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Behind the Scenes Video and Team Evaluation

Team Evaluation: After our initial pitch/presentation in December, we were informed that the particular jokey tone we had gone for was not conducive with a professional environment, and that our humour was based heavily on inside jokes that our audience wouldn’t understand. Thinking about this, we did initially believe this may have been a generational issue and that what came off as an inside joke would instead be understood by a younger, more online audience of our own age (the popular humour of our generation is largely based on sarcasm, self deprecation, and absurd, surrealist themes). People our own age were our target audience, which was our reasoning for the approach we took, though now we absolutely see the potential issues with utilising that same sense of humour in a professional pitch as the company employees we may be pitching to are likely to be of an older generation to us. Looking back, we all agree that picking out jokes better suited to our audience is a skill in and of itself and will be imperative in future pitches to real companies.Understanding that, we were very grateful for the criticism, took it on board, and in our online presence since then we’ve kept to a more universal style of humour that hopefully appeals to a wider audience.  Another issue brought up with us after the presentation was that our asset test video had failed to work during the presentation, and that we should have tested this beforehand. Before the presentation we had gone over our presentation on one of the team’s personal laptops and found no issues, leading us now to believe this was a driver issue with the university laptop the presentation was hosted on. We hadn’t tested the presentation on university-owned hardware and in hindsight we recognise that this was a huge oversight on our part and take full responsibility for it. In the future if we are pitching to a company, we understand it’s very important we test our presentation on whatever computer it will be utilising as best we can, be that our own laptops or the company’s own computers.  In terms of our production, the pipeline worked well. Having everyone design their own characters meant that we could quickly produce a full cast that had unique designs. We had guidelines to make sure all the characters looked natural together on screen, however. Before recording, we researched the topic in depth and held ‘practice runs’ as a group so that the final result was as professional as possible. Asset production was split equally, and the animators collaborated to produce high quality, effective lip syncs to our recorded podcast.  Everyone worked well in their roles, and we all enjoyed the production process and working together a lot. Our team helped each other, cooperated, and treated each other with respect and friendship at all times, and we think our enjoyment shows in the end result. 

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Løve (Vena) finally got a hero costume (bc fight me quirkless peeps can become heroes too.)

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Final Animation and Individual Evaluation

Individual Evaluation: Our pipeline isn’t mainstream in the slightest, we all worked on our individual characters, all did our own concept art, and our own assets (to maintain individual style). Some of us ended up not actually animating or rigging our characters; I only animated the head, but Georgia took hold of rigging and animating the body as I worked on the social networks, getting the website up and running and creating promotional material such as icons – something I enjoyed very much and am excited to continue with different festivities. But I’ve learnt a lot from this module and my colleagues; I reconnected with digital art and learnt new ways to draw - using shortcuts to create straight lines, went out of my comfort zone with thin line-art and a restrictive colour palette. I was taught how to install Durik (an absolute nightmare when you can’t locate your hard-drive on your laptop) and how to animate with it in After Effects. Used a rig (something I admittedly was quite scared of and it caused a lot of anxiety for me, but with reassurance I learnt wasn’t actually too hard. Just time consuming). And animated it, gained skills in After Effects such as tracking and colour correcting, something which came in handy when we needed a breather and made some course-relevant memes of our characters. I didn’t play an extensive part in the collaboration; did my character, made a website and Instagram and such, but it was a key part regardless. Something I’m proud of. Currently the website is giving me issues and not playing the video, and since I cannot code in a website building site, I’ll have to fiddle around with it and the settings, maybe look at some tutorials or get in contact with the company to resolve the issue. The website is the hub of all our activity after all, somewhere where all the different file types are placed so having it not work is a major issue to the audience. If I were to go back and redo this module, I’d definitely like to play a bigger part in the animating and sound, learn how to rig assets up and animate the body parts, make the hair move and such. Maybe take part in editing audio as editing is something I find enjoyable in a calming and repetitive way, we could edit together different clips from the podcast into a compilation rather than just taking a straight snippet. Have some sound effects put in and such to really make it entertaining to listen to. Have a jingle or opening theme and an ending one and such. There’s a lot to take from this module, I’ve been taught and developed many skills, but also the possibility of continuing this podcast and maybe making it something bigger, collaborate with official queer groups and make ourselves even a little bit known in the community and area is something We all agreed to try and strive for.

