Slowly but surely

Slowly but surely I am filling the scene to the desired look, after the crit I decided to keep the scene simple by not cluttering the scene with too many objects.

So with that in mind created the wardrobe, added a floor, and simple textures:

The wardrobe is smoothed but that will be removed due to the loss of detail in the doors, and the material will be a wood of type, paler than the floor.

Lighting in viewport

Working in the viewport doesn't show a very close representation of the final render, as shown in this photo comparison:

As you can see here it is a very dark viewport, the floor is completely black, where there is a texture beneath it, here is the render:

Evidentially there is a lot more light involved in the scene after rendering the frame out, you can see the floor texture and more of the cupboard is visible, this could be quite misleading as you cannot get a clear representation of what your render is going to look like.

I suppose this could cause problems in the professional world due to that fact one has to render every now and again to actually see an accurate representation of what you're building! which can increase workflow times.

Constraint problems

Frustration!

It took me a very long time to work out how to constrain my T-shirt to mooms hand ... i was trying to constraint but nothing was happening even though i was doing exactly what i should be.

this is until i looked at the menu 'nConstrains' 

Then it occurred to me

IT HAD TO BE AN nCLOTH!

I finally was able to constrain the t shirt.

Another problem i encountered was that the t-shirt would just fall right through the hand despite being constrained but this was easily fixed by parenting a small cube to the hand and constraining the t-shirt to the cube and just making the hand a collider object!

This is going to be the process throughout this module, it wont be the knowledge of animation that needs defining but rather the technical skills to achieve this animation. the learning curve is slightly steeper though.

First play with moom before animating my final piece

Here is my first playblast showing my animation of moom, it was just a small walk cycle into a silly dance. it was very much straight ahead animation just to get an idea of how to animate the rig. this also shows my progress with animation skills.

I aim for as much realism in my animations by following the principles of animation, which can be applied to 3D animation just as much as any other style, as i develop my skills through maya i will be able to achieve a more accurate animation, by using the graph editor and such.

Propercorn Brief

With the help of the sessions in class I have completed the proposal form for my first brief for propercorn.

Here is the document:

BA (Hons) Animation - Level 05	Name	Elliot Gascoigne
Module: OUAN503 Responsive	Date	03/12/2014

STUDIO BRIEF 1: Individual Practice

The Problems I aim to solve are…..

1.  The issue of advertising their product to the desired audience 2.  Bringing to life the companies motto ‘Done Properly’ 3.  Connecting to the audience in the most appropriate way

In order to solve these problems I will…

1. Create a piece that will be in contact with the desired audience in their most susceptible stage of the day 2. Emphasise the motto through animation and getting the point across through different styles to engage with the audience in the most effective way 3.  Research into where the audience is most likely to take in information and retain it

I will be aiming to communicate (identify 3 specific messages, ideas, moods etc.)

1.  The companies motto as the main message ‘Done Properly’ 2. Bringing their illustrative world to life through animation 3. The values of the product

To an audience of ….. (name 3 characteristics)

1.  Time Poor 2.  20 – 35 Years old 3.  appreciation of the arts

New references

References

After the interim crit my next step was to create more appropriate reference, and to 'ham' up the performance.

Here are two references that I will use to animate moom.

I thought it would be beneficial to record a different angle.

The issues i encountered was that the performance was slightly different being as though I didn't have 2 cameras, obviously this wouldn't be a problem in the professional world due to the budget allowing extra kit.

Here is the other angle.

Interim Crit!

7/11 Interim Crit

Overall the Crit was a success! it gave me valuable feedback to better my practice and to develop my ideas and hone in my focus to better priorities!

The issues discussed

The environment in which MOOM inhabits

The development of MOOM I have done has been very simple, no obvious environment other than a plane as a floor.

How the T-Shirt is going to be represented

In the Crit I didn't really cover the prop, the t-shirt. this was brought up at the end as something I need to develop. 

The reference material

as I stated in my presentation, the reference wasn't my final reference as it did not have the correct movements in which to portray the emotions I wanted to describe through animation

The timing

A very helpful tip I was given was to slow the whole thing down, I was too worried that it was too short, but my peer said that I could add longer gaps between each sentence. this would increase how dramatic it will appear. also I could carry on the animation even after the camera zooms out after MOOM falls to the floor, this is something I am very fond of and will definitely implement into my final piece.

My Actions

Re-do my reference

To get a better flow of movements and to 'Ham' up my performance.

Test the animation on MOOM after re-doing reference

To see how capable I am at responding to my reference

experiment with lighting/environment

after developing the scene

Experiment with cloth simulation

decide how to approach the prop.

