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FINAL BLOG; PRE-PRODUCTION OVERVIEW

First and foremost, the 10 second test! I utilised after effects to create a blend between both versions of the background, animating a shaped mask layer to create this transition between both states that follows the hero as he slides through over the top! I plan to incorporate graffiti into this for the final product too, using small after the fact animation to really splice in the painterly feel of the makeover. I also used a full pass of the lines and colours to create that soft highlight you see on the character and railing. I made sure to export three passes of the animation: the colour pass, the line pass and the full pass of both. With this I can create a pre-composition within the comp in after effects that can use the full pass as a mask on top of the colour layer under the lines and shift it over to create a highlight that illuminated the surrounding edges of the character without needing to hand paint it frame by frame, but also to match the scene better as I can keyframe it and allow it to move into any shape or form. I intend to do more passes of this test over the break in order to polish it up for use in my final film, but this test allowed me to see just how long and what kind of process would be required to do this effect efficiently. I was told during the alpha crit that the narrative is simple enough to where I can focus on shots like these, so I want to place all my bets on having an action centric animation that can afford to be this visually intensive and not have to sacrifice too much of one aspect to elevate the other, especially with the limit I have on what I can include. As long as story is implied and shown *enough*, I'm pretty sure I can afford to remove what is unnecessary ultimately.

This vibe is what I intend to capture with the highlights moving and such. A lot of research into filter useage, animating with vectors and other post production trickery will need to be done; I might even look into creating a boiling lineart filter just to create a more chaotic vibe to the illustrated style in contrast to the still lineless world of the gray utopia! I am super excited to get this done, especially with my father himself able to help me considering he is who inspired me to go with a story like this in the first place. I will write about this more in the production booklet, but he has been around for so much of my life and his art has really surrounded me growing up. I wanted to write this story based on inspiration to illustrate what he has motivated me to do and what I intend to do for others with what time I have to create and experiment with visual medium. This is also why I ultimately went towards animation rather than the graphic novel route, as hybrid animation within the film industry kind of drove me to incorporate more and more into the moving image genre of art and really bring my visual library to life through motion.

That aside, thank you for reading. I hope to improve and create what will essentially be my swan song from my time studying here at anglia ruskin. I would especially like to mention Grace for lending me her ipad during the time I had no access to my laptop or any of my files outside of class and time I spent at the library. Definitely helped me get all my work in on time! I hope to put all the critique I recieve into full effect for the submission of my final work.

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FINAL STEPS

My animatic has been completed! It took a lot of work to remaster the scenes that I did end up digitising but it was worth it for narrative clarity. I intend to finish it off before the beginning of the next semester to have a clear vision, however the timing will be final. Bearing on almost 3 minutes, I didn't add sound as I am focusing on this project as more of an animated music video. I have since sent this animatic to the friend that I am commissioning music from so we can sort out the timing and structure to fit my narrative. A lot of work is going to be put into that too, as the samples sourced and vibe have to compliment the animation it's playing alongside! I also intend to create promotional material to go alongside my production booklet that I will work on this week too. I want to make sure the presentation of my work is consistent throughout in its aesthetic.

As I have included my animatic here, I can't show the progress of my 10 second animatic in this blog but I definitely will before submission. So far I have that and the two 5 second tests fully completed, so I am prioritising putting together all my work ready for submission, including every powerpoint with every single page of work required.

I am very excited for this visual exploration, and I especially cannot wait to fully showcase what I want to depict with all the moment to moment character focused animation. Vincent Chansard is again a huge inspiration but other animators within the industry like James Baxter and his works on Steven Universe or Beauty and the Beast really bring a huge light to just how immersive and intertwined both character and background animation can be to flourish a story into a very tangible and emotional zenith. As I get along to the final week of preproduction I aim to really squeeze everything out of the time I have to catch up and submit before I leave for the holidays.

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Catching up rapidly!!

I got my laptop back this week!! I am making excellent progress, especially background wise! These next few images are for my 5 second and 10 second tests respectively. I aim to create a sort of fader/ wipe transition with the coloured variant from the gray variant to show how the world transforms as motion happens around it. The long backdrop is to make sure I can scroll through it as the character moves along to avoid having to make too many assets + refresh myself upon after effects concepts.

I have also coloured the next 5 second test as seen here, and began to colour the 10 second test too! A lot of work has been put into this so I am excited to push this all through to after effects finally. I will put the progress I make for these on two seperate blog posts as I am limited to one video per blog post and as such I need to focus on these to the finish line in these next two weeks!

