Fear

Happiness

Surprise

My first atempts with 3D animation involved using a pre-made rig called 'Grunt'. Our first task was to get used to moving the rig around and creating key poses that portayed a certain emotion (as seen ubove). Not only did I get used to moving the rig around I quickly found out how fragile the rig was and quickly broke it. 

We were then quickly shown the basics for capturing movement; keyframing in animation. I experimented moving multiple objects.

My second task was to make Grunt dance. I first decided that I wanted to make him do the Robo. I then found a fitting song and started animating, focusing on key poses and trying as much as possible to move the character to the beat of the song. Weight is obviously a big issue when animating in 3D and I tried to make his movements seem as natural/physically possible.

As part of practice and part of my course we were given the 11 second club challenge. This competition involves animating a 11 second long 2D or 3D animation (or even stop motion)  to a sound bite available on the 30 Second club website. 

From the conversation going on between what I think to be two people in the audio clip, I get the idea that in front of them is an insideout creature that is obviously not supposed to be that way, and doesn't last long before it explodes in front of them. 

For this it was hard to come up with any other interpretation than an inside-out creature of some sorts, and for my animation I wanted to keep it as simple as possible - especially seeing as how I would like to attempt the 11 seconds in 3D as good practice and go out of my comfort zone. 

 

The 11 Second Club website gives you the option to look at the video clip the sound was taken from in order to help with the creative process but I chose not to look at it - as I knew, coming up with limited ideas as it were that if I saw the clip I wouldn't be able to picture anything different other than the real events. 

It order to keep my ideas simple for the 3D side of things I opted for an idea that the two talking are inside a cave and it's pitch black (until the woman lights a torch) only to discover that they are inside some huge creature. It explodes around them and there are left out in the open covered in bits and pieces of whatever mysterious creature they were exploring/trying to get out of. 

 

I quickly threw together an animatic of my simple idea, running out of time I decided to work in flash and go 2D rather than using Maya that I'm not all that confident with and creating a 3D scene. I'm glad I gave myself the option though, but I struggled finding free rigs I was comfortable with and I was worried about running out of time if things went wrong. 

 

I managed to fit the animatic to the audio file and I started animating. Unfortunately I didn't finish the animation in time to enter the October competition, with other modules needing more of my attention. 

 

 

 

You will develop and produce emotionally engaging character animation.  To lead the development of your animation, you should select one of the following fields in which to specialise:
 

 

 

Task 1 – Concept Development & Pre-production (35% Weighting)
Deliverables: Project digital sketchbook/blog including research, concept development and pre-production material including:  Final storyboards and/or an Animatic of no more than 2 minutes in length.
For those using a blog, include a PDF archive of the project blog
 

Task 2 – Animation Production (45% Weighting)
Deliverables: Fully rendered .avi of animation with sound track and titles.  Maya scene files, source, texture and sound files relating to the final project.
 
Task 3 – Project Evaluation (20% Weighting)
Deliverables: Project evaluation, 750 words (+/- 10%), digital copy as a .doc/.docx
 

 

After getting to look at previous students work for the module I really liked the look of everything. Mostly the Animation for Computer Games and Narrative Animation

'Emotionally Engaging Character Animation' was the first thing to grab my attention and I started sketching out and thinking about multiple ideas in my lecture. 

 

 

The characters in the animation don't have names and they don't talk, it's all about how they interact with one another and how the viewer can relate to being in the situation of the young girl. 
The 'granddad' is based on my own granddad that I lost when I was 13. Because I was quite young, all my prominent memories of him were quite innocent and simple, which I think would fit this animation perfectly with the right style which I had in mind when envisioning how it would look. 

 

My second idea also came to me in a lecture when a general discussion initiated by my lecturer involved the struggled of getting out of bed in the morning when motivation to do so is at it's lowest due to depression, the weather, or just plain laziness. 

 

I saw this as a great opportunity for an animation as a lot of people (particularly us students) can relate to it easily. Once again the animation would be simple, no talking, one main character and the usual routinely struggle of waking up to an alarm clock. 

 

The Snowman by Raymond Briggs

Studio Ghibli's My Neighbors the Yamadas by Isao Takahata

Bob & Margaret by David Fine and Alison Snowden

Beatrix Potter illustrations (Peter Rabbit) 

 

I particularly like the environments in 'My Neighbors the Yamadas' they're light and only key features of the room are portrayed as vocal points- not as something to look at, but more so that the audience gets a better impression of the room itself without distracting from the characters and their interactions.

The light almost watercolours backgrounds was something that I also saw and liked about Beatrix Potter's novel illustrations. 

I love the pencil textures of the characters (and whole animation) in the snowman, and in the new snowman and the snow dog. Following the same style as the book in order to make the animation in the same image, it would take a whole lot more time than I have to hand draw my animation in the same discipline but I like the idea of recreating the same effect in photoshop by experimenting with the filters. 

Started sketching out some designs for my main character - 'Gramps'. I started off very childish styled, like a kids crayon drawings as the animation's point of view would be from the young girl. 

I really liked drawing in this kind of style - large head and long thin bodies. Much like the characters in 'The Regular Show' like the example above 'Benson'.

Deciding that I would try do my animation in After Effects I created my final character in photoshop on multiple layers- this design led well to allow me to do that without compromising how it looks. The textured effect was obtained by using the 'oil paint' filter option and just experimenting with the settings. I applied the filter to each individual layer. 

I started trying to mock up how the environments for two of the flash back scenes would look. At first I went for a more painterly style, but I found that it was taking too long and also wasn't turning out how I was expecting. I struggled with the colours and perspective. I went back to my sketch book and tried to plan out a little bit more detail into the design, thinking about how old chairs actually looked etc. I then scanned my sketch into the computer and worked on top of it using simple colours. I actually preferred this result more than the painterly style as it's more simplistic and more like 'My Neighbors the Yamadas', with simple background objects that are relevant to the scene/atmosphere. 

Due to time constraints I knew that I wouldn't have enough time to complete a polished animation in after effects - which I'm not confident with. So I decide to take the character designs and concepts I have done so far and turn them into game animations. Walk, run, jump cycles using gramps as the main character. Because I would be working in flash and not using photoshop I redesigned 'Gramps' to be more fitting with the 'flash' style. It would also make it faster with producing the animations in time for submission and generally fast which is what a game industry would require regardless. 

Started working in flash for the 'gramps walk cycle', taking the design I'd come up with and making sure it looked decent enough. Tried to keep the number of frames down as it would be required for games.

Looking at websites regarding game animation I came across one I found to be very informative regarding pixel animation so I decided to give it a quick try to see what I could come up with in a small framed animation. The simplistic breakdown helped me think more about key poses for walk cycles and timing.