becca

blog for my animation studio class work

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CVS AND PROFESSIONAL FACING MATERIALS

CV 

CVs are always anxiety inducing for me - I’m never quite sure what I should add to it, especially in the skills/qualities categories. When I was looking for jobs in Belfast last year I got in contact with a charity, Orchardville, to help me build a CV, because I was finding it very difficult to do it on my own. I initially used this CV Orchardville gave me for this module, but tweaked the details slightly to be more suitable for animation. I thought this worked okay enough, it sufficed enough for my needs, but when I saw what my friends CVs were like I realised I needed to step up. It was like the business card scene in American Psycho in a way. My friends had included the pieces of software they were experienced in, which I hadn’t, and I quickly realised this was a necessary part of an animation portfolio. In the same way a retail job wants to know your previous retail experience, animation studios want to know what pieces of software you have experience in. The way their CVs were designed as well-made me realised I need to update mine, mine was very cluttered and condensed looking, and it made me realise the visual presentation of the CV is also important in the animation industry. It needs to be memorable and creative while not being unprofessional, the presentation is a reflection of how you want the studio to view you, so I designed it with that in mind.

SHOW REEL

The show-reel is the part of this module that fills me with the most lament. This is because most of what I would consider to be some of my best animation is entirely fan-content, and a lot of what I would rather not include is original work. This is perhaps a display of my poor prioritising of what animation I should produce, considering placement is soon, and I wish I realised this sooner. I’m lucky enough that I do have some salvageable work from uni projects, but I’m stuck on whether or not I should include some of my work from my Moving Image Arts short films. There are some good shots somewhere in them, but looking through them fills me to such a degree of cringe that it's agonising. 

Originally I wish the production of the short we have to make for the other module would mean that I would have more than enough materials for the show reel, but because of how stop and start that production has been, I’m not confident in the work I’ve produced for that.

COVER LETTER/EMAIL

I have written similar emails to what is considered a cover letter - introducing myself and describing why I want to be involved in a project/studio. But admittedly I had to ask for some extra help on this from family, the details are just a little fuzzy to me. What I do get however is that the letter should be primarily about the company you are applying for - displaying your knowledge and want to join the studio. I’m thinking of writing this letter to DogEars, their  a studio I’ve always admired, and could easily write a letter for. The trouble is understanding where to draw the line between admiration for the studio and making yourself appealing as a candidate. I don’t want to make myself sound too arrogant, but I also don’t want to seem like them giving me the job would be a huge favour for me - I want it to should like I’m capable of studio work, while also being humble. The problem is also, because of how competitive the industry is, it’s hard to do this while also standing out to the company.

PORTFOLIO

My online portfolio is something I have been developing for a while, which is great for this module because I don’t have to worry so much about developing it in time. I do think it needs more content on it, but I have been working on concepts on and off, so hopefully by the time placement comes round, I will be satisfied enough with it’s development. Working full-time and uni and at a part-time job has unfortunately given me very little time to work on my own personal projects. I have just started developing a project about four alien girls, who live on a space station together and have to navigate their different alien cultures in order to get permission from their parents to hold a sleepover. I have a problem where I jump from project to project whenever I get bored with one, and often don’t see it to fruition, but I hope I stick with this one.

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EXTERNAL RESEARCH

I’ve been really into character design for a long time, and as part of this, I’ve been researching how to develop a good character design portfolio as possible. One of my favourite resources is Jackie Droujiko (https://www.jackiedroujko.com/) on Youtube, who has worked for Netflix and Nickelodeon as a character designer before. I really like her advice on making graphical, recognisable designs with clear personality. Sometimes I find it hard to find resources on character design, a lot of the people who talk about it online have no real industry experience, which is why I really value Droujiko’s advice. 

One of the portfolios she features on her website, one from a student who took her workshop really stood out to me. Emily Maneval (https://www.emilymanevalsart.com) is an Illustrator primarily focused on character design, but I think the designs she makes also works really well for animation. I really love her visual development work, and that's something I really want to try with my portfolio - developing more fleshed out scenes with the characters I have made, to sell the story a bit more. 

I also particular admire Kenny Leoncito (https://www.kenesu.com/characterdesign) I found him through Instagram, with his character design series based on the Filipino version of Into the Wood. Since then, I sporadically visit his character design portfolio whenever I need motivation. I really admire the variety in his designs, and how he balances monstrous elements with lovely fluid and appealing character design. 

As part of this external research I have begrudgingly made a LinkedIn page, and have tried to connect with many industry professionals I have met previously and tried to branch out into looking at studios I see on the platform. Two of these studios are Studio Spud from Australia, who produced an amazing promo video for Moho, using a 1950’s fashion illustration style. I have interest in Moho as a programme so I have been keeping an eye on Studio Spud.

