Week 2

This week I focused on designing the characters for our short animation. We decided on having a family with two parents and a young child. We chose this to help it better relate with our target audience (adults in mid 20s to mid 30s) meaning the child would be fairly young as the parents are still young adults.

I wanted to keep the designs fairly simplistic while still being interesting and individual as we have limited time to create this animation. For this, the characters are built using simple shapes and have basic but appealing features. To improve these designs I want to figure out a way to give them their own individuality and presence within the animation while still having a cohesive look.

Next I plan to finalise these designs and being creating character boards for each of them.

Week 1

For the first week our group focused on selecting a brief, selecting individual roles, coming up with ideas and understanding the brand of our selected brief.

For selecting a brief, we knew we wanted something fairly open, fun and potentially more artistically oriented. After looking through all the potential briefs we decided that the John Lewis and Partners brief best suited this and held the most interest for us. For the roles of the group, I was selected as the groups director and character designer, as I wanted to to try having a more leading role and I have a specific interest in character design. Ava decided to work on storyboards and scripting while Rhys is focusing on backgrounds and other smaller tasks.

To better understand our brief, we decided to visit a local John Lewis department store in the hopes that we could be inspired by their products, clientele, ethos and store branding. We quickly understood that John Lewis focuses on a high end feel, with high quality merchandise and expensive looking interior. We particularly gravitated towards their gifting section as not only was this highlighted in the brief, but we loved the look and variety of the wrapping paper and gift bags. We felt that this could be a really interesting aspect to incorporate into our project.

Finally we had a meeting to discuss initial ideas for the project, with us all agreeing that we really wanted to incorporate time and the seasons to fit in with the idea with 'giving though out the year' as well as the idea of experiences and memories.

Evaluation 503

During this project I have learnt a lot about what it takes to work as part of a group and the benefits as well as struggles that come with it. I defiantly enjoyed working as part of a group, as it meant that I was able to focus more on parts of the project that I liked and could spend more time on perfecting certain aspects. I also enjoyed having someone act as a director, as it meant that someone was keeping check on my progress and pointing out errors or things that could be corrected. This was useful as it helped me notice things that I may not have noticed myself and find new ways to improve. I felt our director did an excellent job of handling the project as a whole and keeping communications up, as well as making sure assets were organised. However, there were times where they could have been more assertive and given the team more guidance.

I feel that as the leading character designer on this project I created some strong and interesting characters that worked well for our animation. When creating the characters, I wanted to make sure it was something everyone was happy with and could draw fairly easily. In the meetings for the character design, I felt that our group communicated well and I made sure to take notes on what people liked and what they felt could be improved. I believe the colours and textures I selected for the characters worked well with the style we were working with while still standing out against the background. This experience defiantly helped me improve my ability as a character designer and learn about the kind of role a character designer plays within a group.

However, I feel that there were times where I took on more work than I could handle on my own. For example, we decided that to try and keep the style consistent I would draw all of the initial sketch layers since I designed the characters. This meant that I was very stretched for time and did a lot more animation then some of the other members of my team. I do however feel that this did indeed keep things more consistent but I now understand that it would have been better for me to assert myself and insist on spreading out the workload more.

When it came to communication within the group, I believe that overall it was fairly strong. Although there were times where our communication could have been better, for example there were many times where a certain member of our group wouldn’t show up to peer review sessions so we would have to do our best to relay the information given. This improved later on into the project and as such communications improved.

Overall, I feel like this was a successful group project and we have a finished animation that we are all happy with as a whole. Next time I am in a group for a project, I would like to try taking more of a leading role, but I have also learned from this experience that it’s better to play to people’s strengths and to share the workload equally.

Study Task 3 - Animation On A Physical Set Process

The Apple 2018 Christmas advert Share Your Gifts shares similar aspects the our group project as it shows examples of animation on top of a physical set. While this advert uses 3D animation and our groups uses 2D, the process is still relatively similar.

 The Making of Share Your Gift video shows the set for the advert being build and how they used 3D animation to create characters that could interact with the world. With the set, after building everything they filmed different scenes without the characters. This required careful planning as they had to have a strong understanding of how the characters will move in the frames and what they will interact with. This could be seen as a limitation of this type of animation as it can become difficult reshooting shots if the set is no longer standing or has been moved around.

However, a strength of this type of animation is that you can give the backgrounds a realistic and human built feel to them that can be difficult to accomplish with a digital set. It could also be argued that once the background scenes have been shot, there is a set lighting origin point so its easier to keep track of rather then having to remember where it would be in a digital set.

Animation Studied - Sharing Your Gift (2018) by Apple

Study Task 3 - 2D Animation Aesthetic

2D Animation offers an extensive range of aesthetics and styles that can be applied in various unique ways. In animations such as Afternoon Class this varied use of 2D animation can be seen at different points of the short film.

At the beginning of the animation, it uses a very artsy and lineless style that creates an interesting effect, The use of colour palettes is also creative and works well with this style to help highlight aspects of the shot such as the protagonist, who has a brighter colour scheme than the rest of the characters in shot. These types of aesthetics work well with the 2D animation medium and would not create the same effect with other mediums such as 3D.

The style then changes later in the short to a more intense colour palette with a line based style with limited colouring. This blend of styles is best used in 2D animation as it keeps costs down as well as allows the animator to stick with minimal amounts of software, instead of having the use multiple different software.

However, due to the use of perspective in different shots, using only 2D animation can have its limitations as it can become difficult to understand how things look from different perspectives in a 2D format. This is where using other mediums such as 3D animation would be beneficial.

Animation Studied - Afternoon Class (2014) by Osro

Week 11

This week I completed the remaining scenes that needed to be coloured meaning my work on the group animation is pretty much finished.

Some of these final scenes were more difficult to colour/add texture to as some of the lined layers were somewhat messy and in some scenes had lines missing. This meant that I had to be extra careful as well as having to add lines in myself.

Overall I think the colouring/texturing has gone well and will look nice in the final animation.

For the remaining time we have on this module I will be finishing my part of the digital production journal, writing the evaluation and getting everything ready for submission