Animation Process and Practice

Weekly meetings After finalizing the script and starting work on the pre-production and testing of our film we decided to set up weekly group meetings every Monday and when needed Thursday in order to make sure everyone knows what they are doing over the weekend and keeping everyone on track with our individual as well as team progress. It was very important for us all to know where everyone is up to and Trello and our facebook group chat defiently helped with that too. However, in our meetings we discussed more specific things to do with the actual film that was essential in keeping on track of the schedule and getting everything completed on time. As with every group, we had some bumps and issues along the way so far as either our schedules weren't lined up together or when we had disagreements on different parts of the film where sometimes I felt like nobody was really listening and most people wanted to do the things their way as they felt they knew best. However, after...

Sound - Narration and Foley After finishing all of the painting animation and almost all of the post production, we started to work on the sound. We managed to get Barry Purves to be our narrator. We had a very fun experience and managed to get really good narration voice clips for our film. I felt that his voice really fitted with the film as it helped to give the slave the personality that we first envisioned in the script. After doing the narration, I was also in charge of the foley for the film. Fortunately, most of the foley that we needed for our film wasn’t anything necessarily challenging. Things such money, glass clinking, metal scratching I managed to do home. I also managed to do the crowd sounds from the Benzie cafeteria and when put together with the film they managed to work really well together with the rest of the sound. The sounds turned out to be quite clear and unique rather than generic if we were to use foley from online sources. I had fun doing the footsteps ...

Progress on Painting For the past week, we have been painting on glass as much as we can in order to try and keep on track with our schedule. Considering I came across issues when I did a paint test in my sketchbook as I wasn't using any references, I decided it would be good to have the backgrounds printed out and use a lightbox in order to block paint the background. I also had to figure out what size the image needed to be as I was printing the backgrounds on A3 size paper whereas the character animation was on A4. This is why in the first few backgrounds I did when focusing the camera on the characters, some of the backgrounds were cut off, so instead for the following ones I decided to increase the size of the image. Even though we were painting pretty much 5 days a week every day, we were still behind schedule by the end of the week. The backgrounds took me from 1-3 hours to do, depending on how complicated and detailed they were, and the character animation about the ...

Nuke Editing After finishing all of the backgrounds it was time to start working on post-production and colour correcting all the scenes. I decided to colour correct each scene individually as they are all set at a different time of day it didn't necessarily all have to match together and it was more important to make sure that each shot and scene is colour corrected right rather than the who film. In our previous sweatbox session, we were given feedback where people felt that the smudges on the foreground layer as well as the unstable frames were a problem. This is why I decided to try and do a quick rota around the shot I was colour correcting in order to see if it will make it look any better. After doing so, the shot was a lot more stabilised and the smudges were gone. However, I did feel like the smudges helped to give the film a more painted style where you could definitely tell that every frame was hand painted but most people agreed that it looked better without the...

Object Turnarounds Considering the base and focus of the story was on the different glass objects that are presented in different scenarios, I was given the task to create turnarounds for the important ones that appear in different scenes in the story. That way they become useful when it comes to us painting them as we have a 360 view references that will allow us to make them as close as possible to the original real-life ones. In order to do so, it meant that I needed to create my own textures in Photoshop and apply them in Maya. I looked at the original images that Carol had already taken previously and worked with them closely and even though it was hard to create a complete turnaround as I only had one side of the objects I managed to model them to the best of my ability and as close as possible to the original images.

Painting Tests After working and finishing most of the pre-production, it was essential for us to do some painting test before we actually started animating as we needed to make sure exactly what and how we were going to paint and animate everything as the time we had did not allow us for any mistakes to happen in production. Firstly, as I wasn't as confident about using oil paints, I decided to paint one of the backgrounds in my sketchbook. I used the same method in my sketchbook that I would have used for the glass where I used a lightbox and the printed out background that helped me to paint on to paper. After doing so, I definitely became more confident with the paints, however, doing this test made me realise that I need to figure out the right colours to use as the one I chose in my sketchbook weren't really working. As I didn't have any reference for the colours from the 3D background I went along with the colours I felt that would be appropriate but I wasn...