Final Evaluation

This module has by far been one of the most stressful, yet enjoyable modules I have done so far. I feel that I have been pushed to work outside of my comfort zone, which has been helpful. Firstly, I I have never been the most confident with my animation, however this module has made me realise that with enough planning and time management, I can achieve much more than I thought, in terms of quality and quantity. Working with Emma has taught me a lot, because before this year, i had never done much collaborative work. Also, Emma is more confident on the technical side than I am, and she was very happy to spend the time explaining things to me, to make sure I understood and to avoid any issues. We both have a strong interest in quite separate areas, so this was a fantastic opportunity for me to apply the skills I have into the areas I am most passionate about. Since Emma was more interested in animating and post-production, this meant I could take the reigns with pre-production, which is the part I love the most. I think this is why I found the animating of the documentary so enjoyable. I loved knowing that the characters that I was animating, were designed by me, and this was thoroughly rewarding and made me all the more determined to power on through. 

There were some time management issues along the way, due to work from other modules and I think Emma and myself let this get the bestir of us. However, after our final crit, we were able to pick up the pace and get everything done, with time to spare. Emma and I work in a similar way, and have worked collaboratively before, so we knew what to expect. I feel that we worked together very professionally, and we made sure that we were spending time working not just separately, but also separately but in the same room. This made the work flow much easier, because we were able to constantly review each others work. At he start of the animating process, I did make the mistake of animating the first five seconds in the wrong colour, however after realising there wasn’t an easy way to fix it in post, and not wanting to give Emma that extra work, I decided just to begin again. This didn't do any damage to work flow, in fact it only encouraged me to work quicker. This mistake brought my attention to how important it is to keep up good communication, in order to avoid stupid things like this happening again. 

The pre-production side of the this project was one of my favourite parts. I loved carrying out research, and the design aspect of this project. I think having the ability to focus more on my preferred areas this time, has allowed me to enjoy the experience more as a whole and to learn more from it. The style of this animation was quite new to me, because I hadn’t combined watercolour and digital media before, so it was refreshing to do something new. Also, it made me realise that digital colouring doesn’t always have to be the way to go. Creating this documentary has also reminded me how useful and effective animation be for not just fictional narratives, but also for real life topics. I am extremely happy with the amount of animation I managed to create in the space of a week. Due to Emma’s heavy workload in post-production, we decided it would make sense for me to also animate her part of the robin scenes too. This was not a problem for me at all, because I found myself animating at quite a fast pace. Once I was in the flow of production, I was able to get through it without delay. This is the first time I have found my animation pace to be this quick, and also one of the first times I have been so pleased with the outcome. 

If I were to carry out this module again, I would have planned my time out differently, so that there would be no issues with falling behind towards the end. Also, I would be sure to converse with my work partner more in the early stages of the project, because I think this was a problem I had at the start of production. However, I feel excited to work collaboratively again, because I think that the outcome can be very different to working alone. Also, this would allow me to spend more time focusing on my areas of interest. After designing the characters for this project, I now have a greater understanding of what would be required of me in industry, if i were to focus on pre-production, specifically character design. I realised how thorough my designs, and expression sheets needed to be, in order to make it as easy as possibly to animate her part and for me to animate mine. Also, this is the first time I have used lip-syncing. Before hand, I hated the idea of lip-syncing, but this project has taught me that it is actually quite a satisfying part of animation, and that once the phonemes are al created, it is just a matter of reusing the frames where appropriate. Emma and I both have a love for 2D animation, and both have very strong work ethics. I feel that we made the right decision in choosing to work together, because we both had very similar ideas of what we wanted to create. This also gave her the opportunity to focus on the areas she wanted to focus on too. 

Towards the end, on the last day, we found ourselves in a mad rush, due to the fact that we had used my laptop to render everything out in AfterEffects. Emma was used to her After Effects automatically picking things up and 24 frames per second. Mine however was set to 30. This is something neither of us had thought about, so we did find ourselves re-rendering, because the audio and lip syncing wasn’t matching up. However this has taught me a lot, because it was very frustrating to fall behind over something so silly, after working so hard through out this project.

Titles and Credits

After all of my animating was complete, I focused on the titles and credits whilst Emma was busy editing. For the opening title, we decided that we wanted to create something similar to the actually Rewilding Britain Logo. We decided that we didn't want a completely still title, because this would look very bland.

I took the logo to use as inspiration. We still wanted our title to be recognisable but not too different from the original. Since this animation would only be for academic purposes, we didn't see any problem with altering it to suit the aesthetic of our animation. 

