Character Behaviour: More Improvement

I now improved my 'Dry Stone Walling' animation as much as I possibly can. Since adding in the new cut away of the shepherd and his sheep I have also improved the animation by calming down the farmers eyebrow movement and have weakened the background colours to make the character stand out more, it also gives the scene depth and makes it a little easier on the eye. 

Here are some examples of before and after shots of the scenes in which I calmed down the background colours..

I'm glad that this was suggested as I feel it looks much better. not only does the frames have depth etc but where I've use white it looks like it could be a misty early morning!

And of course here is the final animation with the changes made and the extra cut away..

I really happy with this, I feel that the little changes I have made have improved it quite a bit. My only criticism is the lip sync, it wasn't right last time and it still isn't right, unfortunately it too bigger job for me to change within the time I have left to do anything else to it. Hopefully sometime in the future I can fix it!

Character Behaviour: Improvement

This is the first of a couple of improvements to my earlier 'Dry Stone Walling' animation for my Character Behaviour brief - The Message. 

It was suggested that I should put in more cut aways as I had originally intended in my story board as it got a bit much just watching the farmer speaking, especially with his out of control eyebrows (also to be improved). And so I took the shepherd treating his sheep scene, animated it and inserted it into my final animation. I had to rework the drawing and render it digitally as I hadn't done it for that particular scene. These are the steps I went through..

I started with the original frame from the storyboard that I had created

I then took the sheep and drew over it drawing the different body parts in separate layers

And removed the original drawing

I then rendered all of the separate pieces of body parts until I got this final image..

I then placed the sheep back into the frame

I did exactly the same thing for the shepherd..

And placed him in the scene with the sheep too

I then rendered the background with both the shepherd and sheep out of view

And finally placed them back in ready to animate.

And so here is the final cut away animation..

I'm pleased with the result of this and feel that it'll fit into the animation well. It will add just a little bit more variety. Luckily when I created the animation a few months ago now I made it so that it could easily be picked back up and changed if needed which made the whole process much easier. 

Design For Society: Improvement

I've taken on board comments from my tutors and have decided to make an improvement on my final animatic for my Design for Society brief. This was to change the colour of the text use for the first part which was dark blue. This was because the text gets a little lost when the bulbs appear, the suggestion was to make it a lighter blue as not only should it be more clear but also suggested the illumination of the light bulbs. So here is my improved animatic..

I like the light blue, I can see now that it is much clearer to see and it also makes it visually more interesting because it adds more colour to it. Overall I'm very happy with the improvement! 

Creative Futures Two: 11 Second Character Animation Competition

These are the characters I created!..

This is my first rough sketch of Mrs Crawley, an enthusiastic newly married young lady.

This is the old Lady, uptight and proper.

And above and below are my neater digital line drawn characters, worked from the rough skteches

And both characters in the backgrounds. 

I'm really happy with these characters and I feel they suit their roles well. I've loosely based Mrs Crawley on myself for reasons expressed in my previous post about this project. 

And this is the final animation..

I've kept the older lady quite stiff to show that she's uptight. I'm happy with the lip sync but I think it could be slightly tighter and made more fluid if I worked at it a bit more, and I'm happy with Mrs Crawleys reaction at the end. Overall I feel that it's a good attempt. 

I've enjoyed doing the 11 second competition and will be sure to do more! This one was a little rushed as I only found it half way through the time allowed for the competition so hopefully my next will be better! And hopefully I'll gain some useful feedback!

Animating Childrens Drawings

For a while now since BAF and more so from Creative Futures I've wanted to animate some children's drawings as a new challenge and to try something different. So whilst I was home for Easter I asked a 6 year old girl that I know if she would do a drawing of me and explained that I wanted to animate it, I also asked her to draw me  something I could put in the background like the seaside or a house or a castle..it could be anything! And so she drew me as a princess, a castle and the added bonus of my cat Amber! 

Now I had the drawings I decided that I would animate my character singing and wishing the girl that drew the picture happy birthday as it's her birthday at the end of the month, instead of getting her a card!

