PRODUCTION PRINCIPLES – Maya Animation yr1

Out of your head

Story

To give us a starting a starting point in the project we looked at the word cloud and collectively picked out words that we were drawn to and look further into their meanings and through this we want our character to go through some sort of transformation that will help them find comfort and confidence in themselves. We also brainstormed the visual ideas we had through a joint Pinterest board which I think definitely helped us get on the same wavelength with our ideas.

Initial Loglines:

‘A small magical creature faces a race against time to save their world and themselves from the rampant decay which is ravaging their surroundings’

This log line was improved to become: ‘A tenacious magical creature sprints on a time crunch to save their withering world and maybe themselves.’

Another: ‘A distressed creature attempts to save their world, as it withers away, using herbs and a magical lake. What happens when they’re dragged into the lake, will they restore their world or will havoc ensue?’

It was improved to become: A distressed creature aimed to save their decaying world through magical means but what happens when nothing is going to plan.’

Our final longline on this day of initial longlines was: ‘As a violent decay ravages their world, Aether must race to save their environment and escape the divine fate which awaits them.’

After getting constant feedback we realised our longline and story were too vague there wasn’t a clear meaning or message to it so we kind of went away for the weekend and tried to come up with new ideas considering ideas like having an environmental message behind our story, or having personal messages about fears or even as my group suggested a trans allegory having the characters transformation be them becoming who they truly feel they are.

after multiple developments to our story with this last piece of feedback we ended up with our final story which Rhianna C put into script form.

Visuals

When considering visuals for our project with a world disintegrating/decaying, we discussed potential ideas based on stuff we had seen before and for Rhianna in particular was reminded of scenes from Coraline and Paranorman we felt something like this could work quite well with the idea of the world decaying and then one last minute moment of magic transforming and healing our character’s surroundings. Even after going through several story developments and changing up our idea to have fog chasing the characters and turning them to stone I think having references definitely helped us in this project as they still apply to the ideas we have and as a group added a clear understanding of where we headed next in our project after the constant editing of our story.

For Aether and Starlight we wanted to make sure their designs didn’t feel too similar so Rhianna experimented with different cape types some spiky some more rounded but we felt that the spiky designs didn’t reflect starlight’s character but we ended up coming to this long triangle poncho/cloak that had arm pockets in the front which I think helped show starlight’s shy body language. There weren’t as many changes to Aether’s design mainly Rhianna experimented with aether’s facial features deciding that aether would not have a mouth because they felt it would be interesting to have a character that could express themselves so well and emotionally without saying anything which I definitely agree with and helped us focus on the characters actions and eyes to tell the story.

We also made references to these scenes and character designs the character design from Soul (2020) and Elemental (2023) for the character designs whereas the Incredibles (2004) scene was inspiration for the fog that would be turning Aether and Starlight to stone and the bamboo scene in Turning Red (2022) is for the forest our story was set in I do think now looking back that it would’ve been more effective for our scene to have some trees in the audience view so show that we are watching from within the forest. Rhianna also said they referenced the show Bee and puppycat and the game Sky: Children of the light when they were designing Starlight and Aether.

A series of colour ways we experimented with, we tried testing out complimentary colours but were finding it hard to have colours that didn’t merge with each other especially as the characters would be interacting with each other.

Rhianna made concept art for the project once we started drawing out storyboard panels to get a sense of how things would look with the colours we chose, it also helped give us the idea of what texture brush we’d use for colouring once we animate. Rhianna had used a procreate brush that we couldn’t properly transfer into photoshop without it changing its settings and ruining the texture so Rhianna instead made their own brush on photoshop to try and replicate the texture as much as possible that way we could also easily be sent the brush and use it on our devices.

Over the winter holidays Esther took charge of the backgrounds constantly coming back to us for feedback on the colours and the depth in the scenes. We went with watercolour because the texture added to this storytelling/fairytale look which was what we were going for with our story. I also think that watercolour backgrounds helped ground the fog texture as that was on paper too and would not stick out too much.

