1400762-Listening-Project @1400762-listening-project - Tumblr Blog

Final Animation

Experimentation Reel

Study Proposal

I have a good feeling about starting this project as I am with two people who I have previously worked well with, feel we may be able to communicate well and get along. I have wanted to work with Tia and Adele and am glad that it will solely be us three. I hope that working in a small group will make support and communication easier as well as give us all a decent amount of work to do to put into our showreel. Our idea is to take a piece of audio about two genderqueer people describing the world they live in. This is a topic all of us are passionate about and I think we will be excited to put our efforts and enthusiasm into it. We will chose a simple style that we can all mimic and create a and colours that reflect the characters we are illustrating.

Evaluation

This project has been the least stressful and one of the most enjoyable projects I've had in year 2 due to the enjoyable work and support within the team. Having a small group of three people definitely make this project easier and more enjoyable as we were all able to communicate easier and work together more frequently. My team was enthusiastic and respectful and it felt that we were all comfortable to listen and talk about our thoughts and ideas, it was nice to work in such a comfortable and stress free environment with us all supporting each other and working closely. We split the audio into three sections which meant we could work on our own pieces independently and then bring them together, discussing what we need to keep track of and change in order to keep our work consistent. It also gave us the chance to work on our own piece of animation to add to our showreel. The hardest parts of this project was keeping the animation in sync with the audio and keeping this in mind when animating the morphing transitions specifically. I struggles with the thought of making the street scene at the end of my animation and how I would do it but I'm pleased I would a way in the end and I'm more happy than I thought I'd be with the outcome. Some of the easier areas of the project was discussing work and ideas with the team, as well as general communication. Everyone was enthusiastic about animating around a concept we were all very passionate about and due to previous personal issues we all faced in the last projects, we were very understanding and supportive of one another. There was no stress caused by any teammates so this made us all work better and produce better work. I'm pleased with what I have produced for this animation and I'm proud of what we have produced as a team. Maybe having more time would let us polish if further but overall I think this project turned out well and I would like to work with Tia and Adele again.

Our project PDF

listerningprojecttiahayes-blog

Went in to uni to have a review. We were shown a better way of putting in the multi coloured background through after affects.

I was also given notes:

To work on my movement

Add little movement to make it look less robotic

Find a way to export so it keeps it image quality

make the colour less rough

most of these will be fixed by using after affects

1400762-listening-project

This is currently what our animation looks like and our latest WIP update. Our animation is still in the clean-up process but we submitted a coloured example to show how the finished piece may look with colour. So far we are happy to consider animation itself as finished unless there is feedback suggesting we change something. Next we will work on connecting all pieces cleanly together with synced and best quality, consistent audio, as well as show the background through the full animation. When we went for feedback with Robin he showed us a good way of editing our background into the animation in AfterEffects, as well as showing us a way of making a coloured moving background in AE. However, we discussed this and it seemed that we would only be able to have 4 colours at a time if we were to use this method and keyframe the colours changing and moving. We will consider our options, a moving background would be interesting and add to the animation, but we may not do this in order to save on time.

My finished animation. I’m pleased with it and I think I’m happy to finish it here. If there is much feedback from it I will obviously change some things but so far I’m am really pleased with the amount of work I have made in this project. I added more frames into this animation to try and help the movement flow more and and I think it works well with the morphing animation. I’m excited to see it get put altogether in the end and with the coloured background behind.

Tia’s last frame from her part of her animation that I will be continuing my animation from.

Our most recent WIP update showing the animations cleaned up and almost done. More work needs to be done and from the client feedback they wanted to know what would be happening in Tia’s section that was left out, but together we are on top of things and I feel so far we are working very well.

I created another style frame, which was not needed, but felt it would still be interesting to see how the final animation would look with the background. This is my street scene showing the colour underneath. I’m glad that, but happy-accident, the posters I made of the media’s gender stereotyping is over stereotypical colours relating to the gender. The ‘female’ poster is over the colour pink and the ‘male’ poster is over deep red and orange. I believe this helps to emphasise the message we are giving about a gender split world for people who don’t have ‘a box to tick’.

This is my current animatic submitted for the next WIP week

So far I’m pleased with it and I like the progression I’ve made in the storyboard coming together and fitting with the audio. I tried to do a transition where the characters turn into the street scene and although it was difficult to create, I managed to do it frame by frame and I’m glad the effect that I’d tried to make has worked. I was also pleased with the wipe used by the hand to change the clothes of the male and female people. I made a lot of mistakes when animating that so I’m pleased it turned out well in the end.