Below is out final title for the opening of our animation. In order to avoid it looking bland, and to give it some life, I drew it out twice and then played it back in a loop. This gave it a slight shake, which is what we wanted. The reason I decided to add swirls to the inside of the paw, was because after a discussion with Emma, we decided it was important to mention in our blurb something about the Identity of Britain, therefore making the paw look like finger prints could work well.

For the end credit, we decided that having a simple background that connects with the style of our animation would work well. I took one of the textures I had created during pre-production, expanded it, and lowered it's opacity slightly, so that it was't too intense. 

I then hand wrote each credit as a separate layer.

I saved each credit as a PNG, so that they could be placed into AfterEffects and moved around easily. Also, this would leave Emma several option of the way she wanted to present them. 

Post-Production

Once I had my animated scenes complete, I then sent the PSD files to Emma. In order to make it easier to apply the textures to the characters in After Effects, she created an APLHA layer for each file, which would be the solid black colour. This would then be replaced by the textures in After Effects. Origioanlly, I was going to do this to my own files, but Emma asked me to just send then to her so that I could then continue to get through the animation.

Although I wasn't focusing on post, I did tell Emma that if she needed any help with post, just to let me know.

Animating The Robin

Animating the Robin, was in some ways easier because this character had less components to it's body. However it did require a lot more changes in emotion and body language. I also included a lot of secondary motion and anticipation where necessary. This was becuause it would add to the comedy element but also to the Robin's appeal, because from the start we knew we wanted this to be a very cute "squishy" character.

There were two key moments where this was applied. One of which is where the Robin is pulling at a worm in the ground. I decided that as the character leans forwards, I wanted to make her belly squish outwards, to give the impression of how little and chubby she is.

Also, in a later scene, she hops backwards three times. Just before she leaves the ground, I added some anticipation by having her compress downwards, to show that she is preparing to jump, and this would add more spring to her bounce. I didn't just incorporate this to her body, I also added it to the feathers on the top of her head, to show that they are effected by the movement of her body. Both Emma and I felt that this would make this character more believable and more loveable. 

Phonemes

Since this character had a much smaller body than the Boar, obviously this would mean that her beak was very small too. With the shape of her mouth it was very difficult to come up with phonemes for certain sounds such as "Eee" and "Rrr". After creating the first few necessary mouth shapes, I realised that I could reuse some of them for other sounds. This made the whole process look much simpler, and it still had the same result. 

The main shapes I used were "Aaa" "Uuu" "Ttt" and "Ooo" because after experimenting I realised these could all be used for other sounds too. 

Fills

When it came to creating the fills, it was just the same as it was with the Boar, however it was slightly faster, because there was less to colour, and there was less movement with this character. When it came to adding the fills on both characters, I changed the background colour just so ensure that I wasn't making a mess of it! 

Background Sound & Change in Work Load

For the background sound, we used the BBC sound library and chose two separate forest tracks, one for the Boar and one for the Wolf environment. We decided to have two separate tracks to make it more obvious that these animals are in similar, yet separate habitats.


Despite being slightly disheartened after our final crit, I do think this give us the motivation we needed. I managed to get the rest of the Boar animation done in a few days. After handing these over to Emma to be prepped for post, I was abele to get going on the Robin animation. However, due to the heavy workload that would be requited in post-production, we decided that I would not only be animating the Robin in the Boar scenes, but also in the Wolf Scenes too. I didn't have a problem with this at all, because I was managing to get through the animation much faster than I had expected at the start, and also, we didn't want to be panicking at the last minuet. It made more sense for me to focus on the bulk of the animation, because Emma was going to be focusing on all of the editing.

Final Crit

The final crit, was a difficult one. Due to deadlines from other modules and a struggle to manage everything efficiently for a few weeks, we found ourselves behind with the animation. However, we were not the only group with this problem. For this final crit, we presented the few scenes we had animated so far. These were received well, and we were given some good feedback, however we were panicking a lot afterwards. However we still believed we could get this completed in time, so we went ahead and powered on through.

Animating The Boar

The most efficient way to animate the Boar, was to have a separate layer for the Body, Head, Ears, Eyes, and Phonemes. This made the whole process much easier. The animating was done in Photoshop which is what I am currently the most comfortable with.

Having everything split into the appropriate groups made the animating less stressful, because it was so much easier to keep track of all of the different layers. I was using the pencil drawings of the environment as reference so that I knew where the characters would be placed. Each character would be rendered out separately, so I focused on getting the Boar complete before starting on the Robin.








 

Emma and I were making the time to show each other our progress  to make sure everything was consistent. Everything began to go very smoothly which is what we wanted.  Creating the digital fills for the specific body parts, was also quite time consuming, however it took a lot less concentration from the animating, and it actually became very therapeutic. 