We have also started to focus on creating an animatic using storyboarded work we did last week during friday! It is all on very short notice, so I am also trying to speed through that now that my laptop is back. My drawn storyboards are a bit too loosely drawn so I do hope to at least redraw a few of these frames before the alpha crit for my work with the industry advisor... It can't be illegible or I won't get useful feedback!

I am also focusing on finishing off my observational drawings, which admittedly were mostly focused on stylising people I saw in the open rather than drawing what was in front of me, especially during the Tim Burton exhibition trip a couple weeks back which required us to do so... But regardless, the next blog will feature the finished renders for the 10 second test.

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Looking up briefly!!

Work is going fairly okay. I get my laptop back this upcoming week so I hope I can fasten up and get going already. A lot of book work has been going on but very minimal digital work is going on. However, I am happy with the quality of what I am putting out for the most part!

I have looked at other reference for the body language and posing required for this scene specifically, looking at skate boarding, surfing and soap shoe grinding. The centre of gravity is near the pelvis area, with the shoulders broad and spread to balance out the motion of leaning back and forth. The posing of the legs and back is similar to sitting actually, but a lot more focus is put into the positioning of the feet and the length extension of the arm!

In this finished lineart I make sure to emphasise this, as there needs to be a lot of focus put into how the body moves and sways in retaliation to the arcs of the rail being painted as he moves along. Secondary action is super key to keeping this momentum build up believable, so I took a lot of time to make sure everything is consistently built, charged and followed through upon! I just need to implement colour, background work and then post production effects for practice! This will hopefully be done by submission as I get my laptop back soon.

I also thought while I was working in the studios I could finish off the character sheet and make sure it is ready for the submission! I quite like the redo of the linework, since it feels a lot more consistently weighed and balanced, The colours I have settled on, with the orange hat still being different enough to the red shoes but still a bright sort of figurehead to top the character off. I think this design is now locked down and just needs some sprucening up in the technical tests!

And on Thursday I thought I would use the tablet loaned from Grace to redo my concept art image. I realised I didnt want the wild colour to come from anywhere but the characters to make sure it feels lived in, so I also included a concept for how buildings would look with the graffiti artwork on them. I focused on my reference and went moreso on a painterly, lineless look to really take advantage of my knowledge over hues, saturation and values. I believe this works so well because of my application of scanned textures and variance in my brushwork. A lot of gauche texture and strong highlights + the help of poly line selection in photoshop to sprucen up the darkest and lightest parts and make the shapes more noticeable. I am very happy with this concept and I hope to carry it along to my background work for the technical tests.

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Slowly but surely...

It is highly demotivating to keep working without my laptop, especially after recieving the news that it is in fact still damaged and will require another 2 weeks minimum to get back and running. More and more time is being lost due to the fact I cannot continue working once I get back from uni; my usual workflow entails me going to uni, getting work done and going home to complete household work or tasks before getting back to work on my own computer and preset software. It is highly efficient and not having that avenue is a little stressful for me. I have been sketching and doodling ideas for the title as a logo, sort of to create an effective titlecard in the introductory sequence in the meantime. While I work in uni I aim to finish off technical test work to the best of my ability.

Grace was nice enough to lend me her tablet to do digital work once my work time in the animation rooms is over however, and I did manage to work on this mindmap for Ryuta Ueda of Jet Set Radio fame. His work on the series is the main inspiration behind the aesthetic and story of High Contrast, as it is so graphically punk rock and rebellious in nature. His lines are jagged and inconssitent, yet present a structured form and shape that is distinctly japanese punk. His works definitely inspire the attitude of SEGA as a company during the early 2000s and served as a landmark represenation of stylised video games and animation as a whole. The colours are also a big influence here, as the pale greens, turquoise and overall colour discordant palette creates this strange allure of industry behind the idea of vandalism. It itself contrasts against the vibrance of the actual environments in the promotional posters or the outfits of the characters in general, bringing a sort of uniformity to the art that is not present elsewhere. This contrast is what directly motivates the colour change within ACT 1 and ACT 2, showing the more warm tones in the past versus the acidic vibrance of cooler colours in the present day that then wrestles with the paleness of ACT 3's grays...

A lot of character development has been happening both in and out of the studio, with some expression and language sheets drawn here mostly to experiment with those joints and the facial structure.

