Lifting Tower Project study task 3 (2) completion of animation

Process

At first, I started animating straight ahead to portray natural movement, then I was advised to look at my survival guide to understand each point in the image below

and this was the end result of the lines, with the in-betweens. I'm happy with this result.

Then I coloured it in and realised that I should have cleaned it up because of the black background in this example

(Gif didn't work properly so here's a link)

Thoughts on Process

Using TVPaint for the first time was difficult until I quickly developed my knowledge of how each tool works, there were a few hiccups like the transform tool not working properly by moving my drawing when I'm about to use it and etc

I should have started the project off at a higher resolution and used bolder lines to make it less difficult to fill in and look sharper in the end result.

Here is the final animation that I quickly composed on after effects, then rendered on premier with a colour filter to boost up the saturation to pop out the colours.

lifting tower project study task 3 (1) generating ideas

Draft ideas:

- Thumnail sketches of the theme "christmas"
- 2 Thumbnail storyboards

through the keyhole (using thw window from the projector mapping)

Drop the present

Collaboration:

- Rey and I had similar idea's

  - We decided to combine "Drop the present" idea with his, to form "the present falls, surpirse!"(comedic animation)

Storyboard:

- Rey did the storyboard.

- Rey designed the characters from his idea.

- I did the colour boards, making sure the colours are light, so that it can bee seen on the wall.

- Keeping the colours light and saturated is important as it will need to appear on the wall.

statement of intent, study task 1

Brief explanation:

Small brief

- Will be attempting to do live briefs from 11 secs club, loopdeloop, D&AD and YCN

Main brief

- Making an animated documentary about my origins

  - Exploring history

  - Finding out how people came to Leeds

  - How they formed the community

Thoughts:

- Watch waltz with Bashir and any other documentary 

- Talking to people in my community

  - My Father for his journey and how he contributed to building the community.

  - My Uncle for his journey and knowledge of the history of Iraq.

  - My best friend Mother for her journey and how she contributed to the community.

    - She is also making a documentary about her father in Iraq

    - She also wants to be a part of my project and help showcase the animation at film festivals.

Love is love breif study task 2 (1)

Went for a simple approach shown in the example below

Had a colour change when working on the animation, I decided that everything should be similar colours, as its love I went with a red theme, here is the original colours that I changed to fit the colour scheme I decided on.

As you can see it looks better in the first image above!

Applied animation week 16 (final week)

With only three day left I quickly moved on to editting my dads voice as it was important for the animation, I basically went through both audio clips selecting which was the best version of each sentence and placed it in the time line, I did this with Rey so that I had a second opinion on what sounds better. After selecting the best sentences I placed it all together and changed the pitch and speed to make it lower voice for pitch and then sped it up with speed to get it close to his original voice. the purpose for this is so that I can speed up the audio as it was 2 minutes and 49 seconds long which does not fit our timings for our animation which is a lesson for the future, to make sure that I record the voice with the anamatic open for the voice actor. After speeding it up and taking gaps out of the audio I was left with a 1 minute and 55 second audio clip which I passed on to Grace as she was compositing everything together.

All of this was done on audacity and did not take to long to do, allowing me to continue with animating the closing book scene which surprising didnt take to long as all I had to do is draw the page falling down and fitting to the reverse opening sequence of the book which I did struggle with at first as I had no idea which frame I had to combine my page falling to. so I set up a few ruler lines to guide me which was all lined up with the reverse book opening:

After that was done which did take a bit of tie since I had to match it up correctly so it would transition properly, this is what it looked like.

I also forgot to mention that I added the name of the book for both sequences.

All that was left to do for animating was the leaves flying ou of the page and then falling which I decided to do on after effects as I wanted to use the assets that grace made of the leaf, this was a difficult task as I had to constantly duplicate the leaves, key frame it and pre compose them in after effects, heres the process,

After completing this sequence I sent it off to Grace so that she can add the sequences in the animation, little did I know that when I saw the animation so far I found a few mistakes that I informed Grace about and that she said she would fix when she has everything done, I did help them with how each scene should look like and how it should transition, and I'm happy that we have finished this animation on time.

I loved the music choice and sound effects Grace added to the animation helping with the flow of my Fathers narrator voice in the process. 

