"There's quite a lot of people in that lecture theatre!"

Yesterday, I spoke for about 5 -10  minutes in front of the whole of the General Foundation course at Duncan of Jordanstone - that's a LOT of people!! A huge lecture theatre full of people!!

One of my tutors was doing a presentation to the General Foundation students about the animation course and brought along 5 animation students to talk about their own experiences with the course. I was one of them. It was a rather scary experience but I'm so glad I did it! Maybe it will make future talks and presentations seem less daunting... maybe.

Anyway, as I spent a bit of time putting this presentation together, I thought I would post it here. It's actually been good looking back at my journey through uni to 4th year. And I've never posted some of my 2nd year animations onto this blog either, including the finished rendered version of 'Jurassic Jess', so here it is :)

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The route I took onto the course was through General Foundation. I decided I wanted to go into animation after trying it out in the last weeks of the course. I’d never done animation before but found that I absolutely loved it, there’s something pretty cool about seeing your drawing comes to life on the screen! So I really only had one piece of animation in my portfolio for applying to the animation course, the rest of it was made up of paintings and life drawing. I think showing an interest in animation, character, story and showing good drawing skills is a plus for your portfolio of work.

In Level 2 animation we learned the basic animation principles through the practice of 2D animation; through projects with bouncing balls, walk cycles, the flour sack, and character performance. There were also lectures on the history of animation. We also had workshops to learn about the 3D computer program MAYA, the compositing and animation program After Effects and general skills with Photoshop and Flash. I think 2^nd year was really good for learning the key principles of animating. And learning these key principles through 2D animation allows you to apply them to any kind of animation, including 3D.

 

In the first Semester of 3rd Year, we worked in groups to produce a fully finished 1 minute film. I was the Director of my project ‘Jurassic Jess’ and I had a team of 5 people.  It was a story about a little girl, by the name of ‘Jess’ who loves dinosaurs and exploring museums and comes across a T-Rex skeleton in a restricted storage area of a museum. It was a 3D project, none of us had had a lot of experience with 3D before and it was quite an ambitious project for the timescale we had. We managed to finish the main bulk of it that semester and took an extra week to render and composite it together, there’s still some things we would have changed, improved, fix some glitches, looking back on it now, but we’re still quite pleased with what we managed to achieve and was so valuable in learning the process for making a short animated film, as there are so many different parts that go into making a film. Even if it is just 1 minute long!

 

In Semester 2 of 3^rd Year we got to work on the pre-production of our final year films. Including character and environment designs, and developing the script and the storyboard. I’m now the Production Manager of a team of 3 for the 3D film ‘Krokodi’. It will be approx 2 minutes in length and is about an arrogant Crocodile Hunter looking for the legendary ‘Krokodi’ swamp creature of Louisiana, to hunt down. This swamp creature turns out to be ‘Dee’ who works in her burger van during the day in the Town of New Orleans, (even a swamp goddess needs to earn her living) and returns to the swamp at night to revert back to her crocodilian self. ‘Dee’ and the Hunter meet and comedic chaos ensues!

Now in 4^th year, ‘Krokodi’ is in production and the 3D modelling of characters and environments are underway. In 4^th year we have to choose 2 skills to specialize in that we will mainly be accessed on at the end of the year. I’ve picked character animation and rigging. Rigging is where you add the skeleton and controls to a 3D character to enable the character to be animated. I’m looking towards a career in character animation, and having a good knowledge of rigging can be very appealing to potential employers because of its close links with animation. It’s also good at helping improve your own animation skills as you get a better understanding of how a character moves and is controlled. Part of being on the Animation course is having good communication skills and working as part of a team. Not only are we working on our main projects but we’re helping out on at least one other. This allows you to expand your skills and experience through working on a different project and with different people. Also as 4^th years, who always have soooo much to do, with such ambitious projects, we try to recruit helpers from 3^rd year and 2^nd year to do some little pieces of work for us. This not only helps us but allows them to get a good insight and experience into how 4^th year works and the production pipeline of working on a film so that when it’s their turn, they already have a bit more knowledge about it all.

 

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I really hope that there were some people in the audience that were inspired by all of our presentations, to investigate animation further or to try it out themselves - because after all - animation is the best! Not biased or anything :p

And thats a wrap!

