The Message: Walk Cycles, Perspective

I have finally finished my third walk cycle of my character walking away from us, the audience....

Apart from the character doing a bit of a funny limp I am very happy with the outcome of this. I was dreading this one as I've struggled with moving perspective in animation before but it wasn't as bad as what I thought it would be! 

The Message: Character Behaviour

This is my final animation for this brief...

There a few things that could be changed, for example, the farmers eye brows were going ten to a dozen at some points and so I would calm that down a bit, the lift of the rock at the beginning wasn't quite right, and I feel that for it to answer the brief better the character should have interacted with his environment more. If I was to do it again or improve it, I would have the character lifting some more stones at the end and putting them on the wall but in a way to show that he was really having to think about what he was doing, like making him scratch his head, frown etc! I'm really happy with the speech, last time I did this was for the cut out brief last year and I feel that there is much more expression in this characters face than there was in the one for the one before. Also I could have made his arms/hands move when talking to make it more interesting and natural. 

For the voice, my friend and fellow student Nate very kindly did it with the help of another friend and fellow student, George. I also added in some very quiet bird sounds to add to the effect of the setting in the countryside. 

Overall I am very happy with the outcome!

The Message: Walk Cycle, Walking Through an Environment

I have finished the animation of my character walking through an environment. I am pretty pleased with it, it jumps a little but apart from that  it's pretty smooth. I would have liked to of animated the sand moving from under her feet like it does normally but didn't get round to it. Maybe if I have another chance I may adjust it. 

Design For Society: My Final Piece?

I've managed to animate all of my text and images for the first storyboard and put it all together to create the final animatic...or at least I hope! (You never know if a good suggestion will come along) After doing so I have decided that one animatic is quite enough and the second one would be a lot of work, although  a lot of the first one is in the second one. Saying that, if I find the time I may just do it, all depending on how well I get on with the other briefs! Anyway, here is the animatic..

I created the soundtrack myself on a programme called 'Magix Music Maker', through the soundtrack I wanted to give a feeling of importance, as the message was important and I wanted to give it a decent pace to it to represent the time, and that time is running out until this is all put into play. Not being too good with music and creating anything musical at all I feel that I did well. When creating the soundtrack I wanted to keep it as simple as possible but also wanted parts to change and give off a different vibe at different parts of the animatic, for example when the low energy light bulbs were introduced I wanted it to become more upbeat as this needed to be seen and felt positively, I also wanted it to change when the bag was pulled up with the message about not throwing them away in the bin because this was a serious message so made the sound simpler. 

I am not too sure about how the text is animated, still. I feel that it may be a little too much and may be better just fading in. But then again that may just be because its not smoothly animated, as after all it is just a 'rough' animatic, and animatics are 'rough' versions of animations, to give you a feel and sense of timing, movement etc of what the finished animation should feel like. That was a bit of a battle for me, trying not to make it too much like a finished piece, which in some senses it does. I feel that may be I put in to much movement....too smoother movement. If compared to the animatics I studied and looked at earlier on in the project then I would definitely say that to be true.

However, overall I am very pleased with the outcome of my work. 

Design For Society: Text Animation

So after my first experiments I looked at some typography animation on youtube made by others to gets some ideas/inspiration. I then went back and looked at my first ones and decided that maybe they were too slow and so made them faster...

I thought this made them much better but there still wasn't enough punch, especially on the ones where the individual letters came up one at a time. The second one where the words sort of fly in has much better impact but I still didn't like it. So I decided to try two more, one where all of the words slide in together and another where each word slides in one at a time...

These were much better and give the effect that I imagined. I much prefer the last one with the individual words swiping in as it's not as hard and as plain as all of the words at once. I have decided that this is how I will animation the text. 

Design for Society: Text Animation

So I decided to look on you tube for some text animation inspiration as my attempts were pretty dull and boring. Here are some I came across...

All of these have audio to them, which means that the words don't have to be up long enough for the viewer to read them. Which ultimately means that they have that margin to be extra creative and imaginative.Seeing these has made me thing about whether I should actually use a voice over for my animatic. This is something I may try out. These typography animations also use different sized, colours and occasionally font texts. For now I think I'm going to keep my text the same size and font. Most also twist and turn their texts, again although I found this rally effective I'm still going to stick to keeping my text the same way up. 

So my next steps are going to be to record a voice over to my animatic and animate to it. Even if I don't end up using the voice over, hopefully I would have gained another dimension to my animation of text from it using the different tones in the voice and the pauses etc!..

Design For Society: Text Animation Experiments

I decided to try out some different ways of animating the text to appear on the screen. So I took the very first frame from my storyboard and had a play...

This first one was very simple, I made it so that it looked like someone was typing it onto the screen. However I don't feel that it fits in with the style or theme of the animatic.

With this one I wanted to make it look like you was zooming out from the text, this wasn't very smooth and I feel that it would be a bit much if it was to be used for all of the text throughout the animatic. It also meant that I had to start with the screen the colour of the text and I think I would therefore have to rethink the transitions between frames. 

I liked this one much better, it's very simple, the text simply pops up into view without having to move very far. However I feel that the text needs to have an impact, especially with the message it is putting across and I feel that it comes up a little too slowly and leisurely.

This one is pretty much the same as the last but going across. I think I need to do some research on text animation and see if it can jog my imagination a bit better!