Over the holiday I worked on making the fog texture I used acrylic paint and a print roller at first and just layered the paint gradually with a purple I had mixed using the roller in a palette which made a sharp texture which I think adds to the dangerous character of the fog. But I wanted to try out more where I could fill the page better and not have white gaps so I attempted to put the paint on the paper directly and used a sponge to create circular patterns to imitate cloud smoke shape which gave a chaotic look. I enjoyed putting the paint directly onto the paper and decided to use the roller instead of the sponge to see how the colours mixed and weirdly they did mix but it left the original colours I put as like a layer underneath. Overall the last one was probably my favourite because you can see the blues and reds underneath and it somehow feels ominous but as a group the vote was the first one that was sharper as it gave off more of the dangerous vibe we were going for.

Prepping

When making the storyboard we all kind of discussed what would be happening at each part of the story and then individually drew out how the scene would look to ourselves before sharing twitch each other and deciding which shot we liked best or what could be improved. On the left is our original storyboard that fit more with our original story that involved a transformation using the lake but once we had fixed and developed our story we managed to cut it down to the one on the right it still wasn’t perfect though, going to our tutors for feedback we found that we had a lot of straight ahead scenes of closeups on the face so our shots weren’t very varied so instead we agreed that some of the close up shots would have to be over the shoulder shots because our characters were interacting and even though they wouldn’t be talking their eyes would be communicating the emotion.

Once we were happy with our new shot angles Rhianna kindly offered to draw out the storyboard all in one style so it would be a clear guide for us to follow once we started animating.

For the animatic we started with the early storyboards with our individual drawings but it was quite fast paced and the audio was abrupt and very loud compared to the ambience that it didn’t feel very natural. I tried loaning a zoom h2n recorder to record some foley myself but unfortunately I had issues with the file and accidentally deleted them I was a bit annoyed but it was a new piece of equipment that I hadn’t used before, next time I think I’ll give myself more time to learn how to use the equipment before needing the audio. Despite this I luckily managed to inform the others in my group and instead we found some free audio online for our animatic. Our final animatic was much better as the images were clearer and the pacing was good enough for peers to understand what was happening in each scene and the audio had been brought down so it wouldn’t be as abrupt but still have a contrast to the rest of the audio.

Making

Finally when we were able to start animating we decided to plan out how we were going to divide work, in class we were told that a good way to divide work would be to have someone draw the key frames, someone do the in-betweens and someone to start colouring and then we all help colour which I think seemed fair but I think as a group everyone felt a bit overwhelmed to work that way so instead we resulted to dealing out numbers of scenes per person and made our own deadlines. I decided to print out our story board so that we could cross off the scenes we had done as we go and to motivate us all. When it came to actually animating I didn’t have too many issues blender grease pencil is the software we used and it wasn’t that bad for me it would freeze for a few seconds sometimes but nothing that wasn’t easily fixed or when the camera decided to disappear so that I could only view my work on the 3d setting that I thankfully got help with from Ben and Jess. Those were all mainly software issues for the actual animation I only had a bit of an issue when I had to continue a head turn, I got a bit confused on how I would go about animating it and for some reason it just wasn’t clicking in my head so instead I went to my sketchbook and drew out a cuboid shape head and tried drawing out on paper the different phases of the turn which definitely helped I think initial I was finding it hard to go from drawing a flat face shot of Starlight to then having such a 3d moment with the back of Aether’s head.

Final

Overall I am happy with how our film turned out I thought as a group we worked together really well and quickly even if we had to make changes to our story or our animatic. My favourite part of this short film was the 2d animation against the painted backgrounds and the painted fog I really like the how the simple mix of the textures gave it this fairytale look and gave the fog its own character without having to give it a face. I think if I were to do this project again I would’ve attempted to work on it as we were initially advised having it split onto keyframes, in-betweens and colouring just so that the art style would be more consistent despite how close we got in replicating the design Rhianna created for us. Another thing I would of liked to do if we had more time was to try do some tests of animating the fog against green paper to act as a green screen on the rostrum and layer all the textures I made to create more of a collaged look. I think having to rewrite our story many times took a lot out of us that we rushing a bit into animating but despite this I still think we worked well in our time given and techniques like planning, setting our own deadlines and physically crossing off scenes is something that kept me on track and I will take with me for future projects.

