My Animation – A Brief Development

I did a character sheet for the Porg creature and looked into a rough sketchy style over a block colour. After doing this I realised I would have to take the rough sketchy look off as it would be too hard to animate the movements smoothly without a rough jarred look on the sketch lines. For my background I wanted to use very neutral natural colours and I looked into anime style backgrounds as I wanted to use a similar theme.  I designed everything in Procreate and for the grass I used pre-set stencils I had on the software.

I’ve been using Procreates animation mode to get the onion skins and be able to draw frame by frame and see how the movements look.

I kept the same style background in the scene with the main character but I wanted to add mountains into the background so that it made the world setting feel more complete. For the main character the design was created by Rebecca, so I focused on keeping all the features of that character but drew it in my style. I tried to use the similar shades and tones that the environment had in the character so that he wasn’t too out of place and standing out too much from the overall scene.

I looked into anime styles for my backgrounds and watched a few tutorials on the techniques of drawing rocks and clouds and this is something a didn’t have much skill in. I found these tutorials very useful and was able to apply my own style to the techniques to make them fit into my scenes. I used Whimsical to create quite a few reference mood boards looking into perspectives and lighting. I know with anime styles they can sometimes be a bit flat in their shading and its mainly created using block colour. I wanted to keep that anime style with a touch of realism so looked at photography scenes as well as hand drawn artworks.

Using After Effects I am able to retain layers which is very important to me in getting the details right on my backgrounds and allowing me to add subtle movement to make them feel less stagnant.

I had to re-do the storyboard due to getting the extra scene at the beginning of mine to get the main character to fall into the starting position of my initial storyline.

Reflection:

I have found this class easy enough to manage, the only thing that I didn’t quite like was focusing on worlds at the beginning and moving teams. I felt this stumped me a bit in wanting to put my all into each task at the start due to knowing I was going to be moving groups and this wasn’t going to be used in my final animation development. I think if we had of been in the same group from the start I would have been able to apply myself each week and develop everything more to have a better animation. I find that the timeframe I was left with in my final team/world was limiting my ability to fully develop my creative ideas in my animation. I had to go back to our previous tasks and re-do my character designs, storyboards etc to fit the new theme of the world of my group. This took up valuable time I could have been using to start applying to my animatic and cleaning up the animation. I did find this all quite stressful but I was persistent and I managed to get everything done that was required. I do feel my animation isn’t as smooth as it could be but that was due to not having enough time to really perfect the smoothness of each movement but I am still happy with what I was able to achieve in the time limit I was given. I was given additional things to animate the week after we pitched our Animatic to Aodhan as Sophie in my group had too much to animate and she was to animate our main guy falling so he arrived in my channel having already fallen. So I ended up having to animate the main character coming into my channel standing up scared, and falling to the ground as I had already animated from that point and would have had to redo the entire animation if he didn’t fall.

I feel like this class has allowed me to develop my skills in working as a team and planning an animation as a team. It was nice to build an animation in a group as we had loads of different views and ideas inputted. Although having animating experience, I have found this topic quite difficult and definitely felt a little out of my depth. The animating and processes was easy enough but I have struggled with trying to independently learn outside of class, manage my time and be prepared overall for the deadline. I definitely feel like due to swaying more into realism that I try to perfect my art too much and this ends up being time consuming and leaving me more limited on being able to animate more intimately and thoroughly. I need to focus more on simplifying down my art style and building a better understanding of frame by frame animating, because as I become more experienced in this I will be able to do it quicker and therefore allocate more time to the details within my artwork.