Final Major Project

Producer Role:

My role helped me work efficiently to my skills because organising and directing keeping on top of the plans and changing them if we do not hit deadlines, the leadership and constantly checking on progress allowed clear communication on if we have to change things earlier than later, what we need to push the production forward and to tackle tight deadlines, this made for a better working environment for everyone, keeping the moral and optimism up in the group. We would keep up the good communication by calling every week for an hour to discuss what we have completed by the week and what we are planning on completing in the week, any ideas that need to be changed or new ideas that we have. We would also text daily and send progress pictures, and help each other out when need be with program or artistic skills. I would also get feedback by multiple sources since our aimed audience is that of all ages, we would ask other artists and those outside people who enjoy animation.

Rough Animator/Artist Role:

My roles in the animation- rough animation artist, I did 3 scenes 40-60 seconds on each minute, one having 5 different scenes and another being action heavy. My favourite scenes to animate was close ups and expressions for the character, i attempted to incorporate the small habits cats have with there anatomy such as whisker bounces, ear flicks, pupil dilation the attention to detail enhanced the scenes visually making it more realistic and easier to read the emotions since animals facial expressions are limited in different ways to humans and the characters do not speak, this makes the body language much more important and reliant to telling the story. Some scenes that I found more challenging was fast dynamic poses and dramatic action shots, as I did not focus on 2D animation I had to study a lot of animal anatomy which was more difficult to incorporate dramatic actions.

Colour Animator/Artist Role:

Another important job I had in the production was being one of the lead colouring artists for the character animation. This required me to key colour the character animation to match the final designs including the consistent markings and details, such as the scenes I did included colouring the first 2 minutes of animation. This process was tedious as I had multiple characters in a scene to colour, but enjoyable because it allowed me to learn a lot of the programs features and grow confidence in.

Sound Designer Role:

With being the sound designer this allowed me to study the animatic and story to see what would enhance the visuals, especially because the film has emotional build with a tragic ending. I went through the animation available and the storyboards and started with the sound effects, such as considering how environmental interactions would sound. The story has multiple characters and a busy atmosphere so I had to consider what sound would overlap and not absorb the backing sound track. I solved this by making a timeline of each segment and added ideas for sounds and how I could possibly recreate them, using royalty free websites combine with own sound editing and design.

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/524503466

Having needed to apply for an EC due to personal life circumstances, despite slowing down the animation process we still had a small amount of time to work on post production and editing using after effects to create transitions and panning, along with finalize the soundtrack and audio before submissions. In total I coloured several different scenes for the character animation, however it was my favourite learning experiance. After all the scenes were coloured I submitted them to my team who filled in the backgrounds and we edited it together to make the final product.

While the sketching phase did overlap with the rest of the production being longer than expected, we shortly started the style correction and lining phase while I finished the sketches for the final scene. After completing the rough animation for the whole film and starting the lining, I started on the colouring. Colouring the character assets in TV paint, which I had little to no experience with before this project helped the production speed up as we also split the background colouring and used programs such as photoshop to create detailed long shots.

The group begun production on the animation starting of with the rough animation based on the animatic, after splitting the segments up we aimed to have each 20 seconds done every week to stay on schedule. However due to extenuating circumstances the time for the sketches to be due in took longer than planned so the logline had to be reworked. We all continued this process until it was finished for the next few weeks.

Being the sound designer meant that I was tasked with going through the animatic and taking notes of potential sound effects, back track and royalty free songs. The sound effects, I had to research how I could mimic and create certain scenes such as a fire explosion. This process was interesting as the sound effects especially with the animal characters were important with conveying the emotion, since the characters can’t speak verbally the emotion has to be carried by the sound design and visuals.

We completed the animatic and discussed how we was going to translate it into the final animation. Since the animatic was 4 minutes long of footage, I suggested we break the animation down into segments per minute. With this idea we split each minute into 3 sections each having 20 seconds of animation each, we then assigned these parts to each of us for the sketch phase of the animation, even if it was inconsistent with the styles it would then be style corrected when lining which is the longest timed process. We also presented our animatic at a presentation and received feedback on how to continue to the best of our abilities.

After all members creating our own reference sheets our group got together to discuss what animation style we would like to go with for the final product. We went for a simplified style so all members could be consistent with our vastly different styles. As producer I also organized meeting every Tuesday for updates on progress, I also directed the work flow breaking the animation process into segments and weeks dividing the work evenly. Our team work has been extremely well with good communication and helping each other out with all processes.

This stage we begun to finalize our our character designs and start to produce an animatic from the results of our completed storyboard. The main character being a dark purple one eyed cat, who has a distaste for humanity due to the harm they have caused. While our optimistic counter part the angel character, is a small bright coloured sugar glider creature. Having a positive outlook with the terrible conditions and situation they’re in. From our finalized designs we all produced turn arounds and expression sheets we will be using as reference for our final animation. This included exploration of colours, patterns and features in different lighting and conditions throughout the story.