I managed to doodle some of the sheet with the help of the ipad loaned to me on Adobe Fresco, but finished it off in Adobe Photoshop in the studios the next morning. I made sure to include all angles nessecary and overall I am happy with the shape of the limbs, but the linework perhaps needs a better tone. The colours I chose are supposed to be reminiscent of a sunset over the blue sea, with the red of the shoes being the reflection of the pink sun in the hat. However, Rachel did provide some feedback and she did make me consider another colour for the hat, since it is similar to the red tone of the shoes. I like the red in the shoes, but the hot pink of the hat not only feels like the odd one out but it also seems too much of a cap on the top and bottom of the character... I will try something else this weekend, perhaps some orange tone? to keep the familiarity of the sunset at least.

For now, I have use the colours as is to make this run animation. I think its bouncy an focused enough, especially since I made sure not to have any unclear silhoeuttes in the motions of each frame. Every swing is wide and has a lot of follow through and wind up. Perhaps I should remove a few frames to keep it a little faster? For now I need to decide what to do with the background to make it move in unison for my 5 Second test to be complete. I need to speed up or I will never make it for submission!

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Continuing despite the roadblocks...

I forgot to include this in a previous blog, but I did sort of conceptualise the positioning of the character within this scene for the 10 second test last week.

Despite the lack of laptop severely tanking the speed at which I can work on my assignments as well as my research module due to lack of time able to work on a computer I have been relying on class time, going in on my own time and sketchbook work for conceptualisation when my laptop comes back next week. I have created this mindmap of Yuji Uekawa's artwork to study and analyse for my protagonist's look and feel.

Uekawa has a unique sense of posing within perspective. His lines are very bouncy and round, able to create this sort of free flowing motion that removes the idea of hard joints within the characters, which exemplifies Sonic's carefree and free flowing attitude. His nature is very cocky and he presents as such with the very expressive hands and feet, his face is round and smears around like a paint smudge with every pointy expression he holds and it all sort of works together with the lines of action used to accent his body. The Eggman example in the image as well as Billy Hatcher are there for human reference; their proportions are longerand more defined but they still hold the same amount of bouncy rubberhose style that the Sonic poses hold. I need these for animation reference mostly; the next artist I will analyse holds a higher concern for the stylistic choice for my character's design. What makes Sonic work the most as a cartoon design is Uekawa's additions in his artwork and as such it is a beacon of where I want to take my designs within my project.

I want the High Contrast in the title of my project to be symbolic of the people too; the police will not have expressive limbs or body language as my protagonist does or even the civillians that follow in tow. I want the limbs to have distinct shapes but also work in unison to form a good silhouette outside of animation to ensure he is recognisable in front of the cocophony of colours that will trail him throughout the world.

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An alarming week of progress...

My laptop has broken down. It is not a good week, as a lot of progress has now been halted and I am resorting to going into the animation studios when possible for maybe 4-5 hours at a time per day before going home to do my book work. A lot of my work has been impeded and as such it is quite frustrating to work through.

Despite this, I have used this week's session to create a moodboard in Indesign to create a sort of aesthetic vision for my concept art and general colour/texture layouts for backgrounds and character design.

Hirihiko Araki is a Japanese Mangaka who utilises inks to create strong character silhouettes and body language to its best ability, with strong blacks used to block out a lot of the implied texture and shape within both the anatomical structure of a pose but the material of the clothing any character is wearing. It also helps that it seperates them very well from the strongly contrastingly coloured backdrops that accompany the promotional artwork or cover illustrations that I have included within this spread of works. I have also included some works of Tite Kubo (Author of BLEACH) and Kei Urana (Author of GACHIAKUTA) who both employ a similar technique that is executed differently. Tite Kubo utilises strong white and black tones in the backdrops to employ a sort of empty lonliness to be filled by the characters and their own choice of clothing that stands out to be very 2000s in colour and aesthetic choice. It poses a great vibe that radiates a laid back and noncholant attitude towards the environment that they reside in. Kei Urana in contrast uses the backgrounds to the other extreme, where there is so much artwork and colour and different line weights and textures that they make the character pop out as the odd one out within the spreads; a sort of graph of culture that pinpoints the characters as a silhouetted figure by merely being white or grey in a sea of colour.

I have also attatched Graffiti works from Ed Panopio and YAPICO, featured artists in the video game Bomb Rush Cyberfunk by Team Reptile, as I feel these styles are also relevant to my research into the culture of street art and implementation of different art circles/ styles of expression will boost the amount of visual reference to include within the project. What I want to avoid is having the coloured portion of my animation be similarly homogenous to the grey portions. As such, I have been working towards conceptualising other backgrounds for whenever I get my laptop back and can work more effeciently digitally.

