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.