K00317221 Ada Phelan LSAD

MOVEMENT: Exploring where and how Ivy grows and its effect on its environment.

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Vide of the sketchbook i compiled over the course of the Pixelation Project, Re-invention in Storytelling Project and Mouth animation project

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final facial animation.

I had difficulties exporting the audio of the piece within the piece but i am happy with how all the visual components came together.

i feel that the head while obviously a physical object fits in well enough with the obviously digital background

To create the complete piece we used a process where we split each mouth into its own picture with a transparent background and then used above animate to animate them on top of our heads. This is a pretty cool piece of technology as when you upload the pictures of the mouths a specific way it lip syncs them automatically.

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I wanted to create a background in my own version of Kiki Jova’s style after creating the head. As it was late i made one of my room. I used elements that were common in the art like black surfaces being filled with stars, grids and solid colours with slight texture on them to create the style. It was slightly challenging to create this as the colours found in my room are very different from the colours used in the artists pieces.

After i created a sketch i made flat versions of each object in the space and the wall. i then added some sparse linework, highlights,texture and patterns to some of the pieces to make them pop.

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Before i started drawing the mouth movements for my scentence “I Can’t Wait For The Conclave”. I wrote out discriptions for how my mouth looked for each sound. Then i drew them and recreated them with paper in the style of the head i made. Writing discriptions of what my mouth was doing beforehand was really helpful as i was able to break down what i was seeing and drawing them beforehand allowed me to focus on how to translate the drawings into paper.

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Our next project is a continuation of a project that i missed the start of. On that first day as a class we were supposed to draw a real place, then we would go to the library and find a children’s book that was illustrated in a medium or style that we weren’t to familiar with and then we would redraw that place again in the style we choose.

Our prompt for this morning was to create a 3D recreation of our head in the style that we choose the last time and then pick a sentence for ourselves to say and create different mouth shapes to make our heads say the scentence.

As i hadn’t been in the day that we picked styles Yvonne instructed me to look for an illustrator on the Association of Illustrators website. I ended up choosing an artist named Kiki Jova. I really liked her style as it created a very flattened version of real life and it has very appealing textures.

I broke my face down into the most important aspects to represent being my glasses, hair and nose. The artist prominently uses solid colours for the cheeks so i added the design element of the circle cheeks. Another prominent aspect of the artists style is the red/orange trapezium shaped nose with a black outline for the nostrils. I then added big lashes for myself and eyeshine under my glasses. In making the head i choose to use untextured paper as it would be effective in recreating the clean lines of Jova’s work.

I then created a small mock up for how i would make the face of the character 3d. I decided to use a heart shape for the head to make it 3D by folding over part of the head to make it bend outward.

I ended up with a product that i really liked. the cuts in the paper made it 3d but still easy to stick paper onto and to bend it.

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I created an outline for how we would present the project on our pitch morning after the talk given by Yvonne on the subject. My aim in formatting the pitch this way was to keep the attention of the people we were pitching to and showing how all the aspects we were presenting, character, world and music would aid in telling the story.

We started off the pitch with a synopsis of the plot.

Then we moved on to talking about Fiachra. we explained the name of the character coming from the irish name Fiachra as fiach is a word in irish that means raven and debt and we thought that that fit our scoundrel character as he is a corvid and his misdeeds have caused him to have a debt to society. We showed off aspects like of the character like the character line out created by Amira, Early design of the character and the master shot of Fiachra falling asleep at the start of the piece. We then tried to show the clip of the animation from this portion but there was a problem with the sound in the piece.

We then moved on to explaining the setting of the piece. We talked about our research of an iron age setting and how that manifested in the designs of the buildings and the clothes of the background characters. We also talked about the indulgence of the game root on our art style and decision to use animals for the main characters as they carry extra symbolism and anyone can relate to them. We then showed a clip animated by jamie and went on to show the character’s introduction to town in the animatic.

We then talked about our central antagonist Crogall. The name for this character comes from the irish word for crocodile. We thought this was fitting as this is easy to pronounce for a child audience but is menacing enough for an antagonist. The design for the character was created by Teghan and they used inspirations from an early idea where we had set the piece in egypt instead of ireland and the irish mythological figure the Dobher cú.

