Amara Norman Animations

For my personal portfolio I managed to finish off my claymations and turn them into gifs using giphy. They’re now uploaded onto giphy for people to use. I also put them on my website along with some other projects i worked on and got done for the website. My website is complete now and live! It’s looking better than my website from second year, and i really enjoyed making it. I’ve put my showreel up, which shows my best work/recent work- but i don’t have music to my showreel because of the advice we got from guest speakers at the ani wip not to have music on there. But  i think for my website i need to have some music on there? But overall, I’m happy and proud of the work I’ve done for this unit, and I’m glad it’s finally come to an end.

This is the final poster i did for Jamie’s film ‘Twice as Mice’. It took quite a while to get this done, i took a load of inspiration from the vintage Mickey Mouse film posters, and thought it would be cool to try and do my own style one.

This is my progression reel for twice as mice. It’s all the works and experiments I’ve done since Jan for the project!

This is my progression reel for Error! It’s quite lengthy - but this is all the work/experiments I’ve done leading up to the final result from Jan!

This is my showreel for 2019. It’s all my works from this year which I think are my best. They go from best to least and it’s around 50 seconds. From what I learnt at the ANI WIP I didn’t want to over complicate it and put in works just because it was something i had done. I think the work shows my interest in both 2d and stop motion and shows my understanding in movement. I’ve also not put music to my showreel because the guest speakers said they didn't listen to the audio, they just played it. So I thought there was no use in adding in any audio. I don’t know if i should add any for my online portfolio, just because that’s open for everyone to see not just employers? It’s something to think about a little later on I suppose.

I had to edit the intro of the animation with the holograms and the holographic update. After 2 nights trying, I couldn’t figure out how to make the holograms move with the camera movement at the beginning. I tried motion tracking, and it didn’t work too well. I also tried key-framing and then upping the scale of the holograms but it wouldn’t work that way either. So i had to leave it as the holograms kind of popping up and then follwing that camera zoom by keyraming their scale size. It’s really irrittated me that I wasn’t able to do it properly, so I’m going to continiue working on it for the degree show in June. I also ran out time for the holograms, because I was asked to do some other stuff, as well as masking out the hand for the hologram update which took quite a while. So this is what it is so far - but I have every intent of fixing the beginning after hand in.

This is the end scene for the holograms. This is where everything goes to chaos and the meeting man tries to disconnect them all. It took quite a while to scale these all down, especially where I had to reanimate most of them to fit into the animation Isa had done and then animating the other scenes for the animation as well, but I like it, my only problem is with the hologram in the background, doing the ‘okay’ sign. He’s a little too big for the scene so he doesn’t fit quite right - so i need to animate him again for the degree show. AE also didn’t export it properly with the hologram’s opacity either which i also need to change.

This is the second edit of the sigh that I masked out!

I managed to get the  astronaut into the spaceship today - just in time for the edit of the final film. Once I figured out the transparency background, I had to animate a mask to cut out the extra movements, that would make it look like the astronaut was outside of the spaceship.

This is the second sigh! Again the white outline shows - but it shouldnt be too bad on the rendered background.

Cat and Isa asked if I could animate a mask for the astronaut so that we can just put his layer on top of the spaceship - so I had to work out how to get a transparent background from PNG files as it was different from just taking off the transparency toggle on the composition. I had to use key-light to remove the white and it’s worked okay. There’s a thing white line that outlines the astronaut - which i tried to key out but that then took away the white of the suit. So I’m not sure if it’s from the PNG background or from the suit itself, but it;s small enough that it’s not as noticeable and distracting.

It took a little while to scale everything to size for this scene because I had used a different reference for the background and Isa had animated after easter, but I’ve managed to get it to the right scale. I think I’m going to have to do this for the rest of the hologram scenes, so I’m a little behind on 2D animation right now. 

The highlighted ones are the titles I liked the most, and I think fit more than the others, but we’ll see. It was actually quite hard to think about titles, I don’t like coming up with names for things, but hopefully this will give Jamie some inspiration?

The lighting works really well, unlike the old render I was using where it turned the holograms white, here they’ve stayed the same colour!

I’ve added on the holograms to the 3D renders! I had to find a way to export the holograms with a transparent background, and I had to do it by exporting the RGB and the Alpha channel together. But in doing this, its turned the holograms flat, whereas on AE, I animated them to be a little see through. But it’s looking well so far. I have the rest of the scenes to add - but so far this is what it looks like. I’m waiting for Isa to put on the textures for the meeting man, and then the textures for the actual room to make it look less bare for the final render for the degree show.

I added in Emily’s name - even though she’s no longer part of the group, she still did some modelling work so I put her in with the others. 

I made my ‘pull my finger’ animation into a gif for my personal portfolio. I’m a little bit disappointed I wasn’t able to add colour onto the background, but I’m still happy with the idea of it. Like the others I’ve included it onto my projects page on the website.