EL CATO – group project

Brainstorming

We started off looking at a drawing in Aemilia’s sketchbooks of a cowboy and we were all kind of drawn to the idea of making a cowboy character to be honest I’m not sure who suggest making a cat cowboy but we all agreed it would be fun to try. We tried drawing out our own ways of interpreting a cat cowboy and kind of merged our favourite parts into one. Despite really liking the idea of a poncho or a bandana we agreed it would be harder to show movement or actually move the characters body.

Making the Puppet

Once we had our character design idea down we went straight into making and assigned ourselves parts of the body to work on Rhianna worked on the heads and hats, I worked on the limbs, Gracie worked on the boot design and whiskers as she was absent for a couple days but helped out as much as she could later with the filming and then finally Aemilia worked on the body/tail and hay barrel/crate El Cato is sat on. I think this part was pretty easy we all worked quite fast so that we’d have extra time to film our tests. For the limbs I took these long skewers/sticks and cut them in half to make up the main bone and then stuck trying in between to make a loose joint of sorts that would make it easy to move the arms around and bend them. Then for the hand I used the thicker wire to bend one long piece into five finger shapes so that we could mould the hands to hold onto the cigar easily and firmly. I think if I were to improve i’d use the wired for the joints instead of the string as it works better to hold up as it was quite tiring trying to make sure everything was in it’s right place.

Transitions

shapes transitions on Aemilia’s Youtube

This small side test definitely helped me pay attention to little details like how visible the pins we used were and if the shapes we did transitioned smoothly into the others which I think definitely helped us work on different parts of the body cooperatively.

Tests

Here are some images as well as the clips of the animated tests we did for El Cato the main aim of this was to familiarise ourselves with using the cardboard puppet but also to understand how we could work well as a team, what techniques worked best and what issued we faced so we wouldn’t have to go through it again when we actually started filming. One particular issue we faced was that we thought we’d be fine just moving the cats limbs with no real plan but it wasn’t very smooth so we tried drawing out arcs on dragon frame to help guide us and that worked much better, it really made the animation look smoother. As a group I think we worked well in pointing out issues we noticed, we weren’t best as explaining why things were problems however I do think it was because its a bit difficult to get used to using the right terms when describing problems or ideas that we had learnt in jess’s rotation.

smoking test (Aemilia’s YouTube)

kicking feet test (Aemilia’s YouTube)

Filming

Overall I’m happy with how the animation turned out and how well we worked as a group and each tried controlling different parts of the body, my favourite part is probably the tail and whiskers I love the look of them twitching and how realistic and smooth the tail movement is. If I were to improve something I’d probably say the way we covered the smoke on the cigar we originally used black duck tape but I think it wasn’t very hidden in the shine of the lighting so I would’ve tried to use the black cloth instead. As for feedback we got a lot more positive information and barely any improvements from our peers in class we still made sure to note down what was commented on in our sketchbooks.

Final film El Cato (Aemilias Youtube)

BANK ROBBERY – Animatic

Making the storyboard

making the storyboards was something that I had done before in foundation but it was helpful to go over the different shots and staging again it definitely helped remind me to use a variety of shots to communicate what I wanted in the scenario I chose. For example, I used the birds eye view as a way to establish the setting and to get a sense of where everything was happening for the viewer.

Here are some examples of the panels I removed, I mainly removed them because they either felt too repetitive or they didn’t show a variety of shots because most of them were centre shots and/or didn’t correlate with the 180 rule.

Using Premier pro

I had used premier pro before so I wasn’t completely new to it but it still did take some getting used to. I found audio I wanted using BBC sound effects and I came across a problem when I had too many audios and not enough tracks to put them in but I managed to find a video after searching a bit on YouTube that helped me to drag more tracks and I could input more audio to overlap. Something else I learnt when using premier pro was that I could control changes in volume within my audio recordings this helped me take in consideration that the volume outside is louder than the volume on the inside as it would make the scenario more realistic and engaging to the viewer. Overall premier pro was easy to use and any problems I had were fairly simple to resolve.

