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Research & Sketches
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For our animated short, my group included Ellie, Miles, Janet and myself. At the start, we called to go over a few ideas and make mood boards:
I liked the idea of the story being about, someone coming home from work and then on the train (or a ‘journey’) they meet a friend/ partner and it changes their outlook on life – similar to the book I read ‘The Sad Ghost Club’. I also liked the idea of a mental journey which was the first thing I thought of. We shortened it down to one idea:
After this, we did concept art and discussed how we wanted the story to go. We organised another call to finalise our idea. The story was sorted into ‘acts’ so we knew what would happen and around about the time it would:
This was the quick concept art we came up with:
These were my sketches for the train design and ghosts! I also added ghosts I thought would look cool in the background.
For the train design, I made a mood board of different art I liked and wanted mine to look similar to.
Week 3, we did our presentation!
I decided to make a quick 3D model of a ghost! I tried playing around with the emission setting with the lighting.
We then started working on our storyboards. We called on Discord and divided the parts. I wrote a document with the main storyline we wanted and colour-coded it to split up the parts. Ellie is the blue part, I am the purple part, Miles is the yellow part and Janet is the green part!
I looked at other camera angles from movies like ‘Bullet Train’ for inspiration:
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Previs
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For Week 4, we had to make our previs. I got confused about what to include in it, but after watching some YouTube videos on it, it helped me!
We continued speaking more, and Ellie sent in her file for the train interior for our previs! Miles sent in characters and books for us to use. I sent in my previs that I had done. This is what mine looked like:
For week 6, we needed to finalise our characters. I drew some art of what I wanted them to look like, including a character that Miles came up with for the granny model. This is the art I did:
We called to discuss how we want our final characters to look before the next presentation. We sorted out the main design of the ghosts, making them look more wispy and have floating hands. We also split up the characters each – Ellie took the blue ghost, Janet took the yellow ghost, Miles took the background ghosts and I took the conductor ghost! I made some designs for him to get an idea of what I wanted him to look like so we could add them to our presentation.
Week 6 presentation (to show our previs and the final designs):
The feedback we got was that we needed to add more ‘conflict’ to our blue ghost, making him seem more nervous through body language, using separate booths and even the idea of having him want to sit beside her but the seat was taken, showing him having mental conflict.
We already had a sort of story down – some ideas were cut because we thought it would be too difficult to do or not add much to our story. After our feedback, Ellie messaged in Discord:
I liked this idea because it meant we could all add parts of our ideas to our animation! I tried to think of ideas that we could include. I watched other animated shorts for inspiration, including the video Alec sent for our group!
Coat_Animation_Showcase.mp4 – Google Drive
I came up with the idea that he was nervous through his shaking/ being nervous to approach the yellow ghost etc.
We tried to nail down our final idea before going off for easter. It was hard trying to work out when everyone was free to call. We all felt like we hadn’t been communicating as much and that we were a little behind so Ellie kindly made a schedule for us!
We communicated a few of our ideas; Ellie made a channel on Discord for us to post our ideas in!
She included slides with updates on our ideas included in the story. I liked it and wanted it to be our final story. I made a Word doc shortening the slides into acts and including all the ideas so it was easier for us all to agree on a final plot.
Ellie also sent in a storyboard that had the updates of the ideas she had. She also made a quick animatic based on it.
Over Easter, our goal was to get our characters/ props modelled so we could focus on animating after Easter. Ellie made a milanote where we could put all our concepts/ research, so I put all mine in:
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Making my Model
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During the first week, I tried to nail down my model. I began making it using the concept art I drew, references from train conductors and a few blender tutorials on YouTube!
While modelling the clothes, I realised I didn’t like how my model looked. When I began re-modelling it, the clothes started to get difficult to make so I used a YouTube tutorial to help me. This is what my model looked like:
As I began to UV map, I realised that the subdivision modifier was making it harder for me. I remade his clothes – I liked them to look more ‘blocky’ as I think it made my ghost look cute!
I started texturing him; I realised parts of his body looked glitched, so I went back into Blender to identify my mistake (I had a duplicate body for him and forgot to hit the ‘selected objects only’ button for exporting as an FBX). I had my model all textured, however, I noticed a few spots where the texture didn’t seem to work. I messaged in Discord and got a lot of help from Alec! My UVs were small and some faces were lying on each other, so I deleted the faces under his clothes. For his final design, I noticed that conductors had a metal part at the top of their hat with a design, so I used Krita to draw up a design and made a stencil in substance.
I found rigging difficult. I had trouble with moving parts of the body as the clothing would stick out and end up not parenting to the armature, saying there was a ‘heat weighting issue’.
I used weight painting to try to get the clothes to sit right every time a body part moved. I kept posing my model in different ways to see what parts were messing up; it was mainly the shirt and vest as they wouldn’t move with the arms. The shirt would glitch through the vest or the vest would glitch through the body.
I was struggling with it so I watched a YouTube video for help on weight painting to see what places should be painted and this seemed to do the trick!