When I recieved feedback one of the issues mentioned was when the male and female ‘dolls’ get wiped away by the character in the centre of the screen then immediately, the male and female images return. It was considered that having the male and female characters appear again immediately after being wiped away would defeat the purpose of the message that the two genders are ‘not something you need to question’. I explained that actually the two dolls were meant to be different characters to the male and female characters that come back. It was suggested that I make the dolls and the male and female characters stand out differently, but still having a stereotypical male and female appearance. I will change the design of the dolls to look different to the characters that return to avoid the assumption that the same characters return after being wiped away. I believe I also need to change the style at the beginning to something that looks more like Adzies style by rounding the heads, softening the bodies and giving them a nose.

Style frame of how the final animation should look.

Currently this is my WIP animation, more of an animatic, of my part of the animation. I am trying to keep to Adele’s style but will probably re draw the scenes to match it more. I will also re-think and discuss with my team what I should change to make the animation more morphing but so far this is my first idea of what I will do for my part and I’m okay with it. There is also a line at the bottom of the animation which I think is because of the black background not being positioned right over the coloured background, I’ll fix this next time.

BBC’s ‘The Listening Project’ by BBC10 - Adele, Beth, Tia

Our idea pitch to the BBC Client

Animation inspiration. We were insoired by conversation animations like ‘The Ricky Gervais Show’ and ‘Game Grumps animated’ which are animations of conversations friends are having where the scenes they are discussing are given a visual story following the ‘narration.’

After the pitch our client liked our idea and liked how it was more specific to the other ideas, as well as the way we are presenting the characters. However they were concerned about how these scenes would play out and wanted more description on how specifically the animation would look to the scenes as she wanted something more illustrated and less characters based. We explained that we wanted to involve morphing animation from characters to illustrations but we would be happy to tweak our idea and make it more of ‘morphing images’ than something character based. We will take these suggestions and go back to look at what we can change to create something more ideal for the client.

There is the style frame I made in our meet up as well as my storyboard for my part of the clip we have chosen.

I really like the style frame and the soft multi-colours we’re using for the characters and the friendly but simple style.

I had to continue my storyboard from Tia’s which meant my first panels had to consider what her final panel would be and her final panel shows a blank paper doll with typical gender specific clothes, so I thought to continue this by having these clothes move onto the ‘paper dolls’ to show how the person under the clothes is just a person, not a gender. One of the characters comes between the dolls, swipes their arms and the dolls disappear as they state “It’s not something you need to question”.

The rest of the storyboard I still want to re think. We were thinking of involving morphing animations, as well as some lipsync of the main characters talking when they stutter or when there isn’t something to illustrate to their voice, and then animating scenes showing what they’re talking about. And so we wanted to make our images’ humor link to the humor of the people talking in the conversation. My last few panels show the character walking down a street as a form asking for their gender, previously mentioned in the conversation, ‘hits them in the face’.

Art Style inspirations

We were firstly inspired by some humorous self-insert comics I found by and artist who mainly represents people as blank figures with simple but expressive faces. From this we felt that we should represent the two people in the audio as gender ambiguous forms. The first two images are clips taken from the comic and the second two images are ‘draw the squad’ bases. An exercise template of figures interacting for people to take and draw their own characters on top, which also have this blank, ambiguously-gendered style of characters.

When thinking about how to colour these characters, we thought “How about purple?” since it’s neither blue(male) or red(female), it’s like a mixture. But then we took it a step further and thought. The next few images are by a artist called Humon who has made a set of books called ‘animal lives’. They are pages of animal mating descriptions with a small illustrationg of these animals being represented as male and female human forms, this was another inspiration also.

We then thought, well gender fluidity isn’t about being both genders, it’s about gender not mattering or existing. So we thought that having the characters multicoloured, a mixture of rainbow colours, would represent this idea of gender-fluidity better. We looked at the pixar short film ‘Night and Day’ which has two characters representing night and day time interacting with one another. Their bodies are human-like character forms and their ‘colouring’ on the inside of their lines are a background of scenery either in the day or at night. For our colouring, we will have a coloured, rainbow background, behind a black background and the images will be erased from the black background, having anything being animated coloured at the rainbow background underneath.

Chosen audio and Ideas

As all three of us are very passionate about issues surrounding gender identity and the LGBT community, we were very interested in this conversation and took a personal connection with it. There was also a conversation between a trans woman and her best friend which we also enjoyed listening to but we felt that this conversation was slightly more welcoming to an audience and tackles with the concept of gender in general rather than one persons personal journey.

We could create a respectful piece of animation, representing the characterts as gender neutral figures talking about these issues faced in society and illustrating the descriptions they have.

I am very excited to start this project with Tia and Adele because we all work very well and comfortably together, after being the last three remaining in our previous group after members left, and we all respect and connect with this piece of audio we have chosen.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

1400762-Listening-Project