Specialism
Trevor's
Travels
Final
Evaluation
This
assignment is the one I was looking forward to making throughout the
entire course because this gave me the chance to have complete
creative freedom for anything I wanted to make. With that being said
I had the full intention of creating a short animation from the start
as this is the area that I aim to head into for a career moving
forward. I wrote the story for this short tale years ago, it's about
the connection between a little child and a balloon and the happiness
the child feels when they have the balloon to play with, however that
feeling soon changes when she loses grip of the balloon and it floats
away however this tale is from the perspective of the balloon and the
journey he takes after being lost by the child.
For
this assignment I started off by watching short movie clips and
gathering images from Disney shorts I chose to do this as within
these short movies the film is carried entirely by music and
animation without the use of dialogue, from this I wanted to test
myself to see if I could capture emotion from an inanimate object the
main inspiration for this story was gathered from Disney's The Blue
Umbrella.
Before
I began the creation process for this animation I already had an idea
on how I wanted the creation of these characters to go, the real
thought provoking part was to give these characters emotion for my
target audience to connect to, the target audience for this piece is
aged 5+. I watched TV shows from when I was a child like Rollie
Pollie Ollie and used this as inspiration for the blocked out shapes
for the landscape and buildings.
I
began the research for this assignment looking at all sorts of games
to see how the animations worked within the cutscenes to capture
emotion from the player's I also aimed to dig deeper to find out what
rig these companies used to animate there characters Biped, Bones or
C.A.T. But the trouble with this was these companies obviously keep
their creation information locked up tighter than a drum, the main
thing I found was an article from CD Projekt Red where they mentioned
the rig for Geralts knuckles to grip his swords from The Witcher 3. I
also looked at several YouTube videos which spoke about the creation
process behind some games such as Uncharted and more specifically the
animation within the game and how the physics worked to make the
characters maintain their realistic motion, through the write up of
my research I tried to separate it into sections where the start was
a different assortment of games cutscenes both in gameplay and
trailers this was to see how these different scenes can work to
capture the audience and draw them in evoking all sorts of different
emotions. From this is would then move onto a more detailed part of
my research which is where I focused more on what I planned to make
for my final assignment and from this I looked at the blue umbrella
which is the centre point from where I got my inspiration for my
idea. After I had gathered some information on the points I wanted I
looked at more information from the creative side of animations so
from this I then looked into the different rigs that we can use to
give a character its movements and found that bone rigs where the
standard in most forms of animation.
After
all the research I started on the creation process for this piece by
creating a storyboard and the animatic, I enjoyed the creation
process behind the storyboard part as I began to see the characters I
had envisioned from my idea drawn to paper and the story visually
coming together. During the creation process of the animatic I added
a base soundtrack to the background to see how the story would work
being carried solely by the songs and the emotion the characters
could invoke from my audience, once I had the animatic finished I
showed it to my target audience to see what they thought of the
layout of the story and they really liked the idea, personally I feel
once I was able to see the finished animatic that it worked nicely to
see a rough copy of what I hoped to be my final project and
furthermore I saw what I had created in a digital form and from what
I saw it was going well.
Once
I had all the pre-production paper work finished I had to decide what
art style I was going to use to make my final film, my original
intention was to make a traditional animation and hand draw the film
scene by scene, however I soon realised that this wouldn’t be
possible due to time constraints with other units and there deadlines
coming up throughout our progression in this unit. So from this I
decided to make it in 3DSMax I began by creating the main protagonist
through this tale and that would be Trevor the balloon, during the
creation process of him I looked online at how other animators bring
life to an inanimate object as this was going to be an issue with the
creation of my animation because my main character was a balloon that
doesn’t speak and I hoped to draw in the audience through the use
of the characters eye’s alone.
