Monday 31 March 2014

P2. Animation Process

The pre-production stage: consists of budgets, scripts, a brief and the concept are all discussed and considered as a rough structure based on your idea. If this is all approved, then the crews get hired.

Concept: is fleshed out more that includes detail and given substance. The narrative is then changed into a visual style of the animation. The focal point of this stage will be what is wanted, needed, and what has to be achieved. This is often done by experimenting and adapting things.Next, the director and storyboard artist come together to create the narrative in a visual form. 

Storyboarding: the purpose is pre-visualizing a motion picture. It is a graphic organizer that shows the types of shots, the camera movements wanted. the art director will develop a style and create the characters and environments. Most of these pictures showing what everything will look like would be drawn. Storyboarding can be done by an individual or in a group, however with a group it will take long as its not an individuals vision. This stage also allows rough guide lines for animators to work within loose restrictions, still giving animators room for creative inspiration.

Sound Track: casting the voices for each character is done by the director and producer until they find what they want. The chosen voice actors will then receive the script and go over the script. sometimes the voices can be all record in a day, but it can go for days, depending on the vision of the director and producer. The editor will then create a sound track example to show a representation of each character.



Modeling: from the original drawings and designs, modelers will begin to make CG examples (computer graphic(ing)) and the characters skeletons that the animator can move each joints creating realistic human movement.


Background: will be overseen by the art director. They are created and added using CG, basic sets will be built up by modelers, then more detail will come after set dressing is added. With 2D animation, the backgrounds will be scanned in and cleaned up on the computers, on the other hand to avoid the process of cleaning up the 2D animation can just be made onto the computers.


Layout: the layouts will be shot and made into a 'layout reel' or edited into the previously made storyboard. In the making of larger, more structured and expensive products there will be often two phases, rough and final.



Animation:all the assets needed for animation is done excluding the backgrounds. Different scenes will be allocated to specific animators by the director. As each scene is completed the director will approve it and will then be added to post production so it can be viewed in context. 


Each scene will built up to create an almost completed running animation. Effect animations will be added after all is complete.


Tuesday 18 March 2014

Character Design

Character design is the combination of physical traits and "narrative".
- Narrative/ storyline defines personality, gives context (genre, location, setting) therefore has to feed into the look and design of the character.

How to feed personality into the design:
1) The face is the primary channel to express emotion. (- A reason for the many large needed characters.)
2) A lot can be said with posture and body language. (- This allows for personality traits to be identifiable in the silhouette.)
3) Solarski Theory - states that how a character cames their physical weight can tell us about their personality - which body part they lead with is important.




(Hero leads with their chest,
Hercules from The classic disney film










                                    

Pelvis - laid back/ lazy,
Barney from The Simpsons











Head - intelligent,
RoadRunner leading character from the TV show RoadRunner










Knees - coward)
Timmy from the fairly Odd Parents








4) Cuddy Theory - power and dominance revolves around expanding power! Expand - take up space. Weakness - cover up make yourself smaller


Thursday 13 March 2014

Walking Cycle


Analysing the how we walk help to break down the steps to make a 2D animation walking cycle


How I made the Walk Cycle:

  1. Download the Bear File > https://www.dropbox.com/s/fs681w4g0qxgaz2/BEAR.psd
  2. Open After Effects
  3.  Go to File > Import > PSD File of Bear
  4. Bear PSD > composition retain editable layers
  5. Double click Bear composition > open in work space
  6. Progran window > ctrl click > composition settings > Frame rate 23976
  7. Change duration to 5 seconds
  8. 16 frames long > adjust in workspace   
  9. Where the circular arrows in settings next to where the key frames are, you want click that to Change the formation of the sequence to loop
  10. Then using the anchor point tool set anchor point onto the Bear 
  11. anchor points should go on the following > Front Arm / Shoulder-Head / Centre Body / Front Hip-Leg / Back Hip-Leg / Back Hip-Arm / Shoulder
  12. After setting the anchor points you need to set the parents for the Bears elements 
  13. Using the formation of the frames on, frames 1,8,16 make the movements for the body
  14. Once the Walk Cycle is complete you can add a background if you wish and audio

Thursday 6 March 2014

Animation in AE ' YEEEEAAAAH BOOOOiii'

This was created using Photoshop and After Effects.
In photoshop I made separate layers for each limbs so when exported into AE I could animate each limb I wanted individually. However I add and anchor point to the hips (the end point of the triangle) nut only the body was moving. I didn't want the limbs to move without the body other wise it would look unnatural so, selected all the layer and paired it by using the pick whip and parented to the body layer then added an anchor point (Y) to each limb and joint . I made a new project in photoshop to make the different shapes the mouth made when saying 'yeah obi'. There was at least 5 different movements -'ye', 'ah', 'b', 'o' and 'i'; so I made 5 layers for each sound. Then I exported it into AE. I also downloaded the audio into AE and moved the keyframes of the mouth movement to match the speech (audio).

Monday 3 March 2014

Houston We Have Lift Off!


Using window timeline in Photoshop, I edited each frame to make this animation. the "3,2,1 Launch!" stayed in the same postion; as for the rocket I had to the tween button to create frames in between one frame to create the impression of it launching.