Masters Semester 2

Here is a summary (a bit of a long summary post but it's been a busy semester!) of my work from 3 modules in Semester 2 on the MSc Animation & Visualisation course, including links to blog posts for each project.

All blog posts for Semester 2 (including notes from meetings and tutorial/workshop notes) can be viewed HERE.

Going Live
All relevant Going Live blog posts on this blog can be viewed HERE.

Here is the final film:

Concerning Dragons from Kieran Duncan on Vimeo.

To begin the project, lots of research was carried out. I then produced moodboards to help the group with inspiration and reference for each aspect of the story that had been developed:

Next I contributed some character designs for the Eagle and Dragon characters:

Relevant blog post at: Going Live Character Design blog post

One character I took through the pipeline from concept to animation was the Tree-Hand.

Relevant blog post at: Going Live 3D Modeling blog post

Relevant blog post at: Going Live Rigging blog post

Relevant blog posts at: Going Live Animatic Work blog post and Going Live Character Animation blog post

This is the animation I did for Shot 1:

All Xray - Frame 257 to 565 from Lilly Durrant on Vimeo.

One of my other roles within the team was Production Manager.
Relevant blog post at: Going Live Production blog post

Once the film was completed, we all went through to Glasgow to present it to Axis Animation Studio.
Relevant blog post at: Going Live Final Film and Presentation blog post

Some of the slides from the PowerPoint presentation

Photo taken at Axis Animation by Phillip Vaughan

Advanced Production
All relevant blog posts for Advanced Production module can be viewed HERE.

One of the first things our group worked on at the start of the Semester was the story and storyboard. This involved a couple of story meetings and lots of post-its:

Photo taken by Kirti Goenka

I then took all of the post-its and put them together into a rough animatic. The story was then divided up between the team to draw out the shots more clearly, which I then updated the animatic. The story then went through some more changes and development. It was then my job to draw up the new storyboard and animatic. This was the most up-to-date 2D animatic I created:

One of the first parts of research was creating moodboards to explore style:

3D style

2D style

Capturing my own reference footage was useful research and can be used as reference when it comes to animating. I set up the same scenario as the story and filmed my own dog taking a biscuit into the garden:

Put a bird feeder in the garden - reference for the bird character

The dog character took the most work to get right, and involved multiple group meetings to discuss and draw out variations before getting to the final character design:

Dog character sketching

Sketching Dog faces

Dog character sketching - decided on a Jack Russell Terrier breed

Colour variations

Colour variations with jumpers

Color variations for Owner and Dog - the Dog is held by the Owner in 2 shots, therefore the dog's jumper could not clash or merge with the Owner's jumper.

I quickly did an edit with Concept Art that Sheng had created to test whether these colours would work in the environment that Sheng had designed.

Trying out a variety of hairstyles for the Owner character

Through research, I decided that the Linnet bird would be the best suited for the film. It is on the Red List for Conservation Concern and has a pop of bright pink/red to help it stand out in the Autumn/Winter environment:

Sketches and digital painting of Linnet Birds in different poses

These are some watercolour studies I did to explore how the watercolour-style of our film will look:

Watercolour plants

Watercolour studies

Watercolours of props in the film

This is the 3D animatic I created, using two rigs I downloaded (including the Malcolm character courtesy of AnimSchool.com - http://www.animschool.com/DownloadOffer.aspx ). The initial environment was modeled by Sheng. The temporary bird was created by Giorgos. I am responsible for the layout, camera and animation in the 3D animatic. The 3D animatic will continue to be used into the production, swapping in more finalised assets, and re-editing the timing if the film needs shortened:

Through working on the 3D animatic, I learned how to set-up and use an animation picker. This is something I found very useful to use and will most likely incorporate into my animation workflow:

As the Director for this project, my role has been to help make creative decisions, overseeing the creation of designs in Pre-Production and review the progress of assets being created in Production. In order to communicate efficiently and gather notes discussed at team meetings and reviews, I produced documents such as the one below, detailing any adjustments that were needed:

I also worked with Kirti to help with the creation of a Shot List, as I realized that a Shot List would be very helpful with the creation of the 3D animatic and could be used throughout the production to keep track of the progress of each shot:

Working out how to divide the shots up for the Shot List

A page from the Shot List

Reflection On Practice
All relevant blog posts for Reflection On Practice Module can be viewed HERE.
The title of my research for this module was: 'How to create empathy for a cartoon dog - An investigation into the connection between an audience and animated dog characters.'
This relates back to my Programme Of Study and original goal for animating, which is to create believable and convincing character performances.

