weekly 8

moved onto shot three with the phone sequence.

The beginning of week 8 or rather half way through (since i was busy ) i had to move on to my other scenes and from looking at my story board i could see that i had to do the phone sequence which I planned in my head in advance as to what i need to do in order to achieve the effect, started to gather my own references,

The first bit of reference i gathered was the screen text message, i just looked at my phones message app and made something that looks similar, here was the end result:

from this i continued onto animating the typing animation which i referenced from Facebook's typing animation when someone is going to send a message since this sequence needed to showcase the friend sending another message that reveled the title of "last chance" within the message. 

here is a the typing animation which is going to be placed at the bottom left of the screen, this was simple to do because all i did was make one ball move up and down which was done all straight ahead and then copied the animation folder twice and moved it across, 

heres a screen shot of the timeline:

All i had to do was move the key frames so that the circles all started at different moments and the exported it ready for the phone sequence which i will edit into in after effects.

I then recorded myself picking up a phone and bringing it to the screen  as i needed it for reference, which really helped as i only needed to do one frame and tween or rather copied the one frame into the timeline.

here is the recording of the of picking up the phone and my version of the phone being picked up or rather brought into the scene:

Using my own references are very useful because i can showcase some reality into my scenes which can be simplified but still give the effect of being real to the audience.

hopefully by next week i should be able to place the phone screen onto this sequence, one of my friends gave me some advice as to what i should do when placing the screen onto the phone which is to make the screen a 3d object and that should allow me to move it around and fit it to the screen. not much progress so far with only ten seconds of unfinished animation but hopefully should be able to get alot done next week and done by the deadline.

Study task 4 DUIK rigging

This study task took a while to do because i put a bit more effort then i should off but this was because i wanted to enjoy using DUIK even though i had some bad experience on my first go but have learned alot from the mistakes i made on to completing this task.

I first made a character that had gaps in between each body part, which made the process of rigging it using DUIK quite difficult because there were to many meshes and to make it even worse i made to many layers which made it not work in the end.

here's a screen shot:

placing the pins on to the body confused the program because each part was an individual layer, One of my friends gave me one important advice when he was helping me, which was that DUIK's purpose was to automatically make the joints to  the character move which means that there was no point in rigging this character because everything was separated and needed to be connected.

This is what happened when i did rig the character at its current state:

all the controllers and bits of the body would move out of place and rotate completely wrong, from the screen shot above. I had to go back and fix this problem because it was the character and not the rigging that was wrong.

i first went back to the characters design and combined specific layers together, for example the arm, forearm and hand on both sides. I ended up with 5 main layers which were head, torso, arms and legs. I also ended up filling in the gaps between each body part so they were on 1 mesh which is important and makes it easier for DUIK to link the bones.

here's the change i made:

I then went back to Rigging this character which i found much easier now that i only had 5 layers and got all the bones i needed and linked all the bones so they joined up and rigged it fairly quickly because i manually joined them, the reason as to why i manually IK'ed each part was because the full body rig took a bit of time and would not work with my rig properly.

I then had to decide what this character was doing and i was inspired by a YouTube video of a guy playing on a xylophone :

And i decided to make my character play the xylophone, so i quickly made his props and got him to hold two sticks. all i had to do was just key frame the character but i had some troubles on the way because the arms would bend really weirdly, i solve this by keeping the arm straight and changing the IK bone direction so that the bend would transition smoothly through each frame, here's a screen shoot of how the arm would bend:

Here is the end result once i finished placing all the key frames.

in the end i would not use DUIK much as it is not the animation style i like and seems like it would be better for funny animations as i found it funny from the result above.

weekly 7

Starting off week 7 I looked into comedy aspects and how it is portrayed through animations, I mainly looked at youtube videos because its what comes to mind when i thought of animated content. There are two youtuber's that both showcased their comedy through black and white drawings that are animated, both have been using the same medium or rather method of animating for a while and recently have started to apply colour but only on certain areas such as the hair which you can see here:

In fact their recent animations feature these black and white sequences ( that includes single colours such as the example above ) 

I liked how they portrayed the characters with a minimalist style which i could possibly do but had not attempted and have already decided on it being semi realistic. Watching some of their animations i could see how they implement comedy through their drawings, at certain points they would over exaggerate the face that looks semi realistic and this would appeal to the audience and they can connect with the narrative more, heres an example of domics and the fear raiser over exaggerated face:

from this research i have decided to keep it black and white and also implement the way they fit comedy in but rather then making the face over exaggerated make it cartoony because my character is already semi realistic and from this the effect would come out more from making her face cartoony.

