Dusty the Donkey is a series of short stories written for children of the ages 3-8. It is about a cheeky donkey who lives on a field with a farmer. The stories aim to teach children new vocabulary and prepositions through the character of Dusty. For this project I was working as part of a group and had the roles of putting the animatic together to show the demo of the app in play, put the audio and voice over together, developing and animating the farmer character in response to Michelle’s farmer and also to composite the final animation.
This is a model sheet of the farmer character I was in charge of developing, in response to Michellle's original drawings.
Here is the finalised Farmer character, he is used to open the animation.
At the beginning of the project I was experimenting with a vector stye opening Sequence for the app, which although we decided to scrap for a water colour style, I am pretty happy with.It was new ground for me to develop this type of short animation in After Effects and I was happy with the way it came out. I think it worked especially well with the audio track I edited it to.
A still of my vector opening sequence.
We put a storyboard together as a group for each of the three scenes we decided we would animate. It was my job to organise these storyboards into animatics to give the author an idea of how we would further the story and how that would be brought across in an application format. As our storyboards were quite roughly handrawn I was finding it difficult and tedious trying to resize and cut out each image so i decided to re draw all the frames in Photoshop and have a go at animating little pieces such as Dusty eating the carrot. I enjoyed this role and felt I learned alot about drawing with a tablet in photoshop.
A role I particularly enjoyed was being in charge of the audio, although my voice over was perhaps not the highest quality recording I felt it brought across the idea quite well. I am beginning to realise that I really enjoy finding and making sound effects for my animations and this project enabled me to experiment lots, with trying to make trotting noises with coconut shells and recording background countryside noises. I tried to record numerous donkey sounds from real donkeys but they were unfortunately rather uncooperative. That and when a donkey does make that eh-haw sound in real life it can actually sound quite gruesome!
I think the role I found most challenging and also quite educational was the role of editor and compositor. It can get very confusing, very fast when dealing with other peoples animation files. Everyone has their own system which they can understand perfectly but doesnt always translate one hundred percent to another person. I was dealing with my own files, Colms files and also Michelle's files. Each of us have very different ways of working and naming files so it took quite along time to make sure I had absolutely everything I needed from everyone and also that we were all working from the same version of software. As I was compositior I had to keep checking in with the group to make sure they were happy with what I was doing which was also challenging at times, it can be hard to please yourself when your working on animations let alone two other people with very different styles and skill sets. However we got there in the end, and I learned alot of After Effects during this project, and also sound design.
