Task:
For this assignment we were tasked with creating a 10 to 15 second animation in 2D or 3D with a focus on characters interacting with props and other characters, movement and timing. We also had to look into framing and cinematography and how it can enhance the storytelling of your animation.
For this task, I chose to work in 3D as I wanted to further build upon the skills I had learned in the previous assignment with a emphasis on character acting as I want to animate a scene of two people going trick or treating, one is enthusiastic and the other is fearful and reluctant when it comes to an ominous looking house.
Research:
For this task I knew I wanted to animate a run cycle and a skipping cycle so I looked at real life references to gauge the timing as well as key frame diagrams so that I could get strong, clear silhouettes that would make my animations easier to read for an audience.
Skipping
Running
Overlap and Follow Through
Cinematography
When figuring out the cinematography for this animated sequence I wanted to emphasise the personalities of the characters and portray a creepy and eerie setting through the use of camera angles and movements so I looked into German Expressionism and other thriller/horror films that use techniques that I want to employ in my animated short like low angle lighting.
After figuring out what I wanted the environment to look like I quickly blocked out a basic house with a working door, created a pumpkin basket and bowl as well as modelling a simple candy. Afterwards, I looked on Sketchfab for a spiderweb model and a pair of spiders to use as the owners of the house. The Origami boy rig was created and provided to us by Mike, our tutor.
Process:
Storyboards
To begin this assignment, I came up with an idea for a scene that would fit the criteria and began storyboarding how I wanted the scenes to look. I wanted to portray the story of two people going trick or treating, one scared and one excited, who knock on the door of a spider’s house who is collecting candy for their spiderling by scaring trick or treaters.
For the first iteration of the storyboards I focused on figuring out how to illustrate the narrative I wanted to portray in this assignment, I knew there was unnecessary scenes and camera angles so with feedback from Sarah I was able to cut down and merge some scenes to make my idea more concise and manageable to create within the deadline.
I knew the models for the environment were going to have to be simple as this assignment has an emphasis on animation and cinematography so I knew I was going to have to get creative when trying to make a cube house feel scary even though it doesn’t look overly eerie. Based on my research, I knew I wanted to use a dolly zoom that turns to a canted angle when introducing the house to emphasise how eerie and intimidating it is which allows the viewer to feel uncomfortable and understand why one of the characters is so scared of it.
I also used low angle lighting (under lighting) when Phobia, the giant spider, is introduced to make her appear more threatening as the lighting causes sharper shadows which distort the face and makes her appear more creepy.
Environment and Rigging
Once I was happy with the storyboards and the environment that I blocked out, I moved onto rigging the spider models in Blender. I didn’t make the rigs too complicated and only rigged what I needed to save time so the skin weights are set to automatic which causes a little bit of warping to the models which isn’t too noticeable so it still works for my purposes.
Animation
To begin, I created a really rough previs of the animation before going back to look at my references. Using the pose to pose method, I started by blocking out key poses for the actions so that they had strong silhouettes and conveyed the emotion that I wanted each character to have. Most of the time I blocked out one character first then the next character before moving on.
After blocking out the key poses, I worked out most of the timing and added inbetweens to the characters as well as adding anticipation and overshoot to some of the motions. At this stage I added some overlapping motion to the pumpkin basket that hangs from one of the characters arms before using the graph editor to smooth the arcs and motion of the basket and characters.
Finally, I went back and cleaned up some of the motions I was unhappy with and fixed some of the unnecessary and jarring camera movements.
My next focus was working on the run cycle and the skipping cycle. I followed the stages mentioned above; blocking out key poses, adding inbetweens, overlap and anticipation and adjusting the graph editor to animate these actions. I wanted to make sure that it was clear what their actions were and that the timing was right so I spent extra time getting them to a stage that I was happy with.
Skip Cycle
When working on the skipping cycle I used the ‘child of’ constraint to attach the pumpkin basket to the hand of the pink character so that when it came to moving the arms, the basket followed and could be animated with some overlapping motion which I referenced from the tail animation.
Run Cycle
At this stage one of the rigs kept breaking when attempting to animate the run cycle so I just copy and pasted the working one and changed it’s colour and this seemed to work.
Building from the first assessment that included a run cycle I ensured that the faults I found last time were improved upon like the jittering of the legs.
Finally, once I was happy with my scenes I added lighting and made some final adjustments to the camera before rendering each scene. After rendering I added all my clips to Premiere and adjusted the pacing of some scenes and how long shots are held for before rendering the final cut of my animation.
Result:
Overall, I believe my time management was handled well as I am really proud of what I was able to achieve within this deadline. I think my run and skipping cycle turned out really good as neither feel too floaty and both have some good overlapping actions but I feel they both suffer a bit from sliding feet especially the skipping animation, I feel I should have timed out the contact pose better when the foot touches the ground but overall I’m happy with it. I’m also really happy with how clearly the emotions and personalities of each character are in the final animation, you can see how scared and reluctant one is to go to the scary house versus the carefree, excited one who’s just in it for the candy.