Animation Narratives (Assignment 3-Final Presentation -Week 12)
- Marie-Therese Philson
- May 15, 2020
- 8 min read
Updated: May 18, 2020
This is the last blog of my first year in university and I can say its been amazing. It will be one to remember as my last semester was mostly taken from home and on online classes, that my tutors were able to set up quickly and efficiently. In the first year of university and in my animation course, I didn’t even have the closest thing to an idea of what we were going to be learning, I just knew that I always loved stop motion animation, and this would be my first step in my career.
Everything we had learnt in animation was exactly what we as artists, were going to be required to know to become an animator or even an artist.
The lectures were so helpful with student advice weeks, tutorials and were just always hand for any questions or advice we may need. I especially noticed this during the lockdown, as our tutors were even more so on hand and were always understanding and super in depth on how to solve our problem. They never hesitated to send helpful videos or hop on their own computer and show us live tutorials.
I really enjoyed my first year, learnt so much and enjoyed the different assignments that we were assigned for each subject, allowing us to show our strengths to ourselves and what we can improve on. Working in a group and by ourselves gave us a chance to prove to our tutor’s and ourselves that we are taking in all what we are taught and able to confidently apply it to our work.
I am excited for the next year to come and enjoyed being able to have an idea of what we are going to learn and the skills we will develop in next semester.
This animation is the completed animation that will be shown in our groups final video. The differences that I had made with this video after we received some advice from our last group presentation, was that I simplified the front monsters face and design as it was distracting. I had now taken away some of the detail and can say that the shot now looks more cleaner and less cluttered. This scene for the animation was 24fps and within this, I incorporated a handful of blinking eyes in the high trees, brushes and within the trees themselves, a creepy and bony hand coming in from the right and a main monster climbing round the tree in the front. The monsters where the main shot of this scene, which was shot four in the animation and was the part in the story that the character had gotten scared by the dark and had fallen into this creepy world within the woods.
The other animatic within this shot and what I was given to animate on top of was Charlies background, Charlie had animated some falling leaves and moving grass in the background and these animatics were a nice simple touch.
This was the first completed animation I had done and I at first struggled with components such as the monster’s compositions, what to include within the frame and what colour palette to use. I solved this by just referring back to my own character designs and some of the others within my group to give me some inspiration, I then went with the idea of having a main front character to fill the space and catch the audiences eye and added in smaller components such as the blinking eyes and hands into any crevasse within the background. I kept the monsters simple and black and added onto their design with coloured shadows and highlights taken from the colour plate of the background, I thought this would keep the overall composition simple and would help in tying the scenes together nicely. Purple is also a striking colour to imply mystery and continue that spooky sensation of darkness and wonder throughout the animation.
This is the second shot I completed for my part of the 2D animations and this is the first one of my scenes that has both the character and the monsters both existing. This is the part that the kid has now fallen into the spooky world and Philip worked with the character, in combination with my monsters and Charlie’s background.
During our time creating this animation there was a couple of times there was things that held us back and that were not going to plan with our animation, but we were able to work around them and get it all completed in the end. The main problem I had was that none of Charlies’ completed backgrounds were opening in Krita on my Mac computer, so I had to resolve changing to my iPad and to the application ‘RoughAnimator’. This application on my iPad was not the most developed application and was quite simple in its controls, this caused me to worry whether there would be some quality disadvantages when I sent the final shot to Philp and Thomas, but it all worked out smoothly, I just had to make sure I sent the file in a couple of formats and separate them from the background to allow it to work.
Within this scene, which is shot 5 of the entire animation, the animations you can see is again some bustling tress and leaves falling, a terrified kid finding safety hiding under his covers and a variety of monster animations. I kept the colour palate and the designs similar throughout the animations that I created, because I think it looks better to keep familiarity amongst the animations and style. In the animations of the monsters this time I stayed within the blinking eyes but added some yellow teeth to give a little more sinister design to the monsters. I also experimented more on the movements of the monster hands and added in three of them to each side and to the top of the frame. I had the eyes blinking and the teeth grinning, with outstretched arms and waggling fingers of the monster hands.
