For the artbook of Find your Joy, I used Printed.com in order to make it. Creating the slides in Google Slides, I created exclusive artwork for the book and then sent the finished design to Printed.com. However, actually getting the book printed required extensive editing on my end, as Printed.com at the time no longer did editing of the book on their end, and so came to be to amend the changes. By phoning them between 9 and 5, I sorted out changing the book’s size to fit their specifications in Google Slides, and then once the changes were sorted, reshaped and resized some of the text and pictures in the final piece. I was grateful for how dedicated Printed.com was to helping me shape my artbook into the best it could be.
I am very proud of the finished artbook, as it shows every stage of the production progress, from the concept and pre-production stages all the way up to the finished product.
When it came to the table, I put down several posters I created, including ones of my CVs to take, business cards and some stickers I created using the chibi designs I had made. I created the business cards and stickers using Vistaprint, ordering 100 copies of my business card and 20 of each design of sticker. going up to a total of 100.
The last thing I did for the project was compose music and edit in sound for the project. It was quite literally a few days before the deadline, but I managed to get a good soundtrack ready for the project, as well as put in fitting sounds. This is the final project.
After looking over the future plans for after my undergraduate course, I settled on applying for a taught Masters degree for the purpose of learning discipline and not being distracted by other things while I am working on an animation, another reason being so I can learn new techniques to enhance my animations. When it comes to studying masters, I could do a research degree or a taught degree. Research degrees are much like the dissertation I did on Studio Ghibli, and are far more complex than that and especially the essay I did on Richard Williams last year. I would have to research many different topics on the one I am researching, and knowing my heavy handedness when it comes to researching, I discussed with Sarah about taught degrees, which simply use the skills we have used.
Looking through the notes Lisa gave me, I also noticed there are several different types of both degrees:
Timing for animation- a more advanced version of certain modules I’ve covered, for example the walk/run cycles I did last year. I can practice timing for animation in 2D or 3D for my portfolio.
Design research and development- a theory module that will prepare me for postgraduate research and is vital for PhD.
Animation Production- crating a project where I have a topic/idea to start. I would meet each week with a mentor. Will be a pilot for a show.
Experimental design- working with a limited set of assets to help explore a skillset e.g. a set of brushes, understanding what is available and experimenting with it.
Portfolio project- A smaller scale version of the major project I was focusing on.
Looking back at my first CV from last year, I was disgusted by how simple and amateurish it was. Using the video I used from last year, I worked to make a more professional and polished version of my CV for this year, while adding my own unique flair to the layout of the CV.
However, as with last year I had very little time to do my CV, as I was juggling preparing my art book and showreel along with my animations.
I wanted to create a CV with a distinct and more professional look than the last one, with a wider range of colours used for it, so I followed the video I used to make the first CV more closely, learning some cool techniques such as rounding out the edges of the rectangles used to separate the paragraphs by selecting vector points at each edge and then pulling down, and copying over many of the portfolio links from last year to use in my new CV. I also used icons in my CV to ad more visual appeal, and a new profile pic for my photo. I also looked at some classmates’ CVs, such as that of Will Dolan, whose CV uses only a few colours but had a border at the bottom of it, and had the layout of his CV clearly defined.
I also looked back at the other CVs I looked at last year for my first CV- I noted the exclusive pictures that decorated Daran Carlin Weber’s CV, and added a few of my own to my CV, such as a bust of Brent Sawyer, the character I used for our project. I also noted the simplicity and roughness, but I felt that if I made my CV look rough it might come across as messy.
Looking at Liu Binlang’s CV, I saw the layout was very cluttered, with a lot of words spread all over the place. I wanted my CV to be easy to understand and readable, and I felt that Liu’s CV was way too complicated. It also had a large column to the side that had some of his details put in, which was far easier to read and understand than the rest of the CV. I wanted to be careful when making my CV and ensuring to make it easy to read was my top priority.
The most inspiration my CV took was from the tutorial I used for both last year and this year, as mentioned before. The tutorial was by Graphic Island, and his content is conprised of how to create professional graphic designs spanning a wide range of different mediums, such as crisp packets and logos as well as CVs and business cards.
I created several posters for the display for the EOYS. The first one was a test poster with a main focus on Javi and Brent’s relationship, with Javi carrying Brent bridal style as he runs across the stage. As an early beta poster, this really was nothing more than a proof of concept, with far too much clutter with the sunflowers, but it was fun to make, especially with the posing of Brent and Javi’s bodies. It was interesting to see how I was able to handle drawing someone carrying another person bridal style, as I usually just have characters standing around.
The second poster takes inspiration from a really dynamic shot Cor found of someone being illuminated by the moonlight. I was impressed by how the main subject was illuminated from behind and wanted to incorporate that into my second poster. What I created was Javi standing at the top of the stairs being illuminated by the spotlight as he looks down on Brent far below. I liked this poster a lot due to the technical effort I put into it, and also Sarah helped me out with how to make certain parts of rendered clothing stand out more, by putting Brent’s clothes on a separate layer and adding different multiply and filter layer values to it I can make stand out a bit more from the rest of Brent without it looking too dark.