Propercorn Brief Analysis

Brief assessment

As an exercise I broke down various aspects of the brief of propercorn to further understand which way to approach it, here is what I developed

Who is the audience?

young proffessionals

20-35 yeear olds

time-poor

urban

health concious

culturally savy

appreciation for the arts

Who should the audience be?

popcorn lovers who are looking for a low calorie version

snack lovers

people who buy the product for the packaging as well

Who could the audience be?

anyone who is in a rush that wants a snack

cinema goers

health concious popcorn lovers

Why?

because the product is a low calorie popcorn with all the flavour

popcorn seems to be a good snack at the cinema

What do they do?

work

watches films

Where do they go?

work

cinema

gym

swimming

news agents

What do they buy?

snacks

energy supplements

popcorn

drinks

food

lunch

This helps grasp the demographic and how to conform the project in their direction. 

Reaching the criteria

After realising what the criteria was for 99% of the briefs out there. here is a list of 10 things that help us meet the criteria:

1. we get different briefs that we have to approach them in different ways
2. Identifies what makes the work a success
3. You can contact professionals for feedback
4. Most briefs allow you to collaborate to achieve a better result
5. producing work that you like 
6. selecting the right briefs
7. time frames are definitive!
8. certain briefs will tell you outright what they want but others wont 
9. the variety of briefs allow you to approach different skills
10. the background info of the companies helps outline their needs

AUDIO EDITING!

Audio induction.

So today we had an audio induction, learning how to appropriately record audio with the right recorder and equipment, but we also got introduced to a few ways how to edit the audio that we record!

I have used audacity for my editing before but I was never introduced to audition. it was a good program which was more content heavy than audacity but not knowing how to use audition made me sway more towards using audacity!

I was quite comfortable with the tools and now I have more knowledge on the technical terms used in audio such as KHz etc.

I can now use a more technical approach to my audio for my animations and have a better understanding of the different tools to edit them.

 

Acting Up!

First Things First!

The Brief states that we have to animate a given character to the dialogue of a song chorus or verse, using the rig provided to animate the narrative that we choose to create in conjunction with the lyrics.

So the first step was to think of a song that had lyrics that would be adequate to create a narrative for, this proved to be fairly tricky, so there are a few ideas that i've been throwing around which include:

Nicki Minaj 'Anaconda'

Indina Menzel 'Let It Go'

Lilly Allen 'Its Not Fair'

Christmas Song 'I Saw Mother Kissing Santa Claus'

Right Said Fred 'I'm too sexy'


All the songs are quite comical in a way but i want to take the comical value and reverse it in a way that increases its comical value 10 fold!

Ive decided to go with 'Im Too Sexy' and as you know the lyrics are:

I'm too sexy for my shirt too sexy for my shirt
So sexy it hurts
And I'm too sexy for Milan too sexy for Milan
New York and Japan


so I wanted to have my moom holding a t-shirt and looking distraught that he is too sexy for it, because its his favourite shirt, but he cant ear it because he's too sexy!

So my next steps are to film some reference material to work with! 

As a group

After getting into groups we then compared our 10 things and collaborated to form another 10.

1. Learn new skills
2. Collaborate with others
3. Win competitions
4. Gain problem solving skills
5. Not to stick with the same approach 
6. Networking
7. Confidence
8. experience
9. Make myself and others proud
10. Working to deadlines

Over all they are pretty much the same as our individual wishes for the module.

What I want to get out of this module (Responsive)

Here are 10 things that I want to get out of 'Responsive'

1. A better understanding as to who I am as a practitioner.
2. How to better select the right brief
3. A huge increase in my documentation skills
4. A better understanding at how to contextualize my evaluation better
5. To get more comfortable with collaborating
6. More confidence in my work
7. increase my judgement on how to approach different briefs
8. To WIN a competition!
9. To feel more comfortable seeking help from people who can strengthen my weaknesses 
10. To be able to organize my documentation in a more flowing and understandable way

Finished Animation!

My final animation!

i am fairly happy with the outcome, as it turned out better than id hoped, there were a couple of niggles that i wanted to sort out, like the dropped frame rate making it look like its 'lagging' but i will reveal all of this in my evaluation.

Enjoy!!

Piecing everything together

My flat mate said:

"If you get a second monitor ... you will never look back!"

He was right!!!

Having a double monitor setup means it has doubled my work rate, having After Effects on the one screen and Photoshop on the other.

I was completing scenes on Photoshop then transferring straight to After Effects to piece it together, it has been absolutely fantastic and i just wish i had discovered this earlier on!

Here is my project nearing the finish!! it was the longest animation i have ever done so i couldn't RAM preview the whole animation, i had to preview it in chunks because of the amount of RAM it needed!!

