Extended Practice - Clean-up Tests

As I was waiting for feedback, I decided to start cleaning up the shots which I was the most happy with, as I was pretty confident in them, and I also had backgrounds for them already.

I used shot 1 as my starting point for this, of which I started by adding in and lining up the background where it needed to go.  This is that test: 

The background works incredibly well and really elevates the scene, the background artist stuck to my layout beautifully and it really helps bring the characters to life. I was so happy with this when the background was in that I decided to clean up the rest of the shot just to have it done. Here is that version: 

I am incredibly happy with how this shot turned out, I think it really adds a lot to the shot having his hair in, and also giving him the expression as it gives a sense of character. The same goes for the monster, adding in some facial detail makes him a lot more aggressive and the subtle mouth openings make him feel more alive. Ultimately I am happy with this shot, and I do not have to do anything more with it now, so I will move on to finishing off the other shots when I have gotten some feedback on how they could be improved. 

Extended Practice - Storyboard Progression 3

After the crit session last week, I had pointed out to myself that there needed to be some amendments to my animatic, such as flipping shots to make the flow of the story more coherent. I have also now finished what I am calling the "rough pass" of my animatic, which I will send off for feedback from some of my connections from PP. I will also try and get feedback from my class so that I can make sure it reads well before I start making a clean pass. I will start a clean pass of the first shot as I am confident in it, and I do not want to change it as I personally think it works well enough on it's own.

This is my rough pass:

I am quite happy with how some of this has worked out, I have forgotten to flip the close up shots of the monster here so it is making those cuts look pretty jumpy, which I will amend this coming week. I have the bliss of being able to take my time on this animatic, as if it were a longer film, I would have had to have a final rough pass by this stage. I also want to work on fixing up the ending shot, as I think it could be amended to give a little more emphasis on the monsters death, as there is a long build up with little pay off, so I think I could push that a little more.

I am also wondering whether the cut at around the 06:05 mark to the landing shot needs an insert shot first, as it may be causing a little bit of a jump in the cut. The ending shot also may be a little too similar to the opening shot in terms of how he moves, so I feel that that could be amended to read a little better for the audience.

Extended Practice - Storyboard Progression 2

Following on from Hostelworld, I knew it was time to get back into my own project, so I started again with my animatic. There is not too much to say about what is happening, there has just been some progress on shots, with some revisions in places where stuff doesn't quite make sense, I have a couple more shots to rough out before I start cleaning up, and I will try and get some feedback before I clean-up so I won't have to scrap anything that is particularly time consuming.

During my crit session, I noticed that at 09:12, the animatic sort of breaks the 180 rule, almost, and doesn't is making the cut quite jumpy, I will amend this going forward. This will also mean I have to revise the close up shots of the monster, and easy fix as I will just have to flip the shots. Flipping this shot also means I can establish to the audience that he is still holding the gun after being hit, this will make it read more clearly ultimately and will help with the pacing.

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.