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:
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.
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.
This week we prepared our presentation together on google slides showcasing everything we have done and what we have found from our research, and what we are going to do for our Animated documentary through our Gantt chart as to who is doing what and where we should be. The presentation was mostly research and sketches of character designs, mood boards and draft storyboards, with what we had Grace made an animatic of what we are hoping to get done. which unfortunately had a few black screens as we did not have any idea or drawing to represent what we wanted.
We got asked many questions such as "how are you going to fill the gaps?" or "Do you think you will finish the animatic soon so that we can start on the production?" and so these are questions we must reflect and prepare and action plan for whilst also following the Gantt chart schedule we have made.
Here are the draft storyboards I did last week which is not final and still unfinished but it was just to help me visualise what I want to create for the animation:
After the crit session, I did some more research into how silk is actually made nowadays and I found this video with Grace:
From this, I wanted to include the process of making silk in the story somehow. I discussed with Grace as to what we could do to add this process in and so we decided to show the Silk Goddess collecting the cocoons and turning it into threads.
On the topic if thinking about the story we thought about a book opening in a library with one of the paper flying out turning into leaves and the leaves fall into the pond where the Silk goddess picks it up. I also talked with Rey about the Narrators voice for the animation and he seems like he would be a good choice if we were to add narration which is going to be likely.
hopefully, by next week I will have started a script based on the new ideas we discussed.
We met up this week to discuss the roles we were told to do from last week's group tutorial, as we were planning the roles Mary warned us about how much time we have left which we (Ash and I ) replied with we work better under time pressure, which is not a good habit as Mary is always on top of her work and that we are bringing her down, which is upsetting and she should not have to go through this. I did learn that it is important to be on top of the work so that you have more time to get other work done such as the composition, and I should improve to keep organized for any work that I need to do.
Aside from that we gave each other roles to do which were to all make quick thumbnail roughs which I can define a little to make it easier for Mary to do the rough lines of each roughs, after the roughs are done Mary will send them over to Ash where she will be lining everything and hopefully after she is finished send the colouring to be done by Mary and myself. I also have thought about the clothes Matilda is wearing which Ash said she will be modifying to give a bit of detail as it looks to plain, I hope she does a good job of it.
Here is the roughs I did so far for the group of my composition and Ash's composition:
Mary's thumbnail looked like rough lines so I asked her to send it to Ash to move on the next process of our composition, I'm hoping Ash gets them done as quickly as possible over the weekend.
This week I decided that we should all decide the final subject as to what we want to create an animated documentary on since we had a few options, which are The journey of Marco Polo, the History of the Silk Road or the history of Silk. The end result between us was the History of silk because we think we could cover a little of Silk Road and Marco polo's history so I started with drafting a small script. Here is what I've written:
Silk
Establishing shoot inside a library looking towards a book under the name of “silk”, the book then opens, the pages combine and become silk, the question is asked about the discovery of silk and where it came from, the narrator is introduced and says “Where does silk come from, I hear you ask? Well I’m glad you asked, let’s go back to where it all started” as the event (voice over) is happening we are following the silk falling and turning into leaves and as this happens the scenery changes to the silk goddesses home. The camera then follows one of the leaf’s falling down and gently lands into the silk goddess pond, the narrator then starts to explain the history of silk,
“We now enter a time where silk was discovered by the silk goddess named Leizu who loved her garden and is where she first discovered these silk worms. These silkworms would leave there cocoons on the leaves and she would obtain them and begin the process of taking the silk.”
As described above we zoom out from the pond into an establishing shot of the silk goddess back garden, where we find Leizu walking towards the trees. The camera then changes to one of the silk worm's point of view looking above towards Leizu coming in from the right, this then changes to behind shoot looking down from Leizu perspective collecting the cocoons. Which then transitions to the cocoons being held and being woven.
“This process of silk being used to make clothes was hidden from the world for 2000yrs and was then found from travellers that visited China. Trading started to begin only between royal families as silk was very valuable.”
The scene progresses with travellers coming to china, establishing shot of the outside gate.
Even though this is what I have written so far we have more ideas as to how we can include Marco Polo simply by showing him traveling across a silk road map such as this:
Grace had a brilliant idea of making it seem like a timeslapse of him walking across different backgrounds, like in lion king:
From this I also remebered the Short music video called White horses that shows a main protagonist running across backgrounds and interacting with various elements which I hope we can create when I get the script done but, it's very vague as to what I want to create.
Here's the link to the White horses music video:
Grace developed some quick concepts throughout the week and here are examples she presented:
Rey did some character designing of Animals and people which hopefully develops into final designs. and we now have to prepare for next weeks presentation and show what we have so far.
We all met up before this tutorial to discuss what we needed to do, whilst discussing we were watching Matilda to get some inspiration for the composition thumbnails we drew, I decided to focus my composition on the scene where Matilda is talking to her dad and he replies with "I'm smart your dumb", I could just imagine what it would look like as an illustration for the children book, which I described to the rest of the members to get their opinion as to what else I can add to the composition to make it fit in with their compositions. I also gave my opinions on the thumbnails they constructed and what it is we can all do to make the illustrations as part of a coherent series.
Mary came up with some questions for the tutorial so that we know what needs improving. questions consisted of if characters needed redesigning to make them detailed or if we needed to recompose the thumbnails we are proposing not only for the tutorial but to the competitions.
We also thought about how we are going to work together to create these compositions, we thought about it as we all do bits of each composition, as this would mean we all collaborated. We went to the meeting and showcased our work which was minimal compared to everyone else and caused a bit of curiosity as to what we have done as a group in general because we didn't have much to show (partly because I forgot to bring my laptop to the meeting) but besides this we got some feedback as to what we should be doing in order to get everything done before the deadline for the competition.
