Applied Week 13

I finished off the title credits, since the compositing is nearly finished we have been reviewing the animation. Certain elements of the animation have been discussed, such as the suggestion that we change the order of the actions, which involved moving frames, to properly emphasise how the Father character was responding to the repetition of the grandmother. We moved his page turn action to the second 'nice weather today' to properly convey that he is ignoring the statement. Him doing something to distract his mind is a clearer statement than just not responding. The first 'nice weather today' now has the character looking up and acknowledging the statement.


I have also discussed the different components, I gave the LCA logo an animated boil so that it fitted within our animation. I suggested  to meg to use the written version of american typewriter, as it felt that it fitted with the hand drawn element for the dvd cover.


I made slight alternation of how the rain comes into the scene of the animation from scene one, the volume increased to the point of cutting, When we go in for the close up it turn very quiet so it is not intrusive so we can hear her.

Finally we have created our press kit.

Applied Week 12

Because of pressing deadlines of Responsive and CoP, for weeks ten and eleven there was a shift of focus away from applied. However during this week our main aim for to complete the animation. I started animating the key frames and adding the in-betweens in, myself and Dan were able to get through it in about two days, however my animation upon reflection and after being brought up by Dan was fairly rough and goes off model a fair bit. But do to time constraints, we don't have time to go back and redo the frames so they are on model.

While animating i added in some breakdown key poses on top of dans keys poses to make sure the movements flowed into one another, and any continuity discrepancies were cleared up. For example from one key frame the hair went from in front to behind an ear, so frames were added in that had her brushing her hair back. I made sure to make the movement quick, but not out of character or intrusive, and even added a slight smear frame so we could continue with the animation process.

After dan had photographed all the frames, we split the 279 frames of the grandmother in half and going through each file cut out the grandmother from the rest of the page. This was because the character didn't match with the seat in the background, so the background was taken into photoshop and with the redone background it was tweaked so the chair could be moved and the the grandmother could sit in the chair without looking disjointed. We also added a lighting to the scene taken inspiration from Chuck Jones backgrounds, with their minimalist and sharp approach to lighting. Using filters we also desaturated the colour, first turning the overall tone black and white, then painting over with brushes to give the first scene a brown haze. To give the windows more light yellows and golds were added so it looked like a warm da.y While saving this, it was separated into 5 sections so it could be composited in Premiere. The same was done for the second scene, but instead of brown hues, blue and greys were used to show contrast and isolation from the previous home. I made the lighting more directed and smaller to further emphasise the idea of isolation and exclusion. with the close up scene, i added a filter that was similar to a vignetter that focused on her close up which shadowed out the background and surrounding areas.

After finishing the backgrounds I started to cut out the child frames i also animated the in-betweens for her shuffle at the end. As well as this we started writing out the title credits, I first printed out in american typewrite, and then went over them three time to match the characters. This was to make the titles non-static and integrated into the scene, layered over with the filter that had been made.

Easter Break

During the Easter Break, a few frames of animation were done as the focus shifted to other modules. The first set of in-betweens from the first three keys were done.

Applied Animation - Week 9

After our crit it was discussed that the characters designs were too childish after giving the role over to Dan, briefly to get a different perspective on the designs, I took the role back and refined his designs to reflect a weaker and fragile old woman. The large one below we found us all liking but i felt it could of been a lot more.



As we for the time being were satisfied with the characters design so i moved on to create the child character basing her design on her grandmother. But as I did this none of the designs were stand out and simply looked like the grandma without wrinkles so I felt I needed to go back to the drawing boards.



I tried to apply some shape theory to the grandmothers designs using circles that imply an inviting character but Dan and Meg didnt think she should appear fat. I moved on to try and find some inspiration and had a look at the triplets of belleville, their arched and saggy characters were much more interesting to look at so i scribbled out a more hooked character design but kept the soft curves.

With the grandmother established i could move on to the daughter, gradually raging her down however the crooked nose made her look to old so i changed it to a snub nose.

With all the work that went into the grandmother the father took no time at all. I used squares and sharper edges to portray a much stricter look and design to him to help portray his personality.

Below is all three of the family members.

Applied Animation - Week 8

This week focused on the refined animatics and storyboards, which included descriptive text and sound effects detailing the actions and behaviours within the animation. Compared to the previous weeks storyboards they are much more detailed and refined, with the inclusion of shading to show how the lighting will work within the animation.

Applied Animation - Week 7

This week was doing the drawings for the animatic, these are the rough storyboards and drawings. There are only very slight and subtle movements, which made it quiet awkward as a storyboard because it wasn't completely clear.

Applied Animation - Week 6

Now that we knew what direction we wanted to take the story and which characters are within the animation we established our storyboard or at least the last scene based off of a script written by Dan.

I began to design the characters basing it off of my own grandmother mainly. They were similar variants of the same image being of a melancholic old lady so i tried to stylise her look with dot eyes but they weren't conveying the right emotions so i tried doing variants on the yes design that were simple but could convey what we wanted.

I also worked on the storyboards this week trying out a bunch of different camera angles in order to try and see how they could convey and effect the mood of the animation. However, when I brought to my teammates, they felt that the amount of camera movements were unnecessary. They liked the close-ups, which we will consider using in the future storyboards.