Working on the different character designs was interesting to say the least, I have realised that I really need to work on a traditional art again as I don’t think my sketches are that strong, but I do think that I have got some good ideas for the different characters in the story, I tried a range of different styles and designs that ranged from cartoon to realistic to disturbing, by designing these characters I could see the different roles they would be able to play if involved in the final animation. I tried some humanoid birds to give a comedic aspect to the designs, i believe this worked in some cases but lacked in others, i also wanted to do this to make the designs heavily stylised and just different in general.

Whilst doing the animatic, I decided again to use point to point animation, I took the backgrounds from the storyboard and then the individual characters as png’s, I then animated every 5th frame to get a general grasp on the overall animation, it came out really well and I can now plan ahead for the final animation outcome, it also helped me with the timing of each scene. The animatic itself was relatively simple to do, but was quite time consuming overall, but this will help for the final animation as I have learnt multiple way in which I could speed up my animation process. I also gained a lot of knowledge on frame timing to make the animation fluid and the cuts between the scenes should be very seamless and wont draw attention to the camera. The storyboard helped me throughout the whole process as I had everything including camera movement planned out on it, which let me work continuously without having to plan anything else out

I quite enjoyed working on the story board as I haven’t done one in a long time, working with the others to coordinate what scenes we were doing, was very useful. The camera movements  should make for a very fluid and entertaining part of the whole animation, I leant towards more of a silly side by having his tongue flap in the wind along with his wings. I want to keep the overall scene very saturated and lively, hopefully this will give an energetic feel to the final animation. I hope that it fits well in an 8 second time frame, but if it looks off then I will have to rearrange the timing of the frames. After seeing everyone else’s storyboard, I believe the animation will be clean and fluid throughout.

In the bouncing ball animations, I decided to look at references of real objects to give me a good idea as to what it should look like. I used point to point animation on after effects and used squash and stretch to make the ball look more fluid in motion, I had to configure the arches on the ball so that it would bounce and fall at the right speeds depending on each ball, on the heavy ball I was less generous with the squash and stretch as it gave more of a ridged effect and made it look more realistic for a heavy object. I also added a lens flare and gave the ball a glow to make it look more visually pleasing to look at and less mundane. The suns brightness also changes just to make the scene dynamic. I found this task relatively simple as I have done bouncing balls in the past, but not ones of different weight.

In this task we had to colour in a blank terrain to convey different feelings, in this one I decided to use a dark blood red with hits of black and pink, I did this to make the scene look almost scorched, such as a forest fire aftermath, it can portray fear and a sense of dread.

In this one I decided to keep the colours very close in hue to each other, giving it an autumn feeling, a sense of slight heat whilst also calming the viewer as everything looks still and peaceful.

changing the black and white thumbnail to colour was relatively simple, I kept the same shade and changed the hue and painting over the file with a clipping mask, I feel it turned out well and gives it a different feeling, I still prefer the black and white one as it seems more dramatic and serious.

Here is my 4 thumbnail study’s of my world, i tried to make them all vastly different from each other, with different perspectives and shot types. The first one, I decided to keep very simplistic and unnatural, basically more cartoonist. The second piece, I wanted to show a bit more shape and texture, using trees was and easy way to show this, I wanted to show nature with a warm feel. On the third piece, I decided to  show a low angle looking up towards a flock of geese, I decided to put a building in also as it was looking very empty without it there, I also discovered a new way of doing clouds, by using a white oil brush on top of black solid lines, it gives a very soft wispy effect. On the 4th one, I wanted to show an establishing shot of a foggy land with a looming mountain in the background, this gives a cold wary atmosphere, which sets the mood as a more serious environment.

For my blown up piece, I decided to go with my second image, I choose this because I thought it would be nice to establish more of the surrounding land, I wanted to make the middle of the piece a bit more busy whilst leaving the rest very barren, I did this because I wanted the viewer to be able to gauge more of a distance of the overall land. I then decided to do the same technique for the clouds as I did the third piece, I feel it brought the piece together and filled the rest of the page.

Doing the 6 composition studies was quite enjoyable, I decided to try different kind of styles, to see what would be suiting for our animation, we talked about the idea of doing French noir, but thought it may be too dark for the overall feeling of the animation. Experimenting with different styles gave me a completely different perspective on the outcome that I wanted, the three bottom ones i wanted to keep a bit lighter and ‘cartoon-esque’, whereas on the top three I wanted to show more of a serious, dark atmosphere. I really wanted to play around with the cinematography of the shots and see how it affected the scenes. In the master studies, I decided to use scenes from spirited away, it has a very subtle animation style but I thought it would be a great way to show tones, and give an overall soft feeling to the work.

I took this screen shot from a Meatcanyon animation, but as i started to outline the perspective lines, I realised something was strange about it, he used two different horizon lines, I don’t know whether or not this was done intentionally to force a perspective on the viewer

This is a scene took from rick and morty, this is just a standard 2 point perspective piece, the points are quite high relative to the house, to show a high angle shot on the house.

This is another Meatcanyon screengrab, we can see a 1 point perspective, which I believe is used very effectively to convey distance in the scene. 1 point perspective is always a good option if you want to show a street from a P.O.V perspective.