Group Project: Post Production

Editing and Sound

I continued to work on the elphant t-shirt project to do editing, foley and and compositing.

We recorded some sound effects for the elephant ( James is now the voice of the little blue elephant!) and edited the results in Audition. There are 6 sounds in all, including a drumroll, nervous 'oooohs' for the elephant and audience applause. This took quite a while to do, trying to get some atmosphere and character into the final film. But I am sure a proper 'sound man' would have done a much better job!

The final stage of exporting was a painful process, it turned out that the original Flash file was over a GB in size for some reason, so the rendering was taking over 2 hours. So in the end I exported the Flash files as a PNG image sequence, which was of more normal size and then could render from Premiere in a few minutes.

I enjoyed working with Charlotte as producer, as she helped when I needed her to do something and left me alone when I needed to just get on with things as I wished to.

Things I learnt:
More timing in animation, as just reading about it in thoery doesn't get it into your head, only doing it does that.

How not to work with too many images from hand drawn to computer vectors, there must be another way. . .

Some stuff about rendering but this is still a mine field.

And how I am not too good at sound

Group Project: Production

Production - Animation

Animation of 'Aaaargh Nuts': I decided to do the animation for the elephant using traditional method of animation with drawings on peg paper, for two reasons, one, that I felt I could work out the timing better and two, that I wanted to get some fluid movement into the elephant which I didn't feel confident I could achieve in drawing straight onto the computer.

I decided to use peg paper to do the animation as I thought I could achieve the movement I wanted better, it had been a while since doing the animation practice exercises in the first term, so it took a while to get into it again. I don't think I could have done the movement straight into Flash in the same way and I didn't want to have a cut out, dis-jointed look to the animation.
So althought it was a good way for me to work it was a long way round, and the scanning followed by converting all 207 frames was annoying.

I had hoped that by using the scanned bitmap images and converting them to vectors rather than drawing them as vector, as I did for the OSTN project, that I would cut down on the work load and therefore it would be quicker. But unfortunately the conversion process did not go smoothly! The scanned images picked up some marks on the paper from rubbed out lines and so when converted and coloured in there were gaps left which needed to be filled in manually, this added so much time to each frame and felt like my life was ebbing away. The lines of the drawings became grey and not a smooth line, so I think I just don't have the experience to have known how to sort the settings out. The converted images didn't look as I would have liked in the end.

It was difficult to get the positioning of all the frames into the right place, I used a box drawn around the animation to act as a guide but this didn't always work and the animation jumps around a little.
I would have liked to use more movement in the body as well as just certain parts, but getting everything to move at the right time is difficult.

I was satisfied with the line test but less so with the Flash test, due to the scanned converted image artwork.
I do enjoy using the hand drawn peg paper process, but getting to the computer stage sometimes is less satisfying.

Group Project: Pre-Production

Moonut T-shirts project - Elephant on Diving Board

I worked on several thumbnail storyboards for various t-shirt designs with the team and then drew up 2 design concept ideas in more detail to submit to the client.
The 'Aaaargh Nuts' idea was accepted with some ammendments to the story. Following on with some character drawings and colour tests using illustrator.

Maya Animation

The jury is still out on maya animation. I think I got the hang of the programme and I can think in 3D, but at some point it all got very complicated and life seemed a bit too short!

Doing the ball bounces was fun. . ish, and I felt I understood what was going on with the key frames, the graph editor and some form of animation timing.
The flour sack was a completely different thing altogether, maybe because when you are animating it you want control of what bits move and how, which means you would have to do the rigging yourself. I decided not to use a cycle for the walk because it is very difficult to get rid of the sliding appearance, the limp walk ended up being a bit too slow, I thought I could use the graph editor to move the key frames closer together, but unfortunately this send everything off sequence. . .so that didn't work. I was satisfied with the walk though as I had one foot turned forward with his heel lifting and his toe slapping down and the other dragging behind which took a lot of limping round my living room! The jump was really difficult to do as things started to go haywire, parts of him were being left behind, so after losing some patience the jump and landing are not what I had planned. . .but at least it got finished. I could get into it more but it would just take a lot of practice.

