FMP Evaluation:

Research

My research was a mixture of looking at pre-existing sources and experimenting and generating my own ideas using my own imagination. However to be honest, I favoured my own idea development as the main research than looking at others work, that doesn’t mean I didn’t find anything of value, I was able to find very good reference videos and images which helped me to create fairly accurate movement for the animals.

It would have been nice to do further research into the humans but I found it more urgent to research animals more since I’ve never tried to animate animals before.

I mostly used youtube and images from art hosting websites such as deviantart and pinterest for reference.

In terms of story Cartoon Saloon are a big influence, wit both a film about a wolf person coming out soon and a film about selkies already under their belt they inspired a lot of the designs for the characters supernatural forms, with of course my own style making it slightly different, with larger eyes and, especially for the wolf, less stylized and more based on realism.

My designs

Cartoon Saloon’s Designs

I’ve also noticed that, maybe not being aware of it consciously but the human designs also take inspiration from cartoon saloon in terms of style and using shapes to create character design.

 

Planning and Time Managment
The big thing I feel about my time management is that I got far too ambitious with my idea, I didn’t keep it simple so became overwhelmed by the idea I’d chosen and subsequently made a project I wasn’t happy with and felt was not wrthy of a very good grade, if I’d gone for a simpler idea I could have expanded on it to make it a good animation.

I had a good animation schedule set up but I wrote that I’d be working everyday on things which, while isn’t wrong became overwhelming for me and caused me to lose interest in the project I was doing and ultimately produce a not great project with not much to it.

The colouring for the animation took far longer than I expected, I thought it would be done fairly quickly and in little time but it took a fair more weeks than I expected, causing other work I wanted to do and improve to be put by the wayside.

Developing
I changed a lot of the story as I began to runout of time and had to to try and cut parts to get it done in time, this sadly cause a lot of the story and scenes to be cut and changed to something that may not have made sense such as changing the characters from knowing about the transformation to not knowing and cutting out a lot of scenes that would focus on them and how their relationship changed.

I’d considered a couple of ideas for animating, such as the idea of a first time witch getting a job, I feel like I didn’t do enough brainstorming though because in the last few months of the project I came up with ideas that would be more do-able. I also think I din’t stretch myself out of my comfort zone to far in terms of ideas for stories, I kept most of my ideas fantasy based and didn’t really look into other genres and plot ideas.

I don’t think I spent enough time showing my development as much as thinking about it, I dedicated a fair bit to showing different design ideas for the characters which was good since the are the main focus, but subsequently left less time for developing background ideas and story.

Material Techniques and Processes

I experimented by using both pencil and computer based drawing programs as materials in development, I again feel I should have done more for this than I did and am disappointed that I hadn’t thought of enough ways to develop it.

I think that focusing mostly on digital and traditional character design helped me to make solid character animation, which is what I kind of wanted to focus on, excusing the cut animation due to time restraints in a couple places,

Final Outcome

I don’t think my project fulfilled the requirements of the brief, simply because I didn’t do enough and the things I did do I don’t feel I did in enough detail for it to be seen as fulfilling it, I ran out of time and didn’t spend enough time doing the pre-production I should have.

I do find that the actual animation is acceptable and that some parts of my sketchbook work seem good, particularly the written parts, however I just don’t feel like I did enough to deserve a good grade from fulfilling the brief.

As you can probably guess my FMP didn’t come out very well, it was incomplete in a lot of ways and was missing a lot of research and development that, while I thought about and made the change for, I never showed proof of, a silly mistake on my part.

In some ways the animation did turn out as I wanted, it followed the story fairly well and I was able to focus on character animation, something I like the most. However the animation sadly had to have a lot of the content I had intended to include cut out, so the story did lose a lot of the scenes I wanted it to have.

Strengths and Weaknesses

My biggest weakness is my time management, as I mentioned before I began to lose track of my time keeping I’d put on my schedule and ultimately didn’t do nearly as much as I wanted. To be honest I’m kind of ashamed about how little I feel I did and have began questioning if going to university for animation would be a good idea given how poorly I feel I did in this project.

