This year has been quite tough on me due to a lot of personal reasons, such as distraction by video games and mobile phone apps and dealing with losing a lot of personal photos near the start of the year. Teaming up with my close friend, Cor, we worked on a project which involved original characters I had planned for a long time- Brent Sawyer, a character I created sometime around 2022, and Javier, a character I created for the Second Year Project I did with others, Race Against Time, who was starred in unused adverts for cologne. We both put a lot of thought into the Circus aesthetic of the project, looking at shows, manga and web cartoons that all have a circus aesthetic or heavily feature Circuses, such as Cirque du Freak, The Amazing Digital Circus, Helluva Boss, and TooBoe, which had in one of his animated music videos a circus owned by a man named J.

Several inspirations were looked at for the creation of our Project, with many different projects from many different mediums. These include Persona 5, which has a very striking anime style that uses black as shading. Projects with similar art styles, such as Azure Striker Gunvolt, music animation videos from the Japanese musician TOOBOE and the Cirque Du Freak manga, based on the books from Darren Shan, were also inspirations.

Azure Striker Gunvolt’s Artists are:

• Yoshitaka Hatakeyama
• Munehiro Araki
• Ken Fujii
• Tetsuya Enda

Dramatical Murder’s artist is honyalala.

The Cirque Du Freak manga was illustrated by Takahiro Arai.

Brent’s design is based of several different characters, such as Kouichi, from a very obscure Japanese game by Konami called Daisukiss, Ulysses from the Chasing Rats game Struggling and Gabriel from the Walking Dead Telltale Series. I wanted him to look like someone who looks like he hangs around his local skateboard park and breeze through life without much of a care, while also having a design that isn’t to overly complicated despite the open jacket and large hair strands sticking out of his hat. Brent was created a long while before the project was even started, and his original design was a lot less interesting than his new one, so looking at the characters he is based on I decided to give him a new and improved look that is more appealing. Brent has also changed as a character since the project started. Originally, he had an interest in skateboarding, and cared more about art than that, but eventually as the project focused more on Brent’s hobby of art and made it a bigger part of his character that aspect went unused. Throughout many different scripts he was reiterated into a middle aged man, originally had a father who took him to the circus to cheer him up, and even roped into performing with Javi. Ultimately, it was settled that he would remain a member of the audience and become interested in Javi enough to draw him in a sketchbook.

Javi is the other main protagonist of the project and the one Brent has a crush on. His outfits and design takes more inspiration from various circus and bomber inspired characters, such as the Pokemon Blacephalon and Meowscarada, Crimm from Luminous Avenger iX, Fizzarolli from Helluva Boss and Javi from the Walking Dead Telltale Series, who s Gabriel’s uncle. I wanted to create a character that takes Crimm’s manic obsession with explosives and combine it with Meowscarada’s charismatic way of using the element of surprise alogn with Blacephalon’s known unorthodox way of presenting it.

Javi had a very old beta design for when I first had the idea for the story the project was based on, and another for when I used him for my second year project in 2d ads in the 3D scenes in Unreal Engine.

Javi’s final design takes more of a hispanic heritage compared to both of his own designs, which are considerably whiter, to differentiate him more from Brent and to develop him as more of a Spanish Guapo (Handsome man). I found animating him a lot of fun, as it helped me learn the importance of timing, letting frames go on longer than others to add more impact to the movement of the characters.

Over the course of the year I filmed several references for use in many of my scenes. One of my favourite scenes with Javi was one where he was spinning and presenting Brent with a flower, as it allowed me to really understand how a character moves about in an environment without breaking the model’s proportions. It was also a very complicated scene, with Javi first anticipating with charging up a leap by crouching, spinning and changing feet rapidly.

Other noteworthy scenes involve Javi high atop the stairs. There are several different perspectives in each of the scenes, such as an extreme close up of Javi’s face that zooms out down to the audience below, inspired by Shinji’s break down in Evangelion.

Initially, we communicated with each other outside of school hours through calls on Discord, but sometime around after Christmas the lecturers told us to stop making calls due factors such as background noise disrupting communications and the fear that the calls weren’t being used for work purposes. In addition, communication was at certain points heated on either our ends, and I admitted being wrong to lash out when one of my animations was missing a vital frame that changed the landing foot of one of the characters.

We created a OneDrive to put all our completed scenes, even separating them out into who created which scenes towards the end of development. Cor helped me out with sorting out which scenes we can work on, though I accidentally animated one of the scenes that was meant for her, but soon after we agreed I could use it as part of my showreel, and in the event Cor is unable to use her version scene, I could use the scene as a replacement.

I had a lot of fun animating for the project, as it allowed me to exercise my ability to learn timing and appeal, along with anticipation and overlap and follow-through. It was interesting to look at the references I gathered and adapt them into an animated form in my project, as it allowed me to get a better sense of how the body moves without the proportions breaking or distorting. It also allowed me to more accurately create follow through animations for Javi’s cape, tassels and flower. Brent was also a lot of fun to animate, especially his hair, as it was a great way for me to animate follow through animations and make Brent’s movements more appealing. I especially liked how I animated him in several scenes, such as when he’s standing up after noticing Javi, he first is curious but then stands up quickly, in complete awe.

My time in Final year, for all its ups and downs, has been a great deal of fun. I enjoyed animating and putting together my scenes in Adobe Animate, and I am very glad to have Cor help me out with the project by putting in her scenes. She gave several ideas early on about the concept of our project and input her storyboards to use in creating the animation.

Towards the end, we had a bit of a falling out over the scenes, as I had misnumbered some of the scenes and accidentally did one of Cor’s scenes- specifically Scene 58, and we both went to an in private session to discuss our last push and to sort out any crossing of wires we may have had. I admitted that sometimes when I was under a lot of stress I vented angrily at Cor, which I deeply apologised for, and was upset when Cor sent a lot of angry texts on Discord saying to cut out scenes and quit the project.

Even still, when we interacted with each other through our calls on Discord, we were very amicable and often talked about our work together.

I used Adobe Animate to make my scenes, and used the Camera feature and created massive backgrounds in Photoshop to bring my characters to life. One of my favourite things to do was line up the animations of Brent walking down and making sure his contact foot lined up with the previous frames so that it looked like he was genuinely walking down the wall. With the acquired knowledge I had from making walk cycles last year, I found it quite easy, if a little overpowering at first, to animate Brent stomping down until he makes eye contact with the circus in the next scene.

If I ever did something like this again, I would endeavour to devote a lot of time to my project, I feel if I do manage to get into a Master’s degree, I would discipline myself to work as much as I can to my animations. I have learned a lot of experience with animating this project, and have learned a lot of new skills creating storyboards with more advanced layouts of scenes, such as zooming out, enlarged or elongated shots that have a character moving down from a flight of stairs, or a jester twirling and dancing as he gives his dear a flower, appreciating the finer movements suck as the flower wiggling in place as the Jester holds it in front of Brent, or the slight shake of Brent’s hair after he stops clomping away from his ruined mural, and the anticipation of Javi winding up his bow and setting off multicoloured explosions underneath him, and animating the other audience members’ reactions as they see Javi suddenly land right in front of them.