Overall what I learnt!?

Overall I feel that my animation skills in general have improved and this specialism has defiantly strengthened my passion than killed it. Career wise I will prefer animating and pre production than the clean up and colouring but I understand it is important to know these skills not just for my final film but for the industry.  I must also try not to rely heavily on my live action reference otherwise the animation can seem a bit plain and dull as no exaggeration is added.  Inspiration wise I just look at anything generally goofy, funny faces and look at various artists and Jim Carrey for inspiration. This last year I have come across and American animation production company ‘Headless production’ and love the work they produce and the style they take. I do think I do need to explore other styles and just need to get out of my comfort zone. I defiantly need to develop my cleaning and colouring skills, adding textures for colour looks amusing to me and I did want to apply that to my man’s suit on the bus animation but ran out of time. I also need to figure out what I’m doing wrong with exporting videos on premiere, I can’t afford to have bad quality for my final film. I feel quite happy with my four pieces but know I still have a lot to improve on and need to develop my colour and clean up along with my time management skills.


Headless studio reel 2010 from Headless Productions on Vimeo.

EMOTION Final

With my emotion piece, I animated it entirely on flash, as it is very quick and line testing was fast and done the second you draw, I used the program for my soundscape for a dance sequence so I knew how to use it. Once of my favourite things to draw and animate is the face so I wanted a close up. I looked at one of my favourite cartoon artists Katie Shy, I just love her funny looking expressions and tried to apply that humour to my animation. Overall I did love the expressions I produced but it probably would have looked better in pencil than flash, as I don’t draw quite the same on a graphics tablet than with a pencil and it’s just not the same quality on flash as hand drawn.

Emotion Plan!

Planning:

Influences:
I looked at one of my firends in uni, as he has the most photogenic and animated poses I've seen except Jim Carrey. I toke my friends hair and eyes along with Jim Carrey's drastic expressions.

Style wise I looked at Katie Shy, a storyboard artist who I love, she has rich expressive expressions in her characters and like me that seems to be her main point to connecting to the audiance.

(c) Katie Shy

Design:

Storyboard:

rough animation:

I first did a rough animation just to get the general movement and and rough expression right, there are places when the head completly changes shape which I will fix on my cleaned up version.

3D Planes

Todays lecture we learnt about how to use a 3D plane on after effects. Basically creating a 3D space with 2D images. We made a simple zoom in to a boy in a house, going past plants and a bee flying bee. I really liked the effect this created and would like to apply it to some of my work in the future.

I didn't save my work which I'm really regretting but here is the besic effect that this 3D plan creates with all 2D images.




I DID NOT create this!

Miss a Bus Final

Once I tested my animation, it was clean up time.  I scanned every frame and cleaned up some loose lines and faint guide lines and cycles as well as scaling down some of the last frames which I think are still a bit too big, but it is an improvment.  One of te problems with the first animation was I couldn't control the frames of ones and two's, and that's why I didn't scan my dialogue.  Bus after going to see Zara, she showed me an other way to import my frames and still control the timing.  With this new knowlege I imported my clean frames to photoshop and applied a background.  I didn't do alpha channels for this one, instead I applied a background to every frame and just whitened the back of the man frames.  Overall this probly toke just as long and at the end you have less control of when your character is, once editted that's it.  So I will probably stick to alpha channeling my frames from now on.

The only thing I had left to do was the bus, I decided to  hand draw the bus and apply movement with after effects.  I applied what I leanrt in Stan's lecture with the puppet tool, with giving the bus a wiggle effect, like the start of an engine, made the entire vehicle, then  parented a wheel to the bus and applied a rotate function to it.  Overall it worked quite well, though I did draw the bus in a ver flat persective so probably should ahve shown some of the roof.  Also I wasn't sure what the best way to combine the footage of the man running and the bus leaving? I tried atleast three different ways.  Tried the adobe dymamic link, wasn't sure how it worked, tried importing my after effect onto premiere and it came out blank? and finally just exported the man running on premeiere then imported that to after effects and exported it there, though because of this I think I've lost quality and also there is 20 seconds of just black, which when I tried to fix in Premire it was even worse quality, so I'm obviously getting my exporting info wrong.