The last aspect we talked about was the music usage as part of our prompt was that our genre was a musical. We decided to use pre-existing music as we couldn’t write songs ourselves. During the proccess of the piece we decided on using two songs from the musical Epic. The first was a song called Ruthlesness. Due to time constraints we had to only use the backing track for the piece. The second song was Get In The Water which we used for the dialogue between the characters. I wanted to save the usage of dialogue in song form for the highest emotional point of the piece. We chose a song that matched the dialogue that we had already written for the piece.

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In the final days of the project i created a coloured version of the clips we would use in the pitch.

I decided that we would splice small clips of the animatic throughout the pitch to hold the audiences attention and to focus the pitch on the story we wanted to tell with the piece.

The first clip is of the main character as an old man falling asleep and waking up back in his younger days. This acts as an introduction to our character and aids in explaining the character to the audience. The second clip is of the character wondering into town and which acts as our introduction to the setting of the piece. The third clip introduces our menacing antagonist Crogall to the audience through him chasing our main character. Finally the last clip introduces the musical aspect of our piece to the audience.

The reason i added colour to the piece was to make the storyboards a little clearer and to give an idea of the colour palettes of the piece. The colour palettes of the two main characters were decided for me by Michael, Amira and Teghan who designed the characters so i wanted to build the colour of the piece around that. I decided in the end to use cooler colours in the scenes of peril on the river and warmer colours for the town scenes. This created an inviting effect in the town and an unsettling effect when the main character is in peril.

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In the last days of the project i created a few merchandising ideas for the pitch. These included a t shirt version of a design for Fiachra created by Amira and a lego version. To create the lego version i used a lego bird that i found as reference and changed the character so it had the important design elements of Fiachra. It was important to me to create these for the pitch as it would show the Toyetic nature of our designs and the value that would add to our show from a monetary perspective. We initially floated the idea of creating a plush/crochet version of the character to show this but we couldn’t due to time constraints so i created this version.

I also created a simple animation of the main character Fiachra waving goodbye to send off the pitch with a bang.

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today i worked on a master shot for one of my storyboards. These master shot will be used in our final presentation to show how the storyboards will be shown if a completed animation were made.

I found this challenging to create as i was not used to drawing and completing works in the style we chose. I am happy with the result and am very happy with the style itself. We chose it because of its appeal and if it were to be a real show the style would be easy to convert into appealing 3d merchandise.

the building in this piece is inspired by the dwellings of the iron age but as the main building is a market stall i wanted to strip back the structure so that it’d resemble a more recognisable market stall. the rest of the buildings are more generic.

the fox character in the piece is also my design i took inspiration from the root board game, the same art style that we used as inspiration for the rest of the project. The clothing is inspired by iron age clothes that mostly consisted of draped sheets.

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i spent the majority of the second week of this project creating an animatic for our project. As we had expanded on previous work i was able to use that as a jumping off point which really helped in story boarding this. The musical sequence in the piece was previously boarded by Teghan. I used aspects from her storyboards but as ideas for our story changed i adapted them to the current state of the story. I also unified the style in which the storyboards were done in

There are some small parts that i am not happy with but overall i am very happy with this storyboard.

The song was picked for our project by Teghan and she also mixed the audio. This allowed me to focus on the storyboards and their relation to our story and the lyrics of our song.

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Here’s a selection of the storyboards that i have completed. I have most of the storyboards completed exept for the final scene which i will complete this morning.

Due to us expanding on the story we had previously had these storyboards were more about refining what we already had and making sure that they are all in one cohesive style

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On Friday morning we presented a powerpoint made by Michael and Amira of our ideas to the class. The most important piece of feedback to us was the fact that if we set our story in iron age Egypt that the setting would read more as Egypt than Iron Age. We regrouped after the presentation and decided to change the setting. Due to the massiveness of this problem to our project we didn't get a chance to explain most of the story but as a group new agree on the contents in it being good enough to move forward with. Our chosen place to set the story is now an Iron Age Ireland as it is a place much more impacted by its iron age.

Michael then suggested that we use the board game Root as a style inspiration for our characters in this new setting as a lot of the influences we had before were very Egypt focused. We also decided that the characters would all be animals because they can add symbolism to the piece.

We decided to keep the crocodile as a crocodile as its from the nursery rhyme that inspired the whole project, Also there's examples of crocodiles in fantasy media in similar settings like Robin Hood (1973).

I sugge3sted that we make our merchant character a magpie as some bird species have symbiotic relationships with crocodile and the magpie is a bird that has a reputation for stealing.