I also have been looking at is Blue Zoo studio, based in London. I really adored their short “In Shapes,” about a girl who feels self-conscious of her body at the pool. They primarily focus on children's animation and advertisement animation. They seem to be very involved in the development of young animators - hosting the Young Animator of the Year Award, and always seem to have place for Interns and junior animators.

The thing with character design unfortunately, it’s a very hard field to get into, which I understand. It’s unfortunate because I am really passionate about it, it’s something I really admire, and I feel like I really understand, but there's a very low chance of me actually pursuing it as a career. When asking and talking to industry professionals, I often get the advice to diversify what I do, and I’ve tried to take that on. I really love animation as well, but character design would be my dream job. Because I’m so passionate about character design, my portfolio reflects that, I really should have more animation and rigging stuff on there, but I really don’t have the time or motivation to invest in those areas right now.

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PORTFOLIO

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FRAME BY FRAME

The benefit of mixing rigged animation in 3-D space and hand drawn animation, is that I can map out the location and scale of the characters in 3-D space with the rigs, before moving onto the hand drawn animation. I did this with the two imps in the last shot I had to do for the short, and was particularly helpful because the shot involved the two imps running in perspective towards the camera. I hide the limbs and head of the imps, leaving just their torsos, and then animated this in the path, and timing I wanted for the running animation. Using the torso as a guide for the scale of the imps in perspective, helped me keep the proportions of the imps right and the perspective correct - which was really helpful.

Before starting the imp’s animation I was sure to do some studies of chimps running, to get a better understanding of how these characters would run. Chimps have a very interesting run, they tend to bound and throw they’re whole body forward, with alternating limps, much like a quadruped, but then can alternate between four and two legged. These studies proved a little difficult but I still enjoyed doing them. I was stuck between whether the imps should zig-zag when they run or run straight - I decided zig-zag would be the most visually interesting, and chaotic, which fits the character of a demonic imp, so I went with that.

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CONTINUING COMP

Turns out, the effect I wanted to create in After Effects is possible, it’s just very tedious. It involves masking out the character animation of Ghost Kid frame by frame using the pen tool. Some interpolation is provided by After Effects to make it a bit easier, but I found that the character is too complex for the interpolation to work perfectly, so I have to constantly re-adjust the vector line created by the pen tool. When I finish this process of masking the character animation, I then add a shape mask, set the mode to subtract instead of add, so it creates a transparency in the character animation. I also added a fade to create a gradient effect. I then duplicated this mask layer and changed the blending mode to screen, and added an outer glow to give the impression that the character was glowing. I was able to successfully do this for one shot, and I was really happy with the outcome. I then moved on to my second shot - which was far more complex, as I had to mask out a full body character instead of just a head. I spent about 2 hours keying the mask, adding the effects I previously mentioned, but wasn’t able to export or save the file, because the uni computer had no remaining space. This was a big loss, and I just don’t have the time to re-do this work, but I won’t let it get me down.

Instead, I tried using CapCut, a free, rudimentary editing programme. I’m familiar with this programme and knew it had some comp capabilities - it has a chroma key feature, so I rendered the Ghost Kid on his own, and then removed the black background using this. However, because the lines of the character are black as well, the chroma key removed it, I only used this Ghost Kid render for a glow effect. To create this effect I used colour curves to make the video more blue, added a blur effect and changed the blending mode to screen. I then duplicated this layer - and changed that layer to colour dodge, to increase the glowing effect I wanted.

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ANIMATION WITH RIGS

My animation process for Grease Pencil rigs has been to animate the key frames, and change the interpolation to be stepped in the graph editor, refine the in-between and then change the interpolation to be Bézier after. This gives me better control of the arc of the animation particularly, and has resulted in better motion than my previous animation tests. I’ve honestly gone back and forth on whether or not I should keep the stepped animation, because I think it looks similar to stop-motion animation, which has partially inspired this project. But I ultimately decided to keep the smoother interpolation - as some shots will be 2-D animated, and the interpolation would suit more with smoother 2-D animation, and I don’t want my shots to be too dissimilar to my teammates, who are using smooth interpolation. 

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PROFESSIONAL PRACTISE - CONTACTING INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS

During the CMD:Connect event I was able to talk to Barry Brennan, who organises NI Screen Academies, and I originally met through Animation Academy. Barry is always such a great person to talk to, and I asked him to review my portfolio. He gave me some great advice, and encouraged me to continue working on my own projects - he also pointed me in the direction of Jess Campbell, who works as Art Director at Salt Stone Studios, a game studio in Belfast.

