TASK 1

Create storyboards for your chain / linked animation with your teams and work on final designs for characters/creatures to help with design consistency.

Image 1 shows the our original storyboard (shown in week 7, task 4) and image 2 is the updated version. As you can see, the only differences are scene 1 and scene 6, that’s because we have decided to begin with a fade into a starry night sky for scene 1 and scene 6 would be the same. We came across a slight problem after this decision however. We realized that there would be no point in two people (me and Fionnuala) animating the same scene twice so Fionnuala came up with a plan to use one of character designs (Auriga the goat) to each the map at the need of the animatic, that way there will be a light difference in scene 1 and scene 6 while still in keeping with the plot. (This was decided after the creation of the story board which is why the goat isn’t included.)

As well as the storyboard, we had to work on final character designs for our 30 second animatic. To be honest, character designs and drawing are probably my weakest point when it come to animation pre-production but since it has to be done I gave it my best shot.

I tried to relate each of my characters to a constellations, as that is the theme of our world. Image 1 is a character i had designed based on the star sign Taurus. I decided to use Taurus not only because it is my star sign, also because it represents stubbornness and determination, which is very suiting for our plot. this is represented by the necklace she is wearing.

Image 2 is a character design based off the constellation Orion, however, I struggled to incorporate constellations into his character design. This was one of the main character my group and I had initially agreed on.

Image 3 is a design idea for the ‘bad spirits’. My idea behind these characters is that they are controlled by our antagonist, the centaur, and do everything they can by coming from the clouds and setting our protagonists off course.

I created each of these images through Adobe Photoshop and to be honest the only one I’m happy with is image 3 of the ‘bad spirits’. I don’t think I’ve really spent enough time practicing character drawing and at the minute I’m finding it quite difficult, especially when drawing people, but that’s only a good reason for improvement! I’m going to try and dedicate more of my spare time to this so I will be able to create better, more detailed, characters.

TASK 2

Animate a flour sack character – Plan out an action, for example, jumping/falling/emotion – whatever takes your fancy.

This week’s homework was to study the way a flour sack would behave when moved around and to make it into a short animation. I decided to make my ‘flour sack’ jump in from the side then wave. I used Adobe Photoshop to create this but I do wish I used Adobe Animate instead. This would have meant that I wouldn’t have had to draw the flour sack over and over again for each frame, however I’ll know this for next time.

I watched each of the videos provided on Blackboard in order to create my final animated flour sack and I’m happy with the way it turned out, although I probably could have included more details such as colour or shadows.

When presenting this animation to my lecturer, he said he liked the way I’ve made it look like the flour sack gets closer to us after the second jump, which, to be honest, was a complete accident. But, now I can remember this in the future if I ever need to animate something similar to this movement.