Group Project Production Diary: Final reels

These are my final showreels. 

 This is the full film. Overall, I don't think this experience was too bad. It taught me a lot of things about how to work in the industry, mainly getting things done and handed in on time. It was also quite refreshing to use flash again, and I have learnt to better organise frames on there. As I stated earlier, I would have definitely have aimed to get my section more finished, as there are still some areas left uncolored and somewhat messy. Because this was a team job of 4 people, it's no surprise that the art styles would be somewhat different. But they still transition well together. I also think that the music placed here works really well, especially the timing. 

This is a showreel featuring eveything I did in the animation. The first reel shows the final linework I did before colour was added. Because he had a shorter section, David (our group leader) was helpful enough to help with the colouring in, shown in the second segment. He coloured the majority of the scene, characters, backgrounds etc while I finished the animation. However, after I reached a position where I could take over and continue the colouring, as seen in the last section of this showreel, I altered a few areas that he coloured, such as the close up of the boy's eye. I also animated the fire and smoke that is present thoughout the scene. I won't lie, without Ben's help (he is in Vincent's 2D group and thus has done a fire animation already) it would have taken me far longer to animate the fire, which was easier to do than I thought it would be. If there was anything I would do differently with this piece it would almost certainly be to work quicker. Many of the shots took longer than they should have to animate, and if I had gone quicker, I may have been able to handle more of the colouring so David could focus on his stuff a bit more.      

Production diary: Fire animation

As one of the final parts of my piece, I had to animate a bonfire that would flicker and burn throughout the piece. To keep from consistently animating across the entire piece, I decided to create a loop animation. 

These are some of the frames from the fire before color was added. It was surprisingly easy to animate this flame as the outer flame only needed 4 keyframes, while the inner flame only really needed 2, with inbetweens filling up the rest.  

These are the flames after the colour was added. My biggest worry with flash was that I wouldn't be able to create that many effects. However, I changed the alpha on the colors to make them more see-through, and less bold as well. The image above, found on the internet, was used for the colors. It was a simple matter to use the color picker tool on it and begin coloring in. 

Ben was also nice enough to lend me his notes on animating smoke and flames, as he had already done an animation with fire in his unit with Vincent. 

Production Diary: Progress reels

For the next few weeks, I would have to animate the introductory scene of our story. Because I hadn't done 2.D for a long while this was quite a challenge for me. I wasn't that used to working on Flash either, and to be honest I don't particularly like using it. This is mostly due to the fact that it is extremely limited in comparison to other adobe products like PhotoShop, mostly in terms of brushes etc. Nevertheless it is is an effective program for 2D animation. 

These are the opening keyframes for the piece. As I stated before when talking about the animatics we thought it best to use the animatic as a starting point for where each keyframe would be. Of course the timings would have to be altered in certain areas, but it was a start. 

One thing I did regret doing though was while doing these keyframes, I made the mistake of organising my frames into extremely complicated folders, one folder per keyframe. I later realised that when the time came to do inbetweening that this would cause great confusion in my animating (and wreak havoc on my N:Drive). I later rectified this by creating layers for each element like the characters, but the time it took to do so wasn't very beneficial. 

I have made a bit of progress on the inbetweening here. One thing I found difficult was ensuring the characters would be consistent with the designs and the other segments. In this particular scene, the transition to the Shaman scaring the boy is different to the keyframes. Instead of walking behind him, which would have taken a lot of time to animate, the shaman jumps behind him instead, which actually makes the scene more intense, especially when we see the frightened reaction of the boy when he realises the elder is right behind him. One of the things we changed from the animatic was where we see the boy's eye. Originally we would see the eyes of the shaman's mask, which then cut to a shot of him staring straight into the shaman. However, I thought that because the boy would stare at the hand beforehand, the hand would be the shape inside his iris, which would swirl into the shaman's mask eye. The imagery would be more surreal that way.   

More progress made here, rapidly approaching the end by this point. I have added follow-through animation to the hairs on the shamans mask. I have also added more inbetweens to the boy's run cycle at the end. I found construction layers to be very beneficial in this piece, especially in terms of the run cycle and the jump.  

It is always beneficial to look at reference when animating. So I looked Richard Williams book 'the animation survival kit' for references on run cycles. Because of how quick the run needs to be, only the keyframes with a handful of inbetweens were needed to do it.  

I also needed to look at reference for a jump as well. 

  

Group Project Production diary: Animatics

After getting a basic story and character ideas set, our first task afterwards was to create an animatic that would show how the story would go. For reasons of convenience, we decided to use the storyboards we had created as the animatic. This would mean that if we needed to make any changes, we would simply amend the storyboard and then rescan these changes.  

This is the first animatic. I was in charge of storyboarding the first section of the story, the first (19 seconds of this piece), where the young boy Tai is told the tale of the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who. In this version, he simply sneaks away from the camp after hearing the story, which admittedly isn't very intense. 

This is an updated animatic. Once again, I did the intro section (first 23 seconds).  I have altered this section significantly. The shaman character does more to scare the boy by walking behind him, suddenly placing his hand on his shoulder and scaring him into a run. While this is much better, I really should consider that using this would involve doing a walk cycle AND a run cycle. Walk cycles alone are tricky for me.   

This is the final animatic that we agreed would best show the story. There isn't really much different about this one, but when the shaman is first seen in the long shot, the camera angle changes to a low angle shot, so that he looks more intimidating and powerful.  To make things easier when creating the keyframes in the animation, we would use the Animatic as a basis for how the frames would be set up. Of course, we would have to change the proportions of the characters since we had created the turnarounds of the characters by this point.  

Production Diary: Frog construction

I also had to create turnaround sheets for the frog creature.

This is a basic version of the construction. Though the creature only really appears in one section, making it look good and move right is going to be imperative to whoever is animating him.

As I did earlier with the Tai (the boy) I did a basic colour layout for the creature as well. These colours are well chosen as the bright red will blend with the dark backgrounds well.

Production diary: Boy colour sheets

After creating the construction sheets, I also had to create colour sheets for the boy as well.

These two sheets present a dark skinned version of the boy. Although it might be reminiscent of real-life tribes, the dark skin may blend to much with the dark backgrounds.  

I did a second set just in case, making the colours and hues lighter. I think this may be better as it stand out better against the darker backgrounds.

Production Diary: Boy designs drawings and construction

We each had to create concepts for different parts of the story. Some of us would focus on a certain character, whilst others would focus on another, or on backgrounds. These pencil drawings, done by David, were of the boy character and how he was constructed. It was my job to put them through PhotoShop and trace them over, creating construction lines that we could use in the production, and create colour sheets that we could as reference during post-production.    

These are David's initial drawings of the boy.

This was the construction drawing I did after scanning them in. The proportions for the boy would be easy enough to follow so long as the arms and body were in the right proportion to each other. The top of the head is also where the boy's hair is.

Production Diary: Shaman concept

This is a concept sketch I did of the Shaman. This was done completely on photoshop, which was good opportunity for me to try out Digital painting. I think as a design the character works, although he looks like a very thin bodybuilder, which means the final design will need to be less muscly.