Introduction to animation 11/9/23
The aim of the session today was to learn the basic processes of animation and we used Adobe animate and theory work to learn about the methods used to reach the goal.Today I have learned terminologies in animation such as frame rate which is the number of frames that make up a single second of animation however, frame rate can also be a measurement of time in an app (for example Adobe Animate). For example, the TV uses 25 frames, cinema uses 24-48 frames and video games use 30-60 frames. I have also learned what keyframes are, which are new pictures/layers placed in the timeline. The final term I have learned is the timeline, which is a bar at the bottom of the project which is where the keyframes are placed/stored. Finally, we have learned juxtaposition which in animation is when you stitch images to create a video manually/by hand
I have attempted to independently use Adobe animate as my process to try to create my first animation.
This was achieved by using the shape tool and pen tool to create the assets used. In production, I made a circle, and using the onion skin feature I carefully moved the ball around to create a functional animation. As the ball hit the floor I created a new shape in the form of an oval to simulate the ball being squished and making contact with the floor springing back up the circle it previously was. Later on, I used the brush tool to add to the animation to prevent the animation from being 'simple' which I achieved by drawing a stick man that unfortunately gets crushed and has its remains left stuck to the ball
I feel very positive about the processes as I have found them to be at a satisfactory standard. However, the most difficult part of the task was drawing/placing and tweaking everything to make sure it was all smooth and correct to the rest of the animation e.g. Making sure the stick man was under the ball when it landed, the remains stayed on and around the ball, the ball's movement doesn't randomly cut/shift to a different position
I am quite satisfied with my final product as I personally think I did a little better than I envisioned but I could always use improvements to make it run and feel smoother when the animation plays. I would personally like to improve on the drawn part of the animation as there are some points where it could have more frames to smear and flow smoothly throughout the animation
In terms of feedback, I have been suggested to improve on the logic of the animation as the stick man and its remains disappear off the ground and only a small amount of remains appear on the ball. I personally have noticed that the remains dripping off the ball just disappear rather than ending up in puddles on the floor, I have also thought I could add a limb flying off the ball.
Overall from today, I have learnt the basics of Adobe animate and general animation which helps me improve on future creations and/or projects
12 Principles and facial expressions11/9/23
In this lesson we learnt about the 12 principles of animation and what they are:
Squash and stretch- Giving your animations flexibility and weight when hitting an object, floor, etc.
Anticipation- Adding a windup before a movement to give it an effect of realism
Staging- Changing the perspective something is viewed at to show its importance and give it more effect
Straight ahead & pose-to-pose- Straight ahead is when you animate something frame by frame to get the Final animation and Pose-To-Pose is when you animate the key/extreme pose frames first and fill in the gaps afterwards
Follow through & Overlapping- When looser/lighter parts of the body flow differently than the body to give it a sense of life e.g. an animals tail flowing as it runs. This is because different parts of a character from their body, features and clothing have different volumes and density meaning that different elements of the character should move differently to give it a sense of realism and effect.
Slow in & out- Whenever something is moving it needs to accelerate and decelerate, this can be achieved by drawing more frames near the start and end position when the head would speed up/slow down and draw less frames in the middle of the animation to show the increase of speed
Arcs- When humans move there is an arc like bend in most of your actions due to our joints moving and bending, applying this in animations gives life to people as without animating arcs the movements look robotic and dull.
Secondary action- Giving an already animated object another animation is called a secondary action where something that already has a primary action e.g walking will have a secondary action of looking around or chewing on gum.
Timing- The amount of frames drawn to an object correlates with the speed it will have. If an object has more frames it will be slower in comparison to an object that has less frames
Exaggeration- This is when there is an exaggerated movement created within an animation to convey the force and impact of the animation. The exaggeration is prominent in cartoons where a heavy object will slam down on someone and then the subject will be squashed for a second before being sprung up
Solid drawing- The idea of avoiding creating a character that looks identical left to right (referred to as 'twins' because the character is perfectly symmetrical)
Appeal- Making sure that the character design is uniquely shaped to make them stand out and be interesting to the viewer through distinct shapes
In terms of my facial expression animation I feel slightly pleased with what I have produced as I have attempted to make a visible expression with the element of exaggeration which I personally think I have achieved well to a satisfactory standard.
An introduction to sound production 14/9/23
The aim of today's session was to learn about sound production in terms of the different types of sound how they're produced and what kind of microphones are used for different types of sound.
