early concept of the graveyard 2D background, which would be the backdrop for the graveyard scene featuring the bounty hunter and pastor. After this I created the exterior saloon background. I used the same reference images for the colour palette and then an image of a saloon model just for the perspective reference.
Western Saloon Set — L.A. Castle Studios (lacastlestudios.com)
Above is the perspective reference and reference to a saloon. Below is my 2D background:
On week 4 I started some 3D assets and created the animatic. At this point in development, I realised that there’s no need for me and Mark to work on 2D, so I began 3D work with Timmy. Alongside this I worked on our 2D animatic for our next progress presentation. The animatic would be important as it would allow us to visualise our story and would be a good reference for the scenes and assets needed. Using the storyboard, I created in the previous week I put together a rough animatic.
This was shown in the progress presentation in week 4. I received some feedback that it was too fast, and could have been improved with slower camera movements and scenes as well as some sound effects and dialogue. I worked on editing the new animatic and getting relevant sound effects over the course of week 5 and 6. Timmy was able to provide me with dialogue. Below is the new and improved version.
PRODUCTION
Towards the end of week 6 and the beginning of week 7 I also started working on some 3D assets for the environment. I first modeled a water trough.
I added a Toon shaded 3-tone filler to the asset to give the toon shaded effect and then added a black outline to all the edges to highlight them. As well as the trough I also modeled a book. It was originally mean to serve as just a bible for the preacher, but then I duplicated them and changed the colours in order to accommodate a bookshelf for the bedroom scene later in development. All assets from here onwards would have a Toon shaded 3-tone filler applied to keep to the style of our animation.
I then began to work on the town’s clock tower. I looked online and found some interesting 3D models others had created of clock towers and wanted to use them for inspiration.
https://yellowimages.com/stock/low-poly-western-clock-tower-yi3601987
I wanted to create a tall structure that would over look the whole town. I created it with four clock faces and added a 3 tone colour toon shader.
Week 8 was a really busy week for me. I focused on creating various 3D assets for the town we would soon build. In this week I created a Bank, a general store, a water tower, windmill and some barrels. I did a lot of online research to gain references which I could use for inspiration for my models. I saved all my reference images onto the group Miro board and organised it best I could with the links for each image on a green sticky note beside each reference image.
For the creation of the bank and general store I looked up old west architecture and based these buildings from them. Then I just created a sign for the building to give the building its name. I had some issues with the UVs for each building but soon overcame them with some help from Timmy.
Just like the previous assets, I added a 3 tone toon shader and a toon shader outline to add to the toon shaded theme we were going for.
For the water tower and windmill, it was mainly the same process. I researched various designs of old west water towers and windmills and picked the best references to use as a guide.
Above is the finished water tower.
I wanted to keep the colour scheme for the water tower and the windmill similar as it gives the impression they were both made around the same time, and also would fit in with the town aesthetic.
I also looked into creating smaller miscellaneous assets for the town such as wooden barrels. Prior to this I had already research old west miscellaneous assets and saved some reference images in the Miro board to look at further into development.
Below are two variants of barrels I created to populate scenes within the animation and to generally add miscellaneous props to the town.
I focused on fixing up some of the buildings that I had modeled to make sure all the doors were in proportion to a jack rig. Alec had advised me to import a jack rig reference into the scene to accurately resize the doors so they were the right size for the model when it stood next to the door. This helped to make the size of the doors, and placement of the windows look more accurate in reference to the 3D modeled characters. I had to make sure all doors were the same size. Many of these buildings will be placed alongside each other within the town, so if one building had an inaccurately sized door, it would be obvious to the viewer.
I spent a few weeks just working solo on the environment as a whole, creating the various buildings, structures and miscellaneous wild west town props. I modeled:
- A bank
- A bar room interior
- Couple of barrels
- Bed
- Bedroom cabinet
- Books
- Bookcase
- Cacti
- Two variations of a horse cart
- A church
- A Clock tower
- A cross
- Gallows
- A general store
- A hitching post
- A Jailhouse
- An old well
- An Outhouse
- A piano for the saloon
- Chairs and tables
- Power line posts
- Bedroom interior
- A staircase for the saloon
- Town Sign
- Train station with train tracks
- A Trough
- A water tower
- A windmill
- A wooden signpost
- Fences
All of these together would make up the bulk of the town, including the two interior shooting locations.
