City Brief Outcome and Exhibition

When we were given the brief of the city my initial thoughts were what? The city is a massive topic, there are many things we could have focused on. There was also the question of how, how would we present, the availability to explore a new area and techniques we haven’t used before. I joined a group that wanted to make a 2D animation of the city, a slideshow of areas around the city. To start with this brief we assigned roles, I was given the role of an animator as I have had previous experience animating in 2D but to push myself I worked in Toon Boom Harmony as I haven’t had experience with it but knew it was industry standard application. Once we had an outline of the story and what was going to happen, I felt confident that we could produce a suitable animation. We knew that we needed two characters so I made concepts of them, using feedback from peers and others in the group to decide on colour schemes. We wanted the characters to be in two different styles, one is my own style which is a more realistic and the other being more cartoon-like. When I had my character- dubbed ‘Lizzy’- I refined the other character designed by another member of the group. After the characters where designed I started practicing with Toon Boom, creating walk cycles which I then used the walk cycle to create a first draft animatic of the animation. As soon as it was finished and reviewed by the group I continued, adding in-betweens and cleaning up the sketches so that I could colour them later. After clean-up was completed, I used palettes from the character concepts to colour the animation, adding a green background so that we could then use After Effects to add the background images scrolling in the backdrop. I felt confident at first but as the deadline got closer I started to feel stressed, there were delays which made starting the animation later than I wanted, making it more of a challenge to finish an animation on time.  I feel that when assigning the group roles, we did it well, roles were quickly assigned based on our own skill sets so that we could manage the work. We knew each other’s skills so we could distribute work and know who was managing what. At one point, there was some confusion but it was handled Another challenge was learning Toon Boom, I found it hard to start but once I had a general idea and continued to work with it I found myself learning new tricks and ways to animate. Overall, it was a good experience in both working in a group and learning and using new techniques.

During this brief we mainly used workshop skill the green screen, it was very useful for placing the background on the animation.

I wasn’t present for the City Brief exhibition as I was moving house, but I was told that feedback given by a lecturer liked that we had ambition and that we have shown to really push ourselves by throwing ourselves in the deep end. This is our finished animation. There several things I would change if I had more times, I would change the background scrolling pace so that it matched with the walking speed. Another thing I would change it the volume of the sound effects, they are too loud and drown out the voice over. I would also add a visual rain effect to clearly show that it is raining.

Full Colour City Animation

I have finished my part of the city brief, I have completed the animation and colouring of the animation.

I will now hand over this video to my group, where they will add the final things. The backgrounds and the sound effects. The background will be done in After Effects using the ‘keying’ effect to add them into the green screen. Then animate it to be scrolling in the background on the animation. They could also put in the sound effects in the timeline. The one other thing that needs to be done is the rain, there is a rain effect in After Effect as well so I expect that will be used

City Animation Update

I have now completed a sketched version for our group city animation, I plan to now clean up the animation and add colour, we are then going to add the audio and backgrounds using after effects on Monday and Tuesday which gives us time then to make any alterations before the hand in on Thursday.

‘Jack’ Character and Walk Cycle Progress

There has been a rearrange in our group, the other animator has become the art director so I have took on the sole role of animator, I have finished off the character design for ‘Jack’ and I’m working on the walk cycles for him.

The main character design, ‘Jack’.

Sketched out walking

Walking with character and colours.

Group Meeting

Today we had a proper meeting in our group about the city brief, we went through all the details and dates we should do and have done by. Several questions where cleared up and now I now know what I should be focusing on. At the moment we have the script, storyboard and one out of two character designs. I have created a character design for a minor character. To create her, I already had a idea on what she would look like but made several versions of hair so that the group could choose the one that they liked the most.

The long wavy hair was most liked so I then proceeded to create 3 different colour schemes for the clothes and woman. I first posted these as 3 on our animation group page so that we could get feedback on which colours they liked. One that was popular was

But the colour of the dress was disliked and more people liked a red dress, so this became the choosen colour scheme. I then made the front, side and back of the character.

 

This is the design of ‘Lizzy’. We are still waiting for the main character design which is in process. To start with some animation I used reference I had took and made a very rough walk cycle.

 

Group City

Today we went though the idea we have in our group for the city brief, the plan is to make a 2D animation in Toon Boom of a character walking through the city, as he walks their are encounters, such as catching a ball and a quick dance, which will relate to the area he is currently in. The leader of the group wasn’t in, so we where at a disadvantage as she said she had the script and storyboard done. So to move forward we worked on the character designs.