#ba1b

[jakedoanimate]

This is the same animation from before, only I went through the effort of trying to apply sound design to it. This is a new skill that I wanted to explore on my own, as I know it’ll be a key skill in my animation development. The sound effects I used were pulled from various locations such as the BBC sound resource, and youtube. I wasn’t sure where the best places to pull sound effects from were, but I believe these worked well enough for it.

The first step I wanted to do was find a good ambient track for the background. I don’t believe this is necessary, but I didn’t want the sound effects to be isolated by silence - I wanted to build an atmosphere of semi-reality. The ambience I used was that of a small crowd talking in a big room, something unobtrusive and mindless. It also seemed most fitting - while there’s not a lot of context to the piece, it makes more sense for this kind of environment showing up than, say, forest ambience. I think it does the job of setting the scene.

When deciding on the effects I used, I focused on assuming the floor was a hard floor. For this, I would need solid sounding footsteps and a good thwack when the body hits the floor. Additionally, I wanted a softer sound as the ‘lil dude settles into rest at the end, like a muffled sliding sound. It doesn’t show up very well accompanied by the harder sound of the shoes resting too, but the subtlety makes it more believable I feel.

It’s not the most complex piece of SFX work, but it’s a start! It was an interesting process choosing the sounds I wanted, and I think I chose some good ones! It makes the animation so much richer and more engaging than before, which I really like about it.

[jakedoanimate]

After the bouncing ball, it was only natural we would be focusing on the walk cycle, as we had done in 2D. The task would be to animate the ‘lil dude walking from one side of the screen to the other. The aim was just focusing on how to get the motion across and how to use the pins and such - with next week’s session being a culmination of all the skills we’ve learnt into one final, characterised walk cycle.

I must admit that this process was so much harder than I was anticipating. Claymation wasn’t too bad to work with as the clay could be moulded to however I wanted it. This figure was, in some regards, the same - but it was a lot more fiddly! And using pins to hold it down was more difficult than it looked. There are some mistakes I made without paying close attention - with the set background changing a few times as the paper shifted, and pins and pliers being left in view when I’d taken the snapshots.

The motion was both, I feel, a success and not so much of a success. The walk itself is pretty good, with the swinging arms and convincing walk - but it didn’t quite fit the brief, which was just to animate the most basic of walk cycles. I’d realised that the head was hung too low in my initial frames, so I ran with it and made the character stomp a bit more, swinging their arms violently and curving them inwards defensively as they walked. The character the cycle expresses is pretty good I feel, but again, not quite what I should have been focusing on

The character falling at the end was a result of a lack of time. I worked on it quite slowly and didn’t get the opportunity to have the character walk all way to the other side. In its place, I quickly animated the character falling over. This was a really fun little bonus action for the animation, but you can tell it wasn’t thought through much. I tried to pay as much attention to follow through in the legs and easing out as the body rests in the short amount of time I had left with the project, but there is definitely room for improvement. However, I think it’s amusing as it is - I wouldn’t say I performed badly in this area.

I enjoyed this a lot, and can’t wait to try out more next week with a different characterful walk in mind!

[jakedoanimate]

Today as part of the stop motion bootcamp, we got to experiment with Dragonframe with a proper stop motion set up. The small brief of the session, alongside familiarising ourselves with the program, was to create a ball-bouncing animation.

This was my first time animating anything this way. I have to admit it was really enjoyable to pull off! I didn’t draw up any sort of guides for this, which may have helped me plan ahead, but I didn’t feel hindered by that at all. It was fun to experiment with it, I gave my ball some trail effects as it bounced up and down, which came out surprisingly effective in my opinion.

I was a little inspired by Pingu while shaping my ball around - the style for that animation has a lot of fun exaggerated shapes when things are in motion or in contact with something. I tried to emulate this exaggeration with the splash effect as the ball hits the floor. It felt like a very Pingu thing to do. It’s not quite as fleshed out as I would like, if I was running with more frames I might have done more with the splash. But as it is, I think it’s good work for the hour and a half I spent there!

There’s definitely improvements to make. I accidentally moved the camera a bit while animating, which definitely took the quality of the animation down a bit. I didn’t pay attention to the mess I was making around the scene too, with little plasticine bits dotting the paper between frames. But in terms of the animation and the shape of the ball, I think I did well regardless!

[lucyhughesanimation]

Kings Treasure

Sword Research

During my research on swords I looked to find as many archaeological examples of swords from the migration era paying close attention to ones from the UK from around the 5th century.

The model that I ended up creating was based mostly on the shape of the Sutton hoo sword in the top right of my collage, also taking a lot of inspiration from the pommels from the Staffordshire hoard on the mid left of my collage. I also took material inspiration from most of the examples as I found they mostly used wood for the hilt, gold or bronze for the pommel and iron for the blade.

[lucyhughesanimation]

Kings Treasure

For the Kings Treasure task I decided that I wanted to make a king Arthur based piece of treasure, originally I was stuck between making a holy grail and making Excalibur however I eventually decided to create Excalibur because I felt I could make it have more presence in the room and that it would be more of a challenge to make than a cup. I made this sword without research and completely based on imagination, after doing a bit of sword research to help develop my sword I've decided that I should restart my sword design using the research.

[lucyhughesanimation]

Maya

Texturing and Unwrapping

We were tasked with texturing and unwrapping the previous Maya models that we had made so I gave the phone a metal texture that appears more marbled and gave the chair a wooden texture. In the beginning I had trouble with the texturing due to confusion about the software but after I watched back the lesson video I found it quite easily understandable.

[lucyhughesanimation]

The Flour Sack 1

Storyboards

For the flour sack project I created several different story boards for the different ideas that I had. The first was the cuckoo clock that ticks and that the cuckoo then bursts out of to scare the flour sack. The second was the cake that the flour sack goes to because its hungry which then is stolen by a bird, which upsets the flour sack. and the third which is the idea that I decided to go with was the haunted chest that shines to entice the flour sack and then the ghost bursts out to surprise it.

[sophienuablog]

Flour sack animation with background!!! ITS DONE!!! I know that there are still some small things that I could have changed but given the deadline and the fact I did a whole nother version for clean up, I’ve decided not to make anymore alterations, I think this mystery brief has been super fun and I’ve really enjoyed looking at the techniques used to make a flour sack move.