We had to decide wether to do Post-Production or Pre-Poduction. It took me a long time to decide. I thought doing post would be better for me but I would rather do pre. In the end I chose to do post but after going to a few lessons I changed my mind. I was able to move to Pre-Poduction however I had to catch up on the work I missed.
Animatic Project
We got give a few things that we could take inspiration from then we had to create an animatic between 60-90 seconds long. I chose the words "keep your eyes open" and the genre was Film noir.
We then had the project to create a pitch bible. We would be doing many character drawing and backgrounds. We had to keep it in an artist style however. We all got given artist to work from. I got Eric Ravilious. I did some research and collected some images together of his work that I liked.
We then got some cards that were going to be our show,character and setting. I really liked the cards I had ecept for the show. The show made it very difficult for me to come up with a full idea. We were then told we could do our animatic as our final pitch bible. In the end i decided that would be best. I looked at Eric Ravilious again. I found some woodcut work he did and I really liked it. I thought it could fit well with my animatic as it was black and white to suit film noir genre.
We then had to come up with characters, story and practise drawing in our art style. I thought I would have to change a few things in my animatic. My main characters would need to look more different. They looked to similar and its better to have them stand out with a difference. I thought the best way to do this was make one of them a different animal. I also changed the names to the other way around so the one who is know as the detective is called Richards (last name) and his partner is called Dean.
My Logline
A remote stray Labrador investigates a
series of murders in his home town. Working with his partner, a brash young
fox, they must uncover the truth together even if they don’t always see eye to
eye.
My story briefly in pitch form
Crime rate is on
the increase, the local town animals are becoming victims to murder. Finding
cats as the culprit of more than one case Richards, a stray dog who became a
detective after the loss of his owner, starts to believe there is a connection
between the murders. He thinks someone or something is behind the murders and
is driving the cats to commit them.
Working with his
newly formed partner, Dean - a young fox, they must try to solve the case
before it is too late.
However, when
working together they have very different approaches and this causes conflict
between the pair. Richards must find out what connects the murders but he must
also convince Dean that there is a connection.
My Character/Background drawings for this project trying to keep close to Eric ravilious wood cut style.
In groups we had to come up with our own animation idea that was 15 seconds long and it had to be funny. In my group we looked up some funny little animations on youtube for inspirtation help.
We looked at videos like these
I particually liked the first one with the wilder beast. We decided we wanted to create somerthing simple with no talking. We wanted to have a character who was trying to do something and the audience is expecting a certain out come then it has a twist.
We came up with this clumsy knight idea. He wants to slay a dragon but you think hes so clumsy he will just get eaten so we wanted a twist where the dragon would get defeated somehow but the knight thinks he did it when he didnt.
We split into 3. Knight animator/designer, Dragon animator/designer and background/props designer. I was in charge of the knight.
I designed a body then I tried out some different faces.
My final Knight design.
Animation practise. Very simple walk cycle only on 2's and partly symbol animation. Final will mainly be all drawn and will be animated on 1's.
Animation process
I firstly animated the knight pulling out his sword and falling over. I thought in this bit the knight stays in the same place and it would be good to animate this bit first as its one of the bigger movements the knight makes. The timing on this had to be right.
In our animatic we had the knight falling over then struggling with his helmet for the rest of the time until he lifts the visor up and sees the dragon knocked out. I wasnt quite sure how to animate this. Having him struggle while holding his sword sounded tricky. Someone in the feedback group suggested the knight falls over and is knocked out because it wouldnt matter if the visor fell down anyway because you can see through it. I thought that made sense and would be slightly easier to animate. I did more of the animation with the knight jumping in, being knocked out and then getting up at the end.
The animation for the knight getting up at the end I had done wasnt very good. I dont think you could realistically lift yourself up like that. I then struggled on how to get the knight to stand up. I ended up filming myslef getting up and this help massively. I then talked to the rest of my group and Chris said he didnt want the knight to be knocked out for most of the animation he still wanted a bit of struggling before he lifted his visor.
I then used what I had animated and added all the bits I needed to do. The struggling and getting up was the hardest and longest part to animate. Eventually I got it done and coloured.
I then exported my animation and gave it over to Chris who was animating the dragon. He composited the scence together. For the final stage he handed it back to me and I found sounds and added all of them and edited them to the animation for our final short.
The final peice
11 Second Club
"You mind if I give you a bit of advice? of course you know this because your a smart guy... You should never make important desicions while your upset".
I started to think about ideas. Something that these words could fit with. I had one idea for it - A character standing on a bridge is about to jump off. Someone walking passed stops and see him. They start to say "You mind if I give you a bit of advice?" as saying this the other character had his foot off the edge. when he hears the guy speaking it makes him jump and he nearly falls. He stops and turns to see the guy. "of course you know this because your a smart guy" the guy says making hand gesters at the other one. He then climbs up to the edge of the bridge where the other one is standing as he climbs up he says "You should never make important decisions" Then he reaches out one hand to him "while your upset" then the other one looks at his hand then at him then he takes the hand and that's the end.
The second idea I had would start with a close up of a guys face clearly angry and upset. It then cuts and you see him pick up an axe he starts to walk with it anger in his face. Another guy sees him and starts to say the line. He walks up and puts his arm around the guys shoulder. The one talking would have clearly over confident expressions. He's saying this to someone who could be very dangerous but he doesn't seem to care the other guy just looks confused as he starts to speak.
