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.
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.
To learn Duik I went looking for a tutorial, as the official tutorials are expensive, on YouTube. First I found a video explaining how to work the body rig.
Eventually I found a video, unfortunately the video is in Spanish but I used the translate tool on YouTube and just from seeing what was happening I manage to piece together how to work the sliders.
Using this video I was able to make the assets for the body, basing them on the same system. To then test them I followed the video and rigged with Duik.
I also looked into Character Animator for live animating of the head assets, I created a small video of my character talking with me and tracking my heads. As well as adding physics to the hair to seem more life-like.
Using the turnaround of my character I have created my character’s head in assets. I found the process easy and quite calm to do, just time-consuming. Now that I have the assets for the head done I went ahead and quickly tested the layers in After Effects, loading in the file and making sure that when, e.g., the ears rotate they different clip though anything or it was obvious that they ended.
I also created the background in illustrator from the rough concepts, we decided that we should have the animals in a woodland setting because it made the most sense. This background is based on the concept of having the characters sat on a branch in a tree and the bat character is hanging from above. I based the colouring of the tree on the My Little Pony style.
For the asset creation we have found a program that we can use with After Effects that uses assets, Bassel Durik. It can created body rigs and face rigs in 2D to use in After Effects. To begin the process of using this we need to start the assets for the characters, we are going to be using illustrator to create them as it will allow the assets to be vectors, allowing us to scale without losing any quality. A member of the group did a quick look at illustrator as none of us had any experience with the program, then gave us the basic run down how they created their characters head. This started the asset creating processes, at least for the heads at this moment as we are unsure how the body needs to be separated.
Artistic License 