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:

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.

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 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.

For Week 6 we began work on our animatic, I produced my own version of the animatic and also began producing rough draft animations of some of the scenes we had, such as Brent Sawyer rolling his eyes. The animatic test was made in After effects while the Brent rolling his eyes animation draft was made in Photoshop. I used different layers for each of the moving parts of Brent, such as his main body, his clothes, his hair and hat. This allows me to work on animating each part separately so I can create overlap for the hair as the rest of the character’s body is moving.

Our full animatic was a mix of both my and Cor’s scenes. I edited my version of the animatic as best I could, but time ran out before I could edit in all of the scenes. This is what my animatic looks like.

This week we thought up some concepts and potential storybeats for the project. I made an illustration of a scene that could be in the project, that of Brent meeting Javier for the first time.

I focused on my dissertation and watching films around this time as well, but we managed to have calls discussing our project and the next direction to take it  as well as doing our pitch presentation for the class, which we didn’t have until after class. Then we presented out Pitch presentation for the teachers in the class.

We recieved a good bit of feedback from the teachers on our pitch presentation- Cor put it all together, and we also showed them the animatic. One of the issues with the animatic was the timing of the scenes, and we don’t need to have dialogue for our scenes.

The first day of our Final year was sorting out our Major Project and choosing what idea we can use for our project. First we had to get sorted into our groups. I chose to form a two person group with my friend Cor and wanted to work on a project using an idea I had for years now, about a fun loving but unambitious boy named Brent Sawyer who encounters a performer at a circus who inspires him to follow a passion.

I created designs for both characters in Photoshop, and also looked at potential inspirations for the art style of the project.

One of the inspirations I found was Persona 5, which had a striking but realistic art style with characters shaded in black. Other inspirations included the Azure Striker Gunvolt series, which had thicker line art around the eyes to draw the viewers eyes, and Dramatical Murder, which in terms of proportions was similar to Persona 5.

Brent Sawyer is actually a much older original character I created for an novel I had in mind which I never actually drafted. My main inspirations for the character were inspired by skateboarders, and in personality is similar to Ulysses, a character from Chasing Rats Games’ Struggling. His first designs were very different when he was first created in 2020.

His newest design was heavily inspired more by characters by characters like Sans and Gabriel Garcia from walking dead, characters who wear an unzipped hoodie. The unzipped hoodie adds to his easy going nature and his hat was made red to compliment the orange and blues of his design, with green trainers to compliment that.

Javier is a character I had an idea for a very long time, but never actually looked into his personality or design until I started this project with Cor. He was inspired by several different characters, such as Meowscarada and Blacephalon from Pokemon, Fizzarolli from Helluva Boss, and Javier Garcia from the Walking Dead. I used an early draft version of him as part of my last years project, Race against Time, where he appeared in billboards that appeared in the future level.