Evaluation

Looking back at this project I feel that I have been given the freedom by my director to play to my strengths. I've always been more comfortable with digital arts and using a drawing tablet, so I took over doing the storyboard, animatic skills, and DVD case, cover and label. I also had a chance to do some 3D modelling in Softimage to help with the camera angles. I think that with my group I have been very lucky, there haven't been any conflicts or arguments but everyone has got on really well and worked very hard, I couldn't have asked for a better group. If I could have changed anything, it would have been to meet up more to compare animation stills to avoid the simple continuity errors. I feel that I've been a lot happier doing a group project then just working on my own, because the original idea we had, then got improved due to group discussions, whereas on your own the idea may not have been developed as much. I think that thanks to my group we have managed to develop an animation to be proud of, everyone has been able to play to their strengths like getting people that are good at sound working on the sound.
Looking back on this year I have learnt quite a few things. I need to put more into my work and definitely research more. I am, however, proud of the work that I have produced. I have taken away a lot from all my tutors. I feel that I have very bad time keeping skills, and within each semester I have neglected one thing. In the first semiester I wasn't too sure what was required from digital skills so that got put aside, and with the second semester I've been so keen to get into the group project and digital skills that I've neglected my essay. Each semester I have been learning from my mistakes and now know where I go wrong.
Next year I'm very keen to start putting more into my work and I hope that there may be another chance to do a group project again because I enjoyed it so much. I'm hoping that next year I can develop the skills I've learnt even further and hopefully learn some new animation styles. I am very keen to try some stop motion animation and model making. To my surprise I have rather enjoyed doing hand drawn animation, even though before this course it seemed like the worst and most frightful form of animation for me because my drawing skills aren't that good. I have also redeveloped my love for 3D animation whereas last year when I was doing a CG course I lost that love for it. Overall this course has given exactly what I wanted from it, I wanted to explore several different forms of animation and this course is everything I expected and I'm so pleased that I found a course to suit me.

DVD Designs

This is the design for the DVD label. The background will be solid black but to show the template I had to make it grey. The DVD label will be printed onto the disc
This is just the DVD menu. I wanted to stay consistant with the look of it

This is the DVD cover and again I kept to the similar design as the label

Shot 3

When Nathan left, his shots got given out to the rest of us so I took shot 3 with was the extreme close up which didn't require a background

Shot 4

This is the background from Grace and my sketches to see how the character looks from that certain camera angles

Shot 1 Background

These are the background I got from Grace to use for the opening shot

Softimage scenes

The top two images are just on the scene in general and the other 6 are of different cameras angles to use in our animation. I used softimage to just quickly model this for our scene


These are just some fish eye tests in after effects because Alison wanted a fish eye shot within the animation

Storyboard Stills

These are the storyboard stills which I drew on a drawing tablet based on Alison's thumbnails

Character Try outs

These are just some sketches of the character to see whether I could draw it right

This is just some emotive sheets of the character

Grace's Turnaround

This is the turn around of our final character

Grace's Background Design

This is Grace's layout design and the design we've chosen to go with for our animation

Background Tests

These are some background tests to see how different inks and pens work on a blacked inked background which we will be using in our animation.

Character Designs

These are some of my character designs

Fear Script

This is the script given to us by Alison which we all made some notes on in the early development stage

Refference

This is my sketches of the key frames I used in my animation

Run Cycle

(Videos to come) This is the Richard Williams run cycle from the Animator's survival kit

Walk cycle

(Videos to come) This is the Richard Williams walk cycle that was used to get the positions right

Shuttlecock

This is my thumbnails for the shuttlecock animation, I used the refference video that we shot with Andy to get the positions right

Bowling Ball

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yOMflB0AZU

This is the video I used as refference for my bowling ball animation

This is my sketches of how I want my bowling ball animation to look

Tennis Ball

(Videos to come)

Here are some drawings to work out the tennis ball bounces This is the timings of the tennis ball bounce from our refference videos that we did with Andy

Moom Super Hero Poses

Here is the moom character in different super hero poses. This was set as a way to get used to the rigging and moving the character.

Digital Skills Ball Exercises

This is a small video showing the different ways you can move an object using the F-curve editor

This is a quick thumb nail drawing working out the timings for my ball bounce in softimage, I used the timings we wrote down in Andy's workshop as a starting point but adjusted the scale in softimage by eye. Below is the exercise Jon set for us with the ball trying to bounce over the wall.

Digital Ball Animations

This is just a croquet animation for digital skill 02

This is abit more complex with the ball rolling down the slide convincingly

Mr Potato Head

For digital skills 02 we were given the pieces to create a Mr and Mrs Potatohead in Soft Image. We had to move, rotate and scale them within the 3D software, then place them into positions to create an interesting, 3 panel comic strip.

To create my comic strip I used clever duplicating to get another body, rotated it so it was upside down, scaled it so that it was tall and skinny, then textured it in green. I then duplicated the eyes so that he had 3 eyes. I then duplicated some shoes and a pair of arms, and then scaled them, also I textured them along with the body to make them green, and the same skin tone. I turned a spare mouth sideways and then coloured that in blue, to create my alien. To create the overall sci-fi feel to the scene I added in a spotlight pointing it at the alien and gave the light a green glow, thus creating the green lighting effect. After I positioned my camera and got my screen shots I then took the images and put them into a special software specifically for making comic strips, and that's how I created my final piece.

Year 1 Semister 2

This is my blog for the Animation in Farnham. Now we've changed to blogger I'm alot happier about updating it more often as the wikis were very tricky. I hope you enjoy my blog.