I think simple, but scattered variations of the monsters appearing suddenly in the darks of the animation, catches enough of the audience’s attention and frame the scenes well, while not taking too much distraction from the main point of the story as the kid has appeared.
This video was the last shot I animated and the last shot for the monsters in the 2D sequence. This is the part in the animation where the character is at the height of the monsters getting ready to attack him, but he soon notices the bright and shining light of his lucky nightlight that saves him.
In this shot the monsters frame the outer part of the scene, which is shot 9 and shows the focus of the scene with the character and light to the audience. This animation was a little different, as me and Philip had discussed that the scene was going to be a short few seconds, so that it would be best created within Photoshop.
In his scene I just circled the entire shot with a mix of eyes, two monster heads at each top of the frame and two mouths at each bottom sides of the frame. Again I had kept the same style and colour sequence, but this time added in some more monsters to the frame as they were around the sides of the shot and the emotion behind this scene was that the adventure was getting to become all too overwhelming for the character and that the monsters were going to capture him. I then copy and pasted the layer within Photoshop a couple of times and for each layer, to mimic the light fading out the monsters, I just turned down the opacity around 10/20% each layer until the monsters were down to 0% opacity and drowned out by the light.
When I completed these scenes, I uploaded it the Google Drive to then let Philip check it to see if it would work with the background he and Charlie had created. He had noticed that files I had sent over weren’t quite working with the background, were too dark and that the black fade I had applied under the layer of monsters was showing up quite muddy. He suggested to draw each monster onto a layer of their own and then also draw the fade onto a layer of its own and to try to make it less muddy. As soon as I had got these critics, as it was the last scene I was working on, I got right to work to fix these changes. I went onto Photoshop and had redrawn each monster part onto a new layer and used a combination of pen and easer to fade the background into the main background and monsters. Another little change I made was the colour of the two top monsters, as I noticed the dark purple was too dark on the background, so I lighted this to a brighter purple and when I sent it over to be edited into the final shot, it finally worked.
This scene was shot ten and was the final scene for the closing face textures, applied to the 3D model. Again, I find they tell the peacefulness of the character and how happy they are to be home and in the comfort of their own bed. These textures were the first things I worked on in the entire final steps for this project and I was happy to hear from the lectures in the first presentation, that they worked well and that there was not much that had to be changed about them.
In the final editing of the animation the only thing I had noticed was that I included more shots of the characters eyes wandering from right to left, before settling upon his nightlight. I only noticed this near the end, but the animation still runs smoothly and works well.
I understand that things will get cut from time to time within the animation, as the assignment was to make it only 15/30 seconds and there needs to be time for everyone to include their shots within the scenes. Overall, I’m happy to see how the face textures fitted onto the model and worked out well.
This is the completed animation of our group ‘Sleep Tight’, I think as a group we did really well in getting everyone’s shot composed and edited together and did a good job in making sure the 2D and 3D animations worked together smoothly. When we decided to showcase what we learned this year within animation and to combine two popular forms of animation, our main concern was getting the two types of animation to not look too different and out of harmony with each other. Its already a difficult thing being the larger group and getting six different peoples art styles to work together coherently, so the added component of two different forms of animation was a challenge, but one that we were able to successfully plan around.
In order to not have too much noticeable difference in animation and artist styles, we each gave everyone a main part to animate and one that they would animate throughout the entire project. We were not able to get the character for the 2D animation, for shot 5 the exact same styles as the other 2D shots. As there were some complications with files, so we resulted in using the beginning animatic and hoped it wouldn’t stand out too much for the final animation.
In the final animation Thomas was able to work together everyone’s shots, add in the music that Charlie had got for us and added in more personality to the animation with noises for the character saying ‘goodnight’ and noises for the wind, the rain and to also play up the creepiness of the movements of the monsters.
I am happy we were able to produce a final edit of everyone’s work complied together, as it shows our hard work and what we able to achieve.
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