Working in Teams of four please collectively choose one title from the titles listed below and

you must create a short 3d animation lasting a minimum of 60 seconds. Storyboards for the animation and an animatic must be produced first and presented to class.

To complete by the end of this academic year (2017/2018) we have been given a group animation to develop and produce. The brief includes eight options, as a group we are meant to discuss which one will be subject to development for our project and produce a 3D animation to submit to our tutor and class.

Plot summaries to pick:

INT. PSYCHIATRIST WAITING ROOM 
Wide shot revealing the grim reaper, an old man reading a newspaper and an old lady sitting respectively. The grim reaper wears a bored expression and the room is motionless with the exception of the old man, shaking in fear next to him. A quick look at the old lady adjacent and we hear a snap. She's died. For the grim reaper the monotony returns and we pan up to the clock as time continues to pass. 
Suddenly the door to the psychiatrists office creaks open, catching the grim reaper's attention. With caution he creeps through into a long dark room, where the psychiatrist is sitting. He is dramatically lit, a large window behind him silhouettes his chair making his form unreadable. We can only see a pair of cold white eyes. The grim reaper makes his way across the room in a ghostly manner, seemingly never lifting his feet from the ground. Once he sits down the psychiatrist pulls open a drawer at his desk, revealing the reaper's file. He spares a quick glance before looking up at the grim reaper and starting a timer for the session. It begins with a Rorschach test, an ink blot which triggers a flashback for the grim reaper. The grim reaper remembers a time when death was much more exciting and common, when great battles were fought and men were beheaded. This is when he was most happy. We return to present day as the psychiatrist changes the card to another image. This one triggers a much more depressing memory for the reaper. A much more modern setting, where people die of old age. We see the grim reaper waiting endlessly for people to keel over. Families saying their goodbyes in the hospital room, surrounded by equipment sustaining the ageing life. Old men fighting battles on the chess board as they reach old age. Once more we return to the psychiatrists office. The reaper's visions of depression are interrupted by the psychiatrist, tapping his watch. The session has ended and with that the light comes on revealing a small round man with large rimmed glasses. He taps his watch again. The grim reaper sullenly rises from his chair to leave, not before the psychiatrist turns on the television. Disregarding his patients presence he is already deeply invested in the entertainment in offer. As fast as the noise started its interrupted by a news broadcast, catching the from reaper's attention. 
And what news, world war 3 has been declared. This is the answer to the reaper's bout of depression. A global catastrophe. With new found life and vigour the grim reaper begins a transformation, completely coated in optimism he dances in starlight, and grasps his scythe. 
Cut back to the office and he's stood proudly atop the desk. The psychiatrists head slides in two like a shattered iceberg.

In order to create an effective title we decided to try and create a pun that could somehow sum up the content or the main events without giving away too much and spoil the ending.

Following Eryk's suggestion we agreed that Death wish suits the animation well.

The Grim reaper is literally wishing for something to happen or simply wishing to find an solution to its depression, on the other hand a death wish can mean to embark in a dangerous mission, which can both be referred to the fact that the GR is visiting a psychiatrist (whose presence appears to be quite scary in the animation) and to the fact that aforesaid mission will also, in fact, end up being threatening to humanity.

Since the very first interpretation of the brief we all agreed we would have fallen in the Comedy category with our short animation.

There are in fact different types of comedy style we decided to incorporate:

Black or Dark comedy- Deals with disturbing subjects such as death, drugs and/or terrorism

Character comedy- Derives humor from a persona invented by a performer audience

Cringe comedy- A comedy of embarrassment, in which the humor comes from inappropriate actions or words

Musical comedy- A form of alternative comedy where humor is mostly derived from music with (or sometimes without) lyrics

Spoof- The recreating of a book, film or play for humor; it can be used to make fun of, or ridicule, a certain production

Surreal comedy- A form of humour based on bizarre juxtaposition, absurd situations, and nonsense logic

Our strong selling point is the funny set up of the animation, the effectiveness of the character design and goofiness of the movements, the tension that leads to a funny/ bizarre ending and the sound will all help to deliver the comedic outcome which should make our animation really stand out.

Approximately 4 minutes.

According to our final animatic the animation should last round about 3.50 min, however the duration might decrease or increase depending.

Assignments may seem straightforward, but I have had quite a few students turn in the wrong assignment, be it the incorrect exercise or the incorrect format. Typically reading the syllabus can easily prevent this.

