Rapid Production

Project Breakdown -By Shailey Brown

For this assessment we were given the task of creating an animation inspired from a piece of audio. At first this task seemed daunting, as it would mean that it was going to involve either dialogue or some form of monster or vehicle moving around. This didn't appeal to me, as i wanted to continue practising different animation approaches. However, our facilitators gave us the choice of selecting audio from their files, or to go out and look for our own. So i went off and found 16 seconds of audio from the song, Ruelle - game of survival. Segment 0:14 - 0:33. The plan was to have a character in an alleyway, going out to the bridge to have a cigarette.

WORKFLOW BREAKDOWN

Organisation:

The process which i used for this production was built upon from our last studio, which used iterations/previs to have as incremental saves. For a backup, if a shot you where working on failed to save or got corrupted. Otherwise i altered my work to match the deliverables which where due week by week.

Using trello and the brief as a organisational starter kit, i figured out what was either the most important elements or the areas that would take me longer to complete due to my developing skills. Placing them on a higher priority on my trello shot/list. also adding due dates with reminders.

Character concept Design:

Creating my character was another area where I felt it was just going back over what we were initially taught in fundamentals and taking it further.

Over a year, I felt that my drawing has stabilised itself and i’m happy with how my character Kat looked by the final iteration. To the left is a character from my first year in uni. these where colours i preferred to use. down below is outfit tests for kat and different colour examples. I've learnt that its better to experiment and not stick with the same tones for every animation.

Since i knew I wanted a female character due to the audio chosen. i later found that I wanted to create a “strong” female archetype. From that, i sketched out a page worth of silhouettes and body types. Trying to find one that sent the clearest image of a strong working class woman.Once the body shaped was decided and approved through iteration two, i chose to focus more on how i would assemble this character to create a 2d rig.

I tried two different rigs. The first was a profile that was separated into body parts and used pins. I didn't like how it turned out, as it was very stiff. So I tried Duik, and rigged the image to the right. giving the arms, head, torso and hair separate movement.

Storyboard & Animatic:

This stage was something that i was still learning to do, as my preference for shots would be either close ups or over the shoulder shots. And this was a good chance to try different angles and find which would convey my animation the best. Showing off the areas I want my skills on display. I used the resources provided on the google sites. First stage of storyboards was very vague. However during my second take, I included more shots to show each stage, the camera movements and transitions between scenes.

The video below is the animatic made late week three / early week four.

Animation:

This stage was something i have become familiar with. Setting up a filing system that would separate my working files and also show the slow but steady updates of each shot. Starting with the animatic which was used to time each shot to the audio track. I had five in total to work with. Below are some early works in progress of three scenes.

From this point, i started out animating on 4s instead of twos. Because by now it was the end of week four and i knew i wouldn’t be able to animate each shot with the same amount of detail as well as balance my workload. I don’t think that this sacrifice on the smoothness of the animations hurt my final project, as everything had a similar movement and cohesion about it. Next time, if i was to animate this again. I would try and have keys put down almost immediately after story boarding is approved. This way they could be worked into the animatic and show in better detail what it is i’m trying to achieve.

Animating the 2D rig was an area that took me longer than I would have anticipated, as I had never created a rig before and was unfamiliar with what i would need to do to get the movement and look I desired.

RESEARCH

Research for this project wasn't too hard, as all students where given a head start and generic tutorials aimed at each stage of production. These were helpful in making sure my knowledge of each task and the brief was lining up. i watched a lot of Carmen Sandiego and broke down what i could on how to best lay out the environment vs the character animation and ways to use flat colour/shading. what i would want to do next time is have a cleaner saving area to create research notes, as they are kind of everywhere this trimester from being on actual paper, to desktop sticky notes and brief word docs..

Links which i used during this project that helped:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Ls6OL0OFE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvUkaBhwAFY&t=138s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqQIZLn_zng

PRODUCTION ROLES

The different roles that would be required for this project would be teams for pre production, production and post production. In each faction there would be groups to then work on specialised areas such as character development, background artists, lighting artists, storyboard and animatic artists and finally the animators. The role I found that would be most challenging was the environment art that was the background to the animations. As I know i need to improve more on my scaling drawings. However i was enjoying the possibilities of shading and lighting in after effects.

POST-MORTEM

Things that I could have done better to prevent any issued that occurred during production would have been a neater filing system. As i left this too long before creating and thus, had files and images scattered everywhere. so when i came to time of tracking down one particular file. i ended up wasting a lot of time doing so.

An area that I achieved well was maintaining the work and keeping up on the hours this project would need.

APPRAISAL

Overall I enjoyed this project, it was indeed a rapid production and should have been scoped down from the pitch.