Made a few amendments on the animation of her head turning but did not get much chance to work on the animation since i was at MAF and i hope to get more work done over the next few weeks and hopefully finish this animation off before the deadline.

study task 3 puppet master

Starting this study task of by taking a picture of my friend in a side pose, since i had a thought of making the character jump across an area in the composition i was going to make. i told my friend to stand in a specific pose in order to make it easier to cut him out and be able to place pins appropriately when entering After Effects and using the puppet pin tool.

Opening After Effects up, I imported the cut out picture of my friend and found a simple background online which allows me to animate the character to jump in this space. heres a screen shoot:

Using the puppet tool i placed the points that i want to be able to move and animate the character and made sure the spacing between each point was reasonable which you can see in this screenshot:

After placing each point i wanted to apply the starch pins to the character so that it makes the character have sharp movements rather then wobbly moves, these pins where placed on the legs and arms, because this is where movements are sharp in realistic movements, another screen shot:

I learned that you can control how much you want it to bend and appear sharp which i applied in the above screenshot, I soon then realized that coming to the animating the legs where overlapping which i solved using the overlapping pins. From that i managed to choose and select the amount of area in that the arm and leg gets in front of the body which was quite easy to control and could be very useful if i ever come to using the puppet tool. screen shot:

i then moved on to animating this fully pin rigged character and placing the character in key frames was quite easy to do but then i came across a small problem when animating, which made the arms and legs look weird and was quite hard to understand what was making it bend awkwardly, but i manged to cover it by using the other leg heres a screenshot:

Heres the final animation

In the end, the result of using the puppet tool made it easier to animate a character but id only use this when i need to move simple objects on the screen without needing to create new poses/animated sequences. Alan Becker showcases how he used the puppet tool in his Animation vs animator 4 animation where he cuts out the hands he recorded and uses the puppet tool to make a smooth transition. heres a short clip of Alan showcasing the puppet tool: (go to 1:10 )

ppp collaboration

Throughout this session, we were asked to attended, I found it very interesting that i thought i would talking about what we did.

We were asked to go to different departments where we were mixed up with different students from graphic design and illustration. the session started with mixing all of us students randomly. from this, we were asked to team up with the person next to us and come up with a word using our surname and we ended up with Sausage Rain in my team. Then we were asked to think up ideas to what kind of product our title we came up with would be.

So as a team of two we were coming up with simple ideas that ended up becoming all sorts of products. from this, we had to pick one idea and pitch it to the class. After pitching we were to vote who had the best ideas in the class and that the selected teams were going to lead the next task. We were chosen as one of the selected teams as our idea was picked by many teams in the class.

The next task was for the teams that didn't get selected to team up with the leading teams, from this we were to improve our idea, Many new ideas aroused from the people who joined and we began making the original idea even better. We ended up having to pitch our new idea to the class again with our newly formed team and from this we were to decide which team had the best idea. unfortunately, even though our idea gained votes we did not win the majority of votes.

We then were assigned as a class to work on this idea to produce a small advert for the idea that won, which i wish was our team but none the less we started forming new ideas and split up into small teams to create different props for our product. we created the advert really quickly as we did not have much time left. and were to showcase it in the theatre where all the second years were present.

There were three groups including ours that were presenting their ideas for the product they made in their session. We all viewed each advert and were to chose which group had the best advert, unfortunately, our group did not win but that is not really the point of this whole session.