Feedback such as making the backgrounds detailed as kids are interested in detailed drawings but keep the characters simple, try to make a house style which we can all work in so that there are no conflicting styles which helps us with getting the final look to be consistent. Lastly to give each other roles for creating the compositions, One of the other members from the other teams suggested that one person does the roughs, someone does the lining and the final person does the colouring to basically work to our strengths. which sounds like a good idea rather then everyone doing different things then passing it on to the next person.
I like the feedback that was given and the direction we are working towards, I hope to sort out the roles next week and get on with creating the final compositions.
This week I did more research into the Silk Road and the origins and discovered that Silk was hidden from the world for 2000 years in china, and it first came about when a lady called Leizu who is known as the Silk Goddess who discovered Silk worms in her garden and helped with the creation of silk clothes.
I pretty much just discussed what I had found out about silk and how people later found out about it through The royal Chinese family marrying off their princess to other royal families in other countries and that travellers would visit and find out about Silk through the markets.
Alongside the research, I have found I looked into what other material or items were sold along the silk road just out of curiosity, and I came across http://www.advantour.com/silkroad/goods.htm
This website not only showcases what goods were sold along the silk road but how it travelled across Asia to Europe, and how people started to benefit from trading on the Silk Road. here are a few goods that were traded along the Silk road.
"Rome received spices, fragrances, jewels, ivory, and sugar and sent European pictures and luxury goods. Eastern Europe imported rice, cotton, woollen and silk fabrics from Central Asia and exported considerable volumes of skins, furs, fur animals, bark for skin processing, cattle and slaves to Khoresm."
many fancy words and here is a quick list of basic items or rather the most traded goods amongst the Silk Road:
Art
Horses
Wine
Vegetables and fruit
Home furniture
Weapons
Ore's (eg iron, metal)
Medicines
Tea and Rice
Clothes
Animals
slavery
And the list goes on and on.
I will attempt to draw concepts of Leizu because I'd like to contribute to a few character designs with Grace and Rey, but it seems like I'm falling into the Director role for this project because they are developing the character designs.
I met up with Mary today, unfortunately, the other member did not attend today but we kept them up to date through messenger (although it did take her a while to reply to our messages). Besides that Mary and I showed the development of our character since last week, Mary changed Mrs Trunchbull a lot and made her big and strong yet simple to match the style we are going for, as for myself I drew a final character design for matilda coloured in ready to be used in the concepts. Mary also drew Mrs Honey as she had an idea as to what scene she would like to compose but I asked her to wait until we take an insight of what people liked, we did this by making a questionnaire.
The questionnaire was specific to the characters we are going to be creating a concept. Since Mary and I were doing 2 characters from Matilda, I thought about a question that involves finding out everyone's favorite scenes, from this information we can determine what is the most uncommon scene. The idea is that we don't create famous scenes as we suspect that others who enter this competition are going to recreate them, we want to be unique in the crowd. The next question was about people's thought's on Mrs Trunchbull in Matilda so that mary gets an understanding of how people perceive her and this is to also identify what it is she can incorporate into her final design of Mrs Truchbull.
The final question was made for our other member as she has decided to do a mystical creature from Charlie and the Chocolate factory, the question was to identify what creatures people can remember from the film or book if they had read it, which will help with what creature she will be creating.
here is the questionnaire filled in:
(scan from Mary)
As you can see we went to many people and collected through tallying and answers. I had a few options to choose from with Mary, with the options we have, I formulated an idea of what I wanted to create for the final composition. here is the final design for matilda I made:
Hopefully, we will start making drafts of the final compositions ready to be made into final concepts for the competition.
this month’s loopdeloop theme is "Cute" which sparked my interested. I went to find out what i need to create to submit something in time which was difficult because of the time management in terms of not having time to work on it whilst working on other projects. But besides that, I did have an idea which involve an animation loop i did a few years back of a character playing with string, here is the example: http://sta.sh/0b4yvy6xs8b
Instead of doing a character as i was thinking about the time i had and how complex it would be i moved on to thinking of drawing a new animal character that was simple to create, here is the example of the designs and tests:
At first i wanted to just concentrate on making a cat as ive not drawn one before and i wanted to experiment to see what i could come up with in designing using simple shapes. from top to bottom, u can see how i start to creating a base shape that looks like a cat and is simple to draw. I end up using the cat in the middle, the next step was creating the eyes and i wanted to make it as simple as possible so i tested some eye shapes and decided that i like the closed eyes you can see at the bottom left of the picture above.
I realised that i was having a bit of a problem with the anatomy of the cat and how they move, so i decided to do studies of cats, here are is an example:
All i did was look up anatomy of cats and tried to understand how they work and this definitely helped when it came to making the final designs of the character in this example:
I asked around and everyone one replied with it being so cute, which was 1 aspect to the whole project. i then moved on to creating a simple story which loops which turned out to be very similar to my old animation which is linked above. the concept of a ball of string entering from the left and the character interacting with it then gets taken away and this process loops. And since i had the concept i moved on to the animation on Animate CC Through the process i learned very quickly that it was quite hard to think about the motion of the cat in terms of arms and tail. but then i developed a technique, i used the technique mostly on the tail. To move the tail smoothly i used circles inspired by my friend and this was a really good way to understand the motion, as it moved like a chain, heres the progress:
heres the final incomplete animation as i did not have time to do it and by this time i missed the deaad line:
i hope to try and make another loopdeloop for next months competition and submit it. I should also consider the time i have to do these animations and just try to mange my time to be able to complete these competitions.