Handed in all my work today for assessment and Marlo the Magician film was finally completed :D
I used After Effects to composite the animation with the effects and sounds, so turn up those speakers and enjoy!

Sarah also added in a black hole zoom at the end, from taking it from program to program the quality was lost a bit and the sound is slightly out of sync, but here it is:

Roll credits:

Character Description: Lilly Durrant

Character Designer: Claire Roe

Storyboard Artists: Lilly Durrant, Charlie Lodge, Sarah Rettie, Claire Roe

Animatic Production: Lilly Durrant, Sarah Rettie, Claire Roe

Background Artist: Lilly Durrant

Sound Design: Lilly Durrant, Sarah Rettie

After Effects Compositing (light effects and sound): Lilly Durrant

Flash Compositing (black hole zoom): Sarah Rettie

:)

It's magic!

I watched quite a few video tutorials today trying to work out how to add some effects to our animation. And then I just tried playing around in After Effects and managed to do this:

I think this test worked out really well. And it wasn't that difficult to do! :D Once we have it all filmed, added sound effects to the animation as well, i think it's gonna look pretty grand! Monday is our deadline... but i think we're gonna get there - feeling good today! X

Inbetweens done :)

These are Sarah's keyframes and my inbetweens, frames 1-250 of Marlo the Magician animation:

And these are my keyframes that Sarah inbetweened, frames 749-1000 of Marlo the Magician animation:

:D

Inbetweens

Over the last few days I've been inbetweening Sarah's keyframes. I still have most of the walk cycle to inbetween but i'm quite please with how its looking so far :)

It's on it's way there!

Been busy completing keyframes and clean-up before the Easter break (which isn't really a holiday for us all because we need to finish all of our work!)

Before our last ever 2nd year group crit, I filmed all of our groups keyframes together. This is the first time we got to see our animation as a whole:

The group crit went well, one of my goals from the very start of this project was that i wanted the audience to feel empathy with Marlo, particularly at the end when there is the realization of his ferret not being there. The film was shown to the tutor and the group and as it finished i heard "awwwh" - brilliant! Just the reaction i wanted!
One of the things that need to be worked on are a few height changing issuses in the middle of the animation.
Sarah's keframes are from the start to when he puts the teacup in his hand- these are cleaned up and ready for me to inbetween.
Charlie's keyframes are from when Marlo disappears the teacup to when he catches the runaway glove- the final timing still needs to be sorted and frames clean-up. I think with these frames there is a nice opportunity for some comedic timing when Marlo notices the glove running away. Claire will be inbetweening these.
Claire's keyframes are from Marlo shaking the runaway glove to when he is bowing. These still need to be cleaned-up. Charlie has the job of inbetweening here.
My keyframes are from when Marlo gets up from the bow to the end and Sarah will be inbetweening these.
One problem I came across after i filmed them all together and watched it back, was that Claire's hook-up frame and my hook-up frame did not match up exactly, which is why when he is bowing he appears to shift slightly to the right. We brought up the problem with our tutor and a number of solutions were discussed. I will attempt to solve the problem by redrawing a few of my starting frames, as we discussed overall it would be less work for me to adjust my frames than it would be for Claire to adjust hers. Our hand-in date for everthing is the 25th April, so it's all go go go to get everything complete to a high standard - nothing less in my books :)

Flash project - a website for Marlo

For two weeks we all had a new project which was to create an interactive Flash website for our character Marlo. It had to have a main page for our group with 4 links to our own seperate pages, and each page had to have a short animation on it with a few interactive buttons. We had one intense day of training on how to use the Flash program and then we were let loose! It was a slightly daunting task but i'm really happy with the result and learned how to use a new computer program :)
We attempted to put a Flash file onto blogger but it just did not work, so i will put some screenshots up instead! Here is the main page I created for our group:

The letters in 'Marlo' i animated to float up and down randomly to add a bit of magic to the page. Each of the playing cards i made into buttons, each one links off to each of our pages.

Sarah created a dressing up game, Claire made a rhythm game, Charlie worked on a page about Marlo's past, so i helped in giving her some information of the history of Marlo from my original notes.
My page was Marlo's interactive desk, here is a screenshot of it:

I painted most of it in Flash, painting only the poster and wallpaper in photoshop. I think painting in Flash gives a nice painterly look to it. The playing card in the top left is a back button to the main page. If you hover the mouse cursor over the magic wand it becomes animated and shoots out sparks and swirls:

Hovering over the old poster, the figure of Marlo comes alive and introduces Merit the Ferret out of his top hat:

If you click on the glove lying on the desk, it becomes animated and walks off the screen!

