Create a group presentation on the development of our final animatic including an edit of the group’s animations licked together, what you’ve learned from working on your animations over the last few weeks, and areas where you might want to add or edit before the final submissions.
For this task I had a lot of preparation to do.
Firstly, I had to gather each piece of work I have done towards our world theme, which was not fun considering how disorganized my computer is đ and format it all into a PowerPoint.
After this I had to write a script that corresponded to the work I had included (image 1).
Next, I had to record myself talking through the animation and send it to Alisa to very kindly edit together for the group.
After creating my part this presentation and seeing all of my work together in one place, I started to feel nervous that there wasn’t as much work as anyone else in my group and from this I knew I had to work really hard for the final portfolio submission.
I’m really glad we were given the task of presenting our work for feedback as I feel that I would be so much more under prepared for the final deadline (week 13). However, getting to see examples of the amount in other students’ work really showed me that I needed to push myself further this week in order to really show off what I’ve learned this semester.
Here is a link to our final week 12 presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wApQLDQl5if3mI5tuQKWaf82xNYm_ljEprWj1XPanAg/edit#slide=id.g656d74726939f69d_0
There wasn’t really that much discussed during my one to one tutorial with my lecturer as I think everything is going to plan at the minute and I don’t really have any concerns about my course.
Animating 2D effects.
After watching the videos provided on Blackboard I can now say I have a much better understanding of animating 2D effects. They was a lot of advice and animating tips given in this videos so I’ll certainly be referring back to it as often as I can but for now I’m going to work on applying the skills I’ve learned into the animated clouds within my part of the animation to have it ready for our presentation next week.
(I just wanted to mention that the lack of physical work this week was because I was working on getting everything together and ready for next weeks presentaion.)
Unfortunately my Internet was down during class this week and I missed the peer reviews on our blogs.however I will aim to catch up on this with the members of my group or lecturers.
Animating Animals
After watching the examples on Blackboard and reading pages 327-332 of Richards Williams Animators Survival Kit, I now feel I have an excellent understand of how to animate animals. It was very interesting to learn how animating animals can be done through the bouncing ball animation skill I learned in week 7. Unfortunately, I’m not animating any animals in my part of the animatic and since the deadline is 2 weeks from now, I needed to focus on my world design animatic. I really hope to come back to this and try animating some animals when I have the time.
What I did do this week, however, was work on some background designs towards our animatic.
Image 1 and image 2 are both backgrounds I have created using Adobe Photoshop. the reason i had chosen these designs is simply because this is what were agreed on as a group. We aimed to have a background in which the centaur character appears through the clouds and we wanted another to be mountainous. An example of the colour palette I used can be found below the backgrounds as part of the image. I had also tried to use a colour palette (image 3) created by Alisa and used by the majority of the group.
This image is of the background I have design for my part (part 1) of our animatic. I plan to brighten it when it comes to animating it.
Discuss and take on advice and feedback on your storyboards. Make necessary changes if needed to your storyboards.
From today’s feedback on my story board (week 8, task 1) I didn’t feel there were any necessary changes needed. My storyboard suitably explains what we wanted to achieve in our animatic.
TASK 2
Create an animatic for your part of the linked animation. Each group to have a combined animatic edit from each team member that links each group member’s animatic together.
This is the first draft of part one of our animatic. I created this in Adobe Photoshop and, to be honest, I’ve achieve exactly what I had planned to do based on discussions with my group. I had planned to create a 5-8 second sequence showing a starry night sky (with constellations of course) with a fade through the clouds into part 2, Alisa’s part. (the map shown at the end is Alisa’s map design.)
I learned from this that communication is key when it comes to creating a group animation. We were all able to keep each other up to date through the channels made on discord for our group. These four channels are “general” for when anyone needs to communicate with the whole group, and then there channels “2-3-4”, “4-5-6” and “6-1-2” and i know that each group member found these channels very useful for communication.
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.
Animate 3 (or more) bouncing balls of different weights.
