Week eight

Finally the fun starts. This week Leonie had the rig ready for Dotty the ladybird. I am the lead animator for her character so I was able to begin playing around with he rig in celaction. Firstly I tried to get a flying cycle done. I referenced my flash animation I did at the end of week 7. Leo liked the movement but she didnt want the wings to go as far foward as they did. I made ajustments and got the flying sorted. I then did my own little test for a scene in the animatic where an apple drops. Dotty is happy she managed to knock an apple down then as it lands it breaks into which causes Dotty to be shocked and then her expression to change to sad. The final test I did was for a scene where Dotty tries to pull an apple of the tree but she can't. I enjoyed doing the last scene the most and I feel I now have a good grasp on how to use the program. 

Since I wasn't working on anymore editing for the animatics in either projects I was free to do some colouring on Jack's test shot. So far only Salomone was animated so I was able to spend some time colouring him. Jack's project is being animated in TV paint- a program I have used before but am not too comfortable in and I need to learn how to do some things. I feel like I did learn a bit from doing this first colour and I hope I learn more TV paint as I go along.

Week seven

This week I had pretty much finished the animatic for Falling in love. Alphabet Patch still needed some changes. We got feedback in the lesson to make sure we were keeping the animatic to the correct length for a children's TV show. Leonie did some research and found out the different lengths for childrens tv shows most common being: 5mins, 7mins or 11mins. currently our animatic was 6mins and 50 seconds. But we still needed to add an introduction sequence and a ending sequence meaning we needed more time then we had left. We all began to brainstorm on what we could cut. I then began to edit bits out and while I was working I noticed some other shots that could be cut short. In the end I managed to cut the animatic to 6mins and 14seconds giving us enough time to fit in a opening lasting 10-20 seconds and a ending lasting around 30seconds.

For Alphabet Patch story group we had come up with ideas for more episodes that will go into the pitch bible. We had a meeting and decided we would be set episodes B-F for this week.

I began writing ideas for episode C first as I had a few ideas already. Each episode has to have the characters going on an adventure linking to a word that begins with the letter they are learning about. In this case C was the letter and I thought of some words beging with C that would fit the show:

Words begining with C

Caterpillar
Change
Cocoon
Colours
Cabbage
Cry
Confused
Cheer up

Moral of the story could be- Learning that change isn't always a bad thing and that it can be a good thing.

I then wrote a flow chart for the episode and what could happen through out it.



Episode D was the next one I did:


Don't
Danger
Ducklings
Duck

Dark night
Day light


Then episode F:
Fun fair
Ferris wheel
Frog
Fun
Fast
Favourite
Fruit

For this week I was also given the task of sorting out the length of each shot in animation frame rate. 24= 1 second. I did this for each shot in Alphabet Patch and for Falling in Love.

The final thing I did for this week was an animation test for Alphabet patch. Leonie is working on the character rigs and we are going to be animating in Celaction. Each character has a lead animator so to keep the style of animation for that character consistant throughout the project. Me and Leonie have the most time set to doing animation so we have taken on the most time consuming characters. Dotty and Paddy are the two characters that seem to talk the most and do the most. I took Dotty the ladybird to be the character I animate. I love animating very animal characters and since Paddy moved closer to a human I thought I would enjoy animating Dotty more. However I didnt think about how difficult she could be to animate having wings, six legs and two different body standing possitions. But I am excited for the challenge. I was so excited I thought I do my own test before the rigs are ready. I had the animation program at home called Flash. I thought I could use this for a quick test. I traced over Leonies Dotty design in flash and then animated it using symbols.

This is the test I did:

To do this test I referenced some real ladybirds which I was watching late one night when I couldnt sleep to get inspired.

Week Five

Animator Luis Cook came to look at our animatics this week he had a few suggestions on how to improve on the animatics. This week consisted of having lots of meeting and brainstorming on how to improve the ideas. I had to do the editing again after everything had been gone through.

Alphabet Patch

We got feedback to make the characters stand out more and make their different personalities more extreme. We had some fun brainstorming about how the characters would react in different situations. One fun one was asking ourselves "what would that characters favouritetheme park ride be?". We said that cecil the snail would love the rollar coaster since he loves speed and wishes he could go faster. Dotty the ladybird would like the ferris wheel since it goes high up and she likes to fly. Mrs Beanie the chicken would like the T-Cup ride and finally Paddy would like something more education like the train that goes around the park. We all liked these ideas and thought this could even be incorpurated into an episode idea. 

Falling in Love

Luis Cook had many good suggestions towards Jack's project one inwhich involved more gag ideas for the character trying to kill himself and failing. We had a brainstorming session and came up with lots of ideas. Jack asked us to go away and write out a few new gag ideas.

I also did a few silly sketches of Salomone from falling in love.

Week four

This week I was asked to gather sound effects for Mads project I Am Dyslexic. We made a list of all the sounds by going through the animatic.


I also then became the editor for both Falling in Love and Alphabet patch. Jack had a load of storyboard drawings and I had to edit them together. I also edited the scratch track to this. It took me and Jack two days to finish the animatic which was much longer than I had antisipated. Jack had over 100 drawings to be timed and edited and there were loads of sound effects to be edited in too. His animation is very sound and timing heavy so it was a hard task. I edited and Jack directed. Although it took a very long time to do I did enjoy it a lot. For the ending of Jack's film we looked at a short movie titled "The Hedgehog" to get an idea for the atmosphere and editing style for the entire ending scene.

I then spend a lot of time editing Leonie's animatic for Alphabet Patch also. We had a discussion on what kind of editing style we were going to go for.

These are a few examples of the kind of editing style we aimed for:

Week Three

After the rush job we finally got to start working on the chosen projects. I wanted to have a lot of focus on Alphabet Patch. I was also working on I AM DYSLEXIC and Falling in love. All the projects had meetings this week to get people started.


Over the weekend (at the begining of this week) I had a look at Jacks script for falling in love and made some suggestions. I also looked over Leo's script for the pilot of alphabet patch. I made some changes to that too.

early in the week we had a meeting for alphabet patch. Leonie made a story group. Me, Midnight and Leonie were in this group and we focused on the story in it. Leo said she was completely changing the pilot idea. It was now about the characters going apple picking. We all had a big brainstorming session together to come up with ideas for the episode. We then had the task to go away and bullet point the episode structure and in the next meeting we would finalise it.

I went away and came up with 3 flow charts with ideas for the episode structure. I also campe up with a few lines and bits of scripts.




A bit later in the week I had a meeting with Mads group (I AM DYSLEXIC). It was a genral first meeting to get an idea of what people wanted to do. They had a massive group already and I wasnt too sure what I wanted to do on his project. 2D animation was something I thought could be good. He gave out some tasks for people to try out for the first week. For anyone who wanted to work on 2D we had to just practise the style and draw the characters out. We could also draw our younger selves in the style. So I started trying out some of the style.

Then when the final script for alphabet patch was written and we were asked to add some ryhmes to the lines. I began to add as many as I could.

Examples of ryhmes I used:

Wait I can fly let me try

The apple is too far I can't reach it at all. I'm too heavy I'm afraid I'll fall!

I can't pick them it's too tough. I'm just not strong enough.