I also find that a weakness of mine is to not annotate my research when I do it so a lot of my thinking processes and how I want to develop something isn’t included and not seen because I forget to write it.

However I did find that, even though this is only my second attempt at animating, I think I’ve improved a lot since last year, and have more knowledge on how to animate than I did last year and get more enjoyment from it than I did last year too.

I feel over the project I improved on being faster at animating and also just general understanding of timing and weight in animation has gotten better and while I didn’t improve it I’m now more aware of what I have to get better at for university to get a good grade.

Conclusion

I’m not going to say I did well in this fmp, because i didn’t I didn’t do nearly enough for a distinction like I’d wanted to and came out of the project less sure if I enjoyed and wanted to do animating as a job and university course. I’ve also come out of this project doubting my animating abilities, I feel my animating skills weren’t great to begin with but now I feel like my animating is far worse than I’d thought and no longer feel like I should go into animation.

If i did the project I wouldn’t have even done animation because I ended up getting overloaded with all the work I wanted to do that I barley did any of what I wanted. I probably would have just done concepts for an animated show or something like that, it would have been easier to do research for and I wouldn’t have had to do all the work that a full team of animators would be expected to do in the actual world of work, ad that on top of my over ambitious plan and I became overwhelmed and stressed easily.

The thing I’ve learnt most from this project, to be honest, is that animating isn’t something I would be good at enough to follow as a dream, simply because from this fmp I’ve realised I’m not good at the pre-production and research for it or the actual animating, this however leaves me at the conundrum of how I’m going onto an animation degree at university next year, and the fact I’m terrified of how I’m going to end up doing just as badly there as I feel I did in this fmp.

Although, now that I’ve identified my weakness here I can work on them so that I can become an amazing animation student at university and not feel as troubled and self-conscious about my abilities and also do work that I’m proud of because I was able to do it well.

 

Walking Cycle Videos

These videos were used as refernece for our kinematic walking videos.

Tutorial – Bouncing Ball

To create the bouncing ball motion in After Effects I first needed to create a circle shape using the Ellipse tool and having the fill be set to one solid colour.

I also had to create a surface for the ball to bounce on so I created a simple rectangle using the rectangle shape tool.

From their the bouncing ball had to be moved around a lot using the position tool to make the arcing movement.

However, all bouncing ball animations will have the ball display squash and stretch upon impact with the surface meaning I had to change the scale of the ball so that it became a squashed circle upon hitting the floor and then stretching out as it leaves the impact with the floor.

As the ball bounced more I made the amount of height the ball got in the arc less until it rolled, much like the references I found of bouncing balls showed.

 

12 principles of animation

1: Timing/spacing
The essence of animation
The speed at which something is moving gives a sense of what the object is.
2: Ease in and out
Ease in and out has to do with gradually causing an object to accelerate, or come to rest, from a pose. For example, a bouncing balls tends to have a lot of ease in and out when at the top of its bounce.
3:Arcs
Everything in real life moves typically in an arcing motion
When creating animation one should try to have motion follow curved paths rather than linear ones
Even gross body movements when you walk somewhere tend to be perfectly straights
4:Anticipation
     Action in animation usually occurs in three sections
The motion, the actual action and then the follow-through of the action
The first part is known as anticipation, sometimes, anticipation is needed physically.
Anticipation is used to lead the viewers eye to prepare them for the action that follows.
Longer period of anticipation is needed for faster reaction

For good clear animation, the viewer should know what is about to happen, what is happening and what happened.

5:Exaggeration
     Exaggeration is used to accent an action
If used in a careful and balanced = better results
Figure out what the desired goal of an action or sequence is and what sections need to be exaggerated
The key is to take something and make it more extreme but keep it believable

6:Squash and stretch
    Deforming an object in such a way that it shows how rigid the object is.
No matter how an object deforms, it should still appear to retain its volume
Most obvious usage = muscle

7: Secondary action
     Refers to creating actions that emphasise or support the main action of the animation
The secondary action should typically be subtle.

8: Follow though and overlapping action
Can be considered two different principles
Follow through: The idea that separate parts of the body will continue moving after the character has come to a stop
Overlapping action is a very similar in that it means different parts of the body will move at different times

9: Straight ahead action and pose to pose action
   Straight ahead = linear
Pose to pose = methodical/planned out

10: Staging
     The set up of your scene
It’s purpose to make the purpose of the animation unmistakably clear to the viewer
keep focus on the purpose of the shot and what you want to communicate

11: Appeal
     Comes down to adding more appeal in many different areas of your animation e.g: Character design
You want to have a character that the audience can connect to or relate to

12: Personality
   Refers to the correct application of the other principles
It determines the success of an animation
One character would not perform an action the same way in two different emotions
No two characters would act the same

Character animation is about an artist bringing a character to life.
It requires the artist to interpret and create something that is more than the original.

 

Hope animation treatment

Working Title – Bloom

 

Genre –  Bloom is a 2d frame by frame animation.

 

Duration – around 70-80 seconds long

 

Target Audience – My main demographic is younger children from the ages of 9 up to 30 year olds, the demographic includes both females and males however has a slight lean towards women with the main two characters being female.

The psychographics of the group I’m appealing to are

• People that enjoy cartoons and the sort of physical comedy that goes into it.
• People who enjoy animation
• Optimistic about the idea of hope
• Understands metaphors

The social economic groups I’m applying to is most,since the animations contents should be relatable to everyone but the demographics I’m trying to appeal to most is A – C2 groups.

 

 

Outline – My hope animation is about a young girl named Bea who’s flowers dies, her girlfriend, Mari, arrives and tries numerous times to help the flower, all failing. First she tries to water the plant and then accidentally pours all the water over the plant, drowning the plant and then tries to replicate the sun using a light but accidentally sets the flower on fire.

Bea then leaves the room and goes to stand by a cliffside, Mari tries to give her the dead plant but Bea throws it out to sea. Mari looks horrified before noticing Bea smiling, Mari then notices a red leaf behind them which she investigates to find a snowdrop flower.

Bea and mari plant the snowdrop and give it a note stating that it symbolises hope.

The topic of my story is hope and re-finding hope once it’s destroyed.

 

Character Breakdown –
Name: Mari
Age: 19           Race: Black
Gender: Female     Romantic Preferences: Lesbian
Personality: Has an optimistic attitude towards most things, tries to help when possible to varying rates of success. Is very compassionate when others are upset (especially Bea). Can sometimes be a bit absent minded.

Other info.
Colour scheme: Greens and whites with a little bit of dark pink for hair
Cares a lot about making people happy
Is in a relationship with Bea
Name: Bea
Age: 20           Race: Asian
Gender: Female     Romantic Preferences: Lesbian
Personality: Is more of a pessimist than Mari. Has a much more somber mood. She doesn’t have hope through the animation.

Other info
Colour scheme: Blues and purples
Cares a lot about plants
Is in a relationship with Mari

 

Visual Elements / Mise en Scene- The lighting changes 3 times, at first it’s low key lighting then it becomes fairly high key and the last scene goes back to neutral lighting.
The camera stays still for most of the animation but has a few pans to the left and right and also zooms out a bit near the end of the animation.

The setting is in modern time in England. The sets are in a bedroom and on a cliffside.

Audio – The soundtrack will be created by myself. There will be foley based sound effects also created by me. The music will be made on Garageband.

