Production Principles

We have 2 months to create a 20-second long animation, in groups of 2-3. We had to use words from the cloud as a basis, and create something with a beginning, middle and end.

Me, Keyleigh and Iqra decided to make a 2D animated feature about a shape-shifting magical girl who hops through 3 different lands to make a delivery – each one being set in a different environment, character form and one of our art styles.
Iqra was first with underwater, then Keyleigh created a mythical forest, and I was last with outer space.

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I also made moodboards for our character design and art style inspirations, then created concept sketches based off of that. I was very inspired by the webseries ‘Bee and Puppycat’ which features lovely round shapes and a simple style. I consulted my teammates and we liked the dress and spaceboots of the first girl, but the colour palette and puffy hair of the second girl. From this, I finalised the design, and they used it to base their designs on.

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The next stage was planning out the contents of the animation. Since we were splitting into 3, I had roughly 7 seconds to showcase my part. I’m also going last so I had to show the ending, the conclusion, of her bringing the stars to space. I came up with this storyboard.

The final planning stage was to make an animatic, which I did using the panels from above. This was helpful as I realised I definitely needed to condense the content down in order to fit my timeslot.

And then it was on to finally animating. I used the inbetween method on Photoshop and Premiere Pro, before piecing it together with my group members and making music on Garageband. Here’s a shot that I ended up really liking.

Finally, we needed to make a 15-20 second long animation that conveys the theme “connection.” This was done in Adobe After Effects.

First I story boarded out my ideas. I kept imagining having a door that opens and light spills out. I figured that there can be a new world behind the door – somewhere bright and warm, unlike the bitterness we feel in the UK right now.

Similarly to Premiere Pro, I struggled a little with using After Effects – I’ll definitely take time to practice and get to grips with them.

Here I made a 3D “diorama” environment in Maya.

First I used PowerPoint to brainstorm ideas. I made a mind-map of landscapes I think would be achievable, then moved onto a mood-board. I ended up focusing on the cat cafe and the crane game, as the other two might be a little overdone.

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I think how well I get used to Maya will affect which one I pick, as the machine is probably more difficult than the cafe. Although after sketching out a 2D plan, I think I prefer the crane. Maybe I could even combine the two somehow (e.g. cats inside of claw machine).

So, I did actually combine the two. Once I found a rhythm with Maya it surprisingly wasn’t so bad – albeit still very difficult. I modeled a claw machine using tools like booleans and extrusion, turned polygons into a cat house, then coloured with standard surface shading. It’s a program where you have to trust the process, and it totally pays off when you add lighting and it renders like magic.
In the future I would like to make a model with more protrusions and bevels so it’s a little less flat, and possibly use an external program to paint over it. I would also add floor shadows and play around with sample settings to eradicate graininess.

Here are some screenshots of the process. The left crane is a scrapped first try.

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Our goal this week was to make a turnaround sheet for a character we create.

We had a few exercises in our first lesson. We created 5 character outlines based on adjectives, focusing on the shape language. Then we did ‘steal the shape’ where we used the shapes of everyday items to inspire rough character designs. Lastly we did ‘inanimate to animate’ and transformed objects into characters themselves.

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Now onto the main design. We had to choose between the following prompts:
– The concept of ‘winter’
– The song ‘Down Under’ by Men at Work
– A scarf
I like the idea of picking something to do with winter, but also incorporating the scarf somehow as I like the colours and pattern.

This is a character designer whose work inspired me:

caramoccii – IG / TWT

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She has a sharp and angular style, as well as shiny lighting and shading. She has an extensive and impressive portfolio of designs. She made me start thinking about doing a sword-wielding character.

Here is my brainstorm!

I really couldn’t decide which one I liked more, so I combined them. I had the idea of the warrior wearing the deer skull as headgear, as it seems as if she’s flaunting her prey. Maybe she even slaughtered the spirit, in her story. I also imagine the scarf as some sort of precious blanket to her that she wears as a cape to keep safe. I did some different iterations of her character, testing out clothing and making sure the values work well.

I’m very pleased with the final outcome! I based the forward facing pose off of my original sketch, then used gridlines to carefully create a side facing view. I paid close attention to the silhouette too, as it’s important that your character stands out even in their simplest form.
Next time, I might taper the line-art a little to give more dimension.

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This time we had a writing exercise. We had to write a “compelling and dark” short story (or beginning) consisting of 150 words, and something that forces your character to act. We were also given a list of prompts to choose from – I liked “this has got to stop.”

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We had a few separate pieces of homework to complete this week. The first was to create a 20 second video that includes 10 different clips, all showcasing different sounds on a journey between indoors and outdoors. I chose to film my trip to the supermarket.

< video link >

Then our final submission was to make three 10-second long videos, inspired by the sound design work on the online magazine ‘Onomatopoeia Club.’ We had to take audios and edit/distort them in some way using software like Premiere Pro, and then provide visuals to go alongside, either filmed or animated.

< video link >

Our first task was to take a class trip down to Waterloo, where we split off to do some location drawing. We had to do around 10 small sketches – I chose to focus more on figures and characters, so I looked around for people or situations that seemed interesting enough to capture.

My favourite one ended up being the middle right, of a girl standing by the wall to look across the river and buildings. I quite liked the use of negative space, and her being taller than the buildings. I chose this one to use for my final piece, which had to be a comic of sorts, where your original drawing is the middle, and you have to make up the beginning and end.

I decided to go with a lighthearted fantasy theme.

For the second week, we were learning how to edit photos and collages with Adobe Photoshop. More specifically, we had tutorials on using the layer mask function in order to cut out images, as well as using channels, adjustments and layer modes to correct the colours.

These are the 3 pictures I used:
– Floating spheres made to look like octopuses, from the Tate Modern
– An acrylic painting that appears very graphical, consisting of neat geometrical shapes, also from the Tate Modern
– A District Line tube parked at the station, from the way home

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The term began by visiting the roots of animation; 2D hand-drawn on a light-box. In my opinion, this was the best one to start with – there aren’t really any shortcuts or places to hide, it’s just you and a pile of frames to piece together.

Here we began to learn about the 12 principles of animation – the fundamental basics that are absolutely necessary to understand before moving on to anything more complicated. The ones that we focused on were ‘squash and stretch,’ ‘straight ahead and pose-to-pose,’ ‘arcs of motion’ and ‘timing and spacing.’

We applied these to every animators initial endeavor: the ball bounce, before starting to turn the ball into characters, and soon enough we were working on a short sequence of characters speaking and moving their hands.