For example a Tennis Ball, Ping pong ball, bowling ball, etc
Look for reference videos or film your own references for timing
For week 7, we were asked to create a short animation of 3 different bouncing balls. When I was set this task I started to panic slightly as we were told it would be best to use Adobe Animate, and I’d never used it before, however we were provided with a video tutorial on Blackboard on how to use it. As well as this video, I used a YouTube tutorial.
After I had decided that I wanted to animate a bouncy ball, a basket ball and a bowling ball, I had to figure out how each of these balls behave when dropped from the same height. I used these videos from YouTube as basic guidelines for somewhere to start.
Image 1 shows the measurements and markings I used to show how high each ball would bounce. For example, considering the bouncy ball would bounce the highest and longest of all three, I wanted to make it bounce three times. After the first drop, I made the pink bouncy ball bounce back up to the 75 mark, then after the second drop it would bounce back to 50 and after the third it would bounce to 25, eventually rolling off screen. This is similar to what I did for the basket ball bounce, but since it isn’t as bouncy and rubbery as the first ball, it only went up to 50 after the first bounce and 25 after the second. For the bowling ball, I only made it jump back up once to 25 and then roll off as this ball would be much heavier and wouldn’t bounce more than one time.
I’m really happy with the overall outcome of this task. The animation turned out exactly how I wanted it and more importantly i learn the basics of Adobe Animate and I’m really excited to be using it throughout my course.
I hope to come back to this animation and maybe add shadows and details to the basket ball or the bowling ball to make them look more realistic. Below is an animated GIF showing my work. (click GIF to preview)
TASK 2
Read chapter 4 âAdvancing backward to 1940â from Richard Williams Animator’s survival guide.
After reading chapter 4, my first thoughts were that I regret not reading this before completing task 1, as in this particular chapter, Richard Williams explains how to animate a bouncing ball properly and I’ve now released that I should have used his method. I hope to come back and correct my version using these instructions.
I’m also going to try and take the advice Williams gave to his readers and that is to not listen to music while animating as it can be a distraction and I do have a habit of putting on music while I’m animating. I am aiming to refer to this book when working more often as (evidently) its full of great advice.
TASK 3
Meet with your groups to plan the order of your chain / linking animation – Chat with the team member on either side of you in the order you chose to discuss how you want to coordinate the transitions at the start and end of your animations.
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TASK 4
Write down the description / simple script of what you’d like to animate within 5-8 seconds and start a rough storyboard from this.
This week, I switched from group 2, forest world to group 5, constellation world, so i was really only catching up with the members of my new group and discussing new ideas with them. We’d talked about style inspirations to give each other a better understanding of what kind of theme/world we wanted to create together. I suggested that we use ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ (2005) as part of our inspiration.
We had also discussed some things like creating our own alphabet (which we decided would be too hard), our main character, Orion, and creating a map for our world.
Lastly we decided that we should aim to make a story board to show how we want our final 30 second sequence to look. This was our first draft idea:
1. Zoom into eye/starry sky with constellations
2. Constellations/stars fade into map sequence
3. Zoom into map to show off environmental shots (ends with mountain)
4. Characters on mountain â Ground shakes
5. Centaur emerging from clouds (possibly just a silhouette)
6. Zoom into eye (loop)
After this was agreed on, we assigned each person in the group to a part to begin animating our 5-8 seconds towards our first rough animatic. I volunteered to create part one and we made a few discord channels so this way it is easy to communicate with whoever was on either side our part of the animatic. This is the list of who is creating which part.
1 – Mary
2 – Alisa
3 – Darren
4 – Megan
5 – Samantha
6 – Fionnuala
Lastly, I would like to mention that I’m excited to work with my new group and I cant wait to see how our animation is going to turn out.
One to one tutorial on advice on our current work with our lecturers.
This week, we were given the opportunity to talk to our lecturers about our progress and any concerns we had about the course. From this I was able to voice any concerns I had and I was given some great advice that I’ll definitely be taking into consideration from now on.
