BA3a Animation Blog

(September 2019 - November 2019)

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The cover art for my dissertation.

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Film stills with color example.

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This is the completed animatic ready for submission. I’ve added the title, end credits, a bit of color, and ambient and foley sound effects. I’m very satisfied with how this project has turned out, however in the next term, I’d like to add more depth to the sound effects like whispers in the wind for the shadow scene. I’m really looking forward to further developing this animation, and I’m pleased with the movement the rabbit character has here.

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I’ve managed to extend the animatic to 60 seconds in order for the audience to have the time to process whats going on in the story. I have yet to sort out the audio and the color.

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The shadow monster character concept. I wanted to make a simple yet terrifying creature that wasn’t too complicated to animate. I bounce between giving it ears or horns that would mimic the rabbit’s ears, and tried to figure out if I wanted it to look like a wolf or cat, or just a formless demon. In the animatic, I settled on a rounder shadow with devil horns and a fanged smile. I may alter the design in the final animation. 

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My second animatic with more detail. I’ve added more dramatic camera angles to intensify the fear the rabbit and the audience feel when seeing the shadow monster. I’ve also tried to make a disconnect between the rabbit and the monster in the beginning by using a worm’s eye view and grass to separate the two characters so the audience won’t know what the monster actually is and is just as afraid of it as the rabbit. For now, at 25fps, the animatic is only 26 seconds long, but that adds room for the title and end credits plus wiggle room for any extra animation. Also for now, my working title is “The Rabbit and the Shadow”.

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Simple turn around animation for my rabbit character in my modern fable project.

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This is an animation test to see how the rabbit character will move.

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First rough animatic of my modern fable project.

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Character model sheet and dynamic lighting test.

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This is a scene from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) that inspired one of the scenes for my Modern Fable. When the rabbit sees the monstrous shadow, maybe he’ll start to hallucinate more terrifying things around him.

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A quick style frame/concept doodle for how I might want a scene to look in my Modern Fable. I want the background to be in the style of old Winnie the Pooh illustrations to mimic a storybook.

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This is a rough storyboard idea for my Modern Fable project which will be updated and changed as the story is developed. As for the style of the animation, I want to try a more storybook-like style like old Winnie the Pooh illustrations. The background will be very simple and plain with little colour until the very end of the animation where the sunset will be detailed and colourful. 

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Personal Showcase Project

As assigned, I brainstormed ideas over the summer for my Personal Showcase project, the Modern Fable. I had a number of different ideas which were all a bit unsatisfactory, and I don’t feel I had the inspiration during the summer that I have while at Uni surrounded by great artists and their ideas. The following are a few prompts I came up with over the summer:

1. "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle": A bird is making a nest and returns to see a cowbird in his nest. When the cowbird leaves, the bird puts briars in the nest as a trap. The cowbird returns and sits on briars, gets hurt, and the cowbird is upset. The bird sees the cowbird's nest was destroyed, so the bird helps the cowbird rebuild his own nest.

2. "Don't be afraid to ask for help": A firefly with only one wing can't get off the ground, all the other fireflies fly past and laugh at him. Two moths see the unfortunate firefly and ask a spider for some thread to help. The moths tie the thread to the firefly and lift him up to help him fly.

3. “Be where your feet are”: A peacock who stared at his reflection all day in a puddle misses all the excitement around him. He feels left out when his friends all talk about their exciting days when all he’s done is stare at himself and fix his feathers.

 Once back at Uni, I finally had an idea I was happy with. There are multiple messages that can work with my idea, but the general message of the story will be about overcoming anxiety. The message could be “You are your own worst enemy”; “Things aren’t as bad as they appear”; and/or simply “Have courage.” A rabbit comes out of his den and sees a monstrous shadow. He hides in his den, but peeks out to see if the monster is still there. The shadow grows each time he looks up out of his den, and the rabbit is terrified. He works up the courage to look out again, but sees his own shadow. He jumps up and pounces on the shadow, not scared anymore, then turns to see a beautiful sunset behind him. He sits and happily watches the sky. 

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All posts from here and up are unit BA3a

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A quick summer cat animation

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Final Evaluation

This final term admittedly wasn’t my favorite, but was full of valuable lessons and projects. The first project, the animated loops, was a quick and simple animation project in After Effects where we were given a peg bar and told to visualize three emotions of an animator. I chose fury, exhaustion, and the third was more like a representation of artist’s block and trying to take off with an idea. I’m most proud of the exhaustion one (which shows a face yawning) because every loop makes the viewer sleepy or want to yawn. I did an extra fourth animated loop of a pigeon ruffling its feathers because I wanted to show my improvement in motion graphics animation since the first time I learned it, and have to say I’m most proud of that animation despite it not fitting the project’s standards.

The second project was Personal Branding and Career Planning where we were required to research companies and jobs that fit our professions, make a show reel of this year’s animations, and design an online portfolio with a CV. In the process of researching jobs on Indeed.com for my project, I had also applied to multiple companies for summer internships, and surprisingly landed one in a gaming company called Firaxis back in the US near my home, where I’d be doing editing and illustrative work similar to concept art (my dream job). In the process of applying and interviewing, I drew up a CV, which later turned into a creative CV, with my education, work experience, skills, awards, and exhibitions I’d been included in since I was originally pursuing fine art before university. My show reel was the easiest part of the project, since I only had to put together my best work and find suitable non-copyright music. The website was a struggle since I’m not used to organizing website pages. I made sure to choose a consistent color pallet, font, and email throughout the site to make sure any viewer could easily find it.

The third project was the Collaborative Visual Essay in a group of eight people, who all got along really well and the project was easily sorted in a reasonable amount of time. My group chose the Pixar film Brave, then quickly chose a color pallet we all agreed on. The rolls we were supposed to assign to each other didn’t seem all that important because we all did a little work on everything and added whatever anyone else missed. The only independent part of the project was our individual animated scenes, which we all agree to animate in After Effects. We did have trouble setting up meetings online over the spring holiday since most people were with family or had bad connection, but we were always updating one another over text.

The final project was the one I was most excited about which is very out of character; the Research Report Proposal. I don’t particularly enjoy writing reports, but I immediately jumped on the idea of researching dragons as soon as the project was given. I wanted to ask the following questions: Why are dragons so common and popular? Where did they come from? How do they differ between cultures? To start, I looked at Wikipedia to see if i could use any of their sources. I went a little wild and went right into writing my dissertation and forgot it was only a proposal. I did, however, adding in an explanation of what I want to achieve and what might happen at the end of my research to make it feel more like a proposal rather than a dissertation.