There were a number of things learned from the lesson which were different types of audio and pattern-pickup. Pattern-pickup is the shape/area a microphone can and will pick up sound. The different types of audio are Foley, Music, and ADR. Foley audio is when everyday objects are used to create a sound, for example, vegetables would be used to imitate bones being broken or flesh/guts being mutilated. Music audio in the gaming industry is used to give the game a vibe it gives the player enjoyment and this can be done in different ways such as The theme of a character/area/fight, the soundtrack in the environment, and music to match the emotion (e.g. Suspenseful music in moments of fear). Lastly, ADR (automated dialogue replacement) is more or less the dialogue there is in a game to add elements to a scene such as narration. Another set of terminologies we have learned were from different types of microphones.
The first type of microphone learned was the H2 Handy (ZOOM microphone), which is a microphone that is sensitive allowing it to capture many sounds in a 90-degree cone shape however, this microphone is mainly used as a recorder as other microphones get attached to it. The next microphone learned about was the RODE-NTG2 (Shotgun mic). This microphone captures directionally which means it will only pick up the sound in front of it and as the name may hint, this microphone has a short range best used to capture single sounds within a close vicinity. We have also learned about the Beyerdynamic MCE 72 (Boom mic) which is used for capturing many sounds from afar, typically loud sounds. The last microphone learned was the AKG D230 (Reporter mic) which is an omnidirectional microphone used mainly for dialogue/speaking moreover, the microphone has a high threshold to break to be able to make it play sound due to it having such a small pickup pattern typically meaning people using the microphone have to be really close, typically touching the chin just to speak into it.
In the practical work, I have partnered up with two classmates to record different types of audio. The audio types we have made were Foley and ADR. My group started with the ADR task which had each of us doing different actions: I held up the microphone to record, one of my partners read a dialogue and another partner started and stopped the recording and had headphones on to actively check if the audio was nice and smooth. After producing our ADR audio we moved on to our Foley audio in which we used the objects and items around the room to produce noises. We based the theme of our audio off of a horror game so we were inspired and knew what kind of sounds we could make. We produced a multitude of noises, like turning on and off switches, drawers opening and closing, and loud banging/regular knocking on the door this was due to difficulties in thinking of sounds to do considering we had little resources so we used the items in the room and came to the verdict of horror game sounds, overall meaning that we had struggled with the task until we gave the sounds a theme to help us find sounds to create.
Lip Syncing animation 18/9/23
In this lesson we learnt how to lip sync, this was achieved by studying graphs that show what the mouth looks like pronouncing a letter to make the lip syncing more smooth and realistic.
The terminology I have learnt today was flaps, which is the term for the mouth movements of lip syncing
In terms of the animation I have unfortunately not done much due to having a character to draw and choosing a hard audio to lip sync, this made me learn that next time I should keep my character simple and choose audios that are easier to lip sync. I also did not add much life to my flaps which makes my character seem monotone.
We have also learnt how to import audios and add them to the timeline on adobe animate which allows us to analyse the waveform and see where it lies across each frame.
The difficulties I had in the animation was making the flaps actually look like they match the words
currently I am not too confident in my work on the animation and I can improve this by practising lip syncing more.
Introduction to adobe Audition 19/9/23
In today's lesson me and my class looked over adobe audition and learnt the basics of audio editing.
we learnt multiple features of audition to tweak audios to give them a whole new personality.
There were a handful of terminologies learnt in this lesson which were
Parallel- When the audio matches the visuals in a scene
Contrapuntal- When the audio and visuals do not match
Diagetic-The audio can also be heard in the movie (e.g a character watching a guitarist playing a riff)
Non diagetic-The audio isn't heard in the movie (themes, music, narration)
Pitch modifier
Echo modifier
MY WORK
after using audition I have seen to find it quite difficult and confusing with its layout and features, they didn't make sense to me.
If I were to reflect upon my work I would look into practising the software more to learn about it and post up an audio file in the future of greater quality.
Nonetheless I still managed to produce something for my first time using it but I personally don't view it as much in terms of success.
The animation process 21/9/23
Introduction to Premiere pro
In today's lesson we looked into premiere pro to get a grip of how it works and how we can use it in our animation processes.
We were assigned to use the Foley audios we made in an earlier lesson and a video animation to make a hybrid sort of video and pictures, this is what I've came up with-
Personally ofcourse I don't have much reflection to think about as I did this just to get the hang of how it works.
