PRESENTATION FEEDBACK
This week in Animated Narratives we started off the class by going through all of our group presentations on the short animations we were given with Henry – with Aodhan and Sarah there as well to give feedback on them as well.
The feedback on my groups presentation was feedback I expected. They said it was a good quality presentation, but gave me the advice that the sprites I had created for it – while they were cute and made it personable, almost took the visual attention away from the screenshots I was analysing during my part. Taking that on board, next time I would probably be better to make my sprites if I have them in my presentation much smaller, to bring more attention to the visuals I want to be focused on.
In class, Sarah gave us a lecture on the production, planning and pipelines of a short film, where we went over the production timeline for a short film, and were told how to streamline our productions of our short animation.
Then we were given a lecture from Alec on how to set up maya for animation – and basically shown how the timeline worked, as well as set up our workspaces to 24fps for animation, and how to set keyframes. We then went over timing and spacing in animation again.
Over the week I watched the lecture and was introduced to the graph editor and other helpful tools for animation in maya.
We were assigned to download substance painter this week. Substance painter is a program we can utilise to help us with our texturing of our 3D models we create in maya. We can get a free student trial so I sent them a picture of my student ID to qualify and quickly installed it.
This week we were also set into groups for our assignment to make a 15-30-second long animation in maya, as well as two additional short animations.
The first is Assignment 2: Animation studies. Using a Monty Rig we’re provided with, we’re assigned to create 2 short animations. One is supposed to be a study in weight of motion / body mechanics of a character – such as jumping. The second is going to be a study I conveying emotion and personality of a character such as fear or happiness. We had some great examples from earlier years to look at for guidance on the whole thing.
The second assignment is – as I said before, a 15-30-second long animation based on the loose theme of ‘Adventure.’ We were told to sort ourselves into groups of 4-5 for this and I joined a group with my classmates Jodie, Joseph, Una, Wren and myself. After sorting ourselves into our final groups, we took that time to start spit balling for basic ideas, stories and basic characters, as well as begin our research.
For research, we were asked to consider:
- Look to push genre, narrative, character (or non-character) art in different ways.
- Use design thinking processes to work through problems and unknowns.
- 3D pipeline workflow, best practices for preparing 3D assets for animation.
- Best way to communicate and work with your team (slack/regular meet-ups/skype/fair voting on ideas etc).
- Keep Characters simple – We would advise avoiding full biped characters for this project.
Over the week for the short animation, my group made a miro board as well as a discord group chat so we could work and communicate. We made seperate channels for specific things such as general, story concepts, concept art for characters, props and enviroment.
We set up on the miro board very basically, starting with a spider diagram showing the overarching basic theme we were given of ‘Adventure’ and looking over the heroes journey once again.
Since my group is complete beginners to maya, we want to keep it very simple so we don’t overestimate our abilities and then fall short and create something too ambitious that falls through. To combat this, we started then compiling simple character ideas made up of basic shapes so we wouldn’t create too complicated a character.
Once we picked our favourite simple character designs, we started basically outlining story concepts and basic ideas, we had narrowed our favourite characters down to either a worm on a string, a rubber duck, snow bunnies or a slime. We liked the slime story concept the best as we saw a lot of potential in it and thought the concept was cute and funny, so we started making that more complicated and adding more layers to it.
