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Media Final Evaluation

Overall I enjoyed this project. Media roles and practices was something I didn’t think much into researching, but it was really useful learning about the respective roles within the animation industry and where I feel like I could possibly fit. Although I didn’t get much chance to socialise with my peers due to a family loss, I did have a few meetings and I attended a few lectures which I found very interesting, especially the idea of bringing in industry professionals.

I liked that all the projects this year have linked in with each other – learning about VFX corresponded to learning about and dealing with green screens and masks in After Effects. I also liked that we have to work in groups to produce presentations that are a combination of all our efforts, as I feel this will be a very important skill in the working industry when working with teams and to animation briefs. Given more time, I would have produced more comprehensive work with better references. BA1b was incredibly difficult for me emotion-wise. I had a lot to deal with and a lot of issues on my plate but I’m very pleased that I managed to produce work that I am proud of.

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Media Weekly Summary 5

This week I worked on my solo presentation and 500 word statement. I compiled all of the information I had into a document and then slowly pieced it together using Google Slides. It was a lot easier than I previously thought it would be, and I actually enjoyed the statement portion of the submission requirement.

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Media Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GLO_jOQxUu3GPDW0_tYAf9idjDzM3ne9ODrq9QLxZCM/edit?usp=sharing

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Media Weekly Summary 4

After Easter I began researching into CG/VFX, and into one of my favourite television shows, Game of Thrones. I am increasingly interested in VFX and how it’s achieved in live-action as well as animation films and TV shows. I also researched the timeline of VFX, beginning with what I learnt in the VFX lecture with Saint Walker, and began to write a list of things that I already knew and have learnt into a brain dump for easier access. I now want to work on my own solo presentation, as I have been given a two-week extension due to the loss of a family member and I missed meetings with my group. This will not affect me too much – I already knew I was going to research VFX within the group and had done some prior research.

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Research: The Ricky Gervais Show

The Ricky Gervais Show (2010) features Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and the infamous Karl Pilkington. The series is “about important things in life whilst Karl provides anything but intelligent answers” and features 3 seasons. They are a three musketeers of sorts, and have made many podcasts, audiobooks and this animated series documenting their chats about life and current affairs.

Merchant reckons he looks like Barney Rubble (although he hoped animators would make him like Fred from Scooby Doo), Gervais resembles Fred Flintstone and Pilkington recalls Charlie Brown. "We wanted them to be retro and cuddly, and not too spiky and trendy," Gervais explained, "because the things we talk about are pretty much out-there, taboo subjects and we had to show that it was safe. Karl is a cuddly little creature really and even though he says things that could be taken wrongly, there's no malice there – he's like a child, an idiot savant." Source

This includes some rude language, but I’m including the clip because of the well animated eye and mouth rigs. This is the kind of level of lip sync I want to be at when I finish uni - body language is also used to convey an emotion but doesn’t overpower the facial animation, and eyebrows are used to their full potential on the animation of Karl Pilkington. It shows me just how much animating can go into the characterisation of animating a character, and also shows me points that I can improve upon in my own lip syncs (eye rigs, better mouth movement, easier models to animate, body language), and also presents to me something that I really enjoying learning and working on. 

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Mystery Box Final Evaluation

“Mystery Box” was a project I was originally very excited about. Stop motion is my favourite animation technique, and the one I see myself most progressing into. I did originally want to follow both strands of the project (CG and stop motion), but in the end decided against this and just focused wholly on stop motion. CG is something that intrigues me, and something I hope I can pursue in year two when I am feeling better and able to attend university regularly. Over the course of BA1b, I began to suffer a lot from depression and anxiety again, and found it quite difficult making it into some of my lectures and workshops. This greatly hindered me when it came to actually animating (and post-production), as a lot of the time I either had to guess or source my own information and tutorials. I feel like I have become stronger because of it, and am able to problem solve very well in times that I need to.

I did a lot of research for this unit, feeling confident to branch out into different types of animation, from advertising to movies and illustrators. I am beginning to build a good selection of books based on animation itself and different types of films, which I used to my advantage when looking at how storyboards and animations come together to make a final product. I also feel like I branched out in my creative skillset – I used Photoshop to digitally paint a wood texture for my background, have learned basics and more of After Effects, as well as how to navigate Premiere efficiently. I documented my process very effectively, and enjoyed screencapturing painting, taking photographs of works in progress and using Twitter to plug my animations and ideas.

Overall, throughout this year – although I have had quite a bit of time off due to mental illness – I have become a much more well-rounded animator and a general creative busybody. I have learned that I greatly enjoy the process of seeing something come together, as well as building my own props and creating my own backgrounds. This year has been very hectic, creative and at times quite difficult, but I have loved every second of it and enjoyed learning new techniques and ways to make my ideas and concepts come to life on screen.

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Year One Animation Showreel

I wanted my showreel to be a reflection of my personality, so I used a lot of bright colours and After Effects text effects. I think I produced a fun and interesting showreel, containing a eclectic mix of different animations and skills I’ve acquired over my first year at NUA. 

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After Effects + Branding

In my breaks from Mystery Box and Lip Sync, I put my experience in After Effects to use to create this mini outro animation. It’s not amazing - and I have actually gone in a different path with my YouTube branding:

This highlights a few projects I have worked on during my first year, and also introduces my new “logo” of sorts:

From this, I created a new outro that was uniform, as well as an intro to make my showreel look professional:

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Research: Showreels

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Lip Sync Final (Delivery)

Delivery version of my final lip sync, which includes quite minimal eye movement as the puppet I used is quite hard to animate in this way. If I could do it again I would definitely create a much more simple puppet that I could animate with ease, with a lot of facial movement an expression.