But that didn't slow me down too much, but i can see how big animation companies need the most high tech computers to cope with the demand that the machine has!

late copy of my armature design!

My design that i was meant to blog a while ago!!

here is my design, the character is that of my other animation that i did for animation process and production!

The character itself is very plain, but it was mainly to learn the process of making an armature and how to apply those skills.

if i were to re visit this piece i would definitely draw in the armature itself, something like this:

this would avoid any difficulties in the modelling stage, and to get a good spread of material over the aramture, i did enjoy this aspect of the module, as i really like the modelling side of animation, and am looking forward to bringing things like this to life in the future!

Finalised Story board

Here is my final storyboard after tweaking it to make the whole project more manageable, also the script seemed a bit stern before, it wasn't very appealing and seemed quite demanding, so the new script and new scenes added/taken away, has formed to create my final board which i am quite happy with, it was too complex and i tried to squeeze too much into 40 seconds so it would look very sped up and hectic.

so what made me choose these styles?

 Half 1:

The use of colour
The more solid/ objectal the elements are.

Half 2:

The whole second half represents a chalk board and the elements being drawn onto it,

there are many reasons why i did this.

one reason being that some of the scenes were too complex to finish at a more realistic level with the timeframe in which we had.

but the main reason why is the contrast that appears in my animation, the first half being realistic (what everyone would consider problems in an upper class persons world) and the second half represented by a chalk board, similar to that of a school - teaching - people learning the reason of the charity!

Reference of plants germinating!

Here is the reference i used to help animate my first scene, its much slower than what i want but it gives me an idea of the motion in which the plant forms. how it unfolds and grows at different paces, and the slight wobble that takes place, all these element i tried to achieve with my animation.

St Francis Hospice

I see a pattern emerging!

As you can see there are alot of animations when it comes too charity videos, where they make the characters more likeable and cute. but in my opinion this is not the way to go about it, if it looks too unrealistic/ humerous, it takes away the focus from the more important message the animation is trying to portray! 

WAR CHILD

In contrary to my recent post, this video combines both smooth and very impressive animation, in conjunction with real life footage.

The organisation War Child:

the organisation is responsible for rescuing so many children from war stricken countries to avoid a terrible fate. and this animation is very emotional and deep and the animation style is very sympathetic to the organisation.

although i am very impressed i still stand by what i said, that it is a cliche to add footage that disturbs the viewer into feeling sympathetic, we need people to FEEL deep inside what is going on in the world.

a prime example as to how the simple animation style is alot better at making people feel is the video right above

Amnesty internationals own video

Here is amnesty internationals own video on raising awareness but mainly to celebrate their achievements over the past 50 years.

as you can see its very simplistic! much line drawing and block colour, which i think is crucial for a charity video, scare tactics and profound images arent the way to go in my opinion! because people have known for a while that some organisations use these disturbing images/videos for the wrong reasons. so from this i will stick to my second idea of keeping the second half very simple (graphically not animatically)

Colour test!

After animating a few seconds of my sapling growing, I was left with a decision as to how to colour it. it couldn't really be seen just with its black outline so it needed colour! I coloured a few frames just so I didn't wast time, here is the test. I am happy with this, I was worried that it would look too cartoony, but with the right shading and blending I think it will work well! 

My spark of inspiration!

Warning!!

some viewers may find this video disturbing.

View the first 20 seconds only to avoid disturbing language and material.

I apologise about having to post this video, but it is the only video that describes my wishes, and a similar outcome in which i want to achieve.

a viral video turned inspirational.

shrek is love shrek is life, was created by Catalystexe. his main occurrence in his videos is a very calm, deep and soothing voice over accompanied by an equally calm soundtrack.

this is exactly what i want to achieve with my animation, after realising i cant get morgan freeman, i will be able to edit my own voice recordings to achieve a similar effect.

permission request

the song i used was by a band called M83 , managed by:

Deutsch Englische Freundschaft

Who managed many european artists, so i wasnt surprised that it takes a very long time to reply, here is my request to the organization

initially i wanted to use a song called 'smother' by the band 'Daughter' but i found after putting it over my animation it didnt give me the desired atmospheric feel so i decided to have a listen to my playlist again to decide on a better soundtrack.

i understand how important copyright is, as it is a very complex law developing more and more to the increase in media and the internet.

My armature!

Here is my finished armature!

Made from wire, milliput and plasticine. 

As a first attempt i am quite pleased with my model, it was very interesting to learn how this is done and it has explained alot in terms of the benefits from creating armatures! how its a skeleton in which to mimic that of a human one, i will definitely be using them in the future. 

Hardship for charities

one of the main hardships for a charity is to...

