For this module I was afraid and lacked confidence specially in animating, given I have little to no experience in animation apart from failed attempts I did a long time ago. During the past weeks, Something I learned and felt the most confident in was using shape study to create characters with a body that communicates their personality and has and a recognisable silhouette which is something I even utilise in the other module and started practicing it on personal drawings. As well as using the rule of thirds, different camera shots and angles as much as I can to help display things nicely. However, I would like to practise more what we learned the last few weeks given it’s the part I felt I knew the least and barely had a few class exercises as experience, while what we had done previously was closer to what I knew so far. For animation, what I had to change would be my comfort style, which is far too realistic and detail oriented. I’ve adapted a simpler style to make it easier to animate specially in groupwork as well as trying my best to match it to the other group members style to have a nicer flow throughout the animation. When it comes to teamwork, I feel comfortable enough. Though because it’s different from the groupwork I’ve done so far given this is more creative, there was some adapting that needed to be done, such as creating a character everyone would be able to draw, visualising the ideas I thought of to easily share them with my group, similarly to that, visualise the combination of my ideas and other members ideas. I did find myself struggling at times, specially now when it comes to animating, mainly not looking at references out of fear from all the times I did, and the result didn’t look right, and overly doubting if I am able to do it which leads to art block. But I would not want to start over with what I have now as advantage. I feel it is necessary to go through my mistakes and little struggles to better understand what I am doing wrong and specially how to fix it, for example, not using references really shows, the movement the character is doing looks off and isn’t something you can easily understand without taking a step back and looking at references of someone doing the movement. In short, I really need to work on taking a step back to ask myself if it looks right or even if the concept itself can be done, I need to use references and definitely not doubt myself as much as I do to be able to practice more and familiarise myself with new programs, how they function and specially how to take advantage of them in my animation and utilise what I have learned so far to see what I can fix rather than having an over all negative view of my work.

Our group presentation was relatively rough, we didn’t talk much but our work was good so far. It was interesting to see how far each group has gotten to and keep in mind some of the remarks done by the lecturers, even if not directed at our work but that could help us during in our animation process.

here is our presentation:

forest fun

Task:

We had to clean up a flour sack animation and colour it using krita, it introduced us to some tools and their uses, here is the result:

We also had to post our animatics sticked together to get a first glance at what the animation will look like as well as receive feedback from our lecturer:

After the feedback:

certain things needed some altering or simply weren’t needed because they either prolonged the animation, confused the viewer or could be too difficult to animate. Here is the animatic after the changes.

what didn’t work:

• the shot from above at the start would be too hard to animate.
• the turn around after the zoom in was not necessary.
• the turn around with her holding onto her heart was making the animation too long.
• zooming out from her eyes and then watching her run away was also unnecessary and slightly confusing.

Here is my final animatic:

Here is the groups final animatic:

Task:

Here again similarly when it comes to animatic we follow along the basics of the storyboard but in this case we also keep in mind the transition from left to right ( as we do when reading). and to make it easier on ourselves to always remember neutral shots to help when switching angles, so it stays cohesive.

animatic 1:

animatic 2:

Groupwork

While back in our groups we wanted to clearly explain what each individual was tasked to do in their animatic. We sketched out little vignettes with 3 drawings that represent the 3 major actions of the scene as well as a description in the back.

Scene 1

scene 2

scene 3

scene 4 (darker picture to make it as visible as possible)

scene 5 (darker picture to make it as visible as possible)

scene  6 (my scene)

Scene 7 (possibly a last extra shot similar to the third one)

Task

these story boards were done in class as part of the work to get a better understanding on how to do it: the use of different camera angles, the importance of staging and generally how to make a story board.

Groupwork

While in our groups we worked on updating our story as well as creating the story board based on what we spoke of last week:

Character Design:

We had a discord call to discuss a final design for the character after jumping around so much on different shapes and size, we votes and somewhat came to an agreement, and we all took the final decision and make a design: a short character, with braids, hollow eyes, and a poncho/cloak.

the inspiration I used for my attempt:

This one being the final design we all agreed on, with a concept for the darker self, and a few props.