After completing this task I have come to understand the basics of premiere pro and know how to use it now if i ever need to within future tasks.
Sense of speed animation (and feedback)
In the lesson today we have shown our speed animations done at home/own time to our classmates and did so to receive criticism. From my animation only two points have been raised and both were about the man when he turns small it is questionable, from this i learnt that i should've added a background to show the zoom-out/ change in perspective.
I personally think that the animation could be majorly improved upon looking at it and if I were to redo it, it would most likely be done much differently.
Group project animation 19/09/23- feedback 28/09/23
In today's lesson we have gone over and reviewed each group advert made from last week. The rules/criteria for this project were to make it 15-30 seconds long, show principles, etc. Over the week I have came up and story boarded the idea of the animation.
I would personally say the animation was not the most successful this is for the obvious reason of minimal animation and this was due to lack of resources and one of our members were sick for the majority of the time to help animate. Colouring is also missing up until the last part where our teams signature character parodies appear.
The crowd reaction was mixed as people did and didn't like it but after looking at the feedback I decided that reflecting upon the advert I could go for a more simple attempt as looking at the pacing of the story and the drawing done it seemed quite complicated.
Analysing animation practitioners 12/10/23
Original animation project 2/10/23
In today's lesson we have started a new animation project where we have to produce a short film that runs for 1-2 minutes based around a piece of semi-suspenseful audio we have been given as the background music.
Background music given
with the use of this background music we made our brainstorms due to needing to use the audio in the animation. There was also a criteria as follows: must be 1-2 minutes, must have clear applications of animation principles, sound designs and photography, must have three audio components, one walking animation, one head turn animation and 5 different shot sizes.
My brainstorms and designs for an idol
The beginning of my storyboard.
in terms of project planning we all took many roles and gave it dates to complete by so we could neatly flow through the animation and meet deadlines easily due to everyone being organised to specific roles
I personally think the most difficult part of the project will be pacing at the same point as eveyone else, e.g the storyboard not being done whilst everyone has finished their task and wants to move onto the next step.
Synopsis
Schedule
Can I work in the animation industry? 5/10/23
Reflective journal week 1 2/10/23
In this week I have begun producing the storyboard and have completed 15 panels to the animation following the synopsis but making a few tweaks along the way to smooth out the story and stop repetition. We have also went through a long process of character development and changed the final model mid-storyboard
First 15 panels of storyboard
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Character model sheets
Initial/first design
Experimental character changes
Final model
during this week me and my group partners were taking up and trading roles in pre-production to help get work done e.g. who does the animatic, who edits audio, who records it. The work process for this week was underachieved in my personal thought both to me and my group and we used that to get by next week's set work faster.
Reflective journal week 2 9/10/23
In this week more work was done in comparison to last week. Within this week the animatic, audio and storyboard have been finalised (panels 16-27)
2nd week production of storyboard
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after the storyboard had been finalised the animatic was in production during the storyboard production both finishing at the same time. In sound production me and a group partner both went to make the sounds we need with the use of a list.
Some of the Foley sounds produced
all of our foley sounds were recorded in the sound room where we have done trial and error with multiple objects to make a multitude of sound. The microphone used for foley was the ZOOM microphone to capture as much audio as possible in a 90 degree cone from the objects we used. ADR that had been recorded was recorded with a shotgun microphone with a muffler on top to capture direct audio with no other sounds included.
Animatic
Reflective journal week 3 16/10/23
In this week I focused on making the backgrounds as the animatic and storyboard had been finalised leading me to animate the background for necessary parts, in this week I came up with 4 backgrounds and had to drop this to animate as time ran out for our group.
First background
Second background
Third background
Fourth Background
All these backgrounds were made in photoshop in which I would begin by drawing the import parts (any black lines to define an object). After defining my objects/background I would fill in the back to a base colour to associate the other colours evenly and better. After addind all colours I would add details to the drawings (like cracks, eastereggs in the first 3 backgrounds and the detail on the torches.)
In this week as mentioned earlier I had to animate more, in which here are snippets of my work whilst animating.
Animating for videogames 19/10/23
Animation final screening 30/10/23
In today's lesson we presented/screened our final group animation projects and have received feedback. The feedback sheets we have gotten back were as followed:
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Animation evaluation
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