Animation – The Finished Animation

The final animated video has been completed.

I exported the finished Photoshop animation and then put it into Final Cut along with the ball animation. I then transitioned between the two clips by animating down the scale and position of the ball clip to match the running clip in it’s last few seconds. I then just faded out the ball clips so the second clip shows through.

Then the titles were added as well as music and sound effects. I just spoke the sound effects into the laptop microphone, like the “boing” of the bouncing ball.

 

Animation – Animating the Background

Today I finished the background layers and begun animating their movement with the running Panda.

I actually quickly noticed that I hadn’t coloured my character, and so it appeared as black lines on the background, so the first thing I did was fill in all the panda layers with white. I then animated the running loop to last a few more seconds, and then made the character run off screen.

I pasted the layers onto the first frame, and then just have to move each one a little bit each subsequent frame.

I tried to use guide layers to keep the movement somewhat consistent so the speed the layers move at doesn’t jump around. This seems to be working so far so I just have to keep this up.

So I’ve looped and finished the Panda animation, and now just have to complete the background movement, about half of which is done.

Animation – Parallax

Parallax is a way to animate backgrounds to move more realistically. When a background moves in real life everything doesn’t move at the same speed like it’s a flat image. Different levels, or planes, move at different speeds depending on their distance from the camera. The further something is from the camera as it scrolls past the slower it moves.

Disney developed a way of achieving this effect with a multi-plane camera. The camera would look down at many different levels of animation cells layered under it, and the animators could move these levels at different speeds, independent of the others.

I’m going to use the parallax effect to create a scrolling background animation, which can be looped and placed beneath the running loop of my panda character.

For this I went into Photoshop and created a long strip of a document. I then made 5 layers that build of the back ground; the sky and moon, blimps in the sky, buildings, street lamps, and road surface. The layer closest to us moves fastest, so the road will flash past, while the sky and moon will remain static.

I have no created my layers, and I’m just trying to work out how to make them move with my panda. It’s a bit fiddly and some trial and error as I’m not used to Photoshop’s animation feature, but I think I’m on the right track as the animation is coming together and looks alright so far.

Animation – Character Study

Animation – Studio research

Over half term I’ve had the task of choosing one of the major animation studios, Ardman, Blue Sky, Dreamworks, Pixar, Studio Ghible, or Walt Diseny, and researching it with the end goal of creating a slid show presentation. The presentation includes history, key people, and examples of the style.

I have chosen Walt Disney to research, as I am most familiar with their work and history, as well as there being a huge amount to explore, the studio having been active since the 1920s.

For research I’ve had really two sources; the Wikipedia pages for the studio and various films they produced, and documentaries found on YouTube. Some of the documentaries are about certain films, whilst some are about Disney in general.

Whilst watching and reading I took notes on the work sheets I was given.

Here are all the documentaries on YouTube that I found useful:

Making of Dumbo –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEhqBNlSfow

Making Of Snow White-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWJDWKQViI4

How Disney Cartoons are made –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OebUzEhSLBI

The Walt Disney Story Documentary –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHw5JSflDDk

The History of Mickey Mouse –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7C9DJmRjBE

Mickey Mouse History “It all started with a mouse” –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViTDhlxNCds

Making of the Little Mermaid –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACtGIs-elB0

Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009 documentary)

I watched this documentary on the Disney renaissance era, behind the scenes during this time and the build up to it. This was really helpful as my information was quite light on this time, focusing more on the golden age. This really showed me the hard times the studio was going through the struggle for animators to continue working.

It also shows that Disney was quite a difficult place to work and all the politics behind the films that where coming out. The film also helped me pick out Roy E. Disney as one of the key people in Disney history, as he really kept the animation department going despite the unsuccessful films. He kept them going through the hard times so that they could live to create the renaissance era.

With the research and resource gathering done, I now just have to put it altogether into the slide show.

Animation – Run Cycle in Photoshop

With the bouncing ball and the morph into my panda character complete we move into digital. The goal is to create a looping cycle of movement, this could be running or walking or jumping, and draw each frame in on a new layer in Photoshop. For the cycle many templates where available, showing the sky frames of the cycle in a strip. There was a choice of type of movement as well as mood; e.g. sad walk or walking with a musical bounce in the characters step.

I chose a running template to match the action theme I wanted my character to have.

Using a bamboo tablet I traced the last frame of the morph sequence in Photoshop to create a digital frame.  Once I download the template and put it into Photoshop I basically trace over it with my character, using my panda to mimic each frame. To save time I did a lot of copy and pasting from my original frame, using the same head and each frame and pretty much the same body although I sometimes warped it to bend it slightly. For the legs I used the same image but changed it by selecting the lower have and rotating it slightly to make the leg bend. The only things I sometimes drew from scratch where the arms.

 

I couldn’t do an exact trace of the template as my characters proportions where very different; taller, slimmer, longer arms etc. So I tried to match the position of the arms and legs as best I could and work out what the basic idea of the frame was e.g. to bring the right leg forward.