Production - The Beginning!

Over the Easter break, I decided to get cracking with the animation after getting the okay from Emma that we were good to go. However, once we met back up again after the easter break, it appeared there was a bit of a problem. I had begun animating before we had the finalised colour sheet, and I was under the impression that we were going with black outlines, however I soon realised that the five seconds of animation I had done for the Boar, was in the wrong colour. After Emma and I spent some time trying to figure out how this could be fixed, I decided to just create those five seconds of animation again.

This was because, I had already begun animating the new scenes in the correct colours, so I knew it wouldn't take me long to re-animate these five seconds. In the end, it only took me a couple of hours, not only to animate the five seconds but the whole of the Boar's part in this scene.

Although it was frustrating, this mistake helped me in the long run. Firstly, it reminded me how important it was to keep up communication with Emma. I do not blame Emma for this hiccup,  however I do think that it was partially due to a failure to communication between the two of us. However I believe it was mostly down to me diving in without ensuring I had all of the information.

Final Textures

Once the textures were finalised, Emma very kindly put together this colour sheet which we could both use as reference when animating. Specific colours would need to be used for the outlines and fills. 

New Expression and Turn-around Sheets

After the updates had been made on the characters, I decided to go back and take the time to produce some new, better quality design sheets. This was for several reasons. The first being, the original sheets weren't matching to the final characters, also I wanted to crate some digital sheets, as I felt this would look more professional. I was already doubting myself in terms of the quality of my work, so I knew I needed to take the time to improve.

Also, I wanted to be sure that there was enough expression reference for Emma and myself when it came to animating.

Expression Sheets

Whilst creating these new sheets, I was taking into all of the different expressions each animal could possibly be making at different intervals. Whilst Emma had been doing a previous animation test of the Robin, she was struggling to make the character look scared. So this is something I wanted to make much clearer this time around. 

Turn-around Sheets

Although the character would be quite still through out the animation, we still wanted to know what the character would look like from different angles. 

Final Animatic and Storyboard

Emma and I agreed that I would create the new storyboard digitally, and she would then edit the panels into an animatic. 

Our animatic was much better this time, because we had the final audio pinned down and altered so that it would fit into the two minuet slot. 

Intermin Crit

Despite not having a neat version of our animatic and storyboard for our first crit, it was very helpful. Sara and Martin seemed very keen on our idea. Afterwards we had a clear idea of the direction we needed to go in. We also received some useful feedback on the textures, which helped us a lot. The rough animatic and storyboard that we presented, despite not yet being finalised, were well received. This crit reinforced to us how important it was to pin down our final animatic before beginning any animation, that way we would have something to refer back to.

Further Character Alterations

As we carried out our final preparations before animating we settled on how we were going to split the work load. Both of us decided that Emma would focus on animating the wolf, and I would focus on the boar. For the animating of the robin, we decided that it would probably be best to bit animate the robin in or own scenes, because this would help make he production process smoother as we wouldn't need to keep exchanging files over to one another and swapping to and from.  However we needed to make sure that our animation of the robin's lip syncing and body language are compatible. So we decided that it would be necessary for Emma to do an animation test and then pass that on to me, so that I could also produce a test which would enable us to double check that our animating doesn't look too different.

Emma did need to make a few changes to the face of the wold character in order to make it easier to animate the lip movements. This is something she consulted with me first in order to make sure I was happy with it's final design. To be honest I really liked the changes she made to it, because the alterations weren't too extreme and in some ways I actually think it worked better than my final design!

The alterations Emma made led to the boar looking slightly more realistic. This wasn't a problem at all, all it meant was that some slight changes needed to be made to the boar, just so that they didn't look completely different! The main changes on the boar just needed to be around the eyes, because at this point, he was the only character with eyebrows. 

We decided together that reducing the size of the eyes and giving him a ridge above his eyes similar to the one given to the wolf would give them a bit more of a connection. Also the ridges above the eyes could still be animated exactly the same as eyebrows would have been. 

Emma did suggest at one point that enlarging the ears on the boar could possibly enhance the character appeal. However after experimenting with this I decided that I really wasn't keen on this design alteration, I felt that the big ears made the character look too bat-like and a bit too threatening. So after some discussion we agreed that just altering the eyes would be necessary!

Another aspect that needed to be noted was that, in my original designs, all of the characters had sectioned off coloured tips to certain areas. For example the robins feathers/fingers and the top of her feathers on her head are all sectioned off. The same with the wolf's tail and ears. The same goes for the boar's ears and tusks. This is something we definitely needed to keep because this was one of the main features that connect all of these characters together.