During CMD:Connect I had a portfolio review with Peter O. While I'm glad for the experience, and there was a lot of critique I was happy to take on, it also left my ego a bit bruised, and stifled my motivation to continue for a while.

I emailed Jess asking her to provide more feedback on my portfolio, which is primarily character design focused. I wanted to get more feedback from someone who specialized in character design, to see what I was potentially doing wrong and how I could improve. Jess responded and was amazingly kind and provided lots of great feedback. One of these key pieces of feedback was to diversify the type of drawings I have in my portfolio, to show more types of concept art rather than just character design.

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EXPERIMENTING WITH COMP

This is a mock-up of what the final short could look like, I'm not using Adobe After Effects for this, rather I'm using CapCut, which is not specialised for comp like After Effects is. For the final comp we will be using After Effects - because the ability to copy and paste effects between files will be so helpful for us. Especially since we want the Ghost Kid to be semi-transparent and give off a faint glow, to be able to make this effect consistent between shots. I'm having trouble figuring out how to export two renders at the same time, and making the character layer transparent so I will have to try to look into that. Because of this, I had to chroma key the background of the Ghost Kid layer, which resulted in his eyebrows being transparent.

I realised later that it’s impossible to render animation in Blender with transparent background, so doing the transparent effect with the Ghost Kid in Adobe Effect will be impossible. So, I’ll have to figure out how to do this effect in the composition tab of Blender itself - I believe Sarah has already done the majority of the work for this, so thank you, Sarah! 

In terms of other effects I want to add in composition, I don’t think there is much, maybe a slight vignette in some shots, but it’s unfortunate the main thing I wanted to do in After Effects is impossible.

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ANIMATION START

This is the final shot of the short - where the Demon beats his chest and the two Imps run after the Ghost Kid. The Imp's limbs are going to be hand animated instead of rigged, just because it would be too difficult to achieve it with rigged limbs. But, being able to hide the limbs and then only animating the torso will help a lot with the placement of the Imps. When it comes to scenes like this where I need to do both hand drawn and rigged animation, I'm planning on doing the rigged parts first, and the hand drawn second, because the rigged animation takes so little time that if I at least get the scene started, I can spend more time making the hand drawn animation the best it can be.

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ANIMATION TESTS

This is a quick animation test using the finished rigs I made of the Ghost Kid and the Demon. I wanted to show the facial rig as well as how you could hide a part of the grease pencil object to then draw another, and use that for animation. I did as such with the hand of the Demon in the clip above.

This test isn't so great, I feel like I could get nicer motion out of the Ghost Kid rig than this, especially when it comes to the movement of the arms. I need to work on the arc of the arms swinging up and down, and play about with the graph editor a little more.

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DEMON RIGGING WEEK 9

We don't plan for this character to have a walk cycle, but I still wanted him to be able to shift his whole weight while posing the hip bone up and down. So I still had to give him IK in his legs, but I don't want the animators to be able to move his feet from the ground, so I applied a Limit Location modifier on the X Axis and this seems to have worked. This stops animators from lifting his feet while also still allowing them to move his feet horizontally - which I want for better weight shifting animation.

The ears and loincloth also have a very subtle Copy Rotation modifier, so whenever the head or torso moves from side to side, they move with slight gravity. I like doing stuff like this with my rigs, because I think it gives the animators more time to focus on the primary action, and don't have to worry so much about the secondary actions, if they are in a crunch.

The root bone also has a maintain volume modifier, which allows the whole model to have squash and stretch - something which was requested by the other animators, to allow for more cartoony animation.

Not seen in the video above - but I want to use clipping masks on his face, like I did with the Ghost Kid rig, so that his face can't float with nothing behind it, like in the video. Since we are using a combination of Grease Pencil rigs and frame by frame in Grease Pencil, this means the animator can simply, remove the Demons face, by moving the face bone without having to manually hide it in the Object Data tab.

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GHOST KID RIGGING WEEK 4-8 DIFFERENT ANGLES

The rigger who made the tutorial I was following also offers methods to make a turnaround within Blender Grease Pencil, using the limited interpolation features. I wanted to try this method, but I feel like It's just a bit too complicated for me as a beginner. He has an additional method of just making a operate Grease Pencil Object and armature for each angle of the turnaround, and although it's more tedious and limited, I think it will suffice for the animation we want to achieve in this cinematic. So that's what I did, and because the Ghost Kid is mostly symmetrical - aside from a few clothes details, once I finished one angle of the turnaround, I could just flip the armature, and slightly edit the Grease Pencil object for the opposite angle. Which isn't as professional, but it gets the job done. So for those responsible for layout, I've instructed them just to append the collection with the relevant angle of the character - based on the animatic.