Earliest screenshot of the town in the first couple of weeks:
Finished Town:
The mountain range and sky background were completed by layering planes of previously created mountain tops I had painted in Krita to make up the scenery, with a painted sunset to be the last plane at the very back. I painted a variety of different mountain tops in varying colors to add depth to the background when each mountain plane was layered behind or in front of one another.
To achieve the desired lighting of the scene I added an ambient light for the sun and changed the tone to a slight orange colour to help emphasise the sunset look on the scene. I also placed various directional lights to help light up the buildings within the scenes as some scenes were too dark when rendered.
The very first animation of the film was solely just camera shots. As Timmy was still working on both models I focused on filming just the camera shots that featured no 3D rigs. For the first couple of shots I focused on some establishing shots of the town and the scenery. I did this in an attempt to give the audience the feel and the theme of the film. I also felt that it was a great opportunity to introduce the viewer to the environment in which these character would be fighting in.
These were a couple of shots from the camera sequencer. To make sure I got the right timing and length to each shot, I’d playblast them and watch it to see if it ran smoothly.
While waiting on Timmy to finish the character rigs, I focused on implementing some of Mark’s 2D shots into the scene. Mark had created a short animated bartender loop for the scene where the protagonist enters the saloon.
Mark animated him so that he would clean the glass for a couple of seconds and then tilt his head towards a certain direction to indicate where the character needs to go. I have the bartender featured in two shots. I placed the bartender PNG files onto a plane within the scene with help from Alec. One of the issues I faced however was that in the first shot, the bartender stops cleaning the glass and tilts his head too soon. I only wanted the bartender to tilt the head in the second shot and clean in the first so when I watch back the recorded scenes, he was tilting his head twice. To overcome this issue, I imported the PNG shots into Premiere Pro, cut the head tilt shots and just looped the glass cleaning. Now I would go back and import these glass cleaning shots onto the plane and just film both shots separately.
I eventually got the protagonist rig from Timmy. He hadn’t finished the vampire rig just yet but I made a start animating shots with the protagonist rig. At this point I had been designated lead animator so I was doing all the 3D animations. With the shots that required both protagonist and vampire, I just used a duplicate protagonist rig to get the poses in and shots made. Later when the vampire was rigged, I just duplicated the movements on the vampire rig and replaced the duplicate protagonist rig with the vampire. The first scene was mainly just camera work and wasn’t too time consuming. The second scene required a great deal more character animation. In the second scene, the protagonist fires his revolvers, so I animated the wrist movement for each shot to show a little recoil. Alec had a look at what I had and suggested I added more movement in the forearms too, showing a more realistic recoil animation with each shot of the revolver.
While waiting on Timmy to complete the vampire rig, I duplicated the protagonist model and did the vampire animations on it just so I knew where to position the camera for each vampire shot and the location the action will take place. For any of the slow-motion scenes I just set all the keyframes further apart in the timeline to make the animation slow and show the desired effect. I enjoyed adding slow-motion to most of the shooting scenes or scenes where characters dive or fall, just to add more emphasis to the action. Timmy had rigged the gun with certain constraints which meant I could change between the gun following the holster, or following the hand which became very useful in scenes featuring gunfights.
At the start of the animation process I created a spreadsheet documenting all the scenes that feature 3D animation and scenes that only use 2D. This meant that Mark and Timmy could keep track of what needed done, especially Mark as he was working on 2D, and the spreadsheet gave him a good overview of what was needed and in which scene. Under the 2D or 3D sections, the red boxes meant no 2D or 3D was required, possibly just camera shots. Any green boxes however meant that either 2D or 3D animation would need to be completed for that scene.
As I was animating, Mark would complete his animations and send me the PNGs. Then I would bring the 2D shots into the 3D scenes I was working on and stitch the scenes together. Usually with the 3D shots, I’d create a completely different maya save file and film those shots separately with the plan to put them together later in post production.
