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Final Render of 'A Moment, a Place, a Time'.

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Task 3 Process

In the creation of my storyboard, the thumbnails were made by essentially creating a rough drawing on a properly large photoshop document, and then scaling it down to thumbnail size for the storyboard. This allowed me to use these sketches as a basis for my backgrounds.

Next comes the rough landscaping of the digital painting, essentially sculpting large areas of greyscale values to make sure I nail down my composition into more recognizable shapes. Any character work is left out so that it may be done later in Krita.

Finished painting of the background, done from start to finish in Photoshop.

Very importantly; I made sure to paint various parts of the background on separate layers in case I needed to parallax or animate independently. For example, below are a couple of weeds that were on their own layers, that I set to animate using CC Bendit on After Effects, to mimic them swaying in the wind.

Above shows the sectioning necessary to make it appear as though the clouds were moving across the sky, reflected in the water.

Next, the background is imported into Krita and the animation is painted over it, on a separate layer of its own.

For the water animation, I ended up animating sitting/treading water rather than running.

I referenced how other animators had tackled water, and recreated the same effect of my own.

^ Character animation - not very visible, but you can see a little bit of the red semi-transparent onion skinning around his hand.

Finally, the animations are exported as a PNG sequence and imported into After Effects. Here is where I made the reeds and clouds move.

Minus the red circles; gif of the many layers of animation.

Something that interests me in my animation is the idea of appealing to the senses, which is why I went for a montage rather than a narrative. It was therefore important to make many parts of the animation come to life, for the sake of realism.

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Finished Background works

Above was the first version of the background I had made for this scene. I found it to be slightly lacking, as well as the fact that it does not indicate a school environment as I wanted. I amended it to the background below:

The clock's hands were then added in After Effects.

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Extra Behind-the-Scenes Progress

Creation of assets by starting with sketches, focusing on silhouette. The rotoscope was done first, and the second part was made afterwards to get a gauge of where it would be placed according to the first part.

Fly animation. It was important to massively reduce the number of frames for when it flies in, to mimic quickness.

This part where the fly comes out from behind required a lot of reworking; one of the difficulties I suffer from in hand-drawn animation is consistency of objects. It was very easy to go wrong with the shape; the wings would occasionally turn very round, and the size would change quite a lot. It was necessary to keep referencing earlier frames, which I did by 1) making visible a larger amount of onion skin layers going backwards and 2) moving my timer back and forth very often to see more clearly if my object has changed too much.

Above was the animation that took the longest to do for a singular asset, as I had to pay extra attention to line cleanliness and there was a massive amount of coloring to do. The bucket tool was my best friend throughout this.

Above pictures my PNG sequence animation having been imported into After Effects, and creating a shadow for the figure using Ellipse & Mask.

A papery texture animation I made to add a layer of grain to my animation. It goes on top of my layers, and the blending mode is set to Screen, letting only specks remain visible. It is composed of a digitally painted black layer using textured brushes, and having various sections of it loop.

I otherwise also had an adjustment layer with a 'noise' effect to add a very light texture to everything.

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Task 2A & B: Proposals

Proposal 1: Forest Montage

The first option I had in mind for this project was inspired by the idea of taking 'A moment, a time, a place' to illustrate my own various stages of life, memories and experiences. However, when thinking about the topic, I was overwhelmed by its broadness; so I tried to think of the ways in which I could link these experiences visually, so that there is a running theme across all.

What came to mind is that I seem to have had a lot of important moments in life happen to me in forests or woods. I started to compile these memories:

-Very early memories of my grandfather pulling me and my brother in a sled through heavy snow down a road flanked by banks of trees;

-My memory of the first time I ever fell over was in a forest, in which I fell into a huge puddle of water/mud;

-Walking with a group of other children by ourselves in the forest at 4-5 years of age and coming across a clean, bleached, enormous skeleton of a cow and taking the skull home in a pink hoodie;

-Hiking into the mountains with a huge chunk of my family on the rare occasions where we got together;

-The green area around University and woods around MCAST.

Thus, the idea would be to create a montage-type of animation in which the scenes cut to the various scenarios within forests. Below are some visual inspirations/moodboards:

This gif especially inspired me in the sense that I found it a cool idea to vary between aspect ratios, almost as if filmed by different devices throughout the years.

This animated video by Gibbon Animation is exactly what I had in mind in terms of a montage aesthetic. Additionally, I am especially a fan of the painterly backgrounds with very clean, illustrative subject matter transposed onto it. I went down a massive research hole matrix to try and find out what the animators for this - it turns out it was all done on Krita, which inspires me to potentially use it myself.

Proposal 2: Moon Sequence

My second proposal involves the idea of 'a moment, a time, a place' in the sense that I tried to think of a particular visual element that is particularly universal in the human experience across time and places. What came to mind is the moon - something very simple, but which is a constant presence in our lives we often overlook. Our earliest ancestors must have looked at the moon in much the same way it looks now, people must have gazed at it from between the bars of their prison cells, and might have observed it from lofty balconies in elaborate palaces.

Therefore, my idea for this proposal is to create a smooth sequence of the various moons, shifting between different places and people across different environments and landscapes.

Below are some visual inspirations/moodboards:

Using the above gif for inspiration, I used the same colour scheme to create some developmental pieces seen here ^

Ben Mariott's youtube series on 'best animations yearly' inspired me in the way of clean, crisp vector animation with plenty of clever transitions. For this proposal, it is undoubtedly the aesthetic I would opt for.

Ultimately, in the class activity in which we talked a bit about our proposal ideas, it was agreed on that the first proposal seemed simultaneously a clearer and well-formed idea, as well as a topic dearer to my heart. From this point on, I started to develop my ideas about 'Forest Montage' more.

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Task 2C. Analysis of movement, part 1.

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Task 2C. Analysis of movement, part 2.

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Task 2C. Analysis of movement, part 3.

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Task 2C. Analysis of movement, part 4.

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Task 2C. Analysis of movement, part 5.

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Task 2D. Storyboards.

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Task 2D. Animatic

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Rotoscope

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Rotoscope

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Reference Footage. I colour-picked the colours and tried to recreate the fast, erratic movement of the butterflies.

The little red firework animations stemmed from the idea of small flowers blooming.

Liquid Animation Reference

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Reference Footage.

My idea was to animate energy, motivation, creativity. They are (at least for me) spontaneous and capricious emotions that are liable to fast change; so I felt something very quick and bright would be the best representation of this.

I observed that when lightning dissipates, there are small remnants of it, like flakes, often left behind to linger for a while. Therefore I adjusted to put Timing into effect, wherein the small snake-like flakes would dissolve more slowly than the snap-quick reaction of the lightning strike itself.

Liquid Animation 1

Emotion: Motivation

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Reference Footage

Rotoscope 2