Responsive: 11 Second Club - Development 3

Animating the second guy as harder because I had to make him act out the audio first to that the character has more actions and not just stood still. Acting out the audio first felt weird but fun at the same time because it was fun to exaggerate everything but hard to think of an action for what the character says. This took me about two to three hours to do, but I also had to figure out where the characters stood because I can't stand them next to each other because they lean in to each other so they would collide into one another. I found that if I stood them opposite each other they wouldn't collide and it looks like they are having a proper conversation, then I just placed cameras behind each others shoulders so that you can still see the characters when they are talking.

Lip sinking the character was alright because all I had to do was attach a camera to the face so that the head wouldn't be constantly moving, plus I've gotten use to lip sinking now so it did't take too long to do. I think the hardest work I had to lip sink was sausage because I didn't really know how to make the mouth shape for the 'S' sound. However, I feel like I've done a good job with animating the two guy and I really like how they react off of one another.

  

Responsive: 11 Second Club - Development 2

After I finished messing around with the character and figuring out how it works I then decided to start lip sinking on of the guys from the audio clip. I chose to do the guy who talks about being a vegetarian first because I thought he had the easiest lines to lip sink to. I had a couple of problems to begin with because the word vegetarian is quite a hard word to lip sink because it has five syllables in it, so when I finally lip sinked the word it was well out of time and it was going to slow to the audio. To fix the problem I had to go on the 'graph editor' and move all the key frames backwards so that its in time with the audio but this took some time to do.

After that the audio got easier to do because he just said "no" or "no meat" so I got is done pretty quick and finished the lip sinking in the next hour or two. Now that I've done the lip sinking I then focused on the movements of the character, this was simple enough to do however I need to do the other character so that I can animate there reactions off of one another. So far I've animated half of the movements for this guy and I will animate the second half once I've done the other guy so that it's easier to animate.

After showing my tutor my animation he recommended that for the next character I animate the movement first and then do the lip sinking afterwards because in animation it's al about the actions the character makes because it can tell the audience a lot more in the story then just talking. This made a lot of sense and I will be doing this for the next character I animate.  

Responsive: 11 Second Club - Development

I went on to the 11 second club website and downloaded a rig called 'MAX', which was created by Peter Starostin and James Hunt. Once I downloaded the rig I went on to Maya and messed around with some of the controls just so that I could get use to the model and figure out what I can and can't do with it. After I did that I then decided to try and do some lip sinking because thats what I'll be doing for the 11 second club's animation. I found it quite difficult at first because of the timing because the people speaking in the audio clip speak quite fast.

In the video above I feel like its getting there but not quite right yet because the lips slit move slower then the audio and I still need to work out some of the controllers on the face and mouth. However, I do like how it looks for now and I'm picking up the controls on the model quite fast.  

Responsive: 11 Second club

For this brief I am given an audio clip from a film and ten I have to animate to that clip, and I can use any form of animation whether it is 2D, 3D, traditional, or a pixilation animation. The audio clip is from the film 'Everything is Illuminated' but unfortunately I have never seen this film before, however this might help me because I won't be copying the films actions from the clip to my own animation.

I've decided to animate in 3D because for me its what I want to do as my profession so I want to get good at it. Fortunately the 11 second club provides you with a pre made rig to use in Maya so that we don't spend all of are time modelling a character and then having to rig the character because that itself we take a long time to do. The animation itself has to be submitted in a ratio of 560x316 and can be no bigger than 10MB, also you are not allowed to edit the audio clip in any way.

The winner of the competition will receive a professional AnimationMentor eCritique of the entry submitted. I chose to do this competition because a lot of big companies and studios look and the entries and may in fact get in touch with some of the people who have entered. I'll put a link below if you'd like to have a look at the competition your self.

http://www.11secondclub.com  

Animated Documentary: Animatic

This is that animatic that I could put together but because malachi drew out the storyboard in his own style I had to redraw it in the style we wanted and then make an animatic out of it. It took me a while to redraw the storyboard again but once I got it done I started animating it in after effects, however, when I started importing the images into after effects it was importing them as image sequences which I didn't want and I didn't know how to fix this because the when you import some images into after effects it asks you if you want them imported as an image sequence but it didn't tick the box to do so.

