Extended Practice - Animation?

From the beginning of extended practice, I told myself that I was going to animate my final film as well as produce an awesome animatic would showed off some dynamic angles and framing, whilst telling a cool story. Which I held on to far too much. Before I had finished my storyboarding, I started animating on the first shot, getting way too ahead of myself. Here is this animation:

What changed? 

As I was working on this animation, and looking at the schedule I had laid out for myself before the hand in, I decided to take a step back and ask whether I wanted to rush this film I wanted to make my most dynamic animation yet. The answer I came to was no, I had not yet finished cleaning up my animatic and my last live brief was still to be done at this time, so I decided not to animate my final film. Yet. As of now my plan is to give myself time after this hand in to animate on it with some help from others, to have it in our final year show, as I want to give it the necessary time to make it as good as it can be.

My main specialism this year has been storyboarding, and that has not changed, so I wanted to give the storyboards their due respect and have them be as good as I can currently make them, rather than rush to finish my storyboards and then rush to animate a final film that I wouldn't be happy to submit.

I believe my animation will look awesome in the final year show alongside the others, and that will come from giving it the time and work it deserves.

Extended Practice - Animatic Final Clean-Up

After responding to the feedback that was given to me, I made a final pass on the clean up of the animatic. I also was able to put in all of the final backgrounds so that all the cuts make sense in relation to where the characters are in the frame. Here is my final animatic:

I am pretty happy with how this animatic turned out, there are some definite timing issues, however overall I think the work is solid. The backgrounds fit really well with the style of the animation.

What worked:

I think the framing and the movement is clear, I think it translates well for animation, and it has a clear narrative whilst following the basic cinematography rules. I think the drawing is clear, and the characters are separate to the point where it is clear who is doing what. The layouts I had in the original version of the animatic also helped the perspective of the backgrounds which come across really nicely with my style of drawing.

What could have been better:

I think some of the movement in this animatic overall is a little awkward, when I came to clean it up I seem to have changed some poses ever so slightly and that has broken some of the flow in some areas (in my opinion). I think sound will really help bring this to life, but that is something I will work in as I get further along with animating this project.

Extended Practice - Live Brief - Yeti Storyboarding

For my final live brief, I wanted to take on something more closely related to my specialism in storyboarding. Through the recommendation of a storyboard artist from Blue Sky Studios, I found the YETI storyboarding classes online, which offer new briefs every Monday for those wanting to learn the practice.

http://yetischool.com/index.php/storyboard-lessons

The brief I decided to take on, was more about comedy and staging, which had a concept I found funny and interesting, as most of my storyboards tend to be more action based or serious in nature, I thought it'd be fun to take on something a bit more light hearted.

This is the brief I decided to take on, and here are the thumbnails which I produced for my idea.

Overall I was quite happy with my thumbnails, and decided to take them into storyboard pro just for practices sake as it is such an industry standard. Here is the animatic I produced: 

Overall I think there are definitely improvements I could have made to this in storyboard pro, the character's often feel a bit too static for me, and some of the movement is awkward and unfunny, and does not translate as well as it should. In terms of positives I think it reads clearly overall, and the framing is nice (enough) so that the story comes across to the audience. 

I think this animatic would have benefited from sound, as it is such a comedic story, the silence breaks the immersion, which is a shame, but it is sadly something that slipped my mind until it was too late, over summer I am going to take this further and practising storyboards from sound clips, in order to better understand the relation of visuals and audio.  

Extended Practice - Individual Background Specs

Although I had made a base background spec sheet, I still needed to make a spec sheet for each individual backgrounds, of which their ended up being 12 I needed. I made an individual spec sheet, and a map showing the camera for the scene which the background went with. This was the spec I sent to the background artist:

I included the layout used in the animatic, as well as showing the highest point which the character reaches, I did this so that the background artist would know to make the background larger than the standard 16:9 aspect ratio. There was also specifications like making the back 2 rocks on editable layers for fx animation to go on top of them and any parallax that may need to occur. 

This was the final background that was produced by the background artist for this project, based on my layout and specs. I will not show all 12 of the background on this blog for sake of time, but for consistencies sake I made a birds eye map of the area which the animation takes place in, so that it would be obvious where the camera is.

This is the map that was used for background 5, and there was a map for each specific background.