Raise awareness!!!

apart from raising enough money to carry out their desires, the main aspect of the charity community is spreading word to the masses, despite the sudden rise in social media. and more and more organizations are utalizing these websites. but they need to spread like wildfire, so this is my aim to create my animation with that in mind. so i have changed the storyboard to display a different script.

First scene development

Here is the development for the background in the first scene

here is the first background that i created, as you can see it looks very dull and as i wanted to keep the first half of the animation quite realistic, the ground looks too blurred and a bit of an eye sore.

i developed the scene by adding texture to the scene, but as you can see it looks very odd, i needed to tweak a few things!

Now its starting to take shape, but still it looks a bit too cartoony!

after changing the colour of the sky you can see a considerable difference!

Added colour! which is the final composition for this scene, it adheres to the parametres in which i set, to keep it looking very simple but realistic 

Naff scene needed taken out

This scene .... was the bane of my life 

after much fiddling and deliberation i decided to take this scene out, the eyes were suppose to blink but it looked awful and i was ashamed to have it in my animation, but i think i tried to cram too much into my animation after revisiting my storyboard and it kind of worked out well otherwise id have a very fast paced final product 

Armatures in Wallace and gromit

One of my childhoods most favourite film, Wallace and Gromit, a stop motion animation by the studio 'Aardman Animation'

Their heart warming and charming characters could not have been created and brought to life if it wasn't for the armatures that were used as a skeleton for the models which allowed them to move without being damaged due to constant manipulation.

But as im sure you know, the vast array of characters in the films and tv shows means there needs to be very strange looking armatures or else the characters wont be very functional and the movement would look too floppy due to the lack of restricted movement. another reason why armatures are used, the body (be it animal or human) has certain restrictions, for example: you cant turn your head 360 degrees, and an armature is a guideline for these restrictions instead of guessing which could lead to unrealistic movement.

Just an example of some of the bizarre armatures used. 

I will definitely learn a thing or two from Aardmans use of armatures, one being that no matter how complex the character/ model is, an armature is always possible.

also the fact that it helps to refine a more human/animalistic motion in the characters you make.

My 32 Drawings

Here is my collection of 32 drawings that represent frogs to me. i wanted to think outside the box with these, i didn't want to draw 32 different frogs, although there are some in there, but i wanted to explore what the word frog actually meant, wether it be going into the myth that if you lick a frog it makes you high, or the fact frogs legs are a delicacy in france, these are all things i wanted to consider, also the use of media and how it could help get the message across. if there was something i would change or do differently is to do them on separate pieces of paper, because i like Organisation and how neat things are. the pastels and pencil rubbed off onto other panels which annoyed me so i would use separate paper for each one.

my environmental studies

I am not sure what to think...

as we have discovered earlier i am quite fussy when it comes to drawings and drawing observasionaly, so this was quite a learning experience for me. 

i wanted to learn how to let my drawings 'breathe' as we had a presentation of some drawings and some examples were drawn right to the edge of the page but i wanted to let mine breathe to make it more aesthetically appealing! here they are:

As you can see there is quite a mixture of media involved in my drawings as i wanted to broaden my skills in different media and also i might find the right technique for different things. but i think if there was something i would improve/ change is the quality of line, some of these are quite abstract so if someone wanted to know what something looked like, my drawings probably aren't the best to represent that.

i didn't enjoy this task, because i get really conscious about my drawing when it has to have a certain level of accuracy, so maybe thats something to improve, my attention to detail and accuracy.

SEQUENCIAL DRAWINGS!

i was really not in my comfort zone with these, i felt they all looked childish and felt like i was back in year 3 with the quality of drawings i produced, and after my tutor stepped in and told me to refrain from resorting the the scratchy style that i so dearly use, i started to gradually slide outside of the box that i trapped myself in!

Flow 

As you can see i was being very abstract after being told to not focus on drawing the figure but the motion, it took me several attempts to break free from my evil scratchy clutches

Squash and Stretch

Here is the one i am most happy with, i finally got the message of movement across while focusing on a single main line of the human body that it creates. and the charcoal really helped because it made me stop trying to be really detailed or scratchy.

this has taught me several lessons: not all the time does the full figure need to be drawn to get a certain message across.

and the body has one main line that it follows, and that is a good starting point to use, i will use these lessons in future with every aspect of drawing, because often i am stuck as to where to start with drawing life models.

my life drawings

Here are my 4 life drawings, each pose about 20 minutes, i apologise about the poor quality of these images but it gives you an idea.

i need to practice drawing legs!! all the legs are too small!! maybe its the angle that i was drawing them at but never the less it is something to work on!

I should have really experimented with more media for these studies instead of using only pencil, but i really wanted to just focus on the actual form and proportion of the models, because that is the one thing that frustrates me because its my weak point!