The reason this is important—not only in class, but in your animation career going forward—is because in a real movie production you will be required to thoroughly understand shot briefing notes before beginning your shot. Instill the habit early of following notes and understanding shot direction. As a result, you will enjoy a long and healthy career in animation.

Sometimes I find myself underestimating how much effort each assignment requires. Even a bouncing ball can take a few days for a beginner. It may look easy, but once you start panic and stress can set in.

I went through a similar experience during the second half of last year while preparing my final assessment. I had never done a piece of animation before and I was really hard for me to create a time/goals chart for my project since I had no idea how long that would realistically take me. What is going to help me the most is going in anticipating how hard it is going to be, how much work I am going to have to put in. But also, the more space you create for yourself to do great work, the more room you’ll have to make mistakes, and break through natural plateaus that come with mastering any craft. And especially as the assignments get more complicated toward the end of class, time will stretch even more.

So I need to have a good idea of how many hours this project will take and plan accordingly. 

Too often we feel like we are not good enough or experienced enough to give other animators feedback. The truth is, there is no shame in asking for an opinion. It is through looking at other people’s work that we develop our eye. It is through viewing and discussing other people’s work that we develop a community, a sense of togetherness. Plus, it’s a fantastic way to get inspired.

For this upcoming project we really need to take advantage of all the feedback we can get. It will help push our project in the right path. 

We put a lot of hard work and love into each of our projects and it can be really hard sit there and take the feedback when someone is giving you notes on your shot, especially when thinking those feedbacks are wrong or not accurate. We must NOT take it personally. The natural choice is to try and defend ourself, which is understandable, but rather than internalising what someone says, our attention should be on the work itself. It’s easy to hang your head down after a tough critique, but you must realise that you wouldn’t be receiving criticism unless someone believes in your ability to improve. Criticism is a sign of our potential.

Some may not praise our work as much as others, but this is not because they don’t appreciate our work, or have something against the people who work in the group. It comes down to giving a fair critique directed at the work, not to the animator. To be a professional animator means to have to have thick skin, but it also means we are lucky enough to be part of a team, a group of people focused on putting out the best work possible.

This also applies at people within the group. We all produce different work and take inspiration from different artists, but it is essential to be able to keep the communication high and relaxed in the group, to avoid people feeling put aside. Every idea has to be analysed and criticised so that everybody can understand wether or not it could work and ,if not, why.

As a group of professional animators we need to make sure we met copyright standards when using any source of material we collect or take inspiration from. We need to make sure we credit artists for their work when required.

iMac: (27-inch, Late 2012)

Processor: 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory: 32 GB 1600 MK DDR3

Startup Disk: Macintosh HD

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M 2048 MB

Storage: 1TB SATA Disk

Audio: Stereo Speakers and Headphone Port

Ports and connections: SDXC card slo and 4 USB (2 and 3) ports

Mac Book Pro (2015)

Processor: 2.2 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7

Memory: 16GB of 1600MHz DDR3L onboard memory

Operating system: macOS High Sierra

Graphics: Intel Iris Pro Graphics

Storage: 256GB PCIe-based onboard SSD

Audio: Stereo speakers, Dual microphones 3.5mm headphone jack

Wacom Intuos3 

Dimensions: 9 x 12-Inch

Model: PTZ-631W

Adobe:

Photoshop CC 2018

After Effects 2018

Premiere Pro CC 2018

Autodesk:

Maya 2018

BrushOSX 4R7

Nikon 1500 3.0-inch, 921k-dot Vari-angle LCD screen

Lense: Nikon AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-105 mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR Lens

Pinterest- source of references for characters and environments design

Youtube- essential for researching tutorials helpful for the development of the animation and visual references

Youtube mp3 converter- you tube videos sound conversion 

A gantt chart is essential to complete our work since we can keep a record of tasks and manage our time. This is the one we discussed and are currently following as a team.

Our first meeting took place today, we straight away started to choose which ideas sound more appealing to us all. After a quick discussion we decided to focus on only a few of the briefs given, try and develop a good idea for each one of them, ultimately see which one works better but always keeping a back up plan.

The briefs we decided to develop are:

- Computer says nooooo

- The Grim reaper visits a psychiatrist

- Assassin who saves lives instead of taking them

A week after our first meeting we met again to share our ideas and further developments.

We decided to drop the idea of the assassin who saves lives because it represents quite a challenge since it looks like it would involve a lot of movement and it might make things more complicated for us.