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Technical Tests continued

This blog will focus on the technical tests as I believe the amount of work done has to be documented seperately for now. As I continued to animate I believed that I had to continue to work towards polishing my script also. My laptop is slowly beginning to deteriorate it seems, as it shuts off at some random inopportune moments and causes me a lot of stress so it is a lot safer to focus on smaller tasks and save in guaranteed burts. Scriptwork was one, but the 5 second tests are also included. This week I started one of the 5 second tests as to continue working towards something alongside beginning to conceptualise my character's proportions a lot more.

I know that we aren't quite supposed to be at this part, but it helps with my line consistency and shape consistency to have this information when making my character centric animation tests.

I want to have my character be very bouncy in nature, sort of carry their speed with their step but feel like a lot of force is in their run to keep their speed high. It is important to me to have a lot more focus on posing frame to frame as it involves making sure every silhouette is clear and well articulated to avoid any homogenous and unclear moments of the run.

I have also decided that this test will also require me to consider my final decision for the aesthetic of the grey settings. I have attatched another concept for what this would look like using a paper texture I have scanned and altered to create a sort of canvas-like grain.

I want to keep the values, but the shape and perspectives seem a bit off, and I do not like the sketchy outline. I feel I need to make this aesthetic feel more industrial and clean to contrast heavier to the wild splashes that is the coloured aesthetic... I will look more into this with environmental research next week.

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Concept Art Continued!

Throughout the week I have managed to compile a few different variations for my digital concept art rendition utilising Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop by vectorising, colourising, formatting and rendering each image on top of each other to create various effects either interesting or eery.

I then used Photoshop and experimented with colour, exclusion and difference layers to create a sort of surrealist art pop vibe to the colours used in the greenery portion of the render. The city uses painted filters to create a sort of washed/stained steel manner of painting and combining a thick ink linework to create an outline that is otherworldly/ disconnected or dissociated from the new wave. I am not quite sure how this is going to work out in the long run however, as it is a lot of effects work and matching this odd sort of rendering styles for the overall look of my animation will not be a very consistent or easy feat. I will workshop into this alongside the next tasks we have to work on, especially considering character design work begins within the next two weeks of work...

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Technical Tests start!

This week we start actual work on the technical tests, and I will be starting with my 10 second test! I have managed to work on the whole block of motion for the last 5 seconds of the animation; I am also trying to ensure that I can animate the background crowds in specific scenarios, as well as the animation of the background itself in after effects! Here is the progress so far:

The background characters are my lesser concern in this test, so I will be prioritising this major sweep motion. My main reference for this is how rail grinding is showcased within Sonic the hedgehog, as I am leaning towards hyperbolic posing and proportions with this animation through action and character design...

Weight and balance are a key factor for this kind of sweeping motion which makes it a perfect practice for how impactful I want my character to feel when moving across the environments in my scenes. Every action has to matter and feel intentional through this carrying of momentum.

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DONE AND DUSTED! Live Project Submission!

With my work finally submitted, our project is ready for the final delivery to Action on Empty Homes!! I believe our work was consistent, snappy and well animated so I am fairly confident with our presentation. Izzy did a fantastic job editing the composition together, and everyone came through with relative swiftness to finish it off and not have everyone in a rush or panic! All of our colours were consistent, linework was clean and also consistent and everyone put their all into communication and ensuring work is ticked off and done by the schedule book.

Today we start on concept artwork, so we will be pushing towards a more consistent workflow on the FMP as a whole; with that being said I will be coallating the weeks of work into one post per week where applicable in order to simplify my work detailing.

We focused on creating analog concept work to incite a deeper investigation into mood and texture within our work and this has made me consider aesthetics regarding the backgrounds - I already had something in mind for the characters and people in the world but the surrounding world was a blur to me honestly. We were tasked with creating 4 analogue images today with alloted time limits and I utilised different mediums to capture the same idea of the world to create a visual diversity within my library of visuals and perhaps create a mashup digitally to solidify the piece as final.

Attatched are the attempts followed by a moodboard that I utilised to compile the main body of the piece conceptually. I wanted to capture the coloured world vs the grey towers of the city in order to have a solid foundation for the main drive behind my animation: the violent contrast of nothing to something. I believe these are my best attempts, however I feel I need to further develop the shapes and consistency between volume and density within those shapes to really nail the sense of scale I want here...

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FMP - Beginning to organise my story and technical test ideas

This week, we begin with our technical test self-directed briefs! It is very exciting to finally begin conceptualising what I will be striving for animation wise within my final project, and it's helped by my clearer vision for the scale of the freerunning and action scenes. ACT 2 will now consist of a montage of scenes that compile the travelling that brings together the crowd that follows the hero along his journey; I want to show the influence the main city has had on these small rural towns and also the inspiration that the hero brings when he shows them a world of new colour and individual interpretation of previous culture lost to the present times!