Here is the final animation:

this is the compressed version, the HD file is too big so I will place the video in the submission folder.

To finish this project of Grace and Rey took the roles of making the DVD screener and Preskit, I helped both of them with deciding what images we should use and how we should present it, and here is the examples of the final thing:

(this also was the cover for the dvd pack)

And this ends our project, it was a fun project but many problems occoured for myself and the team because of time management, hopefully this animation is good enough to submit to festivals but after we clean up a few mistakes here and there.

Applied animation week 15

I started this week off with the keyframe animation for the book scenes, where I first did a test of what I think or how I think the book should look like and how it will open. I informed my teammates to continue with creating the assets and backgrounds so that they are ready to be animated by all of us.

Here is the test I conducted which I found very easy to do:

I made a few mistakes here and there in terms of resolution but that was all quickly sorted once I realised I was working on the wrong canvas size.

On the program, I was using called Clip Studio Paint, they have a perspective ruler, and this is how I was able to make sure that the book opened correctly, here's a screen shoot to demonstrate the ruler in action as it not only helped with the process of making the book but it helped me creating the background;

So I moved on to creating the line art of the draft animation with the background lines which I then gave to Rey to do the in-betweens and here is the example:

no in-betweens

with in-betweens

Rey mentioned to me that it was a little difficult at first to in-between the lines I created but he managed to do a great job!

from this, I moved on to placing the base colours with shading and highlights and here is how the first frame looked like with this new colouring technique I adopted over experimentation with some previous illustrations I made:

I continued colouring like this throughout the sequence and I'm so proud that I managed to complete my first colour animation of the year and here is the final version of the book opening:

Since this was all keyframed I had a bit of difficulty with the transitioning to white but I managed to do it using a dark purple gradient as you can see in the final example above, all that's left to do is make the leaves flying off the paper and falling down and then create the closing book sequence which I hope to do next week. I also have to edit my father's voice as I've recorded him twice with different voices, I plan to get it all done by next week hopefully before the deadline and also help the team out with anything that's left to do.

Applied animation week 14

Yet again due to handling modules for submission has pushed me far behind schedule and has ruined the time schedule I was to follow, although after finishing and submitting all of the other modules I had some time to make a plan of action with my teammates as to what I need to do and what they should consider finishing, and with that I managed to record my Fathers voice whilst also correcting all my grammar in the script, as my dad found it difficult to say parts of the narrator's script, here's the final version of the script:

My plan for the next 2 weeks is to finish the animations I have to do which involves the book scenes that I've already mentioned, whilst helping my teammates with some of the scenes and backgrounds we have to create. I hope we can finish the animation in time for submission. 

Project report

Cuberush redlight challenge

I went to find a competition to finish my 3rd responsive, since I had already tried animation and succeeded with 2 of the submission I felt like doing an illustration. A friend recommended me to go on a website called cubebrush where they host weekly challenges and competitions every month, the theme of this week(15) was "redlight", I quickly thought about what I should create as I had a lot of ideas, so I started to thumbnail throughout the week trying to create a simple composition that will not take long to make as I've only got a few days to complete.

So I started with these thumbnails and tried to develop some of them, and here is the result:

So here is the process of developing the thumbnails, as this challenge is character based I had to find a composition that will give off the impression of "Red light" then I decided to go simple with a pose that would not take long to draw and with an object, floating in the air which I decided to be a red crystal.

I then started on the lineart that took a while with a bit a trouble with the hands, but I used a 3d program called DesignDoll to help me with hand reference, once the lineart was done I moved on to colouring the base.

unfortunately, I didn't save screenshots of the later stages of this drawing but I learned a lot about colouring techniques in terms of shadows and highlights, resulting in the final result which is a big jump from this piece. I looked at a few references here and there to help me with the composition and colouring, here is a Pinterest link to my board of references  

I love the final turnout and would consider this to be the bigger project out of all the briefs I've tried to work on, as it was not easy to create this piece of artwork. submitting it to the website was quite simple, all I had to do was make an account and submit to the challenge, here's a link

hope I win as it looks like I have 5 likes currently as I'm writing this blog, the more likes I get the more likely I can win which I have to wait for! 

here is the art board:

Applied animation week 11

Due to some work I had to do through easter, I only managed to work on refining the script a little with my dad and hopefully it will be done soon. and hopefully, I can start on animating my parts of the animation which includes the book scenes and a bit of the keyframing of the merchants shaking hands. not doing any of this work for two weeks has put me slightly behind but I hope to catch up soon.

