Week 1 – Form & Shape
Week 2 – Composition & Perspective
Week 3 – Tone & Value
Week 4 – Colour
Week 5 – Character
Week 7 – Animation Introduction
Week 8 – Storyboarding & Animating with Forms
Week 9 – Animatics & Secondary Actions
Week 10 – Reflective Blog& Animating Animals
Week 11 – One to one feedback & Animating 2D effects
Final Animation
Finally, it’s the last week. Below is my final animation. I am very surprised I managed to get it done but I do feel the overall appearance could’ve been improved but for the next semester I hope to not work so much and produce work that truly reflects me. I didn’t get to neaten up my lines or add in the cat for the first scene, I didn’t expect it to take so long. Some colouring of the character is messy but not noticeable from a distance, however I did make up for detail in the closer parts of my animation.
However, I am proud of the end product and think it is a massive improvement from my foundation degree last year. Its been a great semester and I am very excited for what’s to come.
The final animation our group completed looks amazing! We are all proud of what we’ve done and hopefully next semester our work will be even better.
For my last week I worked on my presentation with my group. I watched the presentation links. I watched through them to get an understanding for what’s needed. I then thought about what I was going to say, working my way through these points:
From these points I wrote the statement below with an app on my phone called Easy Voice Recorder. I had to use my phone for recording since my mic doesn’t work anymore and I was having software issues with OBS. However, I think the recording came out well:
From working on my animation these past few weeks I have learned about the importance of taking my time with my work and being patience especially when working with Animate. I found myself annoyed sometimes when certain frames did not work the way I wanted them to, but after long hours I managed to achieve what I wanted without outing my fist through the screen. I also found when drawing my characters basic stance, the proportions were off, and so it took time to do research into how I can make them easier to sketch.
However, I have realized I spend far too much time on the details and not focusing on the bigger picture, when everything comes together. I have learned to make messier work and much looser to stop me from spending hours upon hours on what tiny section.
When planning my part of the animation, I started out quite ambitious. I made storyboards with a lot of demand from them and not keeping thing simple and easy to animate. And so, I had to go back and change my storyboards to something I could realistically achieve and produce a piece I would be proud of. With what I have produced so far, I am happy and actually quite amazed at what I have created, however I just hope the final look will be a lot more appealing than some messy lines.
From this, Dayna was able to create a PowerPoint for us to add our work to. The design was great and suited our theme, as seen below:
I also finished my animation, well the basics of it. I struggled with the proportions of the character but after some research I managed to create what I was looking for.
Below is our groups animation together, it came out great and I think with some final touches it will come out amazing!
I think for the final week I will definitely spend more time on my final animation and ensure all the movements work together and the proportions are equal. I’ll also do more research and watch videos if I’m struggling. One thing I might change is on the 2nd scene, where the character slides down the railing, to him almost surfing down them. I think it’ll add a more of a action scene rather than a kid sliding down saying WEEE!! Overall, I think I’m doing well.
Videos & articles:
For week 11, I had a 30 minute session with Sarah about my work so far. At this stage I am struggling to get all my work completed as I’ve been working quite frequently. I managed to create my background for Sarah to see. She said that the work I had produced so far was great and to not get worried about my deadline. She loved the colours I used in my background and found it links to my groups theme well.
From my feedback I managed to completely finish my background by adding in the stairs for my character to run along.
I really love how this came out and think it’ll suit my scene perfectly. Below are some images I used for inspiration.
This week I also learned about animating 2D effects. After watching Sarah’s lecture I done some research into animating in this technique. Below are some YouTube videos I watched:
I find these videos useful and will more than likely help in future. Possibly over Christmas break I will practice some of these techniques.
For this week I mainly focused on my blog. I was split into a group with Jennifer, Katie and Leticia, who all provided me with both positive and negative feedback. Surprisingly, this feedback comforted me more about what I was producing so far which allowed me to improve my work and make my blog more appealing. It also allowed me to stress less and not be so lost in what to post and what not to post. After this feedback session I feel a lot more confident in what I am producing.
My feedback:
I enjoyed this feedback session and feel it would help me more in the future to ensure myself that I’m doing the right work and keeping myself on track. I would love to do more of these for the next semester, I feel it will help others too when speaking about any issues they have, as sometimes in the main calls some peoples voices get lost and aren’t heard.
I then decided to tidy up my storyboards from the week before. The ones I drew were too sketchy and not the design I was intending. I decided to change the character to running from the left than the right, add in better stairs and background. I prefer these storyboards and think they show my scene and layout well.
After finishing my final storyboards I managed to get my animatic completed. I don’t personally like it as I could’ve spent more time working on it but I didn’t have that time.
I feel that I’ve let myself and my group members down, so for the last few weeks I hope to cut down the hours at work and focus on my final animation.
For week 9, I updated my storyboards. My group and I discussed a different scene for me to do. This scene was much simpler to animate within the time frame we have.
I prefer these storyboards as it will be a lot easier to complete within the time frame. I also think it will suit the story better and fit in with the others scenes.
I then came up with a colour palette that links to our inspiration – Sailor Moon.
The rest of the group added their animatics together as I didn’t have it complete due to work. I managed to eventually put together my animatic the best I could.
Below is my groups animatic which came together quite good.
For this week, I created my storyboards for our Cyberpunk world. I took inspiration from different perspectives and scaling. I think next week I will improve these and experiment more, researching others designs and taking inspiration from them.
