Animated documentary: Week 13

This is a production week focusing on animating the animation, mostly the scene where the progress of the silk goddess feeding the silk worm and woven from the cocoons she obtained. I used After Effect for the animation compositing the assets that I did in previous weeks to form the final animations. Here are some comparisons between the animatic to the animation in progress.

More assets for the silk goddess with different poses to be animated in different scenes:

OUAN503:End of Module Evaluation

I think this is a module with a large flexibility as the set briefs are not specified, therefore it gives freedom to us especially helped to shape our individual directions, to give us a chance to practice skills that we have passion in and would probably do in the future. I enjoyed the module a lot as we can choose our own set of briefs and respond to it, and on the other hand, in the collaborative brief part, I am able to practice my skill of communication, collaboration, and organisation.

The set of briefs I chose are mostly character design challenges as I responded to 3 character-design challenge among all briefs that I have responded, which is also what I am most interested in doing. The submission of the first one I did back in February was late, where I did not take a screenshot as well, therefore I did not miss any of the other deadlines to prevent late submissions happening. The other three briefs are all animation briefs, with the 11 seconds club challenge being the main project for the studio brief 1. I did three of them in three different styles and methods, traditional animation papers, digital compositing and assets in After effects, in order to test that which one works for me the best, and to gain experiences for all of the skills. In conclusion, I think I have made the right choices of briefs to respond to, I had chances to practice different skills both digitally and with traditional methods. What I could have improved is to respond to more briefs that covers more skill range, and to manage time more efficiently to prevent the situation of not submitting stuff on time. I wrote short evaluations for each of the animation or character design I did, and I found that it is a great way of keeping up to date, to give the project a proper finish and to look back seeing the improvement that could be applied to it.

The second part of this module, is the first time that I work with other individuals of other courses beside the collaborative team in the other animation brief. At the first we were asked to present our skill set with four images composited together on a sheet of A3 art board, and to choose a brief on either D&AD or YCN. I was firstly considering between quite a lot of briefs as I can find my individual roles to contribute in all of them. But eventually decided on two briefs to present on the interests’ sheet. Both briefs require animation skill, which is the role that I can possibly take. Finally, I decided to respond to the brief set by Hasbro, to create a new board game facing teenagers aged 16-26. The biggest problem that we all faced was the communication between us as we are from different courses, and we did not arranged enough seminars to discuss the progress of each of us, therefore it lagged the speed of me to complete the final presentation video. Another improvement is that I could have do more research of the background of the game company to produce minor details to the game itself to embrace the culture of the game industry. Eventually we gave it a nice finish and submitted the video along the design boards in time, overall I am pleased with the final outcome, it demonstrates the role and the concept of the appearance of the card game, which on the other hand, I like the idea as it is an engaging game, and a resolution to the life spam of card games, with constantly produced booster packs.

To conclude the process of this module, I have responded to several briefs both individually and collaboratively, I kept my blogs up to date to record the process I went through and gave myself evaluations for the purpose of reducing problems and pushing the quality of works higher for future references. There is still a huge space for me to improve myself, such as on self-management on all sorts of aspects, and the importance of communication especially being an individual with vital roles working in a creative group, that if the team members can work efficiently with the right directions after an agreement approved by all of us. But in general, the module has given me a very helpful guidance to my self-interests and clarification of the roles that I could be taking in a team.

Hasbro: Individual Contributions

Individual briefs: Art boards

Project Report

Animated documentary: Week 12

I will be doing the backgrounds and other assets for the animation and animate the assets. I studied the references such as the texture of the cocoons, the racks and the silk worms, and did watercolor tests for the final assets that I will be making. And for the backgrounds, I referred back to the mood boards that I did before we started the rough storyboards and animatic. So here are some of the watercolor backgrounds and assets that I did on paper which I scanned them in and cut out in Photoshop for further edit. For the woven machine I made 3 set of the spinning wheel for the frame by frame animation movements of it that I can animate afterwards.

11 seconds club: April-submitting the animation

I made a front cover for the animation to submit it with the film. This is a screenshot of my entry to the April's 11 seconds club challenge and another one of the confirmation E-mail that the challenge send to me.

11 seconds club: April-final animation

Here is the final animation for this month's challenge.

Animated documentary: Week 11

As the feedback to the assets that Rey designed did not demonstrate a match of style to the watercolor assets that I did for the silk goddess, We decided that I would redo the assets for all of the characters within the animation, which are the traders, the animals, and the transports. So I used the same style that I have drawn the main character to applied them on the other characters, and created the below assets which we cut them out in Photoshop. For the further animating process I will be rigging then in After Effect with puppet tools, which produce the effect that we wanted for the story happened within the book. 

So here are the assets I scanned and the outcome of cutting out:

11 seconds club: April-Backgrounds

I did the backgrounds on paper and scanned them onto the computer to do further editions. When I was considering the backgrounds, I would like to combine then with the decorations from both a police office to a home, in order to demonstrate that the main characters are imaging themselves as police officers.

After I've scanned them onto Photoshop, I added the colors onto the backgrounds with low contrasting level colors to highlight the characters animated above, so that they stand out more.

11 seconds club: April-Character designs

For this challenge, I started with character designs and some quick sketch of story boards. The sound track given by the challenge is as follows:

-Where are you taking these prisoners?
-These are prisoners.
-Yes, where are you taking them?
- I am … taking them, to imprison them … in prison.

The idea that came to me is a role play of pet animals, dog and cat, pretending themselves as police officers. So I changed the first design of my cat character and designed a police costume for him. I would like to make assets to rig them in After Effect, to do the lip syncing as well.

Animated documentary: Week 10

Focusing on making backgrounds by doing water color test out of the texture of an old fashion story book. After scanned them in I adjust the color tone and the RGB level to lower the contrast between the backgrounds and the characters. I combined some of the backgrounds with frame to frame animation such as the sky scene where the sun is boiling on the sky, by producing five of the same object and edited it in After Effect by time remapping tool. The tricky bit was to adjust the backgrounds in Photoshop to match the tone of the character for it not to jump our of the scene, which I think I did not make it the best where some of the scenes still seem odd, I want to try to improve that in the future.