Mike suggested I add a foot roll to the Ghost Kid, which is something we just went over in a workshop in class. I had to adapt his set-up a bit for a 2-D character, rather than a 3-D model, but it was surprisingly simple, and works great. Mike also suggested I should remove the copy rotation modifier I have for the Ghost Kid’s foot, which adds rotation to the characters toe when the foot is moved. I thought this would help in animation, like the copy rotation modifier I have for the hat, which automatically adds secondary animation, but Mike explained it looks weird and in unintuitive, which I understand so I removed it.

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RIGGING START WEEK 3

This is the Character Sheet for the Ghost Kid as provided by Saorcise and is what I'm working off for the Ghost Kid's rig.

Below is the video I am using as reference.

I drew out each part of his body segmented using Grease Pencil.

I initially had a problem with the body not following the armature, but that's because I had weight painted all the bones to the Root bone, so it dragged all the limbs down to it.

This is how the front facing rig looks so far.

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PRE PRODUCTION START - WEEK 3

Through this project I've tried to take on a leadership role, It's something I've done in previous projects and with this project being at a bigger scale than ones previous it's something I think is necessary - to keep everyone organised and on schedule.

First we had a discussion on what we actually wanted this Cinematic to be this included; what animation style, if it was going to be rigged or hand drawn; what the shaders we would use for the backgrounds and if there were to be hand drawn elements how would we incorporate it; while considering which programme is the most accessible for everyone.

Ellen suggested rigging with Grease Pencil in Blender, and Blender is the most accessible, programme we have access to, while also being something we used as a class. So we're doing 2-D rigged animation with 3-D Backgrounds with hand drawn Grease Pencil animation for extreme facial expressions which cannot be achieved with a rudimentary rig.

So going into preproduction I wanted everyone to have a say in what areas they were interested in, what skills they wanted in their portfolio and what they were generally comfortable with. I also took into account if I had worked with them previously on prior assignments and what I knew they enjoyed and were good at. For instance, I have worked with Ryan and Sarah before in First Year, and knew Ryan enjoyed and did well at storyboards, and I also knew going forward Sarah wanted to work more with Blender (and she had previously made 3-D environments for our short film in First Year.) So I made sure they were still comfortable with these roles, and allocated Ryan to work on Storyboards and Animatics and Sarah to 3-D Backgrounds.

Going forward me and Ellen are working on rigs, Soarcise is doing the puppets, Mara is doing the editing and working with Ryan for the animatic and Sarah is doing 3-D backgrounds.

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ART STYLE DEVELOPMENT WEEK 2

Finalization and turnarounds

When refining the design, I particularly looked at Raz from Psychonauts as reference for the proportions - especially the side profile. As both Ghost Kid and Raz have quite square, wide heads, I wanted to try and get definition in the side profile, while still maintaining the square shape, and I think the Psychonauts 3-D artsyle is good reference for this. Also, in the first image, I included variations with transparency on the bottom, I would maybe like to play around in editing software to make the character transparent at the bottom, to make him look more ghostly.

I asked the group at this stage which version of the design we all liked, and it was pretty conclusively A. I think we all got attached to the idea of him having a hat - we all liked the potential of secondary animation it could provide. I also personally think it made him look part cuter - the rounder shape emphasised his child-like appearance, which potentially makes him look a bit more appealing as a character design.

I also worked on a couple preliminary concepts for the enemy designs - we wanted the enemy characters in the game to demons. I wanted to stray away from stereotypical demon designs, so I thought it would be interesting to combine some demon like elements with monkeys and apes, primarily chimps and gorillas. I had recently done some studies of them, so I wanted to incorporate them into the design, I also think monkeys provide some interesting potential for movement, and I think would work particularly well for mischievous imps.

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ENVIRONMENTS

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ANIMATION FOR CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

Initial Inspirations and Concepts - WEEK 1

When we were talking about what inspirations we wanted to work from, we made a Pinterest board to more easily share ideas. We knew we wanted to head in a spooky, but child-friendly direction, like Laika films and games like Little Miss Fortune and Don't Starve.

I personally was inspired by a project shown to us at the NI Screen Animation Pipeline workshop by Flickerpix called Milly and Mort, which tries to broach the idea of death to a child audience. I wanted this hypothetical game to do a similar thing, not shy away from the idea of death, but not make it too scary for kids playing.

So this idea is what inspired me going forward for the initial designs of the protagonist, I liked the idea of the protagonist being dead himself, so I made him a ghost! I also had a previous short-film project I was working on (that didn't end up going anywhere), about a Victorian ghost kid and a human girl who were childhood friends. I reused this design initially for the top left version, and then expanded on this, pushing the art style in different directions.

I suggested we explored what art style we wanted to use for the style guide individually, so after a week we circled back and settled on a more cartoony style rather than the more realistic ones here.