BA HONS Animation Year 2

Research MAF 2021 AX2002Mario AX2002Mark AX2222Steve

[jollyfoxanimations2]

When i was coming up with how to animate the deer character climbing onto her seat next to the tiger i first started looking at how toddlers climb onto chairs, this is because the deer is much smaller than the tiger and i wanted to give a sense of size scale, so i wanted her to hop up onto the seat but i couldn’t find anything that was like what i was looking for. I then decided to look at people hopping out of swimming pools, this is becasue the motion of getting out of a swimming pool is exactly how i envisioned my character jumping onto the seat and turning round, so after looking over different videos i came across this one and after watching the lady jump out of the pool and turning round i sketched out how the deer would turn around

[jollyfoxanimations2]

This is the photo i used as reference to create the lobby scene. 

[jollyfoxanimations2]

Here the photo i took influence from to come up with the idea of the shop that the deer enters to buy her cookies.

[jollyfoxanimations2]

This is a very rough sketch idea i created which was going to be a point of view shot form the deer character looking around the lobby, i scrapped this idea because i think i would be too hard to get all the perspectives correct for a shot like this especially in 2d, this is a 2d hand drawn version of the Maya 3D work i created a few posts previously.

[jollyfoxanimations2]

This was my first idea for the opening scene to my animation, at first it was a really good idea but eventually i found it to unpractical becasue i wanted the character to walk down the lobby and this wouldn’t have been able to happen with this scene, but i still kept the silhouetted  animal characters which i designed as i thought the were pretty awesome.

[jollyfoxanimations2]

Here is a quick rough sketch that shows my process for roughing out an animation,.

[jollyfoxanimations2]

When i was looking for inspiration for character designs i came across this image, i cannot recall who the artist is but i used the colour palettes of this tiger for my character.

[jollyfoxanimations2]

This is a quick sketch i created of the different animals in the lobby, originally i was going to have animals sat on both sides of the scene plus walking around but because i was running short of time i was advised by my tutor that i should cordon off the left side with barriers and tape on the chairs, this would mean i only had to do animals on the right side, i also originally wanted the tiger to be at the back of the scene but i was also advised that he would be hard to notice if he was all the way at the back so i brought him closer to the front row seats.

[jollyfoxanimations2]

Here is my Final project for year 2 at Uclan. The animation is a poem adaptation from the poem by Valerie Cox, i chose to do another poem adaptation because when i was doing my previous assignment The Postman and the lion, i came across this poem and wanted to turn it into an animation. The assignment brief states that it needed to be a 2 minute assignment but for some reason it ended up being 3 minutes, partly that's becasue i needed to properly articulate the story but there are other factors that lead the animation to be longer than the inital brief. For this project i have used toon boom, adobe audition, adobe after effects and premiere pro to create the animation. 

My downfalls for the project are that because i had worked so much on my other projects and didn't create a work schedule i lost track of how long it would take me to finish the assignment, which meant i nearly left the animation too late but i managed to put the extra work in and got it finished, my problem was that i was just creating scenes without even checking how long they were and ultimately i ended up making an animation that was longer that the initial brief, next year i will defiantly be creating work schedules so that i don't lose track of timing. 

This animation has been a huge learning experience, that has shown me that i need to better time manage my animations, aside to this though the positive things are that, i have relearned how to use after effects again which i used to create the rain effect in the opening scene of the airport. There are quite a few things i would have liked to do to this animation for example, i would have liked to put shading to the characters, animated the animals in the airport lobby, create better lighting in the backgrounds and create more cleaner animations when i came to animating limbs, another thing i will have to take into consideration for next year is to try to get a better understanding of line brushes. Next year i hope to return to university with a better knowledge on how to rig characters because i feel that if i understood how to rig this assignment would have been so much more easier when i came to moving characters limbs and keeping them proportionate at the same time. 

I am extremely happy with the way this animation has turned out, it was nice for me to create an animation with anthropomorphic animal characters (which is a huge passion of mine). i was also very fortunate to be able to use the same voice actress that the group used for the previous witch group project. 

[jollyfoxanimations2]

This is my powerpoint presention for my sculpture pitch it is only a sequence of images as i wanted to talk more about the project and felt that adding words to my slides would distract the audience from my vocal pitch. i feel i could have done alot more to make this alot more presentable but it worked for what i needed it to do.

[jollyfoxanimations2]

These are some sketches for my sculpture project pitch presentation, first and second images are side characters that could be in Martin the pine martens world (first Bruce who is Martin’s Boss and Eddie is a work college/friend) the final drawing is a possible image of Martin when he has moved up the ladder in his job and got a petter position.

[jollyfoxanimations2]

I found this page of sketches i made when trying to imagine what the witch might look like when riding ion the broomstick from a back view, this was for the scene when the witch flys over the water towards the island.

[jollyfoxanimations2]

This is a very quick sketch of what the mustelid estates HQ build might look like.

[jollyfoxanimations2]

Finished Sculpture Project

Here is my finished sculpture project for AX2222 Steve’s Sculpture project.

Im super happy with the way this project has come together

[jollyfoxanimations2]

Here is my finished dimensions project, I have added music, lip synced the audio from the voice actress and added background sounds from the site freesound.org. 

I have learned so many different new skills when making this animation: I have better established myself with the node section in ToonBoom and gained more confidence in this part of the software, I have learned how to add Highlights, toners, glows, light flares, transparencies, blurs (the difference between using a radial and gaussian blur) and cutter nodes. I also learned about how to separate line art and colour art into separate nodes so that they can be used in their own individual way.

I have also gained more confidence when using Adobe Audition for altering not only the sound clips but also the vocals from the voice actress. I also now know how to layer sound clips in the software Audacity and then mash the sounds together to create one singular sound clip.

I am super ecstatic about the way this animation has come together, i really enjoyed doing the research on things from character and background designs, working with Ayrton (fellow student in my class) on creating the portal sound effect. i enjoyed helping the other students with their projects when they asked for help, plus helping the production managers in the group to contact students that didn't respond of contribute when asked and to be an overall ‘handyman’ for any issues that might have arose when making our animations.

I will be taking all these new skills with me into next year with an excitement and confidence and i will be looking forward to whatever Year 3 will throw at me.    

[jollyfoxanimations2]

Voice actress

With the help from Robby (a fellow student in my class) he was able to find a very suitable voice actress to voice the witch on our. We have rented out a sound recording booth at Uni and gave her our scripts. She was amazing and very talented, i had great fun helping to direct her to what sort of dialogue and  sounds we might need for the different students projects including my own, She was extremely skilled at being able to understand what i meant and amazing ability to envision the emotions of the character. I without a shadow of a doubt would definitely ask her to voice act again plus I will recommend her to anyone in need for a voice actress, in fact i have asked if she would like to voice my deer character for my other project and she agreed.

I find it very magical that voice actors and actresses can bring life to a character with their personalities and skills and look forward to meeting equally talented people later in my career. 

[jollyfoxanimations2]

i found this sound clip on YouTube that after altering on YouTube i used it for my witch project background music.