However, I never created the poster with a title card in mind without it feeling mindlessly lacked on and coming across as unnecessary clutter, which poses a bit of a problem for me. So, I created another poster that would wind up being used for our display. This is based on one of the scenes I worked on, where Javi is giving Brent the flower after he twirls toward him. I practised my lighting and rendering in this scene, like the previous poster that had Brent looking up at Javi as he is illuminated by the spotlight. The space between Brent and Javi was for placing the title card in. The title itself uses a Sunflower for the O and since its’s mostly comprised of greens and light yellows it stands out from the mostly red and orange background. I had a lot of fun making this poster, as it was based on one of my favourite and most complicated scenes to work on for the project.
I wanted to make a business card for this year, feeling much more confident in my skills as an artist and animator, I looked at several other students’ cards from throughout the years. Some were very simple, but a little bland, as I wanted to convey a professional yet simple and appealing feel with my own business card.
What I came up with was one side having a stylised version of myself and an inspirational quote from the Walking Dead Telltale Series. I merged together two different quotes from two different Characters; Lilly and Salvadore Garcia. In the latter’s case, Salvadore tells Javi at the start of Episode 5 of Season 3:
‘Legacy, Javi. It’s all anyone leaves behind. That and their bones.’
I wanted to use the quote as all I really want is to leave behind a legacy and have someone, my child or some other, to inherit that legacy and follow in my footsteps and tell my story when I’m gone.
As for the former, should you chose to spare her, Lilly escapes on a raft and tells Clem:
‘Nothing lasts, Clementine. Not friends, not love, not the place you call home. They’ll all fall eventually. Never forget that or they’ll drag you down too.’
As much as it’s true that nothing really lasts, and all of us fear the unknown, I want to ensure that even still, as long as the legacy continues, then surely that will last. So I merged the two quotes together to bring about a more hopeful message.
For the back of the business card, I wanted to make a piece of art that demonstrates my skill as an artist. Since making the Find your Joy project I had grown incredibly fond of Brent Sawyer, so I used him in the project in a scene in a forest where a fight is taking place off screen.
The artbook was the most fun part of the creative futures submission. I enjoyed designing my own artbook and giving it my own unique flair. I looked at several different artbook examples, such as one for The First Eclipse, which had a simple layout for a lot of its pages and Amata, which had an introductory segment I took inspiration from.
For certain pages of the book, I created exclusive artwork of inside the circus and for others such as simple line art of characters like Brent Sawyer and Javi and sunflowers on a purple background. I also went in depth on the origins of the project and how it fits into a larger story I have planned. I put in the artbook bios of the two lead protagonists, the storyboards that were used for the animation of the project, talked about the ideas that were discussed at the planning stage of the project, and also talked about two unused characters I made for the project.
For the covers of the book, I used lineart created for one of my posters for the cover, specifically the third one where Javi is giving Brent the flower, and created a slightly stylised version of Brent Sawyer giving the peace sign for the back. My favourite part about the artbook is that it gives me the chance to show off several different concepts that didn’t make the final project, such as two characters that went unused.
Overall, I had a lot of fun making my artbook, and I really believe I have made a really good artbook for our project. If I ever make another project like this again, I’ll happily do an artbook or it.
Finally there’s the portfolio. Since I had so little time left and After Effects ran awfully on my Laptop, I went in one day before submission date to work on it. I found the original copy of last year’s portfolio and decided to use it as a basis for the revised version for this year. I greatly extended the run time of the portfolio so it can also hold some of my favourite scenes from Find Your Joy, the project Cor and I worked on, specifically, from where Brent was storming off after his mural was ruined to when Javi notices Brent has his artbook out. I also updated the intro so that more stuff goes on, such as using a purple shape to show my name rising up inside it, and two pieces I made for the art book fade into view. I am very happy with how this new version of my portfolio has turned out, as it perfectly shows the great work I’ve done this year as well as all my work before and during my time at Ulster University.
I have Cor to thank for helping me out with my project. I know I haven’t nearly been as attentive to my work most of the time but I still managed to complete all the scenes I needed to do for Find Your Joy. Thanks to her, I learned a lot on designing, refining and bringing my original characters to life. I hope I will be able to do something like this again next year for my Master’s Degree, or even start developing original animations for my personal use and admiration.
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.
Over the course of my year, I’ve neglected to update my blogs to focus on animation and drawing backgrounds for my scenes. Realising this, I’ve resolved to make a post detailing all the references I used for each of my finished scenes, whenever or not they came from films or from my own head and live action references. I filmed several references of myself doing various actions, such as spinning and twirling before presenting a flower from behind my back, smelling flowers, facepalming dramatically and running behind a wall to shelter from the rain. I used these references to create several scenes from the project me and Cor worked on, and they all came out beautifully. I also took care to add the right amount of anticipation and appeal to each of my scenes, such as first having Brent stare at the ruined painting in horror before roughly facepalming, shaking his head as he does so, and Javier’s tassles and cape twirl form behind him as he spins. An issue that confused me was Javi suddenly switch landing feet as he spun, but then I realised in my reference I quickly change landing legs as I spun, so I added an extra frame for Javi that showed him quickly land on his other leg. This made the movement a lot less janky and flowed better without causing confusion. The scene turned to be one of my finest works of animation since taking it up like with the animation of Notch the Blacephalon fighting a Scream Tail and an Iron Bundle from first year.
