Extended Practice - Hostel World Animation 2

I have now finished all of my Hostelworld animation. It has taken a lot longer than I had anticipated, as there was a lot of work passed off to me right at the last minute, so it came off as quite rushed. Overall the compositing done by Liam was the saving grace on this project, as well as the 3D backgrounds, which came out looking great.

Overall we ended up with 4 different idents, with the character animation clean up all done by me, and 2 shots completely animated by me also. I am putting this one down to - I am not a clean up artist, but I will not be using any of the animation here in my showreel or portfolio in the future.

It has been fully submitted, a long with a proposal which I had to make based off team notes, which accumulated everything we wanted to say in our response to the brief.

With this, I had to accumulate all of the images into a condensed press pack of our work, including the character designs and pictures of the environments, as well as how we planned to distribute the advert, should it win. 

Overall it achieved what it needed to achieve, and I am pretty happy with the turn out, but it could have been better had I spent more time cleaning the animation up a bit more. However as animation is not my main takeaway from this module, it has served it's purpose and I will take what I have learned from this going forward. 

Extended Practice - Hostel World Animation

The past couple of days I have spent finally animating on Hostel World. I did not have much animation to do, it was just a case of finding the time between my main project. I have managed to finish and colour this one shot in 1 day, so I am hopeful that I can do the same with my next shot.

These were my roughs for my first shot. This was actually the second attempt I made at them, as TV Paint had crashed my original file, which was a bit of a set back but it was partly my fault for not backing up my work. I am happy with how the roughs turned out, I feel as though the movement translates well. As we are colouring the characters in a way which I am not accustomed to, I am hoping the movement is still see-able when it is coloured.

After finishing my roughs, I went on to the colouring phase, which we were doing with the colour fill tool, which colours as you draw the line. This meant we could get the line-less style which we were going for.  Overall I am quite happy with how this shot came together. However, as I went with the animatic sizing when animating, I am concerned that it may be too pixelated or low quality when it comes to compositing.

Extended Practice - Storyboard Progression

This past week I have spent on a finished, more polished version of my own project, with a lot more thought in the shot pacing and the dynamic angles which it relies on heavily to keep it entertaining. I have finished the first 2 shots for it, and now that I am fully in the swing of it, my workload should increase exponentially per week, as I know more or less how I am pacing everything.

I am very happy with how this board is taking shape. It is a readable board with a lot of consideration for the action and also with consideration for the next stages of production. I have added details where there needs to be of tradigital VFX, with the smoke from the explosion, the dust from the monster's feet and the main character's gun. I have also added clearly the camera movements, which are going to be essential to the background artist for the sizing of their document, so that it stays high quality and does not become pixelated when zoomed in for example.

Overall I am happy with how the storyboard is turning out, however my productivity has been much slower on this as I am taking a lot of time making it polished, when I should be taking the time to make it readable first, and then going back and cleaning it up afterwards. This is something I will focus on going forward, making sure I maintain a professional workload per week, and making sure I meet my own deadlines and stay on schedule.

Extended Practice - Hostel World Storyboards

After deciding on the basic layout of our story, and knowing how we wanted to handle the advertisement using the brief and our own research, I started with the storyboard. We had made some basic sketches on what we wanted to do, so I based my storyboards on this.

This was the base sketch that I had made before any sort of designing or research happened, with an idea of how to round off the advert. Overall we decided to limit the character's to 3, as it was the general advertising rule of thirds, which we decided would work better. Also, with the time limit, it would be better to limit the amount of animation we had to do. From here I put together the backgrounds that we had of our chosen hostels, and split them like this to form a final sort of frame for me to work off with the storyboards.

This was the final frame I put together using the background designer's 3D environments. There is some framing issues but I figured that this was suitable for the storyboard at least, and could easily be fixed.

This was the animatic I put together. As with all of my more current storyboards, I considered the "action safe" area, as well as taking into account the clarity of drawing and the framing. I used the 3D assets to correctly get the framing as close as it could possibly be to the final animation. It stands at 30 seconds so that it fits with TV advertising timings, as this was designed as a TV advert. I was ultimately happy with how the animatic turned out, I think it utilises the 3D assets well. The next stage from here will be to split up the shots and to find a source of music. 

