Week 10 of Creative play had begun and we had only two weeks before we had to submit our animation pieces for our group work. Today though we were a member down our group discussed a new approach suggested by Beth. Our original plan was to draw onto real life objects using animation software to give them life but cartoon like influences and Beth suggested that we should do something similar but perhaps create cartoon characters in real life backgrounds much like the animation seen in the tv series the World of Gumball. Whilst this did remove my stop motion approach from the angle in this project I realised it was within reason as we had only a limited time left on the clock and Kieran agreed with this approach. Beth assured him that he could still do his approach and this was a comforting relief to know we weren't changing all our plans.
I did feel slightly disappointed that I wouldn't be doing stop motion and green screen but I realised this was part of the course of animation. I learned both in my volunteer work and some animation or documentaries that over time ideas change which was the natural course of the industry. We discussed what our plan would be for today and Beth and I agreed the first thing we needed to do was gather reference images and videos for our side of the projects and so the three of us made a voyage into Manchester to gather photos and videos to do with the trams, bins and rubbish, Shopping district and the buildings in the city for Jolantas side of the project given her absence, we didn't want to exclude her side of this project in any way.
Upon arrival in Picadilly Beth mentioned that she may have to buy something to represent the shopping bag element of her side of this group project but as we progressed into our time in the city she decided to draw the bag rather than purchase something which did seem to make sense buying a random object for a bag. In terms of her project she was looking at manikins in stores such as PRIMARK or H&M, specifically manikins on their own but myself and Kieran did suggest looking at some groups but she didn't want it to turn into a group discussion. We looked around the Christmas market stalls that were near the Arndale and whilst I was tempted to buy a custom belt buckle at one of the stalls I realised I had work to do but I did suggest taking some pictures of the stalls for Jolantas side of the project as I remembered her idea of using the market stalls from one of our discussions in project planning.
In terms of my side of the project I needed to take some photos of bins and whilst I had taken some photos of a bin in Altrincham for my research into the shapes I needed one to resemble my bin from my animatic piece that I did on Tuesday. Miraculously as we looked around Manchester the bins looked indistinguishable from the bin I was using in my animatic which was a surprise. Beth suggested that I should film a bin staying in place and the people moving by it, and I realised this was a good idea and realised that in after effects I could possibly make this loop behind the animation of the character as in either photoshop or Animate we could work in layers.
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| Bin character reference miraculously similar to my animatic design |
I was beginning to warm to this new idea and wondered if this would relate to 2D characters in live action films and how this could be an interesting approach. We then headed back as we got the reference material that we needed and Kieran took some reference photos of the tram stops for his project and for when he does his animation piece. We soon returned and over lunch we discussed our approach and that would be to draw our characters so that we could then animate them and I realised that we'd have to learn lip syncing for our pieces to show speech in the characters. I decided to draw my piece out first, scan it to my email via the printer in the Library, book out a wacom tablet and then colour the piece in photoshop. I began sketching and drawing out my bin from observation from my photos and video footage, this was created using some perspective methods learned from past experience and from Intro to the making of. I inked the sketch but I didn't include the eyes or face as I would include this in animate so that it would move and show expressions of mouth and eye
movement.
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| Stall for Jolanta's work. |
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| inked sketch of bin |
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| Figuring out tilting movements |
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| figuring out the tilting movements for animation 2 |
Beth had left to carry out her work on her manikin figure which was very well illustrated and detailed. She decided to finish at home as she needed access to her tablet as like me it was simpler to work on digital illustration with a pen in your hands. I decided to work in uni as I wanted use the time in the lesson so I booked out a stopmotion camera for tomorrow and a tablet for now but I needed to know what computers had the tablet driver installed so that I wouldn't make the same mistake as last time in making of. The booking people suggested talking to the ICT people on the second floor and having been before I knew where to look. They told me that room 3.05's computers had tablet drivers on the computers, I could only hope that there wasn't a lesson going on.
Unfortunately there was a lesson going on so I decided to look in the library macs to see if any computers there had a tablet driver installed, however there wasn't but I couldn't return the tablet too early. So I improvised scanned in my bin piece, opened it into photoshop and cleaned up the inked lines. I knew what to do and that was to adjust the levels slightly so that the black inked lines would show and recently I learned there was more to cleaning up an inked sketch than adjusting the levels it also involved adjusting the hue, saturation and luminosity, as well as, the curves which I did and the result was a more cleaned sketch. This layer was set to multiply and on the other layers I added colour studying from my video and photos. Some of these colours were muted colours like grey pastel yellow or even a form of cool grey for the bin metal.
I took this time to experiment with a shading method I'd learned from my Pinterest board when looking at digital illustration tutorials. The idea being I would isolate the side of the bin and then create a main colour of black on that face, then lower the opacity slightly to give the influence of shading and this seemed to work on this bin piece and it was something I would need to visit later on in my own time and work. Highlights were applied with a shade of light grey and when finished this was saved as the Photoshop file and as a JPEG for my blog. Looking back at this session I could tell we were starting to make progress though we were a person short we took reference material and even considered new ideas and motions. I felt that from this point forward it was going to be all hands on deck for our projects and to get them done on time for submission. However I was confident in my teams abilities and despite what quarrels or differences in style that we may have thats what makes this group project all the more interesting.
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| Inked sketch coloured in. |
In conclusion I knew the weeks ahead were going to be daunting and challenging to get our work done on time but we realise that sometimes we must make compromises to get our work done on time even if it meant coming in on our days off to do the work but thats a sign of dedication and devotion to ones cause and I was looking forward to do some animation.
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