As we weren’t set any physical homework this week, I decided to use this time to familiarize myself with Adobe Animate and use the tutorials provided through the software. (I plan to upload any personal work to a separate category on my blog at some stage)
Character Descriptions – consider the factors in your world, character back-stories/descriptions, personality traits, or other practica; elements about your characters that impact your design choices.Â
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TASK 2
Design characters for your world – fill 2-4 pages of different character design ideas or if you’re focused on just one or two characters then fill the pages with different iterations on the same character.
This week I had to come up with ideas, taking what I had agreed on with my group into consideration, and create some character designs for our forest themed world world.
Image 1 is my design and description of ‘Grumpy Frogs’, they are more of a background character at the minute but so far its my favorite one.
Image 2 is the design and description of my groups main character. We haven’t decided on a name yet, so were just been calling him ‘mushroom boy’.
Image 3 shows a character design and description of the character ‘Max’. Max is a cat-like creature that ‘mushroom boy’ finds after falling into the crystal caves.
Finally, image 4 shows some ‘crystal butterflies’ I designed. These are just background character but they will be seen flying around the crystal caves.
Image 5 is a ‘stained glass moth’ design, an early idea, similar to the ‘crystal butterflies’.
I created each of these images using Adobe Photoshop and I’m quite happy with how they turned out. These are all only rough, early character designs and I plan on updating them if needed but I hope we all agree to use at least one of them.
In the video provided explaining exercise 1 (image 1), I was asked to start experimenting with colour in my work and create a coloured version of a thumbnails from previous weeks. I was only to use monochromatic, analogous, complementary, or triadic colour schemes.
Image 3 is a thumbnail created in week 2, which I have tried to recreate in image 2, using Adobe Photoshop. . I decided I wanted to use a triadic colour scheme, which means that each of the colours I’m using are same distance apart around the colour wheel. (I’ve included images 4, 5 & 6 to explain this with the colours I used in image 1.)
I wasn’t very happy with the way this thumbnail turned out so I decided to try again and experiment with a monochromatic colour scheme in a different thumbnail.
Here is how my experimentation with a monochromatic colour scheme. As you can see in image 1 I decided to use the colour pink, simply because it’s my favorite colour. I used another thumbnail that I’d created for week 2 (image 2). The third image is an example of a pink colour scale I was about to set up in Photoshop and this is what i used to create my monochromatic environment.
I’m happier with the outcome with the monochromatic one over the outcome of the triadic schemed thumbnails as it just looks better and I’m glad i took the time to experiment further on this exercise.
TASK 2
Complete Exercise II : Colour and Emotions
For this exercises, I had to experiment with using colours in my work to portray emotions within a scene. I wanted to create a new thumbnail for this instead of using one I had made before, image 2 shows the outcome. I tried to use some of the examples provided by the video tutorial (image 1), those examples being colours of hope, happiness and whimsical. To create this I used Photoshop and the colour palette i used can be found in the bottom left corner of image 2.
I was quite happy with the outcome of this thumbnail. I think I managed to capture each of the emotions I was try to portray while still in keeping with my groups forest world theme.
From both of these colour exercises I’ve realized that colours in a scene are much more important than I initially thought and I’ll definitely be taking all of this into consideration when animating in the future.
TASK 3
Consider looking into different artists styles of how they work with colour
When doing research on colour schemes and palettes, I wanted to take a look at how some artists use the colour schemes that I didn’t focus on, such as analogous and complementary.
I also decided to look into artists who use colours to portray emotions I didn’t consider when creating my thumbnails (e.g. fury and sadness).
This way, I’ll know for next time I’m creating a coloured environment how to use each colour correctly. Not only will I be able to make my animations aesthetically pleasing to watch, I will easily be able to use colours to display the emotions of the environment too.
This is an analogous painting called “Olive Trees” by Vincent Van Gogh
This is an example I made of the colours used in Van Gogh’s painting.
this painting is called “Weingummi II”. It was made by Kay Kurt from complementary colours (green/red).
An example of the colours used in Kurt’s painting
This is “Fairest City” painted by Nicholas Roerick in 1914. As you can see, the main colour palette used is shades of red, the colour of fury.