Extended Practice - Hostelworld Research

For another one of my live briefs, I had entered into a group with 3 others to take on the YCN brief "Hostel World" where the idea was to make an ad campaign that appealed to the student market to go on holiday and stay in hostels. Myself and one other carried out some research and created a small story layout for the ad to follow. I made some contributions to these documents they were not all carried out by me. The story layout I made as a sort of brief pack that I had been sending to others I had worked with in order for us to get more or less on the same page in terms of what we wanted.

This was a research document made with some mood boards made by another member of the group in order to choose the locations we were going to use as a basis for our story.

This was the brief pack made so that we all knew what we were to expect from this advert. It doubled as a sort of story layout so that we knew what the order of things would be.

Extended Practice - Board Test and Story Overview

During the thumb-nailing stage, I was unclear on how the movement of the main character would work. Therefore I took to storyboard pro purely to test the movement of the character and camera. 

This page shows the shot in question, that I was struggling with. As is shown he uses the monsters head to project himself up and flips around to then aim his gun at it. I was unsure how this movement would work in an animated setting so I had to make a test for this. 

I have very quickly added camera movement in to this test as well, and it looks a little all over the place because I have not lined it up properly or added any sort of ease or timing to it, however I think the test was successful as it made it clear to me how to handle the movement of the scene. I think the movement looks quite dynamic, bearing in mind that this is using Storyboard Pro's own movie player and has not been timed properly, which I will do in Premier when the time comes to make the full animatic. As is stands at the time I have made this test I am in still in the thumb-nailing stage. 

From here I wanted to test whether my story worked with what I wanted to achieve this time, through thumbnails as opposed to taking it to storyboard pro without the proper considerations happening first. 

For this pass I decided to make a condensed thumbnail page from which I could see the whole story in front of me without having to flip through different pages of thumbnails. From here I will take it into Storyboard Pro as I believe it is at a place where I am happy with the shot choices and dynamic action happening. I will undoubtedly make small revisions here and there when I come to the final pass as there will be some things that do not work with in proper perspective. However for now I am happy with how the story looks. It is also a lot less shots than the original version, which will mean less backgrounds. It also means I can cut some character's who were probably unnecessary in the first place. 

Extended Practice - Post Work Experience Re-evaluation

After completing my 3 day work experience at Brown Bag Films, I had received a lot of advice from industry professionals that had caused me to take a step back from my personal project and look at my practice from a new perspective. I felt that my storyboard did not reflect my skills as a storyboard artist, and the story was overlong and did not showcase what exactly I wanted to show in this film. My goal was to create a storyboard where the action was clear and dynamic, and the story was clear through the movement of the camera and character action. However I had included a sequence which had unnecessary exposition which ultimately took away from the storyboard I wanted to make. 

Following on from this I decided it would be best to make a storyboard driven animation, which relied heavily on the storyboard, as opposed to the script. I would use the same script however I would heavily alter the shot choices and angles to create a more readable storyboard. Originally I had planned to have my storyboard finished by this point, however as storyboarding is my focus, I decided to push my schedule back a week in order to take more time editing and making a storyboard I am happy with. During this time I have let my background and character designers about the set back, and will continue to develop my story into a more cohesive storyboard that is reflective of what I can do. 

My first step here was to re- thumbnail the whole board to create a completely new shot list. I have completely scrapped the first section as it does nothing to carry the story or add to the fight scene, and is unnecessary in being there. This has brought my schedule down a lot as it is a lot less to animate. My new time code is hopefully going to be about 45 - 55 seconds. This is to account for just the fight scene section and nothing else. 

These are the updated thumbnails which I created for my project, the process was more or less the same with notes, crosses and suggestions made next to each panel so that I knew I was making the best shot I could possibly make.

 

Extended Practice - Storyboard First Pass

I had my thumbnails, and gained some feedback on them, so that other people could give suggestions as to how to make the shots better. Getting feedback from other departments is a common practice in industry therefore I thought it was necessary for me to do this also using my peers. From there I took to Storyboard Pro to create the first draft of my own storyboards.