Shots 13 to 17 were some of the most time consuming shots of the film. These scenes were filmed on the street level of the environment. At first I used two protagonist models as the vampire was not available yet. For one shot I animated the model being kicked into a group of barrels. Animated him crashing into the barrels and laying unconscious was not too challenging, but keyframing each barrel to react to the impact and spin or roll realistically was a bit challenging. I went online and looked for references of barrels being dropped or falling just to see how exactly they would bounce or roll around. It took a while to get some references but I eventually came across some on Shutterstock.
After studying the references and many playbacks being watched, I got the barrels animated to a point I was happy with.
A few sots after his scene I spent time animating a slow motion run for the would be vampire model. He would be chasing after the protagonist in an attempt to beat him to the gun laying in front of them. Animating the slow motion scenes were not too challenging and I was happy with how they turned out overall. I just had to make sure the key frames were spaced out evenly and looked good on the play blasts. After I had animated both rigs and was happy with how they were looking, Timmy sent me through the vampire rig. Now all I had to do was the copy the vampire movements from the duplicate protagonist rig, and redo them on the vampire rig to the best of my ability.
The next challenge I faced was in scene 3, shot 18 were the protagonist crawls towards the gun laying on the ground. The shot wouldn’t be long but it was tricky to get the main keyframe positions in before even attempting the middle keyframes. I went onto YouTube to look at references of people performing belly crawls to get the main key frame positions. If I get the main positions I can do the filler keyframe and bring it all together.
I watched both videos to get a better understanding on the postures needed to animate from. I preferred the second video for the quality. I used these references to help animate the protagonist crawl towards the gun, and I am happy with how it turned out, even if the shots are reasonably quick.
The scene which features a couple of shots after the crawl is the vampire being shot and flying backwards in slow motion. I enjoyed making this shot because it was in slow motion which I got pretty comfortable animating, and I was able to look at various references of people falling backwards. 
As this scene was in slow motion, I made the key poses and then key framed them far apart in the timeline. Then I tweaked the in between frames and made sure it all remained consistent and was accurate. When the vampire falls, as with most shots of him falling, I made sure to add bounce on his legs, arms, head and a little on his body. This meant he didn’t just fall stone dead, but his body bounces a little and reacts to the hard fall on the ground. Once the fall was animated and exaggerated a little, I then created the camera for the scene and filmed the fall in a 360 degree spin. This meant the viewer could watch the vampire be shot and fall from all angles, and also adds to the slow motion effect as you often see in movies.
Most of the animation after these scenes was not as challenging and I was able to complete comfortably. The only main difficult I had other than animating was bringing Mark’s 2D shots into the scenes using the planes. Sometimes the planes would not show the images or I was not doing something correctly but it took time to bring the 2D scenes in and have them timed with the camera.
POST PRODUCTION
Once I had finished the animation and was happy with the results, I began rendering the scenes out with some help from Timmy. Timmy added in some final gunshots and flashes into some of my animations to help lessen the workload on Mark who was still busy with 2D shots. I used the maya software render at first. At first I was happy with the renders of the first two scenes but then I tried using the maya software render 2.0 and was more impressed with the speed and the results so I rendered the first two scenes out again in the new render 2.0. I applied an ambient occlusion to the new render as I liked how it added shadows to objects in the scene.
The first render has ambient occlusion turned on, whereas the second does not. I continued to use the maya render 2.0 for the remainder of the animation, implementing the ambient occlusion and smoothing. The rendering was quite a slow process as Timmy had to add some gunshots to a few scenes, so I would need to redo some renders, and Mark turned some 2D shots in pretty late on which meant I had to go back and include them in the scene then render the scene out again.
Once all was rendered, I imported the renders into Premiere Pro and began to stitch everything together. A week previous to this, Alec had watched some of my play blasts and advised I cut a few shots that were not necessary, so I took a note of that so that when it came to premiere pro, I was able to cut those shots easily. The particular shot was in scene 3 involving the vampire, just before flying into the barrels. I had animated a shot in between the kick and the crash into the barrels which wasn’t necessary.