We decided to then stick with the first two briefs listed above.

- For Computer says nooooo our first approach is to try and set up a fight between a computer and an employee which could take place in an office space. We took some inspiration from the movie The Incredibles, where Bob (one of the main characters) sits in his boss office. The layout of the scene is quite interesting: symmetrical, grey, boring; everything is carefully positioned and adds meaning to the room, we would like the same feeling into this idea.

The computer rebels to its owner starting a chaotic fight/dance scene which is gonna turn the room into mess. We are still not too sure of the reason why the computer could rebel, we were thinking about what could stop the rebellion, maybe a cleaner unplugs the computer by mistake? 

- For the Grim reaper sees a psychiatrist the discussion has been quite focus in trying to find a good reason why the Grim reaper should actually go and see a psychiatrist without falling in the obvious.

I then had a sudden epiphany and thought "if I were the death I would be quite depressed nowadays, people don't die anymore or at least they don't do it as well as they used to".

Lots of ideas started to come to my mind one after the other.

Maybe the Grim reaper could go to see a psychiatrist to get tested to find out he has all the illnesses in the world? 

We would like to create a funny juxtaposition between the Grim reaper and the psychiatrist.

We are getting close to having to decide to fully develop one project and leave one behind, during today's meeting we compared the main aspects of both ideas, such as plot strength, general difficulties, length, ending and beginning; to evaluate by comparing pro and cons of both briefs.

We came to the conclusion that the Grim reaper brief sound more doable for a few different reasons: the twist we came up with looks more appealing, we have a beginning and we now also have an ending.

During the meeting in fact Thomas suggested  WW3 could break out right as the psychiatric session takes place, giving the Grim reaper a new wave of "vitality" and motivation.

We all agreed it could be a good ending, I also suggested that the ending should be quite comic and to do so we could maybe have the grim reaper chopping the head of the psychiatrist off by mistake.

Everyone appreciated the new suggestions and everyone feels pretty excited about this project so far.

An important improvement has been incorporated in the plot since we decided to add a serie of flashbacks in the story which are going to help us picture how the Grim reaper felt about death in the past compared to how it feels nowadays.

We came up with a few ideas for the flashbacks which are going to be discussed during the next meeting.

We now have to concentrate on the character design of the two main characters:

the Grim reaper 

the psychiatrist

we shared a couple of ideas during the meeting but we agreed to keep researching individually so that by the next meeting or two we can produce and share 4 different interpretations of the two characters, so we can get 4 different prospectives and discuss which visual elements should be kept on and why.

We will share our progress with our tutor Iain during next weeks group meeting and ask for his suggestions and feedback.

- Grim reaper

- Psychiatrist

The grim reaper decides to see a psychiatrist to help him get over the boredom caused by his new boring role in the 21st century. Death is not appealing as much as it used to be and the Lord of death lost its mojo. 

We wanted to push on the comic element for our finale; we had a few discussions during our meetings to find the right way to do it.

At that point we already had agreed on the "actual" ending, we all decided WW3 was going to be announced on TV, event that would finally bring happiness and motivation into the Grim reaper's life again. We had to find a way to make this change of mood as funny and tragicomic as we could.

I suggested the Grim reaper could chop the psychiatrist head off with his sythe by mistake, after a sudden cheerful jump.

I then remembered watching an animation that had the same element in the plot and decided to take inspiration from it.

The animation is called "Laundry day", in the story the protagonist makes an hilarious sailor moon look-alike transformation which I thought would be exactly what we were looking for,.

During this week's meeting we shared some rough character design ideas. 

It was really important for us to get different approaches and the result was interesting and opened up different topic of discussion. For example from the sketches it looks clear the only element incorporated in all sketches is the sythe, which we all agree has to be included. 

Apart from that each submission was different top to bottom.

None of the designs submitted looked appealing enough to me so I spent some time thinking how to really push the charisma of our character to a next level. 

I thought that the main aspect we need to communicate to the viewer is how unlucky the character is: weak, emotionally fragile, easy scared, a sort of grown up child who gets really happy and excited but also really upset and bored.

Since we all agreed there would have not been any speech in our animation I think we really need to push his facial expressions in order to make them come across easily. To do so we need to put the focus in the GR's face which has to look particular.

I then started to think what changes we could bring to the skull.