I love how my storyboards came out, even though I am not a huge fan of doing them. However, I love how detailed I’ve made them and kept to the Cyberpunk theme as well.
When researching some storyboards, I remembered the scene from the Iron Giant. Its called Sequence 24.5: Playtime at the Lake. I loved this scene with the great anticipation of the Iron Giant running to the lake. It shows as well great height of the giant from the camera angles and the after effects of him landing in the water.
The final task is to animate a flour sack. For this exercise, I decided to animate a jumping flour sack. This task was very difficult for me to try and figure out proportions as well as timing and spacing, especially the leap across the gap.
From the feedback Alec gave me, I went back to my animation and applied any changes he suggested. I added in more frames to the section where the flour sack is leaning over the left cliff, looking down. This gives viewers more time to see the anticipation I wanted to create, before the subject jumped. I also added in more frames to slow the animation down as it was too fast to see each jump and the subjects walk. With these small tweaks I think it came out so much better.
Videos & Articles:
For week 7, I learned to create 3 bouncing balls consisting of different weights. I watched a few videos to familiarize myself with how each weight would react differently, these links can be found at the bottom.
I used this reference image provided on Blackboard to give me a better idea of timing and spacing.
The first bouncing ball I looked at was a bowling ball, I knew this to be a heavy and solid, and so the bounce to be firm with no squash and stretch.
After producing this video I was very pleased with the outcome, however if I were to improve this I would add expressions to the landing of the ball, adding a more cartoon feel.
I then moved on to a ping pong ball. The form of this shape was completely different, therefore it was able to be squashed and stretched. The spacing and timing also changed which made me figit about with positioning and angles. I’m very proud of how this turned out.
For my last animation I created a tennis ball. This last one I think came out the best. However if I were to improve this Id definitely add in expressions and possibly more details in the ball itself.
The next task was to read a section of ‘Advancing backwards to 1940’ from Richard Williams Animator’s survival guide. Within this chapter I learned:
Videos & articles:
For the 5th week, I studied Character Design. Usually, I am the type to be too specific with my linework but after a few practice attempts I found myself loosening my wrist, creating a looser sketch. I also really struggled with the anatomy of the face for my first character, I usually copy the outline of another sketch, just the basic shape, but this time I decided to freehand. It took me a while but I think I made a good attempt to capture his basic outline and features. Following this, I started playing around with his features and adding in the antlers/tentacles I wanted when creating this character.
I used some photos online to help guide me, along with some videos. These helped me to break down the anatomy of the face and playa around with cartoon like features to suit more to the plant themed world. I added antlers to give the character a more fantasist look and played around with proportions etc.
From this I worked on the other character I was creating for this plant themed world. It is a Groot inspired character and so I focused on tree creatures, luminescent plants and colour. I came up with 4 tree creatures that I think suit the world best.
I created this mood board of ideas for this creature, including luminescent sea creatures, mushrooms and orchids to incorporate into my design.
Videos & articles:
For this week we learned about Colour. When watching the lecture video I learned:
From the lecture I moved onto the three exercises we were given, firstly to use a thumbnail from a previous week and use one of the four colour schemes to colour my environment. For this I decided to use try out colours from all sectors and chose a colour palette that I thought would suit best. Finally choosing Complementary.
To achieve these colours I used a application from Adobe called Colour Wheel, I was able to choose what colour pallets I needed and it quickly gave me results, it will definitely be used for my future projects.
I really enjoyed working on this piece, I find these colours have really expressed the Japanese atmosphere I wanted. I love how the different shades of blue, show depth and shadowing and match great with the pink and brown buildings on either side.
For the second exercise I was asked to use colour to portray a landscape given to me, in two different emotions. For this exercise I decided to choose calm and fury.
I chose these two emotions as I thought they contrast to each other dramatically and show a lot of change within the landscape. I enjoyed this task as it allowed me to experiment with shadowing and the blending of colours, it also helped me with how different tools work on Photoshop.
Lastly, I completed the last exercise. It was to look at different artists styles of their use of colour, I chose the following images to work from and produced varied colour pallets.
For my first artist I chose Hayao Miyazaki. The amazing animator who co-founded Studio Ghibli. I chose this scene from Spirited Away due to its bright and vivid colours, that vary and show the main feature with ease. The colours are pasteli, very much in Miyazaki’s style, the use of greens and pinks work well together and show the abundance of nature surrounding her.
I chose this scene due to its pastel colours, that reflect Miyazaki’s style within his films. Its a very simplistic shot but shows the environment perfectly and keeps the viewers eyes on the main subject in the middle, just like the photo above. The colours used show a setting or rising sun, setting a calm mood and a fresh start to the scene.
The next animator I looked at was Andrew Stanton who co-directed multiple of Walt Disney films, such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo.
I used this image from Finding Nemo as it shows the definitive colours of Marlin and dory that anyone could notice. Marlin’s bright orange clown fish colours and Dory’s yellow fins. In this scene these colours stand out against the dark blue background and the many fish surrounding them, it gives the proportion to other fish and depth within the environment.
Another piece of Stanton’s work, is the infamous Toy Story. The colours used show the iconic colours of Woody and Buzz. They stand out in many scenes due to their bright colours, this helps the viewer keep an eye on them especially if its in a wide scene. The colours of Woody are more simplistic compared to Buzz and his colours seem more futuristic.
Videos & articles: