Here is the final animation of The Gay Agenda Podcast.
I am very pleased with the outcome the animation. The audio is clear, the lip syncing is accurate and in sync. I think the characters are very complimentary, with the background I think it creates very friendly and welcoming atmosphere.
Here is the Making of video
I really like the Making of video, I feel that show everything we did quick enough to not focus on one thing to much but it take the time to explain everything.
The rendering of the animation was a long process, taking nearly a whole day.
After the rendering had complete I had to edit the animation, adding the camera shots from the storyboard and then the clips. I also edited together a title sequence using the already made assets and made a small jingle to go with it on my ukulele.
I added a warning at the beginning about the language and the use of spoilers in the audio. Then a card at the end promoting the viewers to go forward and listen to entire thing. The whole thing edited in Premiere. It took less time to render this as it was a video file already and wasn’t rendering from several compositions.
This ended the animation pipeline. It is completed.
All the heads have been animated now, then next step is to animate the body with the head in the setting. To do this I will rig the bodies of the characters first then add the head composition to the skeleton of the body.
Then I put the full rigs into the setting.
I then animated the body, mainly the shoulders and the head so that the characters can have secondary movement.
I will now render out this animation then after I will go forward with the editing of the animation, the camera shots, adding clips and then the title sequence.
For the presentation we made a slideshow showing our work and what we are currently working on. We had a script to base what we were going to talk about. The overall presentation was meant to have a friendly tone, showing what we had done, what we planned to do while having some funny tones as that it the same tone as our podcast. Having serious information with moments of humour.
However a criticism that we got was that we were was inappropriate as this presentation was meant to be a pitch which wasn’t known to use at the time of creating the presentation. But we managed to fit in the 15 minutes of the presentation and we got criticism after that from the audience that they were looking forward to seeing the animation.
I have complied all my exercises into my showreel. I made my own template for the showreel and I only looped my climb, dialogue and short twice because of the length of them. I added royalty free music to it. “Chill Wave” by Kevin MacLeod.
Overall I found the module challenging, some areas more simple to than others like the walk over the wall climb. There was times where I got frustrated at rigs not working and being unable to produce what I had in mind. My favorite animation was the wall climb, it took the longest out of all the animations but I like how it turned out in the end. My least animation was the short story, not because of the animation but because of the rigs that wouldn’t work or break when I tried to work with them. There are many things I would improve on if I had time. The one that I would add the most to would be the dialogue as it seems the most bare out of all of them and are so many ways to improve upon it. I would also alter the short story, I feel that is not the best it can be and I’m not sure if it’s the story or the setting or it’s just the fact I was frustrated with it. I might redone it completely different.
For the short story I planned out the character. He is very nosy and always wanting to know what people are doing and why they are doing it, every moment of everyday, and to do this he sneaks to look in his neighbours windows. He does this so often and that one of his neighbours has had enough and tells him off. Once I had this in mind I found the audio clip.
‘Wait, why does Johnny have so many soaps in the first place?’
‘Mind your business David! Why you worrying about it? It’s my life. Damn!’
I found this perfect to use as it is relevant to the situation but also adds humour to it. To start off I quickly made a rough storyboard.
Then made it into an animatic to test the positions, plan out timings and overall feel of the animation.
The initial idea was when the nosy neighbour comes over the other is hiding in a bush waiting for him. I looked into paint effects in Maya to do this, I did find bushes but I found them not dense enough to be effective, so I changed it so that the neighbour would appear on the other side of the window. I thought this would also be good as it would be clear that it was the neighbour shouting at him and not just a random person.
I needed to model the set first so that I can made the rig interact with it so I started modelling with the Malcom rig for scale.
For the Malcom Rig I had tested the rig by moving the joints and such but once I had finished modelling and I went about animating the rig. I keep getting errors when scrubbed on the timeline.
I tried another rig, Morpheus, and found part of its face was broken.
The next ones I tried was Max and Blake but both couldn’t save due to script errors.
I then tried a female rig, Merry, but between key frames the knees and elbows broke. Bending backwards without any provocation.
Finally, I found the Walter rig which worked…until I added another model, but it was something I could overcome. The indicators for the different parts of the rig stopped being able to alter the skeleton, I had to go into the outliner window and into the skeleton group to move them.
If I had more time I would refine some of the steps with the toe bending and add more finger movement.
The dialogue I chose for this exercise was:
“I thought…. that if I could help him in some way, get him this, uh, this girl that he loves… that maybe, you know….. *sniff* ….things would ch… change for me.”
For this dialogue I wanted to do it 2D as I have been using Maya as my made mode of animating so far. The character in this animation is a overworked man in his late 20’s who is trapped in a repetitive cycle of work and sleep. He has become bored and tired of his mundane life. His friend wants to get with a girl and asked for his help in asking her out. He sees it as a opportunity that if he can do this he can get himself out of his funk. But he has messed up and his other friend is confronting him about his meddling.
First I planned out the general motions in a storyboard, focusing the gestures more than the face.
Then I used Toon Boom Harmony to animate it, importing the storyboard then fleshing it out, once the body was done I added a basic face with lip sync and expressions. I found this harder than Maya but that could just be due because I haven’t practiced 2D in a while and have slowed down in my production rate. This made it frustrating for me.
However if I had more time I would redo the hands as I struggled with them and just made them as the rough gestures. I want to add more facial frames and perhaps some hair with physics and clean it up.
The background has been remade to make it more fitting to our characters, making it more friendly and unique as we are using textures rather than flat colours.
I cut down the podcast audio into a much smaller piece, with some of the more important points included in it. Then, using a quick style frame and After Effects I made a mock storyboard, it is very low quality but it gives suggestion of the shots.
Password:thegayagenda
For recording the podcast we wanted to have a high quality recording, so we looked into booking a room that had the equipment to do so. We originally planned on using the Foley Room to record but after email conversation we found that it only allowed 3 people maximum in, a problem as we are a group of 6. Eventually we found that we could record using a radio recording room. We were able to do a induction and booked the room for the following Friday.
The outcome of the audio was high quality and clear, it was a experience to work with such high end equipment but we all enjoyed working with it and grew comfortable using it. We talked for around 1 hour and 40 minutes which was over what we thought it was going to be. The next step is to edit the audio and make it shorter to be put online.
Artistic License 