mi5019harrystubbs

[mi5019harrystubbs]

Evaluation

This project was a lot of fun for me and gave me challenges to over come with things I am proud of as well as things I would improve in the future.

Overall I like my final animation and think it has some fluid movements and has an ubeat charm to it. I liked my idea of little people moving around my house right from the start, inspired by the Stuido Ghibli Movie “Arietty” as well as the Video Game “The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap” which both have similar themes. 

I was pretty quick to get my idea pinned down, experimenting on how it might look with Lego figures and then quickly took pictures, videos and drawings on how it could look. 

I began animating when I got all my shots down but soon learned that colouring in the characters would take a colossal amount of time so I wanted to keep them transparent. I decided to make the characters be drawings that came to life to explain this but I don’t know if it is as obvious as I liked. I included the opening shot to be the characters as drawings to establish this early. I am mixed on how it looks, sometimes I think it looks fine while other times they are hard to spot and blend into the background too much and this is something I would think about if I was to do it again.

My characters were designed to be morphable. This means their arms and legs can morph or sink into their body making it look like they are wearing a cloak and they glide along the ground. I had this idea as early as my inital drawings but in the animation I also don’t know how well this translated into practise and may be a little bit confusing.

Like usual I found time to be a big obstacle as balancing this along side my other modules was hard and I think the overall quality would be better if I could focus all my attention here.  I also had trouble with what software to use. I could get Nuke working on my computer for what ever reason but after thinking about all my options I decided to use a mix of Photoshop and AfterEffects which overall had their fair share of problems but I think it worked out well in the end.

The background music was from The Free Music Archieve and is a jolly upbeat track that I thought fit pretty well but I do wish I had some extra time to add in some foley sound effects or even just test the idea out,

The hardest shot to do was the tracking shot which is why it is short. It came out better than I thought but I wish I had practiced it with the techniques taught to us as I didn’t do that before hand and I feel it shows.

Overall this has been a fun module and I learned a lot of what to do and not to do for the future and I am proud of my final animation.

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This is some rough storyboards for the other scenes. The previous one for the Book Pile will stay the same but I have done away with the camera movments so it is more static.

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25fps version.

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This is a test for my animation running at 24fps

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This is a simple compilation of the shots I tested and tried to achieve using my storyboard. I took multiple takes of each shot so I had enough to work with and sometimes I didn’t quite get the take I wanted. I belive there is enough here for this segment of my filming and tried to consider where the character will be and how it would move when compositing.

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This is a first draft of the start of my animation where the character emerges from the book pile. I loved how there was a natural gap in the books that looked like someone could live there and they are positioned in a way where I could imagine some one climbing up them. This is what I show in my story board and the next step will be to record some footage to see how the shots could work. I tried to show how the camera would move in the storyboard and I will use this to help my filming.

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I created a simple character that will be 2D and move around the 3D environment because I am far more confident with 2D than 3D. I kept the character simple just because it will be hard enough to animate as is. Since there will be a few I will differentiate them by colour and if I am feeling confident add like a hat or additional features so make it more clear which is which. I tried to show how they will move but these are very rough and more work and thought still has to go into them. I also showed how they will interact with certain environments that I have picked out.

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I picked a few other locations that I thought could work well. My blinds with the street view behind for a sense of sclae, my attic which has some long steep steps up which when looking down can make you feel high up, a light that is quite long and some games on a shelf. I have ideas of how some small people could interact with these environments which I have done some quick sketches of to get my point across.

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I looked around my house and took some images of some locatons that could be good for my animation where some small people could be living around or exploring. A pile of books that have been sitting around outside my door for a long time are a great choice as they have been there so long people just walk past them and don’t really think about them anymore. 

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The game “The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap” was also an inspiration for my project. That games has Link shrink down to the size of these tiny people called the “Minish” to solve puzzles and go on adventures in a normal world and a tiny world. I love the setting of the game where the Minish live around everyday objects just like Arietty and use everyday objects like a Boot to make thier home. Being a video game it can take advantage of a lot of unique ideas like exploring the same location from two view points as well as a favourite example of mine being a basic early game enemy being a boss fight when you are tiny due to its now percived size. I feel there is a lot of potential there with showing the scale of normal household items to a small person or a bug.

Pikmin is another Nintendo game, one I know about but have not played. My thoughts are the same but I do like the Gamecube instruction manual showing the size of the main charcter Olimar and his little Pikmin in comparison to a Gamecube Controller, Memory Car and Disc. This made me think about how I will try and keep the size of my characters cosistant. It might be hard to make sure they are exactly the same size but as long as they are roughly the right size I feel there wont be an issue.

I am going to take a look at Terry Pratchett’s novel “Carpet People” and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift which I am only really familiar with from the 2010 Film that I haven’t seen in over a decade.

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I began my research looking at some forms of fiction that inspired my idea as well as taking some time to do some research to see new ideas. Arietty or “The Secret World of Arietty” is a Studio Ghibli film that inspired my idea which is of course based off the 1951 Novel by Mary Norton called “The Borrowers” which has a very similar plot and themes. Both are about a family of tiny people that live amounst the every day objects of Humansnand borrow what they don’t need to live. There has been many adaptations of this popular book but the Ghibli version is what inspired me the most. 

I like the idea of people living in my own home and going around the things in my house to explore and live. This is where my idea came from initially.

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More examples here. I played with the focus some more so the back ground was blured as well as the reverse. These are just experiments of what I could potentally try out in more depth.

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I done a similar thing in my living room. I like the one ontop of a TV where it is hard to tell what they are fighting ontop until it is zoomed out. I also used them fighting on the light so show a sense of scale and show just how small they are in a large world.

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I have small idea of what I want to do for my project and I took some pictures to demonstrate. I like the idea of having tiny people living amounst the rooms or objects of a house. Here I took two Lego models and drew a very rough outline on my phone of people interacting with these objects, obviously it will look much better than this but its a basic idea I am trying to get across. I got the idea from the game, “The Legend of Zelda Minish Cap” where there are small people living on book cases and in vases as well as the Studio Ghibli film “Arietty” which is based on the book “The Borrowers” which has a very similar premise.

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This is my blog for Compositing for Animation