A rough script i did for the second idea
My final idea was two characters in a field. One is looking at a lantern and you see a few shots before that petrol has been poured over the grass. The character is looking down at the lantern and the other character is behind him watching him. The idea is the one saying the line isnt trying to stop the other guy making a bad decision, like my other ideas, he himself is upset and about to make a bad decision. He says it to the other guy even though he is about to make a bad decision. He says the line and with the other guy looking at him worried/concerned. The guy then knocks over the lantern setting the grass on fire and it ends. My characters will be animals.
I did some very rough drawings for the lines. I was focusing on the characters performance since he walks on all fours and is an animal I needed to show him with some personality.
Doing these helped me get an idea of what could work.
I drew the key poses for the dialogue parts.
"You mind if I give you a bit of advice?"
"Of course you know this-
because
your a smart guy"
"You should never make important-
desicions while
your upset"
So the idea is the one speaking is about to do something he sees the other one watching him. He says the line to him almost telling him "what im going to do is a bad decision because im acting off bad emotions but I don't care and im going to do it anyway".
I saw in the 11 second club competision they preffered you not to have much before or after the sound clip. I had quite a lot before my sound clip came in so for the entry i shortened it quite a lot. This is my entry
Crew Project Revenant
For the crew project I was eager to work on the 3rd year project "Revenant". They were creating a game pitch bible and a game trailer. I wanted to do some 3d animation and prehaps do some help with the script writing or story part. They told me at the moment they didnt need any 3d animation at the moment and the script would be later so they asked if I wanted to do weekly sketches for character design. I agreed to do that. A lot of the design involed making up creatures so that was something I was interested in. Every week they would set a task of some creatures and characters/ sometimes backgrounds that all the artists would then submit designs for.
If find drawing people very difficult and this year at uni has been the first time I have done life drawing. I feel a lot of time the sizes are off in my drawings. e.g the one bellow. the legs are much shorter and smaller then the body. This something I need to work on. The more I go to life drawing the better I will get.
Motion Studies
For motion studies we got given tasks each week that we had to animate. A simple walk cylce was one. these tasks are to help us practise our animation skills. We were given feed back each week about the movement and how to improve on it.
Skipping cycle
I never really quite finished this. I wanted to add movement on the hair. I foucused most of my time working on the skip itslef. I wanted to get the movement right.
Juggling cycle
Walk cycle
I always prefer to animate animals walking. A lot of the time its because I dont like moving the arms on a human when they walk. I find the extra legs easier also the position of a dogs body I find easier then that of a humans
Walk cycle re-try (with a hint of sneakyness)
This was my re attempt at a human walk cylce. I gave him a bit of a sneaky walk in the end by having the toes touch the ground first.
At the end of this project we got given the task to aniamte a short dance sequence. We had to use a character rig in cel action to animate it. We had to plan our dance and pick our own music.
bellow is a clip from the blues brothers movie. The moves I used for my dance where inspired by Elwood's moves in this shot.
Character designs for our mazed project. We
have to animate a story we have been given in groups. We all have to
take on a role as director, producer, animation director, art director
and editor. I took the editor role. We then all did some character
designs for the stories we had "Saint Cuby". Some of my designs are
below.
I drew these in Flash because we are going to be using Flash to animate this project.
We had to
get a storyboard together and make it into an animatic. Emily in my
group is the art director and she got all the drawings together and make
a storyboard. She then sent them to me and i edited them together to
create the animatic.I also found sound effects and temporary music to
add to the animatic.
This link is a video from my YouTube account. It contains a lot of versions of the animatic I had to keep editing.
Every week we showed the animatic and changes had to be made a lot.
Weekly I had to change the order of some shots or add in different
drawing that had to be changed.
The link above is to the
animatic when we started putting animation in. We all got given certain
parts to animate. I did the very first bit with the character cuby
growing up and with the griffin next to him. I then also animated the
bit at the end with the famer and the ox.
I drew the griffin in flash then tried different colours to see what i was going to use.
Screen shots of parts of my animation before they were finished.
In this project I took on the role of editor. But by the end of the project I felt like I had also performed as a director. I had orginised meetings with the producer and together we had made a lot of decisions concerning this project.
I also animated a lot for this project and edited it together and the end.
These are the scenes that I animated. We all animated in Flash and we tried to keep the same style throughout.
Scene 1 fading into Scene 2
Scene 4
I wasnt originally put down to do this scene but because of the time limit I ended up doing after I had finished my other scenes while the others worked on theirs.
With this project I struggled to come up with ideas. We had to make an experimental animation and we were not able to use a computer. I had trouble at the start with ideas but then came up with a few and started to try them. A lot of them were very ambitious and turned out to be very difficult to accomplish.
First we had to practise 3 different ideas and see how they turned out. Then we had to do a final one to music.
This first one was one I really liked the way it turned out.
I imagined this idea could go well with the music. I could move the string to the beat.
This was the hardest one I chose to do. I wanted to animate with light. I cut out animation I had drawn first then I had the idea to shine light throw the cut outs and film the light showing the animation. I had many problems with this and it turned out to be very difficult.
My final animation was similar to my stone idea but I slightly changed it.
3D Modelling
We had a 3d modelling project. I'm not very comfortable in 3d yet and we were given this task I was very worried that I wouldnt get it done. We had to make a 3d background. My strengths lie in character animation, animating emotion, editing and story telling. Modelling and creating backgrounds are not what I enojoy doing. I decided to make my model very simple and try and get something done for this project. In the end it looked like something from an old pc game.
2D Backgrounds
In this project we had to practise our drawing skills for animation backgrounds. First we did tasks each week to draw certain things. At the end of this project we had to develop a background we had drawn in a storyboard into a painted finished piece.