This is the process I went through to prepare for animating

This is the original drawing of myself and my cat

I then made the background completely white

This is the original castle drawing

I also made the background completely white for this

I then added in bits for the background like the sky and ground

And finally myself and my cat were added into frame.

Then broke down the drawing of my self so that the arms, head, neck, torso etc were separate ready to animate. I also created different mouth shapes. 

This is the final animation, I use my own voice and I did the cat noises. I found the bird sounds from a royalty free website and added in a quick title and credits. 

Overall I'm very happy with the outcome of this animation, I enjoyed making it and would love to use children's drawings for another animation, maybe for a bigger project. The great thing about it is when you ask for a drawing you don't know what you're going to get to work with!

Creative Futures Two: 11 Second Character Animation Competition

I've decided to enter an animation competition I found on google. It's a competition where you're given 11 seconds of a voice recording and you have to animate a character to it. Anyone can enter and there is a new one every month. The winner gets an 'eCritique' from a professional animator from animationmentor.com 

There's also a forum where you can post your work in progress and gain feedback, which is invaluable. 

The voice recording for this months competition is-

"Please don't think we're ungrateful for your enthusiasm Mrs Crawley but there comes a time when things are best left to the professionals. And I really I really must go. Good day."

My first thoughts were to have 'Mrs Crawley' infront of some sort of scene where she'd tried to do something herself for the lady talking but it had gone completely wrong. Or she tried to do a job in some sort of profession. 

So I looked up professions and the ones that most interested me were architects, pilots, dentist, doctor, engineer, journalist, nurses and surgeons. I thought of things like, Mrs Crawley could be stand in a pilot suit infront of a wrecked plane, or dressed as a surgeon covered in blood, architects blue prints that didn't make sense etc. I tried to imagine the other lady's role in each of these and in my mind she didn't suit many of them. 

So then I looked at some possibilities that I could relate to and there were three things that came to mind. Gardening, painting and decorating, and building work, these are something I enjoy when I have spare time. The voice recording reminds me a bit of when I was younger and liked to surprise my parents by painting a room by the time they got home from work (something they may have thought about doing at the weekend), which was somewhat very messily finished due to my lack of experience. Or I thought I'd tidy the garden up a bit by 'weeding' and 'pruning' much to my Mum's horror I would pull out plants and flowers that she liked and cut  bushes and roses the wrong way at the wrong time of year, again through lack of experience. I've yet to do the same with building work, I've always had my Dad's company for those! 

 I decided that I would base this animation on one of those experiences so that I could understand the situation a bit better. I chose to do the painting and decorating as it would be easier to demonstrate visually than the gardening one and the building one.  

Mrs Crawley would think that she was doing the other lady a favour and surprise her by adding a bit of colour to one of the walls in the lady's sitting room as she had heard her talking about the possibility of having it done. 

And so I created the backgrounds..

Initial sketch in sketchbook

Straightening certain lines up digitally

Primed the image and digitally traced the original pencil marks

Added the colour to show the paint job by Mrs Crawley.

I decided to only use colour for the paint to emphasize the mess made!

This is the scene that Mrs Crawley will stand in. 

Bad door and door frame.

Oversized lamp

I drew both of these in the same scene together but the light was way too big so I made both drew them separately digitally.

This is my newly digital drawn door and door frame based on my original sketch.

And this is the redrawn table and lamp.

I then positioned them both back in one scene together with much better proportions

And finally added the messy paint job. This is the scene in which the lady will be standing. 

Overall I'm really happy with both of the backgrounds and the effect of paint has worked out better than I had imagined it! 

Creative Futures Two: London Studio Visits

In March I went with my University to London to visit various London animation studios. 

These are the studios we visited..

Studio AKA

We were given a talk about Studio AKA, what they do, the processes they go through to get work from clients and to create their animations. Studio AKA primarily create commercials. To have a commercial to create they are contacted by a company or agent and are given between 24 hours and 1 week (if lucky) to come up with an idea, create artwork and pitch it to the company. If they win it they normally have 12 weeks to create the commercial. 