Finally, with all the frames drawn, I used Photoshop’s animation window to create the running sequence for the panda. I basically had all the frames in a project as different layers and for each frame of animation just hid all the layers except the one that was the subject of the frame.

Animation – inking up and Colours

Today I went back over my character morph and inked up the frames, so that the lines would appear bolder when scanned into the computer.

The second thing I did was experiment with my characters colour. I had photocopies of my character sheet and played around with a few variations. The obvious colours for a panda are black and white, however the design is very stylized and unconventional, and so I wanted to go with unusual colours.

I chose red to continue the idea of the panda being violent and combat ready. The red seems hostile and dangerous.

The whole character in red looks a bit too bright and bold to me. Rather than communicate danger it just seems fun. And so I thought about making the eye area red and leaving the rest a dark grey. This gives the character darkness and the contrast with red and grey is harsh.

I’m still deciding whether both his eyes should be red or just one. One red eye suggests a scar of one eye, a symbol of action heroes and war generals in films.

Animation – Character Design

For this task we had to design characters for 2D, hand drawn animation. The character has to morph from the bouncing ball and carry out a walk cycle.

The first step was to sketch out ideas for the character, experiment with different looks and styles. After the initial concept sheet I then took the best of the ideas and turned them into the final design.

I then create the final design sheet, which featured drawings of the characters front, back, side, and three quarter view.

Examples of character design sheets:

The only real rules I tried to follow are that the character has to have legs and feet so it can walk, as a walk cycle is the main goal of the character, and that it would be relatively simple so I’ll be able to draw it again and again over the many frames of animation.

My starting point for the character was that I wanted to create a very stylized Panda. I played around with sketching out different shapes, heights, and faces. Some early sketches had the panda quite cute and small and chubby, before I came across the idea of making him somehow dangerous and combat ready. I tried bulking the Panda up with big muscles, but I didn’t quite like that.

(Top Right Corner: A cute and small and chubby design)

(A strange experiment, testing out how I could make the character sleek and ninja-like)

(Different Faces)

Eventually I sketched a slimmer, more streamlined Panda. I developed it a bit more to try and create a ninja looking Panda.

The hardest bit to work out was the hands. I drew many variations, clawed, five fingered, three fingered, paws. I landed on three fingered with stubby, rounded, yet elegant fingers. They are soft and rounded by are made with these sweeping curve that end in a point where the finger nail would be.

(Testing out hands)

Final design sheet:

The final design turn around looks a little ninja, a little alien, almost what is would look like if a Panda was drawn in the style of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This works well I think, as I wanted a very stylized Panda that looked action ready.

Animation – Editing the Limerick

The first thing I did in Final Cut was chop the animation up into separate clips of each shot using the razor tool. Each shot on its own I went in and re-framed each shot. These were just standard changing the scale and position of the shots so that the edges of the table couldn’t be seen.

After re-framing all the shots I went in a changed some of the timing. On the first shot of the old man walking into frame I used the razor to cut the last frame of that shot into a separate shot. I then changed the length of it to about 7 seconds. This made it so that the man just settled for a couple of seconds after he stopped walking, which gave the viewer a little time to take in the action. I did a couple of other edits along this line, mainly just lengthening the first and last frames of shots. I also cut out a few frames from shots were hands were visible.

In terms of editing the voice over in I didn’t really edit the visuals to the audio, but instead edited the audio to animation. I turned the wave forms on so I could see what the sound looked like and then used the razor to cut the recording up into smaller recordings of each verse. I then moved the verses around to make them fit the animation.

Animation – Animating the Limerick

Today we animated the Limerick and completed all the shots.

I really enjoyed seeing the animation come together when playing back our progress, and seeing when the movement of the character worked. When storyboarding and cutting out the characters I wasn’t sure the man walking on was going to work. However I think what he did worked really well. I enjoyed figuring out how to make that work, thinking of how to show his weight shifting from one foot to the other and how his upper body would react.

Whilst it did take a long time to animate I didn’t find it boring, as I said it was really fun working out how to make each thing work, and I probably could have carried on animating for longer.

As we knew we were going to be re-framing the shots in Final cut we left a bit of the table around the edges of the frame. Some shots will require even more zooming in as they were quite small on the camera and bits of paper and other junk was left on the edges of the screen.

We ended up scrapping the idea of the knowledge turning into a bird due to time constraints. It was really the only thing we could logically get rid of and we always thought it might have to go.

A flaw in the animation would be that there are quite dark shadows that flicker about from frame to frame, I believe cast by our hands. A way to fix this In future would either be to have better lighting or to make sure everyone stands back from the table before taking the frame.

The main thing I learnt from doing this short was how to control the speed of things on the screen. Watching the animation back there are times when and object moves to fast or slow; for example the falling book doesn’t move fast enough. I figured out the way to make something move faster is to move it more each frame. I suppose this is an obvious part of animation but I hadn’t really thought about it before. This animation has taught me to think about how exactly each object should be moving. A falling book will move pretty fast due to gravity, however a head reading from side to side will move quite slowly. I didn’t really think enough about these things whilst animating and just moved objects in each frame.