The last interactive element of this page (at the moment) is the red book leaning against the pile of other books. By clicking it, you are taken to a new page that looks like parchment with a small fact about Marlo's book collecting, and a short animation of Marlo bending over to pick up a big pile of heavy books and then stagger off screen:



And there is also a 'back' button in the bottom right of this page which takes you back to his desk.

Ands that is two weeks of my work!

Just a reminder - this is the link to our group's work for Marlo the Magician: http://marlo-the-magician.blogspot.com/

izzy wizzy - its been busy!

It appears that i haven't blogged in quite a while, so i am going to post a few blogs in a row to catch up with what i've been up to! So first... introducing the final Marlo the Magician character design by Claire:

And here is our script:

MARLO the Magician walks in, tired, slumping on his coat with a CUP OF TEA in one hand as he gets ready backstage for a show.
He takes out his MAGIC WAND. While sipping his tea, he zaps his slippers into shoes.

Using his magic wand, he vanishes his tea cup.
Marlo then vanishes magic wand between hands, slides up sleeves and turns to face desk.
Picks up first GLOVE, puts in on and wiggles fingers. Meanwhile, the other glove comes alive and starts walking away.
Marlo goes to pick up second glove, notices its not there, looks around for it confused. He spots it about to jump off the table and catches it just in time, glove continues to walk while he holds it in mid air.
Marlo shakes glove annoyingly and puts it on his hand.

He then picks up his TOP HAT, brushes off dust, holds it over his head, breathes in, pauses...
As soon as the hat is on his head, he straightens his back, smiles, becomes the performer 'Marlo the Magician'!
The Magician bows, fans out some cards from thin-air, makes one card jump to the other hand, shows the card.
Carried away in the moment and caught up in practising his magic tricks, he takes off top hat, shows the inside, goes to introduce...
Marlo is in the same pose as the old poster in the background, which depicts a young Marlo the Magician introducing his magical assistant MERIT THE FERRET.
His happy face droops, upset and emotional. Marlo sighs, reaches his hand out to the poster of Merit, looking nostalgic and sad.
A black hole zooms into the magician and his long lost companion.

THE END.

Character Turnaround

Once we had explored the look of the character we had to make up character turnaround model sheets:

And here are construction drawings, these are the basic shapes the character is made up of:

I then explored his range of expressions he might adopt during the animation:

Ta-da! :D

Character design drawings

So here he is! Marlo the Magician! These are drawings i did, with added detail. The character is depressed and sad because he has never really got over the death of his companion and magic show partner - Merrit the Ferret. This is a drawing of him with his pre-show cup o' tea, zapping his slippers into shoes:

Once Marlo puts on his top hat he once again becomes Marlo the Magician and performer.

However he gets a little carried away and goes to introduce Merrit - then realises he is not there anymore

Here are some other drawings, one where his beard gets tied into his bow tie by mistake, the other of him looking a bit depressed

Hi there!

Hello! Kinda new to this blogging thing but should get the hang of it soon :p
'Character Animation Performance' is the big project for semester 2!
Here is a general outline of the brief:
"Your group’s character is dressing or undressing when he or she notices something unexpected about his or her appearance or his or her clothing. Alternatively, something unexpected could happen externally to the character, ie, he or she hears a noise, sees a light or object. Whatever the unexpected incident is, it should be relevant in some way to his or her back story. After the incident, the character’s focus has changed – his/her body language has changed, his/her emotional state has changed."

My idea of a magician character, called Marlo, was chosen amongst our group. We have a blog specifically for this project, :) http://marlo-the-magician.blogspot.com/
Here is the description of Marlo from the blog:

"Marlo was a sensation. The world of magic had never seen such a young and talented performer like he! With the help of his sidekick ferret, he would tour the country leaving excitement and wonder in his path. But... that was many years ago. After the death of his only true companion - his ferret- his zeal for magic dwindled, and so did the crowds interest. Small crowds and equally small stages hardly seem enough for this once brilliant magician... but the show must go on."

The next stage was to come up with some designs for the look of the character, here are some initial sketches I did of poses and movements:

More drawings on the way! :D