About our character:

• Her name is głupi (foolish in polish) [the name choice was based of a few words we put together to describe her :naïve, childish, adventurous, curious, foolish. Foolish was the most aesthetically pleasing out of all of them, and was the best choice to hint out the relationship she has with her parents( they aren’t proud of her and view her as a foolish little girl). The language choice was based of the inspiration we had of polish folklore that inspired the story and creatures and traditional clothing style( her braids)].
• She is young around 8-9 years old.
• she is a human

Story Board:

We also discussed in our discord session about a clear story board, here is the first attempt that led us to get there:

With some back and forth on what makes sense and what we wanted to keep and change or even add, this is what we came up with :

plot in this story board: stumbles across a fairy circle, gets transported to another world and land in a forest, she sees a beautiful town that reminds her of fairy tales she read, ventures in a find a dark figure similar to her, follows it when advised not to, jumps in a hole and lands at the bottom of a tree, sees two figures that look like her parents. 

what didn’t work: because we don’t use words it would be way too tricky to make the message come across from the dark version of her telling her things are not what they seems, as well as the parents looking like mean evil giants and actually being evil with the town being sweet and cute and not really seeing how its bad doesn’t convey the message of don’t judge a book by its cover.

Here is the Plot: ( after a long talk in class and advice from the lecturer and a lot of changes to the original story scene above this is what we came up with so far)

Głupi leaves her home and ventures into the forest to clear her mind and finds a fairy circle ( circle of mushrooms), she pokes at a mushroom and faints after the spores explode in her face ( and in transported to another world). She wakes up in an odd looking forest, and down the hill she sees a town with peculiar looking homes perched on the tree like little birdhouses, a ring of agricultural fields and animal pens which framed a market near its centre and all finally leads to a house that looked almost identical to hers. It all looked just like those fairy tales she loved to read before she went to sleep in hopes to wake up there in her dreams. Her adventurous spirit beaming in her heart, she follows the road down to the town. Glupi explores the towns market, filled with sweet, adorable creatures, toys, and all the things children could only dream of having,[will change]-> she heads to a candy stall to have a taste of the sweets they have to offer, when unwrapped she was mortified to find a (baby lizard within the little chocolate eggs or teeth and hair poking out of the chocolate something that looks unappetising), disgusted she continues her journey which leads her to, now at a closer distance to it, a more beautiful version of her home made of sweets? (something pretty a child would like). (upon a closer look the house wasn’t made of candy but bugs ? like oogey boogey from the nightmare before Christmas). she starts to panic and question where she is what is going on, an instinct to get away from this creepy place.( we need to see the horror in her face)

Here is the story:

The girl, branded foolish by her parents, due to her naivety, goes on this adventure and learns to not judge a book by its cover, seeing the fun looking fairy village seemed like a little paradise from her dream but with a closer look realising how disturbing the place looks.

We got a talk on things we should know and understand in animation, like FPS (frame rate per seconds) as well as the 12 principles of animation, and started a practise with bouncing balls:

this allowed us to understand the number of frames per seconds would lead to which result ( something more fluid, more cartoony, or something more like anime).

We had a few new additions as well as a few of us who left, but for those who stayed and had a general idea of what the plot and story was about and overall theme/ideas were, we shared them with the new additions to our team to get them more comfortable to explore what our project is about, so as soon as we would finish the 3D digital literacy assignment we could get back to work.

After having done a class activity of creating a weird creature all together by passing the paper around:

This exercise was quite helpful a way to relax the mind and help for the long process of creating a multitude of different characters.

We had already started with different shapes and styles for the mailman character so we mostly shared what everyone had done that day and agreed which one suited the plot best.

What we focused on was the plot, we created a quick story board and discussed on a deeper story to give the character. We came up with an elderly mailman who missed his grand daughter very much and had a gift to deliver to her (a way to see her) [the idea came from thinking about ourselves in our daily lives, time passes so quickly that some, maybe most, forget about their families specially the elderly. This is like a sweet reminder to not forget your grand parents] on his way there he came across a portal and curiously went to take a closer look, but that unfortunately led to him being sucked into different universes( three), while trying to find a way back his top priority was protecting the package and reaching his granddaughter. The story turned to have a more touching and sweet side to it, so a pastel colour scheme was thought of to convey this sweetness.

  The final design in the bottom seemed the most suitable for the story.