Unfortunately, the animation was a scene that was not actually meant for me, and so I could not use it. However, I did enjoy the proecess of making it, and will be using it in my showreel when the time comes.
I animated cameras for when Javi is standing high atop the stairs and when he begins descending , and he is animated charging up his leap down the stairs before descending similarly to the way Howl from Howl’s moving Castle hops from building to building.
For the shot of Javi standing atop the stairs I animated a zoom effect similar to one in Evangelion where Shinji is screaming loudly as the camera zooms away from his eyes to at the angels surrounding him.
The whole of Javier’s performance takes the most inspiration from a sequence in the Pokemon Sun and Moon anime where a Blacephalon performs in front of Ash and his friends before blasting them with a surprise attack. The most inspiration comes from Javier bowing in front of the audience before setting off smoke bombs right beneath him.
For the shot of Brent roughly sitting up as he reacts to Javi’s sudden appearance, I used a generic sit down stand up reference, and added some appeal and anticipation to Brent’s movements as he stands up. I feel I’ve done a very good job with the scene, and even added one of the other audience members to react to his standing up.
The final shots I worked on for the project were relatively simple, but for one particular shot I made a simple blender modelling of the circus arena and two of the seats so that I had an idea of the perspective I wanted to put Brent and another member of the audience in, I believe by using that reference I was able to get the proportions and positioning of the characters perfectly. I also used a light source for the scene so I had an idea of the shadows and how dark areas are created on the chairs, the rim of the arena, and on the floor. Here is the Blender reference and the completed image side by side:
During my Holiday, I filmed several references for various scenes in my project, such as me carrying an aerosol spray and pretending to spray a wall, running and hiding behind a wall, facepalming very hard, twirling around as I carried a flower in my hand and smelling said flower.
I even looked up several video references on Youtube for a person jumping through a hoop constantly spun by another guy many times. I quickly adapted it to a person jumping through the hoop provided by a machine, as I felt it would be too complicated to animate the man carrying the hoop spinning around.
This week I started work on creating the key frames for other scenes I was given. I found myself lagging behind in production, and having no references for a few of the more movement intensive scenes, so I went outside with my sister Alison to film some references. I filmed references for Javier taking a bow, Brent running behind a wall, and then peering from behind the wall. Here are the references I created.
This week I worked on more parts of my project with Cor. My teacher said that my establishing shot looked barren, so she told me to add a skyline behind the circus tent. So, I created a skyline to put behind the tent and ground. This is the resulting shot. The circus however slides too fast, so I hope to correct that at a later date.
I also created the circus background for the performer balancing on the ball following the colour palettes we experimented with a few weeks back. This is the result.
The idea was to follow the guide Cor showed me from Hilda on Netflix,
Today I decided to use After Effects to work on another shot in the project, when the skies become dark with Thunder clouds. I looked up some tutorials on how to animate lightning, and found a very useful one by Dan Root. It was very helpful in teaching me how to animate lightning- you first make the large flashes first and then animate on 1s the lightning disintegrating into tiny squiggly lines.
Using this tutorial, and adding movement to clouds I created in Photoshop, I created this final shot.
I also completed an animation test to get an idea of the level of smoothness of the animation for the project. I animated Brent sticking out his hand and then pulling a heroic pose. I felt frustrated at my animation being unrefined and wanted to use timing of frames to try and make it better. By spacing certain frames close to each other, I can control the holding of poses and allow them to stick to the viewer’s brain. This is the result of my animation.
I also created an animated version of one of the animatics I created from my storyboards, specifically the one where Brent was rolling his eyes, and then reacting to the lights fading out.
This week I started work on some of the animation for my project. I animated a full body animation of Javier, one of the characters present for the project. I wanted to get some of the simpler animations out of the way so I have more time for the complex shots in the animation.
This week we showed off our pre-production presentation together. Due to nervousness we had out presentation last, but the presentation went really well. Aodhan and Sarah gave us some good feedback on how are story is flowing a lot better and is better paced, and when they saw our animatic, one of the issues they had for it was the panning across each page and the timing. The animation tests and colours of the characters were highlights of our presentation. One of the things we could try was to play around with the lighting and the spotlights to get a better sense of how they work for the circus scenes.
I made several animatics of scenes in the storyboards, including one of Brent rolling his eyes.
My favourite of the three animatics is one where one of the circus performers is balancing on two balls, and then bounces upwards. I used my knowledge of anticipation and following through, along with suspending the ball in mid air to create an eye catching animation presented here.
Welsome to my blog! This documents my Journey at Ulster Uni from 2022 to 2024