Using the razor tool in Premiere allowed me to trim or cut any scenes that did not make sense or were advised prior to be cut. There were two scenes in the vampire kick scene that Alec felt could be cut so I cut them from the final shot with no issues. With all animated scenes in premiere, I focused on applying the sound effects as Mark was still working on the last few 2D scenes. After I had arranged the shots, edited and composed them into the film I then went searching for sound effects and royalty free music. I went to a website called freesound.org. I have used this website in past projects so I was happy to use it again. I obtained all sound effects and music from this website. The music is western themed so as to fit with the animation and theme and I gathered different variations of gunshot sounds so every gunshot in the film wasn’t sounding the same, especially since both revolvers the main protagonist uses look different, so should sound different.
I inserted Timmy’s 2D intro and layered the opening music over it and over the beginning of scene 1 for our introduction. I adjusted the sound levels of each sound layer so the music wasn’t drowning out the sound effects or dialogue. I slightly heightened the sound of all dialogue so it could be heard. Timmy provided the dialogue which I gave him from the script I wrote earlier in the semester. I didn’t use all dialogue as I felt it dragged out some of the scenes so I just used the necessary dialogue and kept it snappy and to the point. I spent most of the day just editing all the clips, sounds and music together and I think it works well with keeping to the theme. For the last scene I chose ending theme music and added an ‘Additive Dissolve’ to the end of the scene which is basically just a fade out effect. I went and lengthened a few of the shots because I felt some went too quick for the dialogue, and some went too slow so I spent some time cutting some shots shorter and adding more length to others until I was happy.
Once the animation was finished I thought it would be a good idea to add one last credits sequence of the windmill spinning slowly while the title of the film and all our names displayed beside it. I went onto Maya and did a quick animation of the windmill spinning slowly, then rendered it and placed it at the end. I added an additive slow to the beginning and ending of the scene. I then created the text using the same font as the posters to keep it consistent. I added additive dissolve to the title and names so that they also fade in and fade out.
I made sure to keep all font sizing and position the same and made sure all our names were displayed for roughly the same time to make it professional and clean. I updated the spreadsheet to show all renders were now complete. 
Overall I am happy with how our animation turned out. We all put a great deal of work and time into it. For the most part communication within the group was good. There were weeks when maybe Timmy didn’t appear or say much when I tried reaching out to him for progress updates, but he did eventually finish the characters which was the important thing. Mark was generally good at replying to my enquiries and he delivered a lot of 2D work for me to put into the composition. Towards the last couple of days he delivered some work pretty late into the editing phase so it was a little tricky getting it in but he had provided a lot to work with throughout. I found the best way to manage the workload was to always refer to the spreadsheet I made and shared with the group. The spreadsheet allowed us to know which scene needed to be done, and in what order the scenes had to be worked on. It was especially helpful during rendering and the post production phase of the pipeline. I always referred back to the spreadsheet to make sure I was stitching and editing the correct clips together and in the correct order, especially with the 2D scenes thrown in. I am happy with how our animation has came out and feel that it shows the hard work and dedication that has been put into it this year.
PORTFOLIO PAGE
Renders of props I created and textured:
Bank
BAR
Barrels
Bed
Bedroom Cabinet
Bible
Book Cabinet
Cactus
Church Interior
Church Interior
Church
Clock Tower
Wooden Cross
Door
Cabinet
Fence 
Noose
Gallows
General Store
Hitching Post
Jail House
Mirror
Old Well
Outhouse
Piano
Power Pole
Scenery Mountains
Train Station seat
Saloon Staircase
Stool
Table
Town Sign
Train Depot
Train Tracks
Trough
Wagon
Wagon two
Water Tower
Windmill
Signpost
Drink cabinet
Final Animation video
All 3D animations were done by me. All town environment props were also created by me apart from the saloon exterior building which was modelled by Timmy. Timmy also made the cross bow, the guns, the protagonist player model, the vampire player model, the bottles in the saloon, the road/path that runs through the center of town and the grave stones. Any scenes of 2D characters or 2D animations were created by Mark. Any gun flashes shown in gunfights was added by Timmy.
YouTube link for final animation-