Project 3: Final Animations/ Evaluation.

Here, are my two final and finished scenes from my animation. 

The aim of this project was to showcase my skills in a digital format, showing how well I could manage, produce, and eventually display my work in the from of an animation. 

I began this project a little unsure of what I wanted to produce from it, I knew I wanted something rather cute and different, but I wanted it to stick in people's minds, and this is why I added such a bizarre ending. I started off with the intention of creating everything in Cinema 4D, but soon after discovering After Effects I think I knew which one I preferred. I really enjoyed making assets and in particularly, the little walk cycles and loops of my characters, as I really saw them come to life and it gave them a lot more personality, which is what I wanted to show in my animation. 

I did encounter a few problems whilst animating my work, and one of those was finding my way round Cinema 4D: Although I have a basic knowledge of the program, and enjoy using it, I found it extremely difficult and problematic to speed up my workflow and get my way around the system without constantly needing to ask for help. 

I think if I were to do anything differently, I would have done all of my animation scenes on After Effects, as I feel I got on much better on that program and would have got slightly more work done. But I have really enjoyed this project and would like to finish off this animation later on in the year. 

Northumberland National Park Competition/ Evaluation.

Northumberland National Park. 

Whilst getting on with my animated short, I was also brought the opportunity to work on a character which would be used in signs and adverts for the Northumberland National Park. This competition was soon ending so I chose to take a few days off the animated short and concentrate on creating this piece ready for the deadline. 

The rules of this competition were that the character has to be a young child, possibly between the ages 5 - 10. I went for around the age of about 7 or 8, as the character would most likely be more independent at that age. 

The character also had to look confident and trust-worthy, as well as outdoors-y and rather adventurous. And I took these rules and put them into characteristics of the drawing. One example of this is her stance, she doesn't have too much of a stereotypically feminine posture, other than her feet turning inwards slightly.

Evaluation.

Creating this piece was a small challenge for me, as well as being something I really enjoyed doing! I took into account my last piece and how airbrushed I thought it was, and decided to go against that completely in this piece. I played around with brushes until I found a thick and contrasting brush setting which allowed me to blend and mould colours together rather than blurring them and taking away any texture. I also really enjoyed the fact I was drawing a little girl rather than a grown woman for a change, as this lead me onto research how a child’s bone structure is on their face, as a lot of children’s faces simply LOOK round and actually aren’t. I also feel as though I chose a rather contrasting colour scheme this time, as opposed to my last piece of personal work, and I think, especially on her face, those colours work really well. I'm rather pleased with how this character turned out, as I don't really focus on drawing children and had to take into account almost everything when I was drawing her. Everything from eye shape, to face shape, to teeth, hair ... everything! But I'm pleased she doesn't look too feminine, and hasn't really been assigned a strong gender role, as this makes her approachable by all ages and genders, and won't appeal to one side more than the other. 

When evaluating this piece, I found a few strengths and weaknesses in my work that I should bring to attention: One of my main strengths in this piece was most definitely my colour and shading, as I felt those aspects were a lot stronger this time around, and they worked well together as both an all-round image and in their individual pieces.  One weakness I found with this image is that although it was to be submitted with just a simple white background, I feel as though I could have done more to this version to make her fit in slightly better with the background, either by just adding a shadow around her feet or back just to make her feel a part of the piece. In the future I think I’ll take this point into consideration when thinking that my image is finished when it may well not be! Even if just adding a shadow, or a source of light could make a big difference to the whole outcome. 

Week 2: Production.

At the beginning of week 2 I went straight into work and began filming myself, all mimed up, painting the E4 logo onto the board. To do this, I set a camera on a tripod at an appropriate distance and set it up with the computer program named Dragon Stop Motion. This camera was set up on a “Time-Lapse,” mode and was instructed to take a high resolution photograph every second. And as fast and efficient as this program is, it did require me to do the process rather slow so that the camera could catch almost every move I did.

I found that whilst painting the logo onto the board, time was going past rather quickly. I found that I would need about 250 frames to make this animation last about 10 seconds so I slowed down massively on my painting speed. I also added water to some splashes of paint in order to help make the paint run, but still maintain a thickness that would make it easier for the paint to drip and be caught by the camera.

When it came near the end of my recording time, I had made a number of drips using the paint, which had been caught by the camera and then will be viewed in real time, which I think is very effective! The state of the paint, I feel, looked good, as it stood out against the white paper well and almost looked 3D. And I feel that when I edit this piece and turn it into black and white, it will look very effective. I chose paint that was the perfect shade of purple to advertise the E4 logo, and I also found that after I have filmed this piece, I can use the colour correct tool in after effects to bring back this exact shade of purple once I have turned the film black and white.

After I had finished painting the giant E4 logo, I began to let the paint drip and waited until the paint had fully ran, not so much that it would ruin the painting, but create an awesome effect when sped up.  Once this had been completed I went on to creating my entrance to the film; I decided to give manual stop motion a try and shoot the images, one by one, by myself. However, I found that the footage was far too jumpy and incoherent because of the mix of me having to concentrate on taking the photographs and keeping my facial expression the same. Because of this I chose to shoot the film through the “Time-Lapse,” tool on Dragon Stop Motion.

I started making my Time-Lapsed video with me on the floor, and as I did with the time-lapsed painting video, I restricted myself from moving too fast in order to keep the video at a slower speed, otherwise the audience would not be able to see what is actually happening in the video.

As the video went on I maintained a constant slow speed and I think this worked so well because it made me look rather sinister, as I wasn’t smiling or showing any emotion. It even showed me blinking, and this being captured on stop motion makes me look rather doll-like and synthetic.

When it came to me making eye contact with the camera, I slowed down much more and waited until the third shot before I made any movement. This had a great effect on the film as it makes my emotions and movements much more clear and easy to read. The only downside I found was that it does make me look rather sinister, hopefully not sinister enough to actually scare anyone though.

I also found through shooting this part of my film, that having done my makeup at least 5-6 times prior to shooting my film, I had perfected the look and thought it looked rather successful throughout the film! When I looked over the film I did see that it was slightly jumpy, with me moving from side to side every so often, however I think this would work well in my film because the style of the film is set to be jumpy and sharp because of the supposed “age” of the film.

My Animatic.

Making My Animatic;

When creating my animatic, a number of things were going through my mind. One of the first being, "Is this film going to be too long?!" fortunately I found out there was no real time limit and was told to focus on around 30 - 40 seconds of good solid work, than two minutes of a rushed mess.

At first, I was interested in using a variety of ways to make my final animatic using the twelve images I had created during the Storyboarding project. However, I chose to stick with using Cinema 4D, as I was new to using this software and wanted to try out something
 completely new. I started off by opening my completely
 coloured and finalised images from my 
storyboard, completed in the previous project, and
 began to edit them individually, in order, to 
show camera angles, and dramatic movement 
where necessary. I added a toner to make the images 
bright or darker depending on the mood of that particular scene.

Over all I'm very pleased with the outcome of my final animatic
piece; although new to the software, it was very user friendly
and I found that once I had started, it was very difficult to get 
distracted, as the program was fun to use and gave me the great 
effects that I was looking for throughout my project.