Loopdeloop chicken

The theme for this months (March) loopdeloop is "Chicken". During March I thought I would have the chance to create something to submit but unfortunately, I missed the deadline again. But apart from that, I had an idea for the theme, the idea was making two people in cars play chicken, and as they are heading towards each other a chicken appears on the road, ending with the two drivers having to swirl around to the other side they were facing. I loved the fact that I included 2 concepts that people can relate or reference too, the 2 concepts being "why did the chicken cross the road?" and "let's play chicken, or are you afraid?".

After coming up with the idea, I immediately came up with a small description of the concept and created some storyboards. here are the storyboards:

as you can see the storyboard is very long but that's to keep the anticipation before the surprise of the chicken crossing the road.

After the completion of the storyboard, I didn't have time to start on it straight away as I had to focus on my other work resulting in limiting my time to create the animation and submit. Final week of the deadline approached quickly, I had to change my idea as it was too complex and would take a while to finish, I discussed with a friend about an idea I just came up with which developed into a ninja chicken, it was a very simple concept of a ninja chicken using a staff to dodge the rocks attacking been thrown at him, I only had 3 days to quickly make the animation.

Creating a style that was simple enough to animate was quite easy since I already had a reference to the chicken I drew in the storyboard above. As it was a simple shape I managed to draw quickly but not quick enough to complete it for the competition. here is the result of what I got done, and should consider finishing for my own benefit:

What I've learned from this, is that I really need to organize my time for the animation work I need to do, I've realized that this style I've developed or rather learned, is simple and quick to produce, and has open my variety to styles I should consider, as it will help with getting animations and concepts done on time.

art board:

11 seconds club ressponsive brief march

March's 11 seconds club animation contest was difficult as I have never lipped synced to an audio clip before, I managed to submit a day before the deadline which I was proud of since it's the first successful submission for responsive.

The process of achieving this took a while because I had to learn the basics of how lip syncing worked. I first decided on what program I was going to use, I choose Animate CC because I wanted to experiment with its capabilities of adding sound clips to the timeline, I then learned that you can change the audio clip to stream so that I can hear every sound/note on each frame which was very helpful.

The audio that was downloadable from the website featured 2 people having a conversation. when I first listened to the audio, it sounded like two men in their 50's talking to each other as if there was a business discussion happening between them. so imagined what the scene could have been like but was unfortunately not included in the final result as the 2 characters were taking much of the space that will be explained through the process I undertook.

After setting up everything in Animate CC I needed to learn how lip syncing worked, I already had some knowledge of how it worked so I just found a mouth reference sheet that I could work from. I learned about this from a famous YouTuber under the name "Domics" who creates 2D animations that involve a lot of lip syncing, he also created a tutorial I watched a long time ago (around the time it was released link for lip syncing)  here is the reference sheets I used, 1 2 to help me with understanding the mouth movement used for each pronounced word.

I progressed with just animating each mouth right next to each other on the canvas (voice 1 on the left and voice 2 on the right) heres a screen shot of what it looked like:

As you can see above I have the audio clip in a layer at the top and the mouth layers underneath (it does not really matter where the audio layer is, but I prefer it at the top so I can see the decebels highlighted by the orange sound wave). After creating most of the mouth shapes Ithat I did striagh ahead I started to notice a pattern that I could go back and use the other frames to quickly finish the lip syncing.