Minus the bad quality and growing I am pleased with this piece, I think he could have thrown the suit case a bit better but it does convay the emotion that the character is feeling and this is my first go at persective applied with a background.  I did want to apply a suit texture to his clothes but ran out of time.

Planning on Missing a Bus!

For my missing a bus, I was at home on the christmas holidays and had just finished animating my diaglogue so to have a break from animating I decided to just plan everything before going back to uni.  While thinking of what character to do, my brother was watching the Godfather in the background and that sprang the idea of how would one of those characters react to missing a bus.

Influences: I wanted to try a different style so I looked at some styles with very different eyes to mine and go for just dots, that way I'd have to reply mainly on the boady language than the acctual eyes and face.  I chose to use Sonny from the Godfather as my characters personality's influence, his quick temper made his reaction to miss the bus straight to the point.

Design: Setting in the 1920's I looked into hair styles and suits at the time.

Storyboard:  with  reference from my brother I drew up a storyboard and was pleased with the outcome.

Rough Animation:  This animation again was done with pencil and paper.  There are some growing issues with it but I hope to rescape this in Photoshop while cleaning up.

Puppet Tool

With Stan, he showed us the puppet tool in After Effects,  it was acctually which a fun session.  We learn the wiggle tool on jelly, and how to apply the puppet tool to make a cut elephant drum and I also made him swim or dance I'm not acctually sure? but it was fun.  





The puppet tool is very useful for maybe background objects such as cars or food but I probably wouldn't use it for character animation as it would have to be quite stiff and wouldn't gve the effect I'd like to my animations.

Chatter, rough, clean and colour

I had finished animating my dialogue animation and once I had line tested it in Ernst I wasn't sure how to clean it up?



Animation wise, I am very proud if it.  I feel the characters personalities do show through from only being on screen for a few seconds.  There is very slight shrinking but not drastically noticable, there are also some anatomical errors with the arms but overall pleased with it.  I have pushed my self with exaggeration with the breathe in part and also concentrating on the hair as well as the body and mouth movements too.

Clean:


Coloured:


for some reason the quality is really bad on quicktime but ok on windows media player

Storyboard Chatter

Through out the week I had done my storyboard for my dialogue and recorded my reference.  With this piece I experimented with different angles and not having everything on one frame, its starts with a medium close up  of the girl then cuts to the boy, then cuts to a medium shot of both of them.

Dope Sheet:

With is animation I also wanted it to have rich flewid timing and nice exaggeration.

Storyboard and Animatic lecture

This week week we had a lecture with Matt on storyboarding and anamatics.  Again Matt looked at how these are best used in the industry and independently, the benefits of them and responsibilities of a storyboard artist.  I found this lecture very interesting as love storyboards in general, and if I am unable to be an animator storyboard artist would defiantly be next on my list career wise.  For all my excerises I always produce a storyboard, but not always an anamatic only because I feel the piece is just too short for one.  The only anamatic I've produced so far is last year with Leonnie on my narrative theory and I did enjoy doing it.  I also follow a few storyboard artists on the internet that are in the industry, but my favourite so far is Mark Kennedy, who's blog has many tips and hits on how to layout and compose a storyboard and many other things he's learnt, I find it very helpful
http://sevencamels.blogspot.com/

Clean up and Colour

With Matt we had a leacture of clean up for 2D animation and how to check your work and improve it.  It was a very helpful lesson looking on what equipment to use and how the set up works in the industry.  I founs this very interesting and helpful and as I plan to work in the industry I need as much advise as possible.