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Production Bible

The production bible was taken charge of by Georgia. Everyone wrote in their part for their characters (we made a template for everyone to follow as seen above) so that our pages had all the information that we needed on. We also made some character profiles for fun, making them seem a little more real and alive. Our ‘Production Bible Questions’ are being used for our character pages word for word with some censoring. We realised we probably needed a logo for our podcast, something to visually identify it with and possibly use for an opening sequence. Beth worked on it and came out with a smooth and simple design, sent it to the group chat and we all discussed which ones we preferred. The dark blue cloud silhouette was a favourite and combining it with the pastel rainbow colours by adding our characters was a really nice touch. The fully outlined logo felt a little too crowded in majority opinion so we went with a lined cloud and line-less silhouetted characters. Backgrounds for our character pages in the production bible were then made using the colours our characters had been allocated, merchandise followed from there. The main font was picked as it closely resembled the one used in the logo - which was used because the round type is more friendly looking, again, soft on the eyes - and used throughout the production bible to remain consistent.

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Animating

Georgia (the master of Durik and After Effects) rigged Smad’s head up for me to animate. Lead me through installing Durik into After Effects on a video call (it took a couple of attempts because I had no idea where the files where) and then made a video for me to follow on how to animate different parts of him. ie: if I key-framed one set of eyes and then later key-framed another, it would just slowly cycle through the bar as the timeline went on. To fix this, I had to Toggle hold the first key-frame (and some others because AE is temperamental), and this was the same for the noses and any ‘extras’ - such as sweat drops or blushes. Easy once gotten to grips with, I just had to check every now and then that things were working properly. I ran into a realisation with the head when moving it from side to side to react to characters. That when I key-frame facing one way, and later, key-frame to face another, the head would just slowly move as the first person was talking. To fix this, I added an extra key-frame just before he had to turn to the way he was first facing, then added the key-frame to the second facing. This meant his movement was quicker and reactive rather than a weird, out of place, slow progression. I went through and did his eyes first as they’re the ones with the most expressions. Fiddled with noses and extras next and finally did the head movement. Georgia was rigging and moving the body for more realistic movement and stopping him from looking too stagnant. She took the head file I’d done, put it on the body and smacked him into the rest of the scene where mostly everyone else was animated. If I were to go back and redo this, I’d like to try timing smaller noises and points a little bit better to be more expressive, and also try animating the body for myself. I’d also add some more expression options like eyebrows to the rig for even more play with the mask. And one day I’d like to try a lip sync for him (he got a mouth under there somewhere), which’d be a nice way of opening up to the audience in a visual way.

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Asset Building

Taking a break from external things (the website took hold of my brain for a hot second), I was brought back down to the main focus : rigging and animation. Georgia and Beth were the leaders on this, teaching us how to use illustrator for creating the assets of our characters. (That top image was my attempt in Illustrator and didn’t go too well. I found myself becoming impatient with the programme quite often and not used to the layout.) We’d all decided on a universal lineart width to tie our characters together despite independent styles for each of us. It worked as a nice connector. Georgia mentioned how as long as it was a vector file (or had layers) that it would work for rigging. I used the little doodle ontop of my turnaround to base where I would be splitting up Smad’s layers for rigging. Going a little more indepth with the power of common sense to split up the hat and antlers and such. Turns out SAI can save as a Photoshop file, and since it’s a programme I’m comfortable and confident in, I decided on using that. It was easier and nicer to build my character this way. Having each layer separate (hat, back hair, antlers, front hair, neck, mask), the only painful part was the expressions. I had the impression that I’d do each eye separate for each expression, each nose, each sweat drop individually layered and such. Turns out when Georgia redrew it (the file ended up being too small and when resized, was blurry) the expressions ended up getting split into, eyes, noses and extras. Which made a lot more sense. At this point we also decided that the characters are going to be sat down talking, so we had to draw them facing certain ways (mine was in the middle so I drew forward facing, whereas Beth’s was to the right so her character Salty was facing slightly left.)

