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This is the final animation, unfortunately a team member could get the first bit of the animation finished and coloured therefore some parts are missing colour.

However, overall my team has produced a great standard of work and the animation was successful.

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Evaluation.

We formed a great team called ICEBERG straight away during the first week of this term and decided we wanted to animate a sequence in 2D for the ‘Live with Less’ speech.

We come up with idea really quickly, creating a basic shot list summarising the animation overall. We picked out the key words and thought of the ways they can be portrayed. For example our Polar Bear would be wearing a suit showing modern society sitting on a throne on top of an iceberg, then an abundance of stuff he doesn’t need would fall down on top of him to show the key word Plenitude causing the iceberg to sink and so on.

This idea became great, we efficiently came up with character and environment designs and created the animatic out of little low detail thumbnails which overall worked well.

Through the weeks as a team we started to slack off and not reach targets I had set for us and ended up only finishing our pre-production stage during week seven.

Organisation and timing as a team is definitely a vital aspect of teamwork we needed to improve on, from not reaching deadlines to being late to not coming into lessons some weeks and therefore we paid the price by having to rush everything in the last three stressful weeks.

However, we managed to overcome this by hard work, dedication and skilful animation to complete our project.

The animation itself has been done very well by my team, however, one of things we could’ve improved on is style in order to display continuity throughout our animation. This is where our timing and organisation needs to be improved as well, as we could have had time to edit the final animation and make it look right.

Another thing I definitely need to improve on is my 2D animation, digital drawing and also character analysis, understand the weight and structure of the character overall.

I found it hard to animate the character’s face from different angles as I found it hard to even imagine what it looked like from that perspective.

I also need to improve on refining my animations in order to bring these characters to life and make them look believable.

Overall, I took a risk to create this animation in 2D and tried to improve my skills in this area using Flash or Animate CC and although I need to improve my skills in this area I still think this animation has been done to a good standard.

I think my team mates have produced better quality animation overall and have brought great talent to the final animation and have participated to the team greatly.

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Week 7

During this presentation we discussed our aims and objectives and how this we engage our target audience also discussing marketing and advertising techniques that could be used to attract the audience in the making of this animation.

We also explained our animatic and storyboarding through this presentation and basically updated everyone on our progress.

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Week 7

This week we had to update our Animatic and create another presentation for the class showing our progression so far.

By this point however, we had only managed to just finish our pre-production stage and have left only 3 weeks to start and finish our animation.

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Week 6

This is the walk cycle we all agreed upon, we like how it carries the weight of this huge Polar Bear and the personality that goes with it.

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Week 6

This week Kat and I started to experiment with the character by animating a walk cycle in Flash. I looked up images of walk cycles to help us get an idea of how we want the Polar Bear to walk and to keep to the same style as much as possible. Kat then drew out the walk cycle by hand first to see how it would look and after this we animated a short walk cycle which I will show in my next post.

Jack designed our Hero image this week. 

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Week 5

This week I drew up the main storyboard so we can finally start fully animating our big idea. I wrote down the timing of each frame, camera shots used and the action that takes place during.

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Week 4

At the end of this week we had to present our big idea to the class, of which went well. We thoroughly explained our intentions and ideas breaking the animatic down and showing our research and designs afterwards. 

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Week 4

This week we drew out some thumbnails and put it into an animatic with the ‘Live with Less’ audio to get an idea of what the animation was going to look like, also needed this to show our big idea in our presentation to the class and tutor.

I also drew a few thumbnails sketches however we decided that Kat’s thumbnails portrayed our idea best.

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Week 3

We also design and created the final still background for our animation using the different colours that we decided on in our mood boards.

I painted the the sky with a mixture of brushes and colours in Photoshop, also using the smudge tool to give it a cloudy look. We wanted the background to be quite simply so I design a few different and simple mountains surrounded by the sea.

I also drew out a very simple floor along with the background will move from left to right when our character moves. This way we can animate our character on moving on the spot which allows us to animate efficiently.

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Week 3

We decided on our final design for the main character, the Polar Bear.

As you can see Jack created these character sheets and there is a slight change in the snout and also the weight of the figure. Again the suit showing modern society and the crown showing plenitude and greed.

We asked Jack to bring the character to life by designing these different poses to get an idea of how the character will react and move.

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Week 2

We started to design our main character, the Polar Bear this week making sure some key words are portrayed through this humanoid Polar Bear such as, the suit symbolising modern society and the crown symbolising plenitude and the need for more.

We then started to think of what we wanted our environment/scene to look like to place this humanoid Polar Bear in, so we decided to go for the Ice environment to portray climate change in our animation through the melting ice. Kat started to create some colour boards that can symbolise the different key words within the environment as the animation progresses, also looking up different references from different movies such as Ice Age.  

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Week 1

Jack, Kat and I joined as a team for this project with the RSA and decided our team name would be ICEBERG. We were given a choice out of two, one minute long speeches; and we decided to go with the speech about climate change and living with less by Richard Sennet.

So we started by analysing the script, picking out key words such as Modern Society, Plenitude, Moral Mindset, I need less, Live with Less.

Here we gathered the idea of climate change and the need for living less to stop damaging the Earth. From this we research a little into climate change and brainstormed what is affected by it, from natural disasters to habitats being destroyed. 

We thought of climate change affecting the North and South pole and how that has affected the inhabitants there. This then lead us to our idea of having a humanoid Polar Bear as our character for the animation also using Penguins as a small secondary role in the animation.

Our environment is going to be a mixture of the North and South Pole so we can use both Polar Bears and Penguins in the same area.

From this we come up with idea really quickly, creating a basic shot list summarising the animation overall. We picked out the key words and thought of the ways they can be portrayed. For example our Polar Bear would be wearing a suit showing modern society sitting on a throne on top of an iceberg, then an abundance of stuff he doesn’t need would fall down on top of him to show the key word Plenitude causing the iceberg to sink and so on. 

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This is the Final Render of my animation of which I titled ‘Just A Walk’ and decided to use a song call ‘At the Mall by David Torn.’

Overall, the render went really well other than it taking a whole day to render all three cameras.

I noticed during this final render that there is a little mistake where I baked one of my characters causing his walk cycle to restart mid-walk for a millisecond in the animation.

I would’ve like to have made this street more crowded like the scene in the streets of Monsters Inc. however I hadn’t enough time to make enough different walk cycles let alone make them interact by moving out of the way of each other.

Overall I would’ve also liked to have finessed the walk cycles a bit more.

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The walk cycles I used in my final animation.

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These are images of my sketches during life drawing classes once a week.

Due to not having a great camera it is hard to see certain images however, this is supposed to show my progression of drawing skills over the past 2 and a half months.

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My inspiration was Monsters Inc. 

This is just a clip of some different walk cycles however, there is a scene in the movie where there is a street full of people walking and I overall wanted to achieve this outcome however, I didn’t have enough time to animate more different rigs and jumble them together like a busy street in London.