I started to take in consideration different types of skull until I remembered seeing in a scene from the sward in the stone, a skull used as a piece of furniture by Merlin in his studio, and I thought it looked very close to the idea I had in mind for the character.

I then did some research on Google, looking for fox skulls until I found coyote skulls were just what I was looking for.

Since the there isn't a script in our story we really had to focus on creating quite expressive facial features to help us communicating without the use of the mouth.

I decided to take a look at some examples that gave me the same feeling from a character that I was also trying and bring across myself.

I took a lot of inspiration from old classics such as a small clip from "The sward in the stone" and "Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner", along with a student film I saw in the past which had also featured the Grim reaper, titled "death by lemonade".

Working on the grim reaper character design was a real challenge but truly enjoyable.

Here are some pictures from the original clips I used as inspiration to shape my character.

Some character development from my sketchbook, skulls studies and a variety of facial expressions.

We are now starting to focus on the environments for our animation.

These are the forniture elements we are planning to include in the story, we made a small list of props we will definitely need to use because essentials to the story and less relevant items that we might or might not include basing on the time management.

- 3 chairs

- 1 small coffee table

- magazines (on table)

- 1 plant

- a water dispenser (?)

- 1 door

- 1 armchair (psychiatrist)

- 1 roman couch (patients)

- 1 desk

- 1 TV

- 1 remote

- 1 rug/carpet

- big curtains

- a fishtank (?)

We are now focusing on the flashbacks we will include in our animation. 

They are a key factor to help us convey how happy the grim reaper was in the past while killing people in all sorts of ways and the frustration he feels now that people die so old.

We wrote down a list of ideas we have and started discussing which one is more suitable and why.

Here is a list of our initial ideas.

Some ideas for the boring flashbacks:

Hospital X

Birthday

Shopping

Chess match X

Some ideas for the happy flashbacks:

Apocalypse

Jousting

Gladiator fight

2 Armies war X

Execution: Hanging/Guillotine X

Storyboards are finally completed and as our deadline for our animatics approach we start feeling the pressure of our work.

As much as we all believe in our project we know it is a challenging path we choose and we all want to do our best. 

We now have a month before our work is due to a presentation.

Some pages of the storyboard produced by Thomas Firth (environment/background design) and myself (character design and DP)

To make the endin of our story even more comic and slightly cringworthy we decided to put in act a small transformation that represents the swing of mood inside the head/heart of the grim reaper as he becomes aware that WWIII has been declared.

To do so I suggested we put in act an actual visual transformation, similar to one I saw in an animation about a year ago.

I showed my group my idea and everybody loved it straight away.

Taking inspiration from an animation called "Laundry day" by Guillaume2111 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ5ziNOtoMU) we will set up a Sailor Moon-alike transformation for our grim reaper.

As we were unable to meet our first deadline because of the length of our animation we presented our project a week later.

Despite we still need to work on some aspects of our animatics including the final transformation, which is indeed the trickiest part, we received a lot of useful feedbacks.

Everybody seemed to be positively impressed and amused, which is a big relief.

We gave out feedback sheets to be filled which helped quantifying the level of understanding of the storyline and a few different aspects; we also got asked a lot of questions about the story itself and how we built it and worked on it. 

We will need to show our finished product when back from our Christmas break and ask again for some feedbacks.

Our first version of the animatics we presented to our tutor and class in order to get feedbacks and collect suggestions.

Today we presented a retouched version of our animatics, the overall reaction was again positive, people understood the story enough which is what we were more worried about. 

We got asked many questions from the plot to the character design, it was interesting to see their thoughts regarding our work choices and to also let them know more about the research behind the project.

During this exchange of feedbacks we collected some really useful informations and suggestions that we very carefully listed and talked through during a meeting which took place right as we finished our presentation.

After the group presentation took place we gathered to discussed the results.

We listed the feedbacks given in the feedback sheets and decided which ones to take in consideration. We ultimately agreed there is some changes that have to take place regarding both audio and video. Minor shots should be included or revisited in order to make some scenes more obvious to ensure some key facts really come across easily. 

But it looks to be the main issue is the flashback elements, in fact during our discussion in class the "boredom" element wasn't enphatised enough in the Grim reaper's movements, which is something we really need to look into if we want to make sure the story is clear.

We have allocated tasks to be ready by our next meeting. Miko and I are going to update the animatics while Eryk is going to start looking into the 3D props modelling. 

After further discussion we decided what the next step is going to be. Since Eryk has been so kind to start modelling both scenes this leaves us with having to model the characters.