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Presentation

The presentation was on the 14th. And boy was it a ride. Not only was most of our group running on little to no sleep since it was deadline day for Performance and Character, but also we apparently missed the memo that it wasn’t a presentation but a pitch. If we’d know it was meant to be laid out as a pitch, it would have been done completely differently, focusing more on what our final product was to be (animation was still in the process) rather than, the main steps along the way (which was our character work as it is essentially, the bulk of what our animation is going to be).  We got criticised on our videos not working (checking before and after, all videos worked on our individual devices so it was more of Annabeth’s laptop messing up and probably being overloaded. The videos were inputted files rather than linked ones so it took up more memory.) And understandably on how long we took (we hadn’t realised it would take that long to get through the intro and our characters. Minimal practising is the cause of this I will admit) meant that the presentation become dull and boring after we hit our limited time, having to speed through the ending where the videos weren’t working caused a lot of stress. Joe said how there were too many inside jokes, it felt too casual and such, whereas again, we never planned for this to be a formal pitch (a podcast is more of a self-built sort of thing anyway) and we thought it would have the same tone our podcast does; a lot of jokes are more for queer people and someone out of that loop may not understand. But they’re not our target audience regardless. I will say that I took some advice regarding the website build from Annabeth into consideration and hopefully practice in the coming weeks though, making sure to work on the shop part and make the home screen welcoming and friendly.

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Sunset hues. 

Jan 2016, Posio, Southern Lapland.

by Tiina Törmänen | web | FB | IG |  

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Short Story

I’m actually very proud of this piece. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s fluid enough, displays emotion through movement and expression and flows rather well. I’m super chuffed with the first scene and the movement in it. I was going to lip sync it but honestly was happy with leaving it as is. Improvement would come with the last scene, more frames and less copy and pasting, create a better flow. Also maybe adding in some lip sync to further the animation visually. I bumped into trouble again regarding syncing up the audio and animation but it was solved through trial and error of how many frames could be used for each scene and movement and then exporting correctly.

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Short Story Issue

When I changed it from a FireAlpca file into an MP4 file, it ran too quickly compared to the audio (I didn’t bother editing it together for this reason as I just needed to tweak the frame lengths slightly to make it fit.) The audio is 11 seconds long and this video only 9.

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Short Story Progress

Going off of the storyboard and key-framing as I go rather than all at once. So things get done in sections rather than bit by bit to key frame all the way through.

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Short Story Storyboard

Using audio from Fruits Basket (2001), episode 9. 

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Christmas Icons

Because the Christmas holiday is coming up, instead of doing regular icons for the website, I decided on doing some festive ones for each character.

Admittedly this will probably be my downfall after Christmas is over, and I’ll have to draw up some regular ones. But for now it’s nice to be festive. I planned out that Cozy will be above Cloud as the star on top of the tree. I tried keeping the colour palettes the same. Using someone’s main outfit colour as another ones background to make sure everyone was tied in together, Beth ended up using hers as her character Twitter profile which is really sweet! 

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Dialogue

I used FireAlpaca this time around. And must say, the programme is very nice and mostly animator friendly, the issue being that you can’t time independent frames like in After Effects. Could do with some editing as each frame can be saved as an individual image but that can become very time consuming as I found out in my first wall climb attempt. So this piece is kinda sketchy but I prefer the style for something like this? Some inbetweens aren’t as smooth as I wanted them to be and I came to realise that more often than not I couldn’t add more for fluidity because then it would out-sync with the audio. More frames meant that the video would be ahead of the audio and throw everything off, so I had to sacrifice some things.

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Dialogue Progress Slow but sure progression in my dialogue piece. I decided to add in some vague and horribly done lip syncing about halfway through. It sort of matches up but not greatly.

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Dialogue Storyboard

A basic idea for the dialogue piece to the New York audio (June of the 11 seconds club)

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Recording

Georgia and Beth helped organise our booking of the studio recording room on the first floor (our group was too big to fit in the Foley room). We had a introductory meeting on the 6th to be shown how to use the room, do’s and don’t, hard rules, how the recording booth works and how to do sound checks for everyone. Ci decided to be the audio checker and record everything for us. For some pre-planning, we did Discord calls, organised a script over voice chat and practised with it over the next few days, cleared up any misunderstandings and got our intro down to a pat. Tried to get more of a flow going between us but it was pretty hard not to talk over one another without visual ques, something we hoped would clear up in the studio. Three days later and we found ourselves with two hours booked and ready to go. There were a lot of factors to take into consideration regarding background noise; no tapping, mind your breathing, when pulling the script paper up to turn it you had to be gentle. It was all to make Ci’s job easier when they edited out all our ‘um’s’ and ‘ah’s’. We’re new to this so not very well trained in speech, it took us a good forty minutes to get into the swing of things and diffuse any nervous energy. Our actual recording ended up being around an hour long, time flew by quite fast and we skipped some areas of the script that could be deemed irrelevant. But it was a proud moment that we’d managed something so big with minimal issues. I ended up coughing a few times (which will be cut out) due to a dry throat and some people hiccuped every now and then with speech but overall we did a good job for our first try.