Storyboarding and Scriptwriting

I enjoyed these assignments, but don't know if I am any good at either of them.

Storyboarding the 'Mark and Kevin' story:
I liked the process of drawing up the scenes and it seemed relatively straight forward. After I had finished though I thought one of the scenes should have been done differently. Following the close up of Mark with a fist, I think should have been just a close up of his fist filling the screen, but I did a profile shot instead....oh well.

Scriptwriting:
This was quite difficult to do at first as I tend to write in book form as a story, so trying to just write the essentials stumped me for a while. Ben suggested drawing the storyboard first which I did, and this made an amazing difference. In drawing out the story I got all of the discriptive stuff out of my head and wrote all the camera angles and cuts for the scenes, which I could then just use for telling the story in script form. I think it is 100 times better than my other attempts, but then I did start from a low point so anything from there was up! Don't know if it is any good as a script, a story or as a storyboard, I am just relieved at getting a result.

Ident - Final thoughts

After having some time away from the final result and having viewed it a few times since, I can appreciate what I have learnt and try to learn from the mistakes, and although I didn't get everything done the way I would have liked I should not be so hard on myself for the result I did get!

OSTN Ident

Well, the last week and a half has been so intense that now I feel exhausted, a little dissatisfied with myself and full of confusion about technology.

Various stages of the journey: I did all the action sequences on peg paper to test which worked well up to a point, but when I took the vector drawings into Flash and set up the scenes as the drawings they didn't seem to work as well. I think you can get too close to a project and lose sight along the way. I am not sure now if my project is the way I intended or not, think it is too soon to tell. But I definately wasn't able to concerntrate on the look of the finished work because of trying to fathom my way through the jungle of technology, which I feel really hindered by. Even when you know what your're doing things can go wrong with computers, like software crashing etc, so adding that to not being knowledgable enough can be a huge headache.
I really felt the lack of technolgy knowledge throughout this project, there is so much that can be achieved but it is knowing what the software packages can do and how to do it.
I couldn't remember how to use certain parts of Flash and I feel that I didn't use it to the best effect when I did get into it. Perhaps I am more of a pre-production person, as I really enjoyed the early stages of the project. Writing the idea down, creating the first character drawings and sets, designing the look and doing the story board. I don't know whether over the course of the next few years if that will change as I become more experienced on the software programmes or not, it feels like there are people who are naturally gifted at operating programmes and those who get some one else to do it for them! Overall I found it difficult to estimate how long each stage was going to take because I didn't know enough about the following stage. I don't feel very happy with the final result, at the moment!

The last day was very difficult, as the DVD burner decided not to work, the exporting settings of Quicktime movies from Premiere squashed my final work, and I exported it at various settings in the end trying to sort this problem. I had to change the settings from the notes on Moodle, so it took most of the afternoon to export the file. The second DVD burner set up wouldn't accept my + disc and I had to get a - disc instead. When I finally had my DVD some of the line tests do not play from the disc and apparently these will have to be dragged onto the desktop to play properly.

Lastly on a good note, the things that I will take from this as a positive are that I liked my idea, (even if someone else would have produced a better finished piece) I am happy with the planning stages and my thought process. I managed to learn alot about Illustrator in doing all the vector drawings, as at the start I had never used this programme before. I think it helps in getting to grips with a new programme if you already know a similar programme, in this case Corel Draw. I do feel alot more comfortable in opening Illustrator now and with using layers, which is something I had not worked with. So this is the main achievement, which is good, but that took alot more time than it would have done, and therefore caused me to get behind schedule.

I did enjoy most of the project and I do think it is a really good idea for a project, but it was quite stressful in the second half.