At the pitch they show various pieces of artwork such as concept art of characters, maybe an animatic or blockmatic and backgrounds or environments etc. They use various techniques to create commercials, they say that it all depends on the commercial as to how they go about it. However they like to throw in some stop motion every so often to freshen the team up. 

There is only about 24 people that make up Studio AKA so it's a pretty small team. In between making commercials they make their own short films, such as 'Lost and Found' and their recent success 'A Morning Stroll', which they were nominated for an Oscar for and won a BAFTA! One commercial that they've kept making more of is the Lloyds TSB adverts. 

I would love to work in this studio, or atleast gain some experience here as I love the work they produce, especially as they use a range of animation techniques! 

Blue Zoo Productions Ltd

We started off by having a talk with Tom Box , a co-founder of Blue Zoo by showing us their show reel of which had a mixture of children's series, commercials and channel idents.  He then showed us a video of the process that they went through to create the choc'n'roll commerial which was very interesting and good to see. All of their animation is produced digitally on computer. At the time there were three main projects going on which were three children's series, 'Olive the Ostrich', 'Alphablocks' and their most recent 'Tree Fu Tom' of which the staff were split up into teams, each team doing a different series. The studio was very big, spanning over two floors of which Tom Box told us that the Studio start on the lower floor and the amount of staff had more than doubled in size.

Tom Box went to Bournemouth University with the other two co-founders Oli Hyatt and Adaw Shaw and they started the company after they had graduated. 

This studio was much different to Studio AKA, it was a lot bigger and there seemed to be much more going on (although this may have been to do with the time of day). We were told that  to get a job there or to get some work experience within the studios you would be expected to already know how to use the likes of Maya. 

Astley Baker Davies (The Elf Factory)

The Elf Factory is the studio where 'Peppa Pig' is made and more recently 'Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom'. Which makes sense to me now when I look at both styles as they are both quite similar! I liked this one, mainly because the lady that showed us around not only talked to us about the different stages that the company goes through to create a programme for a series but showed us round at the same time. So for example when she was talking about the animatic stage she took us to the team that create the animatics and got them to demonstrate how they would do it. It was good to see them demonstrating it rather than to be just shown a video as you could also ask them anything as they went along. 

I liked the look of the programme they used to create the animations, its like flash but better. 

I wouldn't mind getting some work experience here either! 

Picasso Pictures

Again when visiting this studio we had a talk and were shown  the showreel. Picasso Pictures creates commercials, title sequences, idents , TV series and short films. We were shown the stages of the making of one of their commercials called Fidelity which was about banking. Not only did I learn about how a project is thrown back and fourth to the clients to make sure that everything is to their liking and the stages used to create such a piece but also that a banking advert doesn't have to be boring and mainly fact based but can be made very visually exciting. I loved that commercial as it's the sort of thing that I would love to make. This studio was similar to Studio AKA being that it was quite small and they both create animations for commercials mainly. 

Before going on the London trip I had sent my CV and showreel to a few studios in London in the hope of getting some work experience in the summer, Picasso Pictures was the only studio that got back to me, unfortunately they didn't have any free spaces for work experience until December. Having been there and seen what they do it's made me want to get back in touch in the future and hopefully I'll have more luck. 

Cartoon Network Europe (Turner Animation Studio)

The last studio we visited was Cartoon Network Europe. This tour was much like The Elf Factory, they took us around the studio showing and explaining the processes they go through to create a programme for a series. They showed us an animatic they created for The Amazing World of Gumball and then each stage of creating it. It was very interesting as both 2D and 3D was used in it as well as photographs and so it was good to see how it all came together. 

Overall the London trip proved to be very important and very interesting/exciting. It was good to see the possibilities for my future, especially as I have the advantage of living near London at home. I will definitely be getting in touch with these studios in the future as well as others I may come across. It was good to see how each studio worked as each one was quite different to the others.