OUAN403 : Animation skill : test

Following the Animate it study task, I decided to produce a short animation gif to further experiment with 2D animation , in this is its a samurai drawing his sword. I have to say , the more I do this the more I feel that the straight-ahead form of animation fits me best , as it allows me to be much more flexible and creative in creating motion, especially ones that are complex like the drawing and sheathing of sword of a samurai (which on the latter I failed to do actual, as it is missing the sliding of the blade along the sheath before actually putting it in - which will be a quite confusing description for people who don't know how that works ) :

Animation-wise though , I'm actually quite please with it . the action is clear and shows a decent amount of fluidity ( agains thanks to straight-ahead animation ) even is the lines is constantly moving out of place ( boiling point style ). I'm also please to see that I have gained some level of understanding speed in animation , as the swift draw of the blade is exactly what I want to portray.To that end , what I would want to improve on it is first , like mentioned above is to produce a more correction representation of the action to real life and second , is having more movement variation is the different sections of body and armor , by doing so show that they are individual pieces that doesn't stick to the body but follows it , creating a more lively character and more realistic movement

OUAN403 : Animation skil - Brief 3 : Animate it ! further improvements

After taking a look at my animation , Michael suggest that the pacing towards the end of the animation seems a bit rushed ( the 3 final cuts when the character is sitting in his chair , sweating and blinking as the camera zoom out ). He suggested that there should be a smoother transition between the emotional stages , by making him blink rapidly at first and slow down as it gets toward the end. By doing this , it give the audience a bit more of a breathing room to comprehend the situation, which is a great advice after taking a look back at the original. The first solution was actually just to extend the time on each of the 3 cuts (therefore creating more breathing space ) but due to the time limit that was set in place (15 seconds) , it wasn't viable , therefore I resort to the plan above, along side that cut out the final scene so I can extend the play time on the rest. In the end though , it worked really well, and didn't alter too drastically any points I wanted to make in the original animation , which raises the question , did I went over-board a bit with my storyboarding , adding in too many scenes (that contributes little to the story-telling )without enough consideration for timing and pacing. ( which is actually quite a bit of a problem I have had - doing way too much ). It definitely serves as a good learning experience for future projects, where I should start putting some sort of a "limit" on myself, where I made less works . but within each of those works it delivers more content. (in this particular case , less scenes and cuts , but more action and animation in each one )

OUAN403-Animation skills: Brief 3- Animate it - finished animation

Finally completed the animation with exactly 15 seconds of video time (apart from ending scene). I have to say , I was really pleased with this project and the finished products. Animation quality is good and actions are clear and smooth. The "boiling point" squiggly lines gives it style , while not hindering and obscuring any important details, partner that with the sound effects and we have an animation that communicates the plot really well (especially with the dramatic SFX that emphasise the "fear" and "panic" factor of it ).

However, there are a couple nitpicks that caught my attention , first is the transition between the 2 scenes below: 

 

This works well on storyboard but when it came to the animation , the sudden change in the position of his arms from holding the belt to gripping the seat handle makes the scene seems really detached from each other, creating a bump in the animation. Second problem would be within the latter of the two above , when he's pushing his feet against the seat , his legs should straighten out a bit to make more visible that he's pushing against it . These problem was caused mostly due to frame limit , so I can probably fix it with additional frames thrown in . But overall , it's a good effort !

**Update : Fixed errors , the final version where the adjustments mentioned above have been made. It definitely works better ! 

OUAN403 : Brief 3 : Animate it (Animation)

 This is first 5 seconds done in my 15 second animation. I'm quite please with it actually , the pacing is close to what I had in mind ( a bit slower would be perfect ) , the style is good and it has that "dramatic" sense. Also, animating in Photoshop is more intuitive than I expected it to be , albeit not without some minor technical difficulties. Timeline were easy to comprehend and through some screw-ups , I've managed to learn the difference between a regular image layer and a video layer. I also learned that this squiggly-line style is called "boiling point" or something like that, I'll definitely comeback to this style more often in future animation as it really make animating much less labour-intensive and more efficient as it removes the necessity to have lines traced perfectly on top of each other , especially for scenes that uses a lot of repeated frames
With that said, I'm really excited to see what the full animation will looke like !