What i experience in this session opened my thought process as to the possibilities that come from teaming up with others and from such a simple system that gave us a way not only to communicate as to what we can do with an idea but to also make it better by involving more people.

This is what must be going on in big companies that have teams of animation, graphic designers and illustrators working on producing products, which is why collaboration is important and why us creatives should work together.

Weekly 6

Starting this week i decided over the weekend that the backgrounds were taking to long and that the colours were not working well from what i see, which was distracting me from the main task of starting the animation, looking at the amount of angles i have to work on will take to long and will decease the amount of time i will have on animating the character which is the main focus of this brief.

I want to concentrate on clearly portraying her feeling in the scene, which is how i'm going to showcase the narrative, i'll be doing this by looking at reference images of expressions and how they are animated or rather how people (actors) express emotions from films. the emotion that I want to express the most is anger is she starts losing her patients waiting for the bus.

With how things are going from making this new decision to not colour in the backgrounds but rather get on with starting the animation i have already manged to get 6 seconds of draft animation done which is a good start but i want to get most of the draft animation done as quickly as possible so that i could move on to lining the frames and colouring the character in, if i have time i will go back and colour the background in.

heres the first 6 seconds of draft animation showcasing a quick pan to the right then zooming on to the character off her looking around and then getting a message which i am still yet to draft animate it :

this gif does not include the first three second pan to the right because there is not much movement, so this is showing the next three seconds of her moving her head to check her surroundings and hopefully getting a text message.

weekly 5

Starting the week i got on to designing and colouring the backgrounds for my animation, whilst drawing with flat colours i thought about what i can add to the scene and how i could use the assets for other angles (7 different angles).  from looking at what I've created it just did not look right and was taking to long to make backgrounds which i'm starting to think of an alternative way to make the backgrounds work with the character.

here is an example of the flat background iv'e made so far:

I've been influenced by the colours from the photographs i took by colour picking and changing the saturation to make the colours brighter and blend well with the colour palette for my main character, i hope by next week i would have made a conclusion as to what i want to do for my background.

I've also have made a new character design sheet which now showcases that my character is an artist ready with her bags to go to an art convention to sell her art. The reason as to why i gave her a casual look and is holding loads of things such as bags is to show, its to showcase that shes a mature adult. heres the character design sheet

here's the finished character design, as you can see the character looks older with casual clothes and she looks like a creative character which is what i wanted to portray. On the right of the character design is the colour pallet which i thought about carefully an stuck with tertiary colours which fits warm and cold colours together.

hope to start animating by next week and have enough time to create a draft animation which i can line and colour which im looking forward to, so that i can concentrate on the character's narrative. I mostly want to focus on my main characters expressions so that the viewer can feel the emotions going through her situation of missing the bus without having any dialogue.

------- Artist research 365 day's of sketching by Atey Ghailin

This book is very inspirational when i found out about it from one of my friends, the artist challenged himself to draw within 2 hours everyday for a year; this was to try practicing story telling as said in his sketchbook, this was because hes a professional game artist working at Riot games. this intrigued me when first reading about it and then i looked at his concept drawings and i could not believe that the artist was able to draw such amazing concept art within two hours which he explains throughout the book by tutorials.

One of the main interests in this book is the way he uses colours in that he has a main colour which is apparent and then is able to use other colours that work, which i want to understand for this project. The reason as to why colour is important for this project is to figure out what colours work together and is pleasing to the eye, heres an example :

If i could understand how Atey or rather how colours work together, i would be able to make my backgrounds and characters fit well in a composition which is what i want to achieve with this project from finding out about this book, it has inspired me to experiment more with hard brushes rather then the air brushy soft brushes that i like to use for most of my compositions. 

I hope i could get the understanding whilst experimenting and looking more into Atey's drawings through his sketch book and socials websites which he highlights at the front of the book after the first page.

Here's the book cover and some of my favorite pieces which has inspired the colour choice i have gone with for my project:

I've also looked at the way his lighting works in these images which has given me a develop understanding which i hope to showcase in the animation, lighting is very important and i want to hopefully get the right lighting to give depth to the character in the scene which I'm animating.