One of the first methods of research was to carry out a focus group. During this focus group I asked the participants questions relating to two video clips. First was Walt Disney’s Pluto – Bone Bandit (1948); the second was Walt Disney’s Bolt (2008). They both showed a cartoon dog hungry and searching for food. An interesting aspect I analysed was the different responses between dog owners and non-dog owners and how this had an effect on their empathy towards a cartoon dog.

Making notes and highlighting important points on the transcript.

I then investigated different techniques to create empathy for a cartoon dog that I can use for the dog character in my own film project 'Tug of Biscuit'. Here are a few of these techniques below:

From the focus group, it was clear that both dog expressions and human expressions are needed to create a believable performance. This helped me to add a new shot into the Tug of Biscuit storyboard, showing the dog stop to look around suspiciously for the bird, before deciding to dig a whole to hide the biscuit:

Three Storyboard panels I drew for Tug of Biscuit, with the new shot added in the middle

Incorporating realistic dog behaviour is important, therefore collecting reference video footage and doing observational drawings from life are ways to capture subtle mannerisms and movement that can be incorporated into final animation:

Observational drawings of my own dog

 Another technique to help with anthropomorphic characters is to draw a human's reaction to a similar situation, then draw the dog again but with the human expressions incorporated:

My own drawings showing a human’s reaction to their food being stolen by a bird.

My own drawings showing a dog’s reaction, merged with human expression, to their food being stolen by a bird.

All of these techniques and methods I can incorporate into my practice as an Animator, on a variety of projects.

Slides from the PowerPoint presentation for the Mock Conference

Life Drawing and Observational Drawing
Drawing and observing life is something I still value as an important skill in animation. I managed to find some time to attend some life drawing classes this semester. As there are two animals I will be animating in Tug of Biscuit, I went up to Camperdown Wildlife Park to do animal sketches. I've also using my own dog as a reference to draw from. Relevant blog posts at: Life Drawing and Observational Drawing.

"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

A virtual drive around New Orleans...

I've been looking at the town environment for a bit, for our 4th year film 'Krokodi'. First I tried to gather information that would help me do some designs for it. The first half of our film is set in New Orleans. We agreed at the start of the project that we liked the French Quarter architecture. Decided to go for a virtual drive around New Orleans (courtesy of Google Street View!) The first picture is a photo of a page from my sketchbook, with some screenshots from Google streetview, with my added notes of environment props that kept appearing everywhere, including the same style of street lamps, bins, water hydrants and balconies:

 Sketches of compositions based from 'Krokodi' animatics, and adding details of buildings on top based on research and paintings of New Orleans environment:

Some small-sized acrylic paintings, quite liked the angles of the building in the middle painting and the different bright colours of the buildings in the last one:

 A bigger acrylic painting with coloured pencil:

The thing I was most happy with in this digital painting was how I painted the sky, rather pleased with it :) Maybe I might possibly do some Matte paintings for our film?...

Added some digital paint to a sketch I had done in my sketchbook. Tried to used a variety a bright colours. Quite like making all the buildings a variety of colours:

Started to use red pencil and pen to sketch out some scenes based on camera angles from the animatic and sources of inspiration. Tried to make the angles and lines not perfect and a bit more stylized for the sort of style we are going for:

I then added some digital paint to block out some possible colours, and add in the characters and burger van to see how they fitted in with the environment:

It's not long until our deadline for this semester so I'm cracking on with the production bible work and organising my team to make sure we stay on schedule, it's all go-go-go! Here's the link to our group blog which features all the pre-production work so far: http://krokodi.blogspot.co.uk/

P.S. 'Jurassic Jess' is scheduled to go back into production as soon as this semester is finished - Jess has most definitely not been forgotten! :D

http://jurassic-jess.blogspot.co.uk/