We also learnt about clean up and what are the do's and don't.  Overall lots of tips and helpful hints about cleaning and producing animations overall and the structure of working in the industry when producing an animated piece.  I toke notes of all the slides and what Matt had to say of his experiances in the industry and try my best to apply this to my work.

We were then shown an animation by Amanda Fonbis and Wendy Tobly - When the day breaks (1999)




Next week we had a lecture with Stan on colouring our frames.  We looked at doing this in two programs Adobe Illustrator and Toon Boom.  Both ways seemed nice and easy to use but both methods didn't seem to work that well with my drawing style, and the fill paint feature certainly didn't as my drawings have many gaps and I don't usually join up the lines.  As well as that vectorising method on toom boom showed what bad quality my scanned drawings were, which was a mystery as my resolution and size was correct but the quailty remained bad.  Stan toke some of my scans but could not work out what was wrong with them?

I would like to use this method of colouring but my style of drawings are too loose and the colour would just leek all over the frame, so I think I will stick to  just colouring in Photoshop, though it will definatly take longer to do, overall industry wise I am not interested in the colouring aspect of it just either animation, character design or storyboarding. Although I understand colouring is a big part of many pieces, industry or not, but I do love it sometimes when animation works brilliantly without lots of colour and just the lines like this piece by Louis Clichy

Chatter Chatter Begins

Once my open excercise was complete I made a start on preparing for my dialogue.  I had recently finished watching a new BBC crime drama Sherlock.  This twist on the classic Sherlock Holmes investigations had rich recreate of the crimes and driving character development and intereaction.  Therefore I wanted to take a snip piece of dialogue from this series.  I also wanted to do an intereaction between a male and female.  Looking at the show there were a few female characters but I wanted a female the same age, so only one I thought would be best was the police officer that hated sherlock, therefore came up with the situation of uni students living together and having a quarrel.  The situation of the male, leaving a jar of eye balls in the microwave as an experiement and the female finding them unimpressed.  Since they are living together I suppose she is sort of used to these matters but still gets annoyed with him.

Once my situation and releationship between the two was set, designing them was underway.


The Female:
I wanted a contrast between the two character so as well as being male and female, I wanted their appearance and personailty to also clash which would make the dialogue more interesting and realisting considering they are argueing.   However I was limited as the voices was already set.  So for the girl I made her a half white half african black but grew up in the UK as that is her accent.  I made her a bit of a diva and is used to things her way and also into the creative arts and jazz.

For my influences I looked at Beyonce with the colour of her skin, her big lips and rounded face. And then looked at some hair do's an d this was my fav, with big volume and nice framing of the face.

Desging Fola:

I gave her an African name that means Glory as I think she's quite a competitive person.

The Male:
With the contrast in mind I set the male as a middles class scientist and constantly bringing them to the flat where they live.  Contrast to Fola being curved and a plus size Fateen (name meaning clever) is skinny, tall and much stiffer in his movements than her.

For my influences I looked at the character Sherlock from where I got the audio from and at an artists style Phobs that have an elegant posh style to it that I wanted to apply to this character.

Designing Fateen:

Open Clam

The following week, I did what I heart in Stan's tutorial with alpha channels,  as my style did not work in illustrator with itc vector channel, I had to apply an alpha channel to every single frame.  It was repetitive not excitable work, I much prefer creating the movement that cleaning it up.
Once every frame was clean I applyed my animation to a photo of a beach for the background, this was the result:



For some reason the quality of the frames weren't as high as they should have been, I toke my frames to show Stan but even he wasn't sure, none the less I didn't really have time to rescan everything and the movement I felt was clear, it was just pure quality that wasn't 100%. 

I'm glad I know now how to clean up my work and the wonders of actions on photoshop that must have saved me hours.  I would like to maybe try out my work in a vector channel but with somthing more simplistic as the vector channels just completly got ride of my facial expression which is one of my favourite parts of my charcters and how to connect to the audiance.