Here is the list of jobs and people they have been assigned to.

Miko- (modelling) GR

Eryk- (modelling) psychiatrist

Thomas- (textures)

Bea (modelling)- 2 extra charactera

During our meeting we decided to reallocate some tasks as it's going to save us some time. Thomas and I swapped and I am currently working on textures while he will be modelling the two characters.

Eryk has started to model the first environment for our animation: the waiting room

We agreed to keep the design quite simple and low poly.

We are going to play around with textures, trying to keep them as cartoonish as we can.

We found some interesting inspiration online so we decided to apply something called "toon shader", to be applied to both characters and environments.

Eryk, Miko and Thomas are all busy modelling the characters for our animation.

It was a hard stage for us since we didn't fully understand how hard it can be to translate a 2D character into a 3D model without loosing the feeling of it, especially when it's features are so important (like in our case) to the story itself.

A big part of the comedy in our story comes from the facial expressions of our assets.

I have been quite strict about it since I was the one who developed the characters designs, I really wanted them to look as close to my drawings as they possibly could, and for this reason there has been a bit of trouble in the group, as other members of the group were happy with pretty much anything but as the following pictures of the models will show there was still a lot of work to do and I am happy I pushed my friends to do more.

Eryk's first psychiatrist model

Miko's first grim reaper model

A lot changed since the very first models were showed to the group.

The overall look of the model looked very poor at the beginning, but a lot of things were retouched:

-Body/arms/legs relationship has been changed

-Height. The model looked too tall and slander compared to the original drawings

-Head shape. The head was too pointy and high

-Tie has been added

Miko's model was extremely challenging. The original model might look close enough to the original but a lot of work had to be done to make the skull as expressive as it could get.

-A tooth had to be added

-Posture. The body curvature had to be retouched as the grim reaper appears quite straight in the drawings.

-Dress. The outfit had some work done too as it looked too tight to the character, it almost made the grim reaper look like a woman. The bottom of the skirt was too wide open and the waist was way too thin.

The sleeves have also been readjusted to fit a bit more wide.

Here is a picture of the updated models. Much better!

A lot of work had to be done for the two secondary characters in our animation since we encountered some issues at the rigging stage.

In fact the way the models were built wasn't ideal and Eryk had to manually adjust some vertex and resculpt some things (i.e. the woman's mouth).

But since they will be in scene for just about 20 seconds we won't bother spending too much time fixing them than it is necessary.

Here is an updated picture of how the models look so far. 

Here illustrated are the colours we will apply to our environments: the waiting room and the psychiatrist's office.

https://sketchfab.com/models/ff202e8e89134c3f9406528403f658d4 

Above (left) an example of "Toon shading" that will be applied to our environments and characters post texturing.

Above (right) an example of a 3D model whose texture inspired us for our project. 2d look-alike is the style we choose to pursuit.

After receiving the finished environments models from Eryk on the 15th of Jan I started working on the textures which we all agreed would have been pretty much monochromatic and similar to the ones applied to the 3D models.

Here is a picture of the very first waiting rom environment I got from Eryk.

Despite asking Eryk to model each prop separately so that they could be approved by the group before being put into scene, he didn't pay much attention and went ahead modelling an environment which didn't reflect the mood or style of our animation good enough.

Here is a picture of what it looks like.

We had to ask Eryk to follow the original indication more carefully to avoid him doing extra job in the future, and to always double check with the group on progress.

As it can be noticed from the picture the style and the colours chosen for the models don't quite fit the animation, everything feels too real and not very comic.

Giving Eryk more precise information he was able to complete a nice low poly environment for the waiting room, more similar to our animatics.

As previously mentioned we decided to keep the style of our animation quite cartoonish so we decided to keep our textures as simple as possible.

Even if this might sound quite easy to accomplish it was actually quite hard to pick the right colours and create a nice composition.

Every object in fact helps convey the mood of the animation and since there is a big contrast in lighting and vibe between the two rooms I had to carefully make my choices.

After texturing using UV Mapping in Maya and Photoshop CC for more details this is how the waiting room looks like now.

Firstly I rescaled some of the props.

-Room: I scaled the room bigger so that we had enough room in our scene

-Chairs and plant pot got moved closer to the walls

Plant pot and water tank got scaled down as they looked to big and were overtaking the scene a little

I needed to add a few small props in order to make he scene less dispersive and more "realistic". 

