Carrying On

The rough animation is nearly done. This week I'm doing the shorter shots that require less movement like the President's day montage and him looking out a window. They're less interesting to animate and more challenging since the movements are more subtle and harder to draw consistently.

Looking out a window, boring shot

Writing at a desk

Standing at a press conference

Addressing his generals in the war room. I drew this extra as well

I've ensured that even for the shots where the character doesn't move a lot, they are still active in a small way so that pacing isn't lost. I was given the idea to cut on movement early on and I thinks it keeps the film interesting at all times.

Using Reference Footage

Reference footage is helping me animate faster and now I use it for most of my shots.

Progress: Gantt chart is working well, team morale is high. I've started making my rough animation more rough and less refined to SAVE TIME. I'm confident I'll have it done before Chrimbo so I can help my team in colouring.

Smiling president

Sitting up in bed

 Getting out of bed

Group Crit Week

We stuck our completed work so far onto our animatic and got good feedback!

Suggestions we received:

• Add ambient animation to the outdoor backgrounds i.e. leaves rustling, birds etc. to give it more life.
• When the president approaches the gardener, have him enter from the other side of the screen so it's consistent with the direction he was moving in the previous shot and is less jarring.

 So they face in the same direction

We made a gantt chart to ensure we finish the project on time. It's made everyone happier.

Creatively titled

I'm continuing with the rough animation. It will all be done by the fourteenth of December. I'm pleased with it so far.

The gardener getting bashed

Unproductive Week

Fairly unproductive week due to MAF but I got a little done. I resumed the line animation for Medi to add detail over and I'm pleased with how it all looks.

I've started redrawing the interior backgrounds to make them more easily editable for group work and to remove some of the design inconsistencies, like how the pillows and side tables would change shape in between shots.

The above shot has a blue tablecloth in it but it's nowhere in the bottom shot. The colour scheme is also inconsistent.

The above is a background I discarded for the peculiar sense of depth and the position of the camera.

Now the backgrounds are more consistent and I'll collaborate with the other background artist about picking colours for them.

Lip Sync Practice

This task was important and it was good to further familiarise myself with the ways of Adobe After Effects, but lip syncing was mind numbing. Constantly checking numbers against each other and putting them into the computer went on for a billion years.

I enjoyed learning about time remapping and drawing my phenomes, although I could have made the mouths more exaggerated. Occasionally the mouths didn't communicate the sound properly.

A couple of my DOPE sheets

For a first attempt, I'm pleased with the result but it needs more practice.

More Line Animation

I'm carrying on my line animation and am pleased with how it's going. TV paint is really neat and intuitive.

I made a run cycle and another crucial shot in the animation. We will export all these as png image sequences and do the full line-work and colour them in photoshop.

I'm pleased with it but reckon I could do a better job of showing the weight shift in his hips

I'm pleased with how this punch turned out 

I really enjoyed animating this HAT falling off his head

Line Animation

I started the line animation this week and am pleased with how it's gone! I'm really happy using TV paint. It's well intuitive.

I'm proud of my character animation. I think it's expressive.

I didn't co-ordinate enough with Medi, the other animator, though. This meant our drawings looked too different in our respective scenes we were animating and it didn't mesh too well. Our solution now is that I am drawing the rough animation to capture the movement and Medi is adding the fine detail.

My rough animation, to be drawn over

When I find myself working with a larger group of animators, I will employ a guidelines sheet complete with little rules to be observed, like this.

Updated Animatic and Sound

We met and decided on a new animatic draft that we all agreed on, which was GOOD for team morale. Adding placeholder sound gave it better pace and mood. I'm feeling more confident than last week.

I experimented, recorded my voice as the president and tweaked the audio on Premiere so I sounded more like a 60 year old. He only communicates in grunts and sighs.

I've been training to draw characters in the art style of the character designer to keep a consistent aesthetic.

Animatic and Rewrites (Trial and Many Errors)

As animatic maker, I made the animatic. But it wasn't brilliantly received by my peers for being too cluttered and unfocused.

I should work on adding detail to the characters. I'm pleased with the blocking and camerawork but without facial expressions it's harder to understand. I'm also struggling to assert myself in my group as I'm bad at saying "no" to ideas I think would be detrimental to the story.

I cut a shot where a hand throws the meteor out of a space portal as it detracts from the focus of the story.

I'm more pleased with the new animatic. It's more focused on the original concept of the President fulfilling his gardening dream in his final moments, BUT it still needs work and I need to meet with my group to discuss it.

I doubt that this will be the finished animatic but I've promised myself to have it completed and approved by my group by next Friday.

Bad Bits of Hand Drawn Animation

Hand drawn animation is terrible. It takes so long to make movement look convincing and involves hours of tedious repetitive drawing. 3D animation creates smooth, natural movement more quickly and develops sprawling, beautiful scenery with detail and DEPTH that hand drawn animation can't accomplish.

Piper -Alan Barillaro

It's easier to experiment with trial and error when working in 3D than with 2D, where you must draw many rough frames and line test them before you know if it'll look good.

2D animation severely limits the degree to which you can move the camera, so you can't shoot a scene where the camera moves through a window and into a room. This makes it harder to tell a compelling story with exciting shots to convey a mood.

It's also harder to animate very subtle movements like breathing or natural movement when a character is in standby. This detracts from the illusion of life.

Good Bits of Hand Drawn Animation

Hand drawn animation is great. Brad Bird describes it best as a more personal connection between artist and viewer because you can see the human element in the brush strokes of the background design and the line art of the characters. Small details like that make it really human because you can connect with the animator who acts out the character when they draw them.

With 3D digital, the sets and characters are never touched by human hand and it can seem more mass produced and LESS personable and authentic.

Hitman: Hiding in Plain Sight (Harry Partridge)

Prince of Egypt (1998)

It's easier to stretch and exaggerate characters to make them cartoonish using traditional animation without having them slide into the uncanny valley. There's no technical 3D software and rigging to work around which makes this much harder in 3D. Animators have the visual freedom to scribble scenes to give the illusion of speed, to apply unique brush strokes for a fresh style, and to change things about the set and designs really easily.

Storyboarding

I drew a draft, rough storyboard.

We had a meeting and edited a few things, and then I took the notes and drew up a PROPER storyboard. The biggest edit we made involved contriving a reason for an asteroid to appear in the earth's atmosphere without having been spotted by NASA already, so chose for it to come of a BLACK HOLE. 

We made it a wacky visual gag

We racked our brains for ages about whether or not to include the hand, but after a while a DIRECTORIAL decision had to be made. I'm pleased with this storyboard.