OUAN403: Animatic

I had to leave out a significant portion of the original storyboard in order to fit the 15 seconds time frame. However I think that I've manage to retain the main points of story with this , and also very happy with sounds added, as it really captures that feeling of fear and panic. One thing that could be add its more dynamic camera movement and angles but in my mind its not completely necessary. Now onto animating and I decide to animate it digitally as oppose to doing it on paper like before, as I think it will be more neat and easy to adjust. The style of the lines will be quite similar to the storyboard , but more swiggly and free form. The animatic breaks the animation down into 11 scenes with each scenes around 16-20 frames , so I'm going to break down my animating process accordingly, which should be efficient 

OUAN403 : Brief 3 : Animate it ! Storyboard

A finished storyboard for Turbulance. Overall I'm quite please with it from characters to scenes. I didn't focused too much on lighting or shading since the way I'm animating this is on paper, minimum shading is required. I'm also happy with the current pacing I have in mind , although that we'd still need to work that out on Premiere when I get started on the animatic. However , the thing that worries me is the length of the animation. Since I haven't made the animatic yet, I haven't been able to see whether the storyboard would fit in a 10-15 secs time frame, and worst case is it going over that limit. However , I've already worked out in my mind some scenes that can be discarded when that time comes so it's actually not that big of a deal. On the side note, should probably start learning some tips from the Japan Animator's Expo Intros that I mentioned in PPP

OUAN 403: Animation skills- Brief 3 : Animate it!

From the words that was given to us , I chose "Fear" as my theme to do a 10-15 sec animation on.
At first , it was a stalemate between doing a sort of Japanese horror story ( the slitted-mouth woman is a good one ) and a short of a WWI soldier right before the come over the trench , both differently but equally strong forms of fear. However , after some advice from Martin, I decided to switch to a more personal and, more common fear that is easy to relate to, which is fear of turbulence on planes. It is something that is very much familiar to me , so I probably can do a better job of translating that fear onto paper, plus , 15 seconds is a bit short to do a proper horror story or going through everything in the mind of a soldier. With that in mind the first stages were setting up the environments and characters , which was pretty straight forward :

Really took advantage of those tropes that are used to indicate fear on a character ( blacken eyes and shakes mark) . I also went for a very simplistic look , as I have to animate this on paper which mean drawing the character over and over again. Same thing goes for the plane back drop. Probably in-scene , only the character's seat will be drawn properly , while the rest can be omitted or done a very simplistic way ( silhouetted ) 

OUAN403 - Animation skill: Brief 2: Telling stories -Storyboarding review

This week was the first "crit" for the any kind of work I've received , and it was on the storyboard that was done for last week. On my part, the overall comments were pretty positive, complementing me on the visual quality, lighting and style of my storyboard, which is awesome because that is something that I was striving for. More importantly though, negative critiques focused on the inconsistent flow of the story scene-to-scene and the lack of movement indication ( another minor flaw would be the the 18-frame limit that was crossed ). On reviewing the critiques, I found that all of them made a excellent point, as I did put much of my movement indication ( cameras, characters ,...) in text below rather than on the screen itself ( there was white arrows but they were indeed a bit obscured ). That would probably make it easier and clearer for the animators to work from, and having tasted the hardship of animating, I'd probably appreciate that greatly. The point on the the flow of story is also good as I did have to fast-forward some scene to keep up with the pace of the rhyme, (especially clear during the transition between the stile and the pet shop ).With that in mind , probably in the future, I should take more into consideration the speed of the narrations if they are presented as to have more fluidity to my story. However there was one critique that I disagree : "Could do with more colours". The monotone theme that I chose served 2 purposes: first is to simplified the storyboarding process, having not to think about colour composition in order to focus more on movement and characters , hence enabling me to produce scenes more efficiently. Second is for the gritty, dark style/theme of the animation itself .So in the end, I fail to see the need to add more colours.

As for others, I found myself giving out a balanced set of critiques, with some of the work being very cool and unique ( the silhouetted dove in particular ). More importantly though I've managed to acquire a set of "guild lines" that my critiques can be placed upon, which would not only help me to judge the works of other but myself also !