To fix this I had to create new sense in photoshop and copy and paste the images in to that and then it worked for some reason. Anyways putting the animatic together now was easy to do so, but unfortunately Malachi didn't have any backgrounds ready for me so I just put in a black background for now. The hardest part of this was making the audio line up with the images because there was just a lot of images to line up with the 2 minute long audio.

Animated Documentary: Re-editing the Audio

Are tutors gave us some advice on are audio and told us that we had to re do it because we was not leaving enough space for pauses and that we were talking too fast, which meant that the audience weren't going to follow what we are talking about. They also said that we should work on are tone of voice because we sound very flat so we need to add more emotion and speak clearly.

So Molly and I went back into the sound booth and re-recorded are stories, making sure we take deep breaths inbetween sentences and speaking with a purpose. It took some time doing this because of two reasons, one because we were recording one sentence at a time whilst re-recording the same sentence over and over again so that we get the right recording. The second reason is because we were messing around in the booth as well, so the whole thing took us about two to three hour to complete the recordings.

After that I gathered up all the recordings and then edited them on my computer whilst intertwining Molly and mines story. This took time but I was able to come up with a better audio then before, because there are more breaks inbetween sentences and and voices are clear with more expressions on certain words.      

Responsive: Onform Sketches

Onform Sketches is a competition where someone posts a different shape ever week and people have to create something with the shape given. You can make the shape into a character, an object, what ever you want but you can't change the shape, for example you can't change the size, rotation and colour of the shape.

So far I have done about 4 onform sketches for this competition but I feel like in need to do more drawing in this competition to make is a substantial brief. This brief has challenged me because I'm not that great at coming up with character designs and just sketching in general , but I have also enjoyed doing this because I've posted my sketches on Tumblr and Instagram and the feedback I got from them are very good and had boosted my confidence in drawing more and posting my work out to the public.

These are some of my sketches I've done for the Onform Sketches brief:

Animated Documentary: Speaking With The Tutors

The other day my group and I had a little chat with the tutors about are animated documentary so that we could get some feedback on what we are doing and what else we need to do before we start animating. I told them what we have done the character designs and that they are sorted, storyboards are done, script and audio has been recorded, so with them hearing this they were pleased but they wanted to hear the audio just so that they could get a feel of what the animation would be like.

They really liked the narrative and what we where taking about, but there where a couple of things that they said that would make the audio better, which meant that we would have to record the whole thing again. The tutors said that there where bits in are stories that we didn't really need so we could cut them out and so that would leave more room for us to add more pauses, which will add more dramatic effect plus it will help the audience sink in the story that we are projecting to them.

The tutors also said that Malachi needs to start working more and producing more background designs which I agree with, and that we need to do some animation tests using a noise grain effect on the characters which will make them look like they are shaking and we can increase and decrease the intensity on the effect.  

Animated Documentary: Storyboard and Animatic

Now that we had the recording done we then could get together a storyboard for the animation, so I told Malachi to do d quick storyboard so that we can figure out what the animation will look like and how it will flow with the audio. When Malachi produced a rough storyboard Molly and I looked over it and gave Malachi feedback, which was that some of the shots in the storyboard were a bit static and there was not enough different camera angle shots. I then told Malachi to create a storyboard in photoshop so that it would be neat and professional with colour and to take another look at the characters Molly designed just so that he could draw in that style.

When Malachi told us that he finished the storyboard he put it in google drive so that Molly and I could look and critique it. Molly and I both said that Malachi didn't draw out the characters in the style we wanted and that he just did it in his style so that he could work on the camera angles and shot framing more, and I must ambit that he did a good job with that. However, I wanted it to be in the style we wanted so that other people can see how are animation will be projected towards are target audience the young.

So before I could start on the animatic I had to go back and redraw out the storyboard so that it will be drawn in the right style. I though if I did this it would be quicker to do and so that I could get what I want from a storyboard. It did not take me too long to redraw out the whole storyboard, I think it took about three hours to do the whole thing in photoshop but I was also watching TV at the same time. Now that I've done the storyboard I can work on the animatic and hopefully get that done by next week.