LAUAN503 - Weekly update for week of 11/12/17

Final week before Christmas break is also the week of completion for the line animation , and the beginning of the colouring process, which has gone very smoothly with 3 scenes fully finished and another 2 60%. The Line animation looks very good, and my other team members to finish all of their part for it , which I'm really happy with. Overall , I'm very pleased with our current progress.

LAUAN503 : Study Task 5: Walk this way - Walk cycle

Any interaction with 3D animation has always been fascinating to me, and doing thi walk cycle is no different. The process was much more straight forward than I thought, and with the help of Richard William's template , the walk came out looking really good, with an extra added to it by myself. Also doing it really help me to memorize the correct pattern of the walk which will help me alot in doing future cycles, as well as boosting my confidence in doing 3D in general. However , I find that the lack of onion skinning makes its a bit difficult to properly place the movement pose, which resulted in the character sliding out of their position in some cases, perhaps that is something to look at later when have the chance

LAUAN503 - Weekly update for week of 4/12/17

This has been the week for the "big final push" in getting the line animation done, as a result, only 1 scene on my part is left. There's 2 more scene for the shark and the wave scene which is being done by other members. But overall I'm very confident that The line animation will be finished by the end of next week , and ready for image sequence export for colouring over Christmas break. After the finalisation of the line animation , I'll also take a step back from the production , and focus on providing support if needed for my team mates

Finished "Act 2"

LAUAN503 - Weekly update for week of 27/11/17

+Continue getting more scenes out , nearly reaching 2/3 mark, got the most complex scene done ( running across the water). Overall, looking to finish the entire line animation by the end of next week.
+Colour and effects test on Scene 1 and 2, overall very happy with the looks. If we have some time before the submission. I'm planning to import the animation into photoshop to do even more post-production VFX such as lighting and colour adjustment.
+ Backgrounds is 80% done with only the final scenes left.

Running scenes

LAUAN503 - Weekly update for week of 20/11/17

Major notes :
+ More scenes finished for lines, decided to keep it as clean as possible to save the step of having to re-line everything again post-key animation .
+ Testing with finalised background slides - Fits generally well, should considered some post-production VFX in Clip Stuido or Photoshop the set the character better within the scene. Waiting for Kate to finish up the wave animation to continue with the characters for that scene.
*Notable points : Should maybe considered cutting some scenes even more to reduce coloring work load ? Will discuss with team

LAUAN503: - Weekly update for week of 13/11/17

-As this was MAF week , not much has been happening in the progression of the project. However , on Friday , I managed to finish another roughs for a scene on Friday , which came out looking really good. Matt had some input of the type of action used in the shot , however, I saw it fitting what I'd envisioned in the first place, so I just made some light adjustment

LAUAN503 : Study Task 4 : Lip sync

The experience gained from this has been quite eye opening and helpful as before hand , I've always considered lipsyncing to be a part of the main animation it self rather than treating it as a separate process. I found that through this , though maybe more of a round-about way to work in terms of using multiple software, actually is more efficient and effective, especially if you just want to set up the basic shapes at the correct time and later adding more detail/animation to it . Overall I'm very happy with what I got out of this, especially learning about the "dope" sheet as well, (it was very helpful!)

LAUAN503: Weekly blog for week of 6/11/17

Animation week started off with a bang as I finished doing the rough animation for the first 2 scenes. The feedback on them was great and I personally feel very satisfied with what I did too :  the animation has a good sense of movement , good speed and style. What I probably would like more is a few more frames of tweens to really smooth it out but this is still key animation after all , we can always add the tweens later. On another not , TV Paint has been a wonder for animating as it feels so much better drawing-wise compared to Adobe softwares !

LAUAN503 Weekly blog :for week of 30/10/2017

Nothing major on my part for this week as we're making progess with the backgrounds. We'll begin principle animation next week . On a positive note, Kate and Katie are becoming more confident with their background work and its showing in there work for the background, there are things that still needs help but I'm confident that I can help them sort it out !

LAUAN503 - Research 2: Limitations of 2D

Another fact that has started to appear to me as we move from character and environmental design is the problem of keeping consistency within 2D animation between different members of the team. The clear issue is the fact that the skill levels  in drawing ability affects greatly the quality of the material coming out , and that different styles contradicts each other, making the end product a jumbled mess, not to mention different amounts of time needed by each member to push out a products greatly affects the overall efficiency. Therefore, 2D animation ( especially long running-series) often limits itself to more stylized /simplistic designs and look that may cause it to look not as “finished” as a fully-rendered 3D productions. This is something that I , as the director of the group need to be aware and tackle.

examples from our own project, different interpretations of the chameleon character

LAUAN503 Weekly blog : for week of 23/10/17

the main task for this week was to finish up the storyboard and the animatic for the animation . In general the process went very smoothly and the first draft of the storyboard came out looking very good as it was finished digitally (with a bonus of my illustrating skills). However, we ended up with a animatic that is a bit too long (1:45) and members of the group do not feel comfortable with this, hence after some revision , I managed to cut it down to 1:27 , changing the narrative quite a bit from the original. Fortunately , it still retains the quality of the first one and also have a coherent plot and flow.All in All , I feel it was a very productive week. Now we're lookin on how we can shorten the length even further

LAUAN503 : Weekly blog for week of 16/10/17

The beginning of this week was focused on getting out the rest of the character designs for the chameleon family , which turned out really well and fitting to each of the member's expectations. 

With character design essentially done, my role turns toward editing the script and making roughs for the storyboard. The process was streamlined for the most part, as everyone was pretty happy with the script we've got, so much of the "work" went into dealing with setting up scenes in the storyboard. In the end , I think we came up with something quite decent , although one concern is the overall time-length of this animation ( don't want it to be anything more than 2 minute long ). I'll consider making a pass at Matt first with this rough before moving on to finalising this storyboard next week and making the animatic 

LAUAN503 - Research 1: Limitation of 2D animation

As an illustrator, I tend to have a bias toward 2D as a better way of creating aesthetic and style for my animation. But what it strives in aesthetic and character, it lacks in efficiency. It is a known fact that 2D animation is incredibly time consuming and repetitive, and even divided among the 3 people that is in our group, there’s still quite a workload for everyone, considering the fact that the environment is planned to be rendered in 2D too, as well as all the weather effects, among which is the water which would require extra attention to get the physics correct. Right now in the industry, there are a lot of animation studios ( especially in Japan ) using a combination of 3D and 2D in the shows, with 3D handling scenes that has many characters or wide shots, but it tends to look very obvious or uncanny so for our piece, we’ll keep to 2D for the entire animation.

Some quick examples from my own experience, going from making sketch to lineart to coloring the animation process is basically doing a full picture 163 times which is a ridiculous amount of work for a piece of animation that is less than 2 seconds. Hopefully , with our team we can divide load more efficiently 

LAUAN503 Weekly blog: for week of 9/10/17

So for this week , and the following one as well, we set it to be the "Concept" weeks, with one of us finishing out the script and the remainder and pushing out some quick concepts of 2 of the main characters : a chameleon and a shark. Since the style of pitch was gear more toward a cute cartoonish style, I decided to have the chameleon walk on hind legs but break down the shape as much as possible, focusing the mass on the stomach and head as they help enhance the cute "factor" alot, also simplifying the eyes to dots (the cutest eyes). In the end, we all settled with my design for the chameleon male.