After a few tries trying to create the right shape mouth, I started to get the hang of it. most of the time I would imagine how my mouth moves when I say each word, Does it stretch and get thin or get tight and thick, this method plus the referance sheet helped to figure out if the mouth looked wrong or not. I spent most of my time on lip syncing. When it was done I moved on to how i'll be composing the scene, to include both characters and lips. this idnt take long because of the limited movement from the characters, I mostly wanted to concentrate on the lip sync as it was my first time. here is a screen shot of the faces I pictured them to have for the voices:

Heres the final result:

Art board:

this is the letter I received after submitting to 11secondsclub:

Applied animation week 8

Starting this week off straight into the script writing as I had some idea of how I want the story to be played out, but throughout this week one of the Tutors noticed something wrong with my script. I've been writing it wrong this whole time. I never knew there was a way of creating scripts and was directed to look into script writing. Throughout learning how to write a script from various websites that all pretty much had the same concept, I wanted to see how a script gets visualised, so I tested it by Reading a script and watching a scene from Cars 2. It's astounding how the script fits so well with the animation, here's the script and video:

http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Cars-2.html



After doing this I was inspired to create the script ready for next week as a final draft that Grace can develop storyboards,

Here is the First draft which I still think needs refining:

As you can see above this is my first attempt making a proper script which is used for industry, I instantly understood the techniques required to make the script and had something we can base the storyboard on. Whilst Grace was making the storyboard I helped Rey with deciding what character to look for and design, we also thought about the process we were going to use to animate, which Grace suggested to us that we should create assets as it would be easier and quicker to animate.

Last week I mentioned that we would possibly have a narrator, which I asked Rey to voice. So we recorded some of the narrator's lines using different voices that Rey could make, here are a couple of examples Rey voiced:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BxIyDr0S-ishamxMUDNaV0ZWSVE?usp=sharing

I showed these examples of Rey's voice to one of the tutors and they said that it would not work as it does not suit the theme of what we are going for and they suggested that either one of our parents should do it.

towards the end of the week, Grace had finished the story board:

hopefully, I will edit/refine the script over the holiday so that I can record the audio with my dad.

Roald Dhal responsive week 7 final week

This week was the final week, the deadline was on Thursday at midnight leaving us with limited time to get everything done. On Tuesday I met up with Ash, hoping to get some good news that she had finished the Lineart we set her to finish over the weekend to be ready for colouring, and she told me that she had lost her tablet pen which caused her to not have anything done and she found the tablet pen on the day. I asked her to finish them quickly on the day so that Mary and I could colour it.

Later on that Tuesday evening i fell ill causing me to stop working because of the inability to move from the shivering, I stayed at home on Wednesday and informed Mary that I was ill, from that she tried her best to just get the work done as quickly as possible because Ash had finished the lineart on Tuesday night. I also asked Mary if she could do some colouring on my composition once she had finished working on hers. She also mentioned to me that she didn't know how to watercolour digitally, and suggested that we keep it to flat colours which i agreed on as the deadline was approaching quickly and we didn't have time to experiment.

Mary sent me a few messages showcasing the colouring she did for her piece which turned out really nice but needed some shadows which i assisted on when i came in on Thursday. We all met after the PPP session, As I had not done any colouring i decided to quickly to fix and colour my composition and added some shadows, as I was working on the colouring Mary started to get on with Ash's composition which she finished lining after redoing the lines. After i finished with my piece i moved on to adding lighting and shadows to the other composition so that they are consistent and to also give depth to the compositions.

Here are the final compositions:

I mostly worked on colouring my composition, and then Adding shadows and lighting to all compositions, which you can see above. Mary worked with Ash with Ash's composition of the creature interms of the flat colouring.

With 7 hours left Ash leaves unexpectedly leaving Mary and I to go through the brief and prepared design boards which presents our work as a team, we already had a few ides for the design boards we discussed on monday and went ahead with it.

here are the design boards:

Page one explains the character design process we all undertook to get these character to look like they were part of the same art house style, also with a description of how we thought about each character.

Page two explains all the final compositions, all informed by the  information below it explaining what we liked about our piece and the description of whats happening in each piece.

With it settled we submitted and this collaboration was finished.

This whole journey to complete the project was difficult, but we managed. Having to keep the team together and help each other was the hardest part and i wish i could of been better at managing and organising my time, because of the bad communication with one of the members it may seem like The other member has lost any interest to work with animators which is a shame, and has set a bad example for animators. I've learned a very important lesson from this and will remember never to repeat the same mistakes for future projects. It was really fun to work with an illustrator but i feel sad for the problems that occoured with the other team mate. I now wonder how well we are going to do in the competition.