The Vincent Price audio clip was quite confusing for me, but I enjoyed that it had a lot of enunciation so I could really match the phonemes and mouth shapes together. My only problem with this clip is that the word “family” appears a little quicker in the video than the audio does, which makes it a bit off kilter, but I am pleased that it’s recognised as the word.

My dope sheet is, of course, quite messy. I numbered all of my mouth shapes so that I could easily refer to them on my second screen while animating in After Effects with my first. I set up the mouth rig with a slider control with a value of 13, which made the shapes easily to sift through when I needed to change them and hold a keyframe.

Though it’s not used properly - which I’m sure is something I will both learn and master in the future - it suited my purpose perfectly and I was able to animate quickly and efficiently using it.

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Lip Sync Test 1 (Edited)

After animating only with a mouth rig, I used the same principle to create an eye rig featuring 5 poses (open, closed, top lid down, bottom lid down, both lids down). The rig worked perfectly, but I didn’t like the way the blinks looked using all of the poses, so I only used the open and closed poses for this. I think it added a nice emphasis to the video, and am pleased this experiment turned out well.

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Mystery Box Weekly Summary 6

I managed to complete my animation after several days of difficulty in feeling out how to work out the masking option in After Effects. I was rushing a bit and didn’t quite realise that I hadn’t selected the “subtract” option and it was instead subtracting the rest of my animation rather than the area I penned. Due to the fact that my rig is in the way in a lot of the shots (this is something that I can definitely learn from and not do in the future to save myself hours of work), I had to manually go in and track my mask and adjust it in keyframes so it didn’t subtract any of the puppet or the box. As a result, some of the shadow from the puppet in the beginning of the animation has been masked out because of the poorly placed rig. I have definitely learnt that the rig needs to be somewhere out of the way that doesn’t obstruct from the overall look and final presentation of the animation. Overall, I really like my animation and, considering the circumstances, think I did a very good job at completing it on time.

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Introducing April

The final animation! By no means perfect at all, I can still see some parts where the masks haven’t taken effect, but I am proud of what I produced considering all that has happened and the fact I applied for extenuating circumstances and received a two week extension. I added in a evil laugh cartoon sound I sourced from online, but I feel like the animation is all too fast - there isn’t enough pause to fully enjoy this laugh or the ending. 

For a better image:

Before all of the masks and after the green screen removal.

After the addition of masks. Here you can see that I used 5 in total due to my sloppy filming and the fact that the rig was in the way of the shot a lot. 

My experimentation reel, showing the entire process of the animation and each step that I took. I used an instrumental mix of “Something Just Like This” by The Chainsmokers and Coldplay.

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Film Slot 2

After rebooking my film slot, I ended up having the entire day booked out in the right rostrum studio, which allowed for me to arrive and spend as much time as I needed on animating. I ended up spending a total of about 3 ½ hours, though I think more time could have been spent working out the timings and making sure the outcome looked correct.

I made this cheat sheet for what I needed to do on the day - and ended up hardly following any of it. I changed my mind on whether I wanted her to kick the box, and instead wanted her to push it, and then finally I animated her kneeling, opening it, then looking dumbfoundedly at the camera. This was for ease of animation - kicking was perhaps too ambitious for me at this stage and I don’t think the puppet would have really taken to the poses, as I needed to use a rig for her to even walk straight.

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Mystery Box Weekly Summary 4 + 5

These weeks are mashed together as I didn’t really have a productive/worthwhile few weeks. My puppet was finished with the addition of the feet, the entire construction of which was done in about one and a half weeks before filming. As it came to filming, my puppet’s feet broke due to the wire being drilled into and causing the milliput surrounding it to crumble away. This has been quite a big setback, but I am lucky that I had a two-week extension to rely on to finish the animation. I feel like this has helped improve my problem solving a lot as usually I would get very stressed out at this stage. Instead, I focused on other projects for a few days while I waited for the milliput to properly solidify on the feet again, and then I went back into tackling the issue of filming with a fresher mind. For my final weeks, I aim to film my animation and run it through After Effects to add in the background, remove the green screen and mask any rigs that I need to use.

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Lip Sync Test 1

As I haven’t been to any of the lip sync workshops, I was pretty much on my own when it came to actually rigging the mouth set and working my way around After Effects. I’ve previously had some experience with it, and with the help of a few video tutorials to refresh my mind, I set about making this:

It’s a test I created with a few simple words and one quite difficult one. I used my friend as a model for this, and asked him to video himself saying it:

I found the overall feel of lip syncing pretty easy to do. It looks very complicated before you actually set it up and understand what you’re doing, but it’s definitely something I see myself doing a lot more in the future. For reference, this is the filled out dope sheet that I used to create this (probably not used in the right way but it definitely helped me during animating):

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Research: Injustice 2

“Injustice 2 is the super-powered sequel to the hit game Injustice: Gods Among Us that allows players to build and power up the ultimate version of their favorite DC characters. Featuring a massive selection of DC Super Heroes and Super-Villains, players can personalize iconic DC characters with unique and powerful gear earned throughout the game. Additionally, for the first time, gamers can take control of how their characters look, fight and develop across a variety of game modes.”

Whereas ME:A (Mass Effect: Andromeda) has been given a lot of backlash and publicity for its extremely bad facial animations that portray just how complicated game animation can be, Injustice 2 brings forth a new era of animation to the game fold; where emotions and faces are used to their full potential to drive you through storymode with believable animation that even stands out in the combat portions of the game.

It reaches that idea of uncanny valley, where something is so realistic and lifelike that it is actually creepy to look at for some people. In the gif below, we can even see Harley chewing gum as she replies, and everything about the look of this scene and the character facial animation is on point and has been catered specifically to their face/character structure.