DONE

 

I can now give my fingers a rest , lots drawings and edits later and we now have a 24 second animation, managed to work through the mistakes and im quite impressed with the result, got to admit , been hard but i have really enjoy it, hope you enjoy it too

after effect editing

I wanted to show the makings of the animation , now with the goal in site i wanted to show how i tied off the lose ends and made sure the animation ran well.

the first beat starts a bit in and  i thought it should match the rain, so as the rain comes in i moved the selected part of the song and made sure the beat kicked in when the rain started to fall.

In order i looked at the section and as you can see on the screen shot lined up where the action was to the beat in the songs

I had seen a few animation of the groups and to top it off and finish nicely i decided to add my name, what better way to show you proud then to put your name on it

more film

 

I was just to excited to wait , i wanted to show you how i was getting on with the next bits of the animation and here you go , add them together and ive got an animation. i am so pleased with the motion , the umbrella comes out well and the the effect of the lighting tops me off

beginning

 

As i have created my animation in section i haven't worked in order but now the beginnig is done i thought i give u a sneaky review , im excited for the rest of the film now , and its almost there now , just need the finsihing touches of timing and music and the animation will be alive (ha ha)

at least now i seem to be able to work after effects, good job for trail runs

time line

After looking over my first clips of he animation coming together i started to worry , i had already planed how the animation would run in the story board , giving brief details as to the seconds and frames, but becasue i had now got a feel for how it works in after effects i decided i needed to tie of all ends and create a accurate time line , i looked at how many frames i had created for each section and using my 12 frames per sececond i calucated how many seconds that would be, as a visual aid i create small drawings, this time line really helped me think and visual how it would all work together and after seeing how many seconds i had filled and where everything sat i could use after effected to fit the beat of the music according to the action in my animation.

all the rough notes turned into a tidy time line, no more " now where did i put that " and more " yes i know whats next"

 

coming together

 

This animation hasnt all been smooth experiences , when i was on after effect some of my uploads where coming in the correct sequence , i had to rename a whole folder full of images and then after effected decides to delete some of my files and make the half the size , after deleting uploading a few time i managed to get it working, but some of the animation was running to fast and this was one of the parts where even ho it was meant to run at 4 seconds it ran at 2 and working on a computer when your angry isnt fun

re-think

After looking at the story board and having a few chats , i thought one of my ideas to zoom into the facial reaction wouldn't work, i had planned to create different emotions throughout the animation and to zoom in on just the face would lose all the other hard work of detail, i changed the idea to the rain drop zooms out and the one rain drop then becomes part of the group falling on the boy/character.

how its going so far ...

 

This is just a quick look at how im getting on so far, my first bit of movie animation :), i haven't yet perfected the frame rate , but i think the concept works really well , i am happy with how the animation moves and i dont think its too jumpy, looking forward to the rest now

other objects ...

 

In the animation i am going to build up to the beat by using a planet that zooms in to the blue sea and from that turns into a rain drop, iwanted to draw out all the ojbects used in my animation so i got to drawing the earth, after i made sure it was a perfect circle i scaned it in and coloured it to fit the bill.

the rain was the next scene , i wanted to have a collection of sizes for the diffenrent strengths of rain, scanning this in and playing with it on photoshop i found that the rain needed to be smaller or it didnt look like it was moving,

The clouds i drew them out thinking they were going to link up , i wanted the clouds to come in from the side and turn the animation literally grey and miserable, i scanned it in and played witht the size and how they would move accross the page and the clouds moved well and could link at the end to form the sky for the lighting.

 

The lighting was my favorite idea , i wanted the audience to connect with my character  and listening to my music again and again i thought that the rain and the hapy getting the umbrealla out didnt fit the music ,i wanted to turn up the  danger and thought lighting fitted with the weather i had already going on and would top of the danger feeling , looking at the ending after i scannded in a few executed characters i could see the animation coming along , i wanted to keep the audiences attention and i think the lighting does that.

character colour test

 

 

After looking throught my develppment ideas i decided on this male character and this femal character and thought to further measyre i should try different colours and see how thye look , itried to get the colours to compliant each other or so they would stand out , i didnt want they colours to take away from the characters detail so i decided that blue and browns would make the best colours for the animation , i tried out a few diffent ways before i finally decided i shoose the blue, brown and orange, the red was a close second but i though the colours matched south park too much and i didnt want to copy there style.

The female character doesn't fit the deserves needs for the animation, i think the age i have created her makes her too old , i think a young boy how can get into trouble would be perfect for this animation.

