So for this week I got some of the animation done and have asked that Niamh practice working in After fx and have some thumbnails as I have only seen two by now and they dont work with the animation. I have also asked that she work on more assets and have all the work sent to me by the 5th of January so comp work could be started for when we get back and that she continuously uploads her work to the drive for me to see.
I asked that Emma write a script and send it to Catherine to make sure its okay with her. I suggested that she look at what is happening in the animation and try time/base what she is saying around it while getting the necessary information out. I also asked that she get some different types of music for the same date above.
For this week Niamh has done a background and I asked that she make some changes to better suit the animation because hers was to imposing and would have block out a lot of the animation. I gave her another template to work with.
I have now asked Emma to do the Voice over, Sound and Editing instead because she has not begun work on the keyframes and I cant be sure if she will/can do it.
For this week I built the rig for the character that Catherine choose and I will begin the keyframes and animation.
Sunday 11 December 2016
I wanted to have a scene in the animation that had the background changing from one era to another while the character also evolved to try show that time was passing by. The GIF above gave me the idea of having the character tripping over himself as he morphed.
As the production has been progressing I have been drawing up and sending DG mocks images for him to work off while doing the backgrounds. This is to help give him a clear idea of the type of shot and animation I have in mind for the scene.
Unfortunately for this week we didn't have anything new besides the rigs to show Catherine but we discussed some things and have decided to do a voice over instead of the text boxes to make it more accessible and have picked the female design for the Pieta House character.
After that was done I went through how to set up a 3D environment in AfterFx with Niamh and sent her a tutorial she could follow so that she could start it when the background was designed and asked her to thumbnails some designs asap.
I also went through the animation process with Emma again to make sure she new what she was doing and asked that she have the walk keyframed by next week.
Tutorial I sent Emma that shows the animation process for if she gets stuck.
Dean Gordon (DG) will be doing the backgrounds on our project so we talked and settled on a similar style to the ones Scott Wills did for samurai jack. I wanted to get a few images for each location and send them to DG so he understood what kind of visuals I had in mind for the project.
For the first location we settled on a red palette. The idea is to arrive on a desolate planet that is destroying itself with molten lava and and acid water.
(Loc1, Red)
In the second location the acid water transforms into fresh river water and the character emerges into a lush green jungle full of plant-life.
(Loc2, Green)
The third location is the only one to have a slow transition so we went with a colour close to green, yellow. We then decided on an Arabian theme which felt like a good way to ease into civilization
(Loc3, Yellow)
For the last location we went with a SciFi city set a night time so we could do a Pink and Blue colour palette to pop out from the rest.
This week I have had a look at Niamh's background drawings and asked that she do more thumbnails as 1 was not enough, then when she had done more that she start drawing up some assets such as different Tree, Mountain and Ground designs. That way it would be a lot quicker to apply them to the thumbnails and change any layout designs and we can start comping in AfterFx a lot sooner. I have also asked that she look at this website as the artist work is good reference showing the process I want her to follow through with. https://www.behance.net/gallery/11163093/Background
As for the animation, I got the main character rig sorted and have made a Flash file for Emma containing the rig and the Animatic with all the settings set up so she can focus on getting the key-framing done right away. After talking to the tutors, Kevin and Tracy, I have also asked that she concentrate on a specific section (The walking section) and have it sent to me as quick as possible as I want to start clean up so that there will be a sample ready for when Catherine comes in the following week.
For this week I have asked Niamh to start thumb nailing out and designing something similar to the references I showed at the pitch .
I decided after some research to do the animation in Adobe Flash with a similar process to cut-out animation, meaning all the body parts of the character would be on separated layer and posed to the keyframes in the rough animation.
So for this week I will be making these assets so that Emma can start posing them out by next week.
After the pitch to the Pieta House member my idea was chosen to go forward with and so I was put in charge and was teamed up with Emma and Niamh. I will be making entries to the blog on the direction and progress of the project.
Week One
For this week I have asked Niamh to go and design some background concepts as she is a background Artist with the hopes of her taking it and setting up the layout comp in AfterFx and Emma will be doing the Animation with me.
I will also be researching the best way to do the Animation. I will be looking at the differences of setting up Rigs in Flash and Toonboom and any alternatives that will help speed up production.
I have also set up a Facebook group for us to communicate as well as setting up a Google drive for us to share files more easily.
This year for the professional animation project we are to work with Pieta House and where asked to create a 30 second Animation that would help describe one of the service or a aspect's of the charity. For me it was the "Bereavement service".