I modelled and added (from left to right)

-Psychiatrist name tag

-Newspaper

-Degree certifications on the wall

-A small coat hanger 

The presence of the newspaper was essential to the story as one of the secondary characters will be hiding behind it while sitting besides the grim reaper (see animatics)

We are currently refining our characters in terms of textures. Both Miko and Thomas are currently working on the 4 2D flashbacks of the story. 

I will be retouching the environments as, according to our schedule, we are supposed to start animating this week.

While I am working on textures and lighting Thomas has been making some progress on the 2D flashbacks he is working on.

Here is a picture from his development depicting the first of the two flashbacks (i.e. the chess game).

After a long pause due to our now assessed solo animation deadline, we are now back and fully concentrated on our group project.

Miko and Thomas keep working on the development of the 2D flashbacks, while Eryk and myself are animating a few scenes using Maya.

We have now approximatively 3 weeks left to finish and edit our animation.

When working on our animatic we put a lot of effort in finding the right sound effects, which we will be carrying over into our finished piece.

The audio was all downloaded from you tube (i.e. door opening/ clock ticking/ tv sound effects etc) to help us conveying what is happening in the scene; we also used some music to help us push on the comedy aspect of the storyline highlighting the attention peaks of the animation (i.e. the waiting room opening scene/ the battle scenes/ the transformation sequence etc).

One of the ways we want to be able to convey comedy is by drawing a line between music and sudden extreme silence.

Today we were called individually to have a private chat with out tutor Iain MacArthur in order to get some detailed feedbacks regarding both our solo and group project. 

We had a general talk about how both projects are going and most importantly we got some feedback for our planning documentation we submitted about a month ago and discussed how to improve it and what I should focus on during the next couple of months.

Here attached is a copy of our emails.

After presenting our solo projects we were finally able to focus on our group project which we had left aside for the past month. 

We are now all ready to animate. As previously agreed on we divided our work basing on people's preferences.

Miko/ Thomas- will be concentrating on animating the 2D flashbacks

Erik/ myself will be working on the 3D animation using Maya

Erik will lead the process as he has more experience with the software.

We decided he should take care of the trickiest scenes such a. the beginning shot and b. the transformation scene.

He would then pass those files to me so I could clean the movements and apply minor changes.

I would concentrate on working on the rest of the animation in the meantime.

As we went alone a few problems came up to the surface, for some reason we forgot about some small details mainly because we were focusing our energies on our solo.

We had to quickly produce the things we were missing such as:

a separate head for the psychiatrist's death

a "patient file" folder for the psychiatrist

the "breaking news" TV gif alongside with 

2 ink block tests

transformation background gif

I have been concentrating all my energies on animating all the missing clips and collecting the 2D flashbacks and general feedbacks from my group mates.

Using Maya I was able to produce the clips needed.

How does it work?

Once Maya is opened I would:

import the environment I needed for that particular scene

import the characters/ character needed for the scene

use the characters/ character rig to animate using a timeline and helping myself with the "graph editor"

Toon shader- It's a NO

After rendering the first scenes both me and Eryk noticed that the Grim reaper looked to moody and it was really hard to create a light that was powerful enough to illuminate him without making the rest of the scene too bright.

We decided to eliminate the toon shader and just reapply a new material (lambert19) to the Grim reaper and we obtained a way better result.

We had to recolour the darker parts of the Grim reaper (i.e. nose and eyes).

Most of the problems I faced during the animating process were due to lighting. 

It was generally hard to find a light to suit the animation, so I had to carefully proceed by rendering multiple times the same frame while applying small changes to the light in order to find a good balance.

I have been asked to produce a background gif for the transformation. I had to make a rough one for the animatic in black and white, but I needed to clean it up and colour it.

I took as reference the first video I used to help myself with the animatic, "Laundry day".

I took some screenshots from the original video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ5ziNOtoMU) and then sample the colours in a colour palette to use for the gif.

After analysing the shapes and elements present in scene I was able to reproduce them in Photoshop and animate them using the "Timeline" tool.

1. light blue stripes

2. light purple stripes

3. bubbles

4. stars

5. small violet particles 

It was very complicated to create a clean product as I needed to be able to loop each of the 5 elements in scene.

It was also hard considering that each of these elements moves diagonally from the bottom left corner to the top right corner making things even more complicated.

I decided to animate each thing separately and then build the gif in Premiere Pro CC using the "screen" layer option, which allows me to layer up my files.