I will be making the sound of the sea using a Pringles tube with dry rice inside and will make the other various

 

Rationale – I chose this idea because it was easy to understand the meaning of and would be open to any sort of person watching. The current skills I have are a basic knowledge of how animation works, though not how to apply it properly, hopefully, this project will help me learn how to. I also have a basic understanding of how to use Adobe Animate, including the shortcuts, meaning I can do certain tasks much quicker, such as ad new key frames. I also have a fairly good understanding of GarageBand

To achieve my idea I will have to learn how to animate in a realistic and generally good way as well as how to use Premier Pro to edit the video and audio together and export it as the correct file type at the end.

 

Primary and Secondary Research – The research I have undertaken to back up my idea is to research what hope is in basic definition as well as historically and philosophically, to understand how other people represent and see hope so I can use it in my animation. I also researched the different types of animation that exists and analysed why it’s appealing to people and how I can use it to make people find my animation appealing, such as colour schemes and the speed of movement as well as general symbolism.

Before trying to do the full animation I’ve done numerous animation tests to see if a movement would work in the final piece, such as a hair test to see if having the animation of hair blowing in the wind would work, I also did a test to see if I could animate water correctly.

 

Requirements and resources –  The equipment I’ll need is a computer with Adobe Animate, GarageBand, Adobe Audition and Adobe Premier Pro on it. I’ll also need a sketchbook to sketch my ideas and processes into, I’ll also need a recording device, preferably a microphone but a normal phone will work too.

 

Constraints and Contingency – A big problem I think I’ll have is time restraints, since I started this idea a bit later than I should have since I’d originally planned for a different idea, however this problem will be easily overcome by simply editing my schedule I made to indicate where i changed my idea and then restart the creation of storyboards, animatic and animation, luckily the character and background designs will probably be reusable so I can keep those for this second idea.

 

Legal and ethical considerations – My animation will be shown to a panel of judges for a competition and, if it is put into the final it will be shown on a big screen to a large group, including myself, however since the competition is for young people. the crowd will also include children as young as 8 or 9, meaning the animation will have to be family friendly since showing an adult oriented animation to a large group of children is unethical for numerous reason, including that it’s inappropriate and I’ll get in serious trouble for disobeying the rules the judges had put in place.

 

Budget – Potential costs include the monthly cost of the Adobe Suite which, with the student deal I have would be about £15 per month.

 

Schedule – The schedule I created shows that I would have a maximum of 42 days to create the animation but since I started a new idea I’l have less time, about 30 days or so.

Animation Basics for assigment

Ideas for animation:

Keywords for hope:

Process of planning:

 

 

Narrative theories from euanstenhouse

Forward and Inverse kinematics and chain animation

Key points of rotation and movement are the key effectors on a object when it’s moving, for example, the anchor points on an arm in an animation would be on the wrist, elbow and shoulder.

Forward kinematics is wen you move each individual effector one at a time.

Inverse kinematics is when if you pull one of the effectors, it will move all at once.

How to create chain
Download chain link brush to photoshop
Create each chain link on their own layer
When you create the first chain link you should rotate the chain link so it’s horizontal this can be done using the shortcut cmd+T and then rotating
Then simply copy and paste that layer 4 times so you have 4 chain link on 4 different layers, a short cut for this is clicking alt on the layer and then dragging.

 

Walk Cycle notes

For a walk cycle to work a walk one walk cycle would be made and then looped.

Animators work on the legs and then the body and arms afterwards in a walk cycle.

We move up and down in a wave like line that the head flows though when we walk.

The starting position is called contact of a walk cycle is the foot closest to the “camera” having contact with the ground.

The second frame is the down point will be the figure having full contact with the ground and the back leg being raised.

The third frame is known as passing

The fourth frame is the up

The fifth frame is contact again.

When animating a walk cycle from the front the up and down frames should be done first.

When animating a walk cycle from the side the contact and passing is drawn first.

Animators used a lot of walk cycles references

Animation notes

Animators need to understand the two min ideas behind animation:
Movement and timing

Animation follows a linear path.

After effects create in betweens, After effects shows in betweens as small dots on the lines.

 

The graph editorCan be used to control Z, Y and X axis.