But obviously I am focusing on the more action oriented scenes; I have been doodling more concept thumbnails and camera moves in my sketchbook to ensure that I can indeed match what I am conceptualising and manage to push myself with the animation process. Which leads me to the headlines for my technical tests. There are 3 main concepts I want to experiment with through these and they are as follows:

Colour

Lighting

Movement

These can be done in level of priority, starting with movement as my 10 second test. Lighting and colour will be the 5 second tests, as I will focus on how my animation looks with a background element in motion and how characters will be affected by this. More on this in next week's blog.

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Live Project - Cleanup and considering colour!

Lines are all tidied up and ready to colour! I am falling behind a little bit because of the focus on trying to make progress on my Research Project module, however this portion of the work is finally looking up! Everyone else is also doing very well on time, despite some no shows this week. Grace has made a lot of good progress on the scenes shes working on and Brye has finished off his scene very well too, so it's up to me to continue working at a decent pace ready to submit later this coming week so that we can comfortably start focusing on concept art on the FMP next lesson!

I believe my study on Vincent Chansard's work was at most a moderate success considering just how much I balanced the look of the whole animation and the amount of movement I wanted in my cut of animation, so I am excited to put this practical work into effect for the technical development of the FMP too!

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FMP - Scriptwork continued further...

ACT 3 is going smoothly, however I am having doubts about just how empty this section of the story feels... I have not been able to recieve further feedback from Rachel just yet because of how cloudy the script feels to me just now.

I am currently looking to plot a course for the major players within the short section that really is ACT 3... Especially considering the 2 minute ideal runtime and let alone the 3 minute limit. Pushing 3 minutes is not ideal for me as it would require such a large amount of time to really delve into... But its looking promising! The map shows the course the hero will take, capturing a tower and looping around whilst their crowd of followers capture the others, ending with him capturing the tallest central tower an overlooking the world they have changed for the better. But getting here is the roadblock to me, perhaps I need to emphasise more on the surveillance state nature of the city's...well, surveillance.

I have even given names and scaling for these, but it still only adds to the background details that I would not have the time to explain myself! It is quite frustrating, but I believe I will put it on the backburner for a while until next week...

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Live Project - Finalising and beginning to colour!

Lines are finally done! A lot of cleanup is left over, a lot of fixing up lineweight and consistency too, but it is finally done! Colour will now be the main focus, and everyone else seems to be progressing very well! Although Chris has not given many updates lately... but Brye, Grace, Izzy and Fayzah have been on it really! The house animation looks bouncy and very full of character, backgrounds look consistent an vibrant to match our character driven animation and a lot of the character designs match throughout scenes fairly consistently! We haven't looked into music or much of sound at all but I am sure we will discuss this over the next week to progress towards the critical eval of this before the final submission!

Backgrounds for my scene are to be done by me, but I will do those once I am done with colours to make sure everything matches between scenes... consistency across teammates is key when being directed by someone else's artstyle and vision!

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FMP - Script continued!

So here this week I am struggling to really concieve of how to write this story. I've been writing slowly towards the end of act 2 but I find myself focusing on how to set up the actual physical space of the settings I am imagining...

I find myself doodling these thumbnails to ensure that I can actually picture scenes I want to write first... Even if the scenes I draw are not going to be literally present within my final storyboard. I am very concerned by how important this narrative is as a service to produce my animated sequences unto. I do have a passion for the little story I have to tell regarding the importance of cultural influence in artistic expression and preservation of individuality, but balancing exactly how much of this must be presented to the audience versus how much of the sequence should be focused solely on action is a high concern at the back of my mind as I continue to dwell on ACT 2.

I have, despite this, written the beginning of ACT 3. The ending and the beginning of ACT 3 are solidified in my mind and the rest is up to scripting exactly the camera motions, key action sequences and moments to linger on for focus in my animatic... I am confident next week will be a lot better for this.

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Live Project - Animation and teamwork

So now that I've finished blocking out the animation this week I get to proceed with finishing off the lines and hopefully colours by the end of submission.

The motion planned is wide and focused on having a lot of body movement to ensure that there is no second wasted with stillness, just to keep it interesting and flowing with the rest of the scenes in the project since Brye and Grace have shown a very pleasant animation style with their own scenes so far. They display a smooth and subtle animation style with minimal boiling in certain parts so I am a little subconsciously worried about matching the animation style and art to make sure it isn't too out of place.

This week I will be focusing on lining and cleaning up hopefully, considering the motion is fully planned it shouldnt take too long!