I
then made the remaining characters and the scene’s that the short
film would take place in, for the buildings and world space I got a
lot of inspiration from the kids TV show Rollie Pollie Ollie, I chose
this because this show looks nice in its simplicity with the blocked
out characters and landscape and this seemed appropriate for the
younger audiences and so from this I chose to make my models with
that art style in mind. As the development of my scenes began to
progress I liked the way they were looking and through this I had to
think of ways to add motion to my background to give the scene some
extra life and I decided to model some 3D clouds and stars which
would slowly move across the scene as they progressed I was very
happy with the way these look in the scenes, not only does it achieve
the goal of adding life to the background of the scene but the way
they were modelled fits perfectly with the remainder of the scene. I
originally found the animation for the stars to be a little tricky
because I wanted to find a way to make them look like they were
twinkling and I chose to make them differ between rotating and
scaling which gave me a nice twinkling effect that I was looking for.
With
the creation of the balloons the trouble wasn’t so much in the
modelling as I found that to be quite simple when I achieved the
correct shape, which I then simply added some eyes and eyelids to
convey emotion on my characters, however this is when the main
troubles began to arise with the balloons, I attached the eyelids to
the eyeball and the eyeball to the balloon but because the eyelids
were created from duplicating the eyes there was a trouble with the
clipping of the eyelids through the corner of my eyes and the
position I had them in worked the best because if I moved them
forward it made the character look misshaped and if I moved them back
the clipping issue obviously was worsened. This issue however wasn’t
something that I seemed to notice when I began to animate as the way
the character moved on the screen was favourable as to not see the
clipping issues.
I
then began work with the human character models which went smoothly
and no trouble appeared until the creation of the models were done,
this is where the troubles began to arise my original intention was
to add some clothing to my characters, from what we had been
previously shown on how to use garment maker which I aimed to use to
make mine, I followed a step by step tutorial online on how to create
them efficiently and all was going well until it came time to stitch
them together this is when the garments I had made couldn’t find
the object even after I selected it through the both the side toolbar
and the model itself. To counter this I decided to try a different
approach and chose to try the push modifier for some clothes and so
from this I selected parts of the body where the clothing would have
been featured and used the feature to create some clothing this
worked like a treat until I added a cloth texture to the object,
gravity and some other physics to the object I kept finding that when
I simulated the physics on the object the material all went crazy
regardless on which I chose, I once again looked online for a guide
on how to fix this problem and found that everything I did was right
I think it must have been a problem with the model itself. This was
then worsened by the time remaining in this unit so I had to make the
decision to keep working on this part of the object or proceed to get
some animation done and I would have returned to this later if I had
the time left to play with it.
All
in all I have thoroughly enjoyed this unit generating my ideas for a
short animation film, I was able to choose from some short stories I
wrote from when I was a child watching Disney films and drawing my
own characters and creating stories, this felt like a bit of a dream
come true in some respects as I was able to have complete creative
control throughout the making, I have also shown the finished product
to my target audience and they really liked the story and the
animation and so from this although there's a few major thing I would
like to improve upon I am glad that I pleased the my audience.
With
this unit I was able to have creative freedom on the animation, the
story and everything that I wanted to make, there have definitely
been many problems in the creation process along the way such as
clothing not working with my models, time constraints with all the
other units throughout the year that we had to do alongside this one,
the aim was to also have no dialogue in this piece as I wanted the
characters to evoke the emotion from my audience with some music
running along in the background to carry the tale along, my original
intention for this was to create my own music and have that play in
the background of this tale however this was something else that I
wasn't able to achieve because I fell ill and was hospitalised for a
little while at the end of this unit and didn't have the time to make
it, I was offered an extension to this unit but I didn't want to take
it I wanted to get it finished for the original due date, anything
that wasn't complete in that time as horrible as it would be I would
put it down to a learning experience and I need to make sure I manage
my time better next time, finally the research while I understand why
its required I managed to write 37 pages and over 11000 words and all
this time I spent on gathering information from other animators who
inspire me, as interesting as this was to read and collect to see
how these professionals work and how they make their creations, I
felt that it heavily cut into my time in the production of my own
piece. Given more time I would have spent more of it on trying to fix
these troubles providing I didn't have many other units coinciding
with this one, I do feel in some respects that what I originally
intended to make here was too much for just 1 person to make.
As
much as I have enjoyed this unit I feel that moving forward I need to
focus more on making something that is doable in the time allocated
rather than aim to big.