When carrying out this storyboard, I kept the action safe area on, purely to keep in mind the action that was happening so that it was in view for the audience. I also included a rule of thirds grid so that I could make sure that the framing was always absolutely clear. I wanted to make sure that this storyboard was my best storyboard so far, so I have taken quite a bit of time making sure that every aspect is right. Saying this however I have taken considerably less time than is industry standard to get to this point in the storyboard. Also at 36 seconds so far I am on track for my desire for the project to come out to just around a minute.

From here I will try and get feedback on what I have so far, and go from there. I think there are some improvements to be made in terms of the movement characters and the performance could be stronger. I am also concerned that I am at 36 seconds and I am yet to hit the action. My goal with this was to create a dynamic fight scene with a lot of good solid camera movement and character performance, and I am not sure this is translating to screen as it stands here. 

Extended Practice - Background Specs

After finishing my thumbnails, it had come to my attention that I had not yet found a background artist. I searched around for a little while, looking towards people in the year below, before I found a talented background artist who I thought could carry out the work I wanted doing efficiently. After making a quick correspondence through Instagram she agreed to do some backgrounds for me, and we had a brief discussion of specifics. As with all people who have worked on my project, I sent a brief pack to her detailing the type of thing I wanted. This pack looked like this:

I tried to accumulate everything I had so far into a cohesive pack which could be obvious to anyone looking at it. Obviously because I have a lot of stuff to be getting on with it needed to be something she could get on with confidently. She was nice enough to make a quick test of what she had taken from the brief pack. I used this quick test, as well as the first proper character image to form together a proof of concept to figure out the colour choices for the character which was still not finalised at the point the test was made.

This was the first proof of concept I put together. I was incredibly happy with how the background looked. The shading was impressive and the composition was also exactly what I was looking for. Although I am incredibly happy with the character looks, I felt this initial colour pass of the character was a bit too mismatched with the background, and he did not quite fit in the way I wanted him to.

Proceeding this, I went into Photoshop and added some colour layers and some shading to make him fit a bit more aesthetically with the backgrounds. I feel like this version is a bit more cohesive with the background colour palette. The harsher shading I added to the character also adds to him being a bit more inclusive with the background colour choices. I sent this back to the character designer on my project so that he could make the character sheets using colours similar to this. It will probably differ to the colours here as this was a quick test just for the sake of cohesion.

Extended Practice - Thumbnails

After finishing my script, it was time to start storyboarding my project. I started with a series of thumbnails with notes attached to easily visualise my story in short so that I could decide on the dynamic camera angles which I wanted to achieve. I was quite thorough with my own thumbnails, as I wanted the framing to be perfect, and I knew I could spend more time on them as it was for my own project. Although I had a cut off point in my animation time, I knew I was going to thumbnail out the entire script and storyboard it all anyway, just because I wanted to see how the story worked overall.

I was happy with how the thumb-nailing process turned out. I prefer to thumbnail on paper as it gives me a lot more loose freedom to play around with quick drawings. As is shown in my thumbnails, there are a lot of sections crossed out, with many notes next to them detailing how a shot will work and whether it needs to be altered or scrapped completely because it does not add anything to the scene.  From here my next stage is to start a rough pass using Storyboard Pro. I have decided to do this on Storyboard pro to increase my usage professionally, as it is the industry standard tool.

Extended Practice - Loop de Loop

For Extended Practice, we are required to undertake 4 live briefs, in which we effectively respond to a live competition or brief currently ongoing outside of University. As my storyboarding for other people is now completed, I decided to move on to my first live brief. The live brief I undertook first was for Loopdeloop, an online animation challenge in which you create a looping animation based on a word. This month the word was "pig".

I started with this basic proof of concept, and I decided to make an animation in which a Pig is continuously hungry and wants to eat apples, purely as a comedic little animation. I knew I wanted to include a lot of squash and stretch with this, and really break the design of the Pig.

From there I made my quick animatic, this took me a day to do, as I wanted it to be as clear as possible, and as I was animating it myself, I knew all I had to do was essentially set my own key frames. I am happy with how the animatic turned out, it reads well and ended up being very close to the animation. 

This was the final looping animation, I am proud of how it turned out. I think the squash and stretch works very well, and the animation is cohesive and fun. I like how the colours turned out also, they match the proof of concept very well, and the red shadows and line-work really add a lot to the aesthetic. As it stands the video is view-able from the Loopdeloop website. 

Above is how the video looks on the loopdeloop website.