Making of Integrated Practice- 

Weeks 9 - 11

After all the characters were made, and whilst Chloe was working on all other assets, I produced an animation test on one of the simplest scenes, the car scene at the beginning. I timed each shot to last exactly as long as each shot lasted in the original Simpsons clip that we were imitating, therefore hopefully producing the same intended effect. Below is the Simpsons clip we used, and following that is my animation test.

Fortunately, I was able to right away emulate the style that I was going for, meaning that this test animation was worthy for the final piece. I then proceeded to do the same with every other scene in the animation, this was a very time consuming task, as I not only had to redraw Talula's expression and pose (if necessary) in response to the situation and background in each given shot, but also had to monitor the goings on in the background including giving life to the side characters if applicable. In order to get the effect that these are a sequence of photographs that have been taken at different times of a sequence of days, as appose to it looking like an awkward and jumpy animation, I made sure that assets subtlety jitter about from frame to frame, such as what was pulled off in the Simpsons clip. These jitters vary in aggressiveness depending on the situation, such as whether or not the scene is moving in the car.

A selection of Talula poses, rendered as PNG's from Serif Draw Plus

A section from the timeline in Sony Vegas, my editing software

During certain aspects of making the animation, I recorded my PC screen as I posed certain characters in Serif Draw Plus and positioned and edited them in Sony Vegas. I felt that this would be good practice for the making of, as I am using practices that aren't typical to industry, therefore a straight recording of my process would be the best way to communicate insight into the way I work. I imagine me voicing over this is the final edit of the making of, explaining what I am doing and why I think it's an efficient method. This would also work well with the video footage that Josh gathered of me working on the animation.

As Chloe produced each background for us to work over, I notified her with what I want altering from frame to frame, therefore she could produce many different alterations of that background for me to use in the sequence.

In order to get accurate timings for my animation, I timed it perfectly along side the animatic that Chloe and Josh worked on previously, that way I can successfully communicate our intended group vision as planned, and also have the animation work around the music and foley that the other team members work on accordingly. The animatic can be seen below.

When posing characters, the geometric shapes came in very useful once again, as they served as an excellent base to draw around. Making sure not to resize, distort or separate each shape, I re-position them to resemble the posture I desire, using visual reference if necessary, therefore getting all of the body proportions accurate when drawing around them. This method has been an ideal way of drawing my characters, and because of it I don't think that any poses look odd or out of proportions. The stages that

The process of posing the character

As you can see from the image above, I have been ensuring that I have been saving each stage of development when working on any major asset to the project, as I am sure this would come in exceptionally handy when editing the making of, due to it breaking down my process into four clear steps.

Page turnings were added throughout major changes in the story to signify a large change of events, like a new chapter in a book. This not only helped to reinforce that this story is being told through a storybook, but also helped to mask large alterations to characters in terms of age and state, meaning that I wouldn't have to show a gradual progression and therefore creating a load more character models.

Due to the way in which I have structured the animation, I wan't able to utilise alternate shots and angles to emphasise certain emotions and threats, as the frame always had to consist of direct approach of Talula, thus keeping to the structure of animation that we established at the start. The scene with 'Tyrone', the tough street dog is a scene that is especially effected by this issue. Fortunately though, I managed to impact the emotion behind the piece in alternative ways, primarily through colour. My favourite example of this is the scene where Talula is left outside, as the navy-tinted colour scheme helps to establish the mood without it becoming too dark that it looks dull and hard to see, and it also contrasts with the bright colour pallette used in the previous scene when Talula was happier.

Screenshot of what I feel is a strong use of colour in the animation

Once the time consuming process of animating that sequence was done, I then proceeded to produce the keyframe animation to go at the end of the animation. This is the animation practice that I am most familiar with, so this was a relative breeze to go through.

The first step was to separate the model of Talula into individual assets, so that they could be moved, rotated or distorted individually without disrupting other elements of the model. These then have the ability to be keyframed individually, making up a new pose for the model, allowing the software (Serif Draw Plus) to animate the inbeween frames, thus creating a fluid animation. Timings and easing paths were also set for each keyframe, in order for my desired effect to be achieved.

Due to the fact that we only planned for Talula to simply look up towards the camera happily, I wanted to put as much life into that simple gesture as possible, which is why I separated Talula into as many different assets as I could and had them all accordingly bob up and down joyfully in different ways, the result of which, worked exactly as I planned.

The animation components for Talula

I understand that this isn't normal practice for keyframe animation, as most programs centred around animation have tools prepared for you to make your own animation character rig, but as the program I use isn't dedicated around animation, I had to make one of my own. This unfortunately isn't good practice for going into industry, as if other people/colleagues were to pick up this file and want to begin animating with it, they very likely wouldn't know how to do so, and this file wouldn't be compatible with industry standard software anyway. This has shown me that I should really start to use a more widely used professional software if I wanted to go into that profession legitimately, but I am proud nonetheless with how I have managed to work around this issue and still produce something that I am proud of.

As this was a new method within this project, I felt it essential to again record the process from my computer screen, therefore showing insight into all my different methods that were utilised in this project.

After the keyframe animation was done, our team all went to a green screen room that we booked out in Media City to record the live action footage that would act as the opening and closing scenes of our animation. The footage was of a book that was decorated by Chloe to have the first and last inside pages to consist of the first and final frame of our animation middle section respectively, opening and closing whilst placed on a table, before the camera pans out, filling the frame with nothing but the green screen. This was needed so I could chroma-key out the green so that I could place the animated keyframe animation behind the table, thus mixing live-action and animation to produce our final scene.

Us working in the green screen room

As for editing the 2D animation and live action together, it was a relatively straight-forward process, The only issue was making the pan up on the camera mirror the pan up on the background. If I was to animate the pan in the background, I would have to redraw Chloe's design background several times, at different angles, a very time consuming process. Fortunately, I worked around this my adding motion blur as the background emerges into frame as I sped up the speed of the pan on the live action footage, which successfully masks the lack of a tilt in the background .

The decision to include this was done as a way to make less work for myself, as deadline was approaching so I didn't think I'd have time to animate a book opening and closing effectively, so we went back to our original plan of filming this segment in live action. I would have liked for our entire piece to be animated, but the final result of a mixture of mediums ended up really effective, and didn't look as jarring and off-putting as I originally predicted it would. It works from a narrative point of view, because as the frame zooms out of the animation and into the real world, it suggests that that story is over, therefore making it more of a surprise when the camera pans to see the animated dog in our world.