Lucy Moles

Also thought I would put my final submission/PDF here.

My final film 🙂

Now everything was ready to move into Toonboom. Although it was pretty intimidating at first, I found it was an intuitive program and was able to get the basics like drawing frames down.

Update 1: Rough Keys

Update 2: Clean keys, plus some inbetweens, boils and lipsync done

Update 3: First 10 seconds animated

Update 4: Fully cleaned up

Update 5: Finished flat colours (and alternate lineart version)

Moving on to x-sheets and mouth shapes, in order to precisely time and plan the animation.

First I drew the most common shapes in the style of my film, so that I can refer to it.

Then the exposure sheets. These definitely took a lot of time to work out what I was doing. There were a lot of tricks and rules to adhere to, such as focusing more on sound/phonics than individual letters. I also made sure to put the shape in which a beat hits a couple frames before the sound itself.

These are my turnarounds for the two main characters. At the moment I can’t choose between pink or black lineart, but it can be easily changed around in Toonboom.

Then I drew a 12-panel storyboard, with dialogue captions. I tried to make sure to follow the 180-degree rule. I also intend to boil the lines whenever characters are semi still, and have quite a few camera cuts, as well as some breaks in action.

I then created an image sequence in Premiere, to test the timing, and cut some parts of the audio to be a close to 15 seconds as possible.

But, it was then suggested I should move the final shot to the beginning in order to make their ‘screen side’ less confusing. I updated my animatic to reflect this, as well as corrected the aspect ratio. I feel like I will probably use this one, as the final shot being the duck is pretty funny.

First and foremost I had to choose an audio. I was debating between find my own or picking one from the given sounds (either 02 or 06). In the end I chose to do 06 to show I can respond to a brief, and I like the comedic aspect.

I like the light-hearted arguing/staging an intervention, with a person confronting their friend being broke over a jacket. I will have to trim it down ever so slightly in order to be under 15 seconds.

First I made some moodboards outlining animation style, environment design and character inspiration.

Then I moved on to sketching a flower girl and her judgmental pet.

Now for some initial boarding ideas. The cat is just a place holder until I finish their design. But I know that I definitely like the high/low angle, and the height difference.

Then this is a work-in-progress turnaround for the main girl. I’m undecided about the gradient on her hair – it depends how easy it would be to animate. I also figured I would add eyebrows to her as well, as feedback suggested it would make her more expressive. I need to do the pet as well, which I’m thinking will just be a cat/dog with a flower on its head.

We also did a background paint test, by assigning grayscale values to a lined piece. I wanted to mimic lightning illuminating a room through a window, with an eery atmosphere.

This let me start off with backgrounds for my animation as well. I love the watercolour brush/smudge tool on Photoshop, it makes for great clouds.

My character is ready!

So now it’s time to move into Maya. This is always a little bit of a challenge for me as I’m more comfortable with Blender, but I try to do the best that I can.

We imported our reference sheets in as an ‘image plane’ which allowed me to blockout the character accurately. I started with the standard polys like spheres and cubes, and pulled the vertices around to create the shapes I wanted. One setback was trying to adhere to the polycount, as 2000 faces wasn’t a lot for someone who has a lot of round edges in their design.

After some thought and struggling with Zbrush, a remodel was necessary.

Adding materials and lighting is always the best part.

For my first 5 week taster of the pathways I went with the games option, as I am interested in exploring 3D character modelling and getting to understand the industry. I definitely need more practice in softwares like Maya as well.

I joined a pair with Keyleigh in order to tackle the brief ‘dark and dangerous.’ Our idea was to create a juxtaposing scenario by having an innocent-looking character holding a massive weapon. So, we brainstormed until and mind-mapped until our concept was a small anthro-axolotl with a dangerous scythe, as well as an origin story and motivations.

My part is making the character. I created a moodboard real life references, pre-existing character designs, and art styles from games that fit well. I think that new gens of classic Nintendo games like Pokemon Sword and Shield and Kirby Star Allies are a good example to follow, as they’re relatively low-poly and simple, but still have lots of different character types that fit well together (e.g. ‘fairy’ vs ‘ghost’). Going off of these, I did some sketches exploring silhouettes, position/pose and scale, as well as different ‘gill’ types.

Now we have a final mockup and turnaround, ready to be made into 3D.