I didn’t want to go into detail as my character wasn’t going to be in the animation for too long. I watched Mike’s videos on shape keys to do the facial animations for the eyes and got them working. It was challenging (I forgot to make 2 separate vertex groups for each eye) but after this, it was right! I changed the graph editor to *50 to get it to fit!
I went back to double-check that my pose was working for my model – the heat weighting got messed up so I had to redo it all. I started with the head and neck however, when it came to weighting, if I added weight to the headbone and tried to add weight to the neckbone in the same place, it would overwrite it, so I messaged Alec to see what was going wrong!
Alec showed me that my bone placement wasn’t great and recommended that I change a few parts. I watched all the videos that he sent me so I finally got my model rig fixed! The tail was messing up the buttons of the vest and the pockets. I fixed it using the vertex groups, this is what it looked like:
This is the full turnaround of my model! (GIF)
I decided to update our PowerPoint with my designs and my character. I also added in some tests I had done to make sure the rig was working. (GIF)
I made a few props for our animation. I started with a book, textured in substance.
I drew out a ticket for the train! It would be small so not much detail needed to go into it:
I then made cans using the boolean modifier for the drinking part at the top! I drew the texture for them in Krita and I changed the colours.
For our presentation, I sent in a Word doc of our story with different parts highlighted so we could all pick each part we wanted to do and asked everyone which part they’d prefer to do!
Week 9 Presentation:
We got feedback in class; Ellie kindly wrote all the points that were made in our discord and we discussed what we needed to change.
We decided to make our ghosts more ‘glowy’ and to make the tail of the ghost transparent. To do this, Janet kindly offered to help, Ellie sent in videos she used and a screenshot of what her nodes looked like!
I was struggling, but with help from Ellie, I got it working!
Ellie wrote what we needed to get done and the ideal time frame to get it done, so I followed it! I wanted to re-do my previs as I wanted to do the start of the animation so I made a quick storyboard.
I made a Word doc splitting up each part of the animation with different colours so we could all pick which part we wanted to do!
I began making the new previs. I was struggling with the graph editor as it was confusing me so I looked up a YouTube video which helped:
It ended up being 30 seconds which was too long. I didn’t know what scenes to cut out so I used CapCut to split the scenes up. I was able to cut it down to 15/16 seconds.
Before:
After:
I sent in the doc again and asked if everyone wanted to go by that to decide the parts we all wanted however, Ellie made a doc splitting up all the shots and which one would have a lot of action in them, so we could evenly split them up!
I messaged in asking if we could split up the parts before class. Unfortunately, most of our group were busy however, me and Ellie were able to split up the parts. We sent it to the group to double-check that everyone was happy!
I started putting my animation together and brainstormed for the background! I wanted it to look like the train was moving so I sent in an idea on Discord!
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Animating
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We sent in one-drive files to all of the models we made. Janet offered to set up the scene for us so all of us would have the same base and seating all the different ghosts we had, wouldn’t look different in everyone’s animation. After I got the scene, I began animating. I looked at my previs and storyboard to see where I wanted the cameras to be and set them up before I began animating! I uploaded videos for our presentation with the same files. Based on the feedback, I needed to trim down the timing – I also wanted to change the facial expressions for the yellow ghost and some lighting. After editing and adding lighting, it looked better! Ellie had added an HDRI environment for the background so we wouldn’t need to stress with animating a background so I decided to use it too. I downloaded some audio and added it to my animation:
For the second part, I didn’t want to add too much as we all wanted to speak on Discord to make tweaks so our frames ended similarly and to discuss sound.
We all sent in our clips on Discord and discussed what needed to be changed. Ellie edited all the clips together and wrote suggestions of what to change. We needed to link up each section and also add in a tunnel! Ellie had also offered to add all our clips together; all we needed to do was add sounds and she would add the train ambience.
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Final Animation (before and after)
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Before everything was put together:
After:
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Reflection
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I was really excited about being able to create my own animated short but at the same time I was nervous. I wasn’t sure how the group work was going to work or even if it would but I’m really happy with how it all turned out! At first, I was excited doing all the concept art and research for our story and I really liked the theme of it as it reminded me a little of spirited away and included all our ideas. When it came to modelling my character, I found it difficult to make it and I was spending a lot of time trying to fix parts of it, but in the end, I got it all finished and working properly, thanks to the really helpful videos from Alec! Trying to divide up the parts for our group was difficult at times as it was hard trying to get everyone to message at the same time as many people were working or busy but I’m happy we got it all sorted in the end. Towards the end, the communication was very difficult and sometimes it would be a struggle to get work done as I wasn’t too sure when everyone’s work would be sent in and I was worried that the animation itself wasn’t going to be finished but it did! I believe this module taught me a lot about teamwork and communication as well as learning a lot more about blender technically; I didn’t think I would even be able to model a character never mind make a whole animation so I’m really glad I was able to learn how to! I’m very proud of myself because of how much I’ve learnt and how far I’ve came from the start of this course; not knowing anything about animation and being new to digital art to being able to create my own character and animate my own little story! :))