Feedback and Improvements

The feedback from the first draft was helpful I had been told that there wasn’t need for the amount of birds eye view shots I had put in and that despite having created a lot of tension in my animatic I would be more effective to have some dialogue which I agree with as it definitely added to the sense of urgency in the scenes, I did keep to short sentences so that it would only aid the tension and not take away from the action. The other piece of feedback I got was to show more reaction from the characters which I decided to do by cutting to a close up of one of the robber’s reactions I initially tried to zoom in but that didn’t feel like it communicated a reaction it felt more like it was setting up for something to happen which I didn’t want so I kept to a simple cut.

final edited version

After making the necessary changes it was great to hear back from everyone and to see that it had gotten a good audience reaction. I definitely think that my pacing and sound were my strongest parts, however I did stick to having my brother record all three voices which didn’t necessarily turn out bad but I think it would’ve been more effective if I had actually tried to get three different people to voice the characters in the animatic.

DISTRACTED – 2d shape animation

Planning

I wasn’t sure what I wanted my emotion to be mainly that it would be something around distraction, burnout or getting overwhelmed and to plan that I drew out possible shapes how they would change or move so that I could take into consideration the 12 principles of animation and I ended up with distraction as my chosen word/emotion. We were encouraged in class to make a list of the principles and write how our animations will use them I got a bit confused if I’m being honest so I turned it into a list to summarise each of the principles so I could remember them better, looking back I think I got a bit overwhelmed with the idea of writing while my brain was in a visual thinking mode and didn’t really know how to puts my thoughts to paper.

First Try

My initial plan was to have shapes drag the main shape back so it would not get to its destination and would have to start again, I wanted this to be linked to how when I get distracted it’s like something pulling me back to the start of whatever task I’m doing I did try to plan out the movement and the pacing of how fast or slow the shapes move. I wanted the triangle shape (the distraction) to be airy and random because distractions to me are more things that kind of float into my head but grab my attention fast so I tried to measure out more frames as the shape ascends and less frames as it descends to make it faster. However I kept getting stuck on where to go further after the two shapes met, in class when I showed my first very incomplete draft someone suggested another approach instead of the distraction setting the shape back the two could bounce off each other and throw each other off track, this definitely made things a bit easier for my brain to compute and tried drawing out lines to help imagine how the shapes would move.

Issues I faced were mainly to do with colouring in the shapes every time I tried to fill using the bucket tool it would read the shape I made sure that I was on the right layer and the right colour layer but I still wasn’t working so I tried searching up what issue could be and one of the ideas was that it could be that the shape isn’t connected when I checked it was connected but I noticed that because of the brush, I used the end strokes had a lighter opacity, I assumed this was the problem but I knew I wouldn’t have time to go through and fix each frame and then colour them all so I decided I’d keep the shapes unfilled and assign colours to the outline instead which I still think works fine. I ended up going with a light green colour nothing too intense so it could inflict a feeling of calm and stability and an orange colour for the blob as the orange encourages a sense of enthusiasm and optimism, I felt this helped show that the blob was determined and enthusiastic as it moves forward giving it some character whereas for the triangle shape the colour I chose was grey and it was neutral and represents that a distraction can be anything and doesn’t have any intent it simply falls and invades your focus. For the sound I wanted something that would also be calming but would be easy to manipulate, when I found this audio I thought it fit very well it reminded me of a fly or a bee buzzing from afar to then when it comes close to you it becomes annoying and distracts you. I then also made the buzz louder for the blob when it shows a little frustration at the end.

Final edit

after getting my first set of feedback I definitely felt less stressed and that this project was more manageable so I’m very grateful for the feedback. I was definitely happy with how it turned out in the end I really like how the sound works with the actions of the shape and how well I managed to use the principles in my work especially ease in and ease out it really helped give weight to the shapes. I think if I were to work on it more I’d go back and use a better brush so that I can finish the colouring properly and I’d maybe experiment with maybe changing the colour of the shapes or the background ones they hit each other to show the imbalance the distraction caused. A popular piece of feedback I got from my class was that I could try making the shapes bigger so that it would be more clear and that too much empty space would maybe make you feel like you’re expecting something else to happen which I agree with, making the shapes bigger would add more clarity. I think I mainly started off small because of my nerves when starting this project.