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Jamie and I spent Thursday afternoon writing the dialogue for the dialogue scene before it was brought to our attention that because our genre was musical it would be wise to use music instead of the dialogue we had.

The time to sing is when your emotional level is just too high to speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel. - Bob Fosse

Because no one in our group makes music we decided to use preexisting songs. Some of the songs that I suggested based on the dialogue we had already written were: Hellfire - from the Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Why are you Hassling me? - From Schmigadoon, I Steal Everything - twisted and The Confrontation - From Les Misérables.

God always fights on the side of the bad man Bad man, bad man, bad man" I've got clean away but I'll be back some day Just the combination will have changed Some day they'll catch me, to a chain they'll attach me Until that day, I'll ride the old crime wave If they try to hold me for trial I'll stay out of jail by paying my bail And after I'll go to the court of appeal saying "You've done me wrong, it's the same old song forever, forever" Done me wrong, same old song, done me wrong Same old song, done me wrong, same old song Done me wrong, same old song, done me wrong Same old song, done me wrong, same old song Done me wrong, same old song, done me wrong Same old song, done me wrong, same old song

The song that I felt most embodied the dialogue we had written was Robbery Assault and Battery by Genesis. I feel that these lyrics can be used in the same way as the dialogue as written so the song would be a good fit. The song is very upbeat and has multiple parts where the lyrics break for music so it would be very good to use for the transition from the chase scene to the dialogue scene.

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After pitching the idea that we'd expand on the first half of our storyboards the whole group agreed to go forward with my idea and then we all began as a group to pitch ideas for where we would expand the project.

For the first scene of our main merchant character would fall asleep as an old man we decided to add more shots of the room he was in and the things in it to establish that he was a merchant that would travel around to many far off lands through the room itself.

For the scene of him waking up in a boat not for from our egyptian town we said we'd add more shots of the character trying to find his bearings, seeing land and a town, rowing over to it and departing the boat. These weren't present in the initial plans as we wanted to maintain the pacing of a trailer.

The character walking into town from the boat was brand new as we felt seeing this characters reaction to the town would be a valuable asset in establishing character. We then added the idea that the character would steal something. This allowed us to have the character do something bad worth judgement and also put a start to the chase scene.

Amira whop initially came up with the storyboards for the chase scene took charge of our revised chase scene and already had her own ideas for how to extend that so we trusted that her vision would be better uninterrupted granted they start at a certain point and end at a certain point.

For the dialogue we initially wanted to have only a line or two of dialogue but for the revised version of the project we decided to lengthen the scene as we had to establish the character of the crocodile throughj this scene

After adding more direction to other parts of the story and assigning as a group which person would be in charge of which portion of the project Jamie and I started work on the dialogue and I started work on storyboarding the dialogue scene.

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Once we all had everyone's storyboards completed we all put our boards up on the wall in order of where they took place in the story. Shortly after arranging the storyboards together we watched these videos with Yvonne. Pixar in a Box: Story Structure.

The story structure video talked about how by revealing certain pieces of information at certain times can reveal story and character in a more effective way. This video made me think about the fact that we were presenting our story in the form of a trailer. We initially wanted to present it as a trailer as we thought that it'd be the easiest way to show that our character is travelling from town to town.

When I looked at the storyboards again after watching and discussing this video I realized that the majority of our plans for the trailer were one continuous scene set in largely the same place being our idea for an iron age Egyptian based town. The other places were only being shown by the storyboards that I showed in my last post and shots of the merchant's boat arriving and leaving other towns.

I decided to pitch to the group that we'd expand on the parts in the one continuous scene and that we'd cut the other parts. I only felt comfortable suggesting this as most of the storyboards being cut were my own and one other person's who had done a major amount of work on character designs

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we then broke the story up into pieces so we could storyboard different parts separately. Mine was a scene where our main character was walking around a new town and saw two people fighting there. We decided that this scene would take place in a viking town.

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This week we started a collaborative project where we’d create a pitch for an animated project based off of a children’s nursery rhyme. Our theme were given the rhyme Row Row Row Your Boat with the added challenges of our genre being Musical and our time period being Iron Age.

We initially discussed plans of the project being of someone who rows from town to town in a medieval age and then being chased away by a crocodile as it is an element in the rhyme. We were instructed to delve deeper into this and we decided to incorporate dream and mythological elements.

We decided on our central character being a merchant who has escaped death and is now being chased by a manifestation of judgement who is represented by a crocodile god based off of egyptian mythology.