 I have chosen the male character as my finally character i think the female character doesn't portray the characteristics i need for the animation , as i will be creating a quite painful and dark animation to match the theme of the music.

character ideas and development

These are my many different character ideas , taking the thisngs i had looked at in detail and pieceing them together , looking at both male and female character so i could make a fair judgemetn at to which would work best , each drawing is slitghty different as i already have a brief idea of how i want the character to look but i want to experiement with differnt ideas.

This is my favorite design , i like how the eye are close and the use of the hoodie instead of a zip or shirt creates a informal feeling , a young boy who could get into mischieve.

 

These where the things i wanted to look at that would start to shape andd form m charater , looking at the exprression and the stle of dress to determind how they make you feel, and as i haven't yet decided if i will be creating a male or female character i felt it best to look at both gendered in the eyes, hair , hats and extras, i wanted to really look at how i could develop my characters identity and want it to fit with the music and style of animation i want to create.

I found inspiration in these cartoon character, each different cartoon uses different stles and techinques to create the cartoon look and personally i want this cartoon coloured look for my animation.

Stop motion

In the workshop i created a stop motion piece of two characters dancing and having fun , after creating this i did think stop motion was a option for my final piece, i liked using the onion layers, where you could see the layer underneath and move the next frame just enough, i think if i was to use stop motion , i need to get to grips with the lighting and camera, althought the workshops we have had in the past have helped alot, and i would have liked to have shown you my experiment as it was a short but sweet little film, sorry , i couldn't manage to upload it, i saved it as the wrong file , oppps.

Story board

The animation starts with the music intro being slow and chilled,

while this is slow we are having a look into space , the stars in the sky

the music is still quite chilled so the we zoom

into the stars to find a planet in the sky

the music slowy picking up a beat and then 

we see a close up planet earth in all its glory

quickly the earth turns blue and 

the shape changes into a rain drop

 

the beat kicks in and the rain falls quickly

 

now you can see the character a zoom out

  

raining hard down on the poor character, beat is strong

 

getting really wet now " hmm if only i had a umbrella"

 

quickly getting his umbrella out to stay dry

the umbrella is keeping him dry, the worse is over surely ??
 

the beat is high and there is a storm coming, watch out !

the charcater reaction to the storma and lighting
 

the lighting hits the charater fast and hard

 

ending the character is extricuted by the lighting

Story board ideas

 

My main ideas for the animation, i keep coming back to space, water and danger , these are the strong feelinngs i get when listening to the music.

first ideas of the continuation of the snail adventures , i like the idea but after listening to the music i feel the snail isnt fitting with the feeling of the song.

 

Mind maps to help me narrow down the mood of the song and the section the animation could be broken up into.

 

Quick story ideas for my main ideas of space, time, water and danger, looking at how i could convay them into animations.

 
I then thought get my ideas down on paper , write them and see where they take me.

 

Listening to my music, i thought it be a good idea to show visual what i was thinking  so i went to look for images creating this mood board to start my ideas off for my storyboard.

 

Snail animation

To create this animation of 3 seconds each drawing had to be scanned in, all 36 images canned and imported into After Effects. I think the hardest part was remebering how to save it all correctly . The animation was meant to be12 frames per second which would make it 3 seconds long, but we thought it be best slowed down a bit to 8 frames per second adding a extra second.

after a succesful save it just needed music, sara used her music libary and looked for suitible track and after some experiementing came up with a song to match.

Im am really  impressed with the animation and how it worked out, i would of liked to try colour or using a higher frame rate to test the difference , but ive got to admit, although i have really enjoy cellular animation , and would consider using it for my final piece even at 12fps there would be a LOT of drawing , i think it is worth it though.

Snail animation storyboard

In the workshop session we was told to make a short animation in pairs and to get us started we looked at possible character ideas and After a workshop session me and my task partner Sara Akl draw out each scene on paper using the clip at the top, we decided to draw out a short story of two snails. The snails worked well for us both and were the characters which looked the best at the end of the worshop. Starting with 3 frames; beginning, middle and end, we decided what would happen in each one. The frames in the middle would be the 'tween' frames.

Here are the 3 original images drawn out:

At the beginnig the two snails meet

 

 

Then the two snails fall in love

shock, the snails scared for their lives

WORKSHOP
This is the work we did before the animation , looking at creating characters

These where my develpoped ideas for the adventures of the snail , going to space and snail in the rain , i thought i should look at if there was room to continue this idea and how , i thought of these little story lines/boards to try and give another look at the snail animation , although i like the snails adventures , i think for the task and the music a cute snail isn't going to work, however i like the concept and think cell animation is the way i want to go .