OUAN403-Animation skill: Brief 2: Telling stories

Week 4 was quite a relaxed week , but then again ,its relaxing in animation so not much at all ! we started out finishing the task from last week , but quickly moved on to what is becoming my favourite part  of the animation production process : Storyboarding ! We learned about all the basics from the different effects of different type of shot frames (extreme close-up supposedly help developed intimate relationships while long shots isolate the character and tell where they are) to the line of thoughts that build up prior to storyboard itself : what the story is , who are the characters , lighting ,composition, actions ,…. Basically, my over-simplification of story boarding is , drawing a rougher, slightly more descriptive manga/comic, which I ended up doing a pretty good job of if I do say so myself !

    
             can you feel the intimacy yet !


   yep , he's in a trainyard all alone , lifting trains... 


Of course we would ended up doing a storyboard of our own, base on a nursery rhyme of our own choice. Mine was "The crooked man". While ,most of the table tried to find the true meaning behind the rhyme to base their plot on that, I decided to go with describing exactly what is happening in the rhyme, building the characters of "the crooked man" , the cat and the mouse. My thought was, realistically speaking , this animation would be aimed at toward young children, hence does not require a heavy and sophisticated plot that they might not understand! This choice also influenced the design of the characters as more cartoony forms.

  

The crooked man was design as both old,lanky and evil-looking as to cover all the terms of what "crooked" is 

 Having a background in illustration and eventually developing a thing for the tiny details, I found myself extremely focused on making each of the scene as "pretty" as possible (especially on the digital version) , with lots of lighting and background work. This was influenced by Miyazaki's style of story boarding where each slip was a piece of art in itself ( HOW DOES HE DO IT! )

  

unbelievable !

But in hindsight, switching to a more western style was a good decision as with my skill level right now , it allow me more time to develop the character and push out more scene more efficiently, which is logically and realistically better. But I managed just to retain a certain level of details , especially on the lighting, which in my mind really enhance the feeling of scene in general !

    

  

these scenes from "Tangled" are something very relatable !

OUAN403-Animation skill : week 3

The first sets of tasks that we’ve received through out the week introduced me to the basics of animations, all the while jumping straight to point, already having us start making actual animations through the use of flip books and regular paper, with help from the tools and software provided in the studio , most notably “Dragonframe”.In my view, the most important knowledge that was gained was Disney’s 12 principles of animation, 3 of which that up being a major help for me through most of my tasks ,since these tasks were set up specifically for them: Squash and stretch, Pose to pose and  Slow out/slow in . Having never make “proper” animation before, these basics rules really shed light the tiny details that I usually take for granted, such as in order to make an object or character move slower, more frames are required to be drawn, or how everything squash and stretch under different kind of pressure (which was really interesting seeing how real-life physics affect the production of  character/animation, albeit it was exaggerated). 

Talking about the task themselves, for my first time animating, I think I did a pretty decent job , working through all the problems that was presented. The “bouncing ball” was an absolute classic, which focused mainly on “squashing and stretching” ,with a bit of slow-in and out. The end product looked really good, with nice amount of timing , squashing and stretching. Keeping with that idea, I did a cannon firing for the “free-form” flip book, having the cannon cartoon-ishly squashing in just before firing, and then stretching to ridiculous degree as the cannonball was exiting. These actions indeed really help  to  give a feeling of “power” for the shot, which really open my eyes to how other actions can also be improved with this, from other forms of firearms to jumping or slamming a hammer down, which undoubtedly will change my approach on how character moves in future works. 

As for task 2 with the pendulum, which focused on spacing and timing, having the knowledge from task 1 of slow in/out , and a basic knowledge of how a pendulum really saves a lot of time creating the frames. Working in a set frame number was interesting though, learning how to divide of the frames to create good timing and spacing , again, a basic but important skill that would definitely help me a lot in future projects. However there was one thing that I’d criticized myself , was that I was still stuck on “straight ahead animation” for the first 2 tasks. 

Key frames are undoubtedly a major part of animating, and having task 3 pushing me to use it was definitely helpful in the end, although , if  I’m honest, the use was still very limited in my mind, but I’m sure I’d get more in tune with it as the time goes on and I have to deal with more complex movements. Overall it was a very exciting and practical introduction to animation, and I definitely learn more from the rules just by using it in practice, truly exemplify the idea of  “actions speak louder than words”