The first thing I did was write out some bullet point as to what the Bereavement service was so that I could better understand it myself.
What is the Pieta House Bereavement service?
-The Pieta House Bereavement service is a Free external Helpline for those who have been effected by the suicide/attempted suicide of someone they know.
-The helpline service is open to anyone 24/7 to call in and request a liaison officer, who will come out to the home of the person/'s who need help and someone to talk to.
-The liaison officers will talk with them about services offered and point them in the direction that best suits their needs such as Therapy, group meetings and other charities.
Video Reference
I decided that I wanted to do an Animated Info Graphic for the 30 second animation that had a story in the background so I began by researching Saul Bass, an artist who did many of the famous title openings in film today such as Vertigo, Casino, Cape Fear, Psycho and many more. The reason I chose to look at these openings was beacuse Saul would come up with a way to illustrate the story you where about to see in a much shorter fashion while still getting the information of the cast across in a visually plaesing way and I thought his methods would work perfectly with what I had in mind. I then came across an hour long video with many of his title openings and found a lot of the 2-D graphic openings he did to be very useful reference...
I also found the title opening in "Catch me if you can" that was inspired by Saul Bass's work to be very helpful too.
Live action reference
After looking at some videos I decided to also take inspiration from the T.V show called "Stranger Things" as I though the parallel of their "Normal" and "The Upside down" worlds to be a good visual in the animation and with this in mind I did a story board. I then showed it to Catherine from Pieta House and she gave me the go ahead with this idea.
Design Reference
Once I had the Story Board I went and got some visual reference, I looked at many different styles and found silhouettes with minimal tone to be best suited for the animation. I even found a stranger Things poster that helped me illustrated my idea perfectly while I was giving the pitch to the Pieta house members.
Ref: Stranger Things (ProMo Poster), D.K Country Returns (ScreenCap Of Game), Limbo (ScreenCap of Game), Digital Painting by artist known as Yao Yao.
Concept
Once I had a fair idea of what I wanted to do I began drawing out some Art based on the minimal tone and silhouette style and while I like the silhouette style for the backgrounds I decide to add some highlights to the character as it made them feel a bit more real and separate from the backgrounds.
Once I did a Basic Story Board to get a rough idea of the story DG and I began to cut and add some shots that we thought would make the story better...
the into to this video where the creature are under water was an interesting shot and i want to try and incorporate it at the start of the animation, i also noticed that it stands out to the rest of the video so it made me think of doing this section of my animation differently to the rest of it.
Two
The reason I chose this video was because it is a compilation of many different videos taken by people in various parts of Russia where a meteor big enough to be very noticeable struck the Earth. From it I was able to get a clear idea of what an actual meteor strike looks and sounds like and this was great help when boarding out the meteor scene in the animation.
Three
In all Gozilla and most dinosaur movies there is an iconic shot where we first see the feet of the creature and the rest of it is revealed in a slow pan up its body zoomed in on its face and usually ends with a roar. I wanted to include this in the animation for the reveal of the Dinosaur and then again later by mimicking the same shot for the reveal for what the dinosaur has turned into as another way to reinforce that it is the same character.
Four
This video is a chase scene shot in first person so i was able to use some of the shots as reference.
For this project I wanted to showcase my Character Animation skills and after talking with Dean Gordon (DG) who wanted to showcase his background skills, we decided to partner up.
We both knew we wanted to have a variation of characters and backgrounds so DG had the idea of a story that would start at the dawn of time and end in present day with the character travelling through all the different era's in time. I then decided that the Character would start out as an Amoeba and would evolve as they visited all the time periods and it became a story about evolution, the evolution of earth and the evolution of life.
Once we had the general idea of what we wanted to do, we both did Separate word-weds to try flesh out the story some more and have a broader vision.
We then went off and wrote 3 outlines each without discussing them until we where done. Once we had read each others outlines, we come up with an outline that myself and DG where happy with.
Outline
>Opens to a meteor crashing through the sky and splashing into a body of water.
>As the meteor is sinking down into the water, lots of little amoeba like creature light up and begin to detach from it.
>Camera zooms in on one of the creature's as it cycles through some evolutionary stages.
>It then pops out of the water in a lizard like form.
>It begins to walk on an adventure through time as it and the landscape is evolving through many different era's.
>It comes across an egg and destroys it but then the mother, a dinosaur, sets chase on the creature.
>This causes the creature to evolve into a bipedal form as it needs to run away.
>The chase comes to a stop as time hits present day and the character in its human form hits a Dead end.
>Main character turns in anticipation only to see that the dinosaurs has devolved into a chicken. End.
