Helena's Blog

Different color blood tests I did some tests to see what color blood I’d prefer to do in the animation, but in fact it was the bright pink one that won the tests. It matches with her purple hair and it’s so dramatic on itself. It’s important to do color testing to see what colors do we prefer in our projects

ForeFront 05 Adventure Time Adventure time is a tv animated series, very popular known world wide, but what is less known is the Adventure Time: Distant Lands.That started in 2020 It’s The show but focused on Marceline the vampire queen and Bubblegum the Queen of Candyland and their relationship as well as saving the world from a dragon. Around from 2020 and 2021 we’ve been noticing a increase of LGBTQ+ characters in shows, by this I mean officially admitting a character being gay or trans, or not hidden those facts from the public anymore. Tv-show and movies are starting to be more open and less scared of sharing to the public the LGBTQ+ and spread more positive awareness to this. What this brings to the industry is tv-shows feeling less strict of the things they can and can not do in animations. Before society wasn’t as open as it in now so it was taboo and risky to put LGBTQ+ characters in the series. It could cause uncalled for drama and the show could be cancelled just for that. Adventure time was no different, although the show was adored by many fans, they kept hidden the relationship between Bubblegum and Marceline, only revealinh at the very last episode that they were together and even kissed. The creator have admitted that they felt scared of sharing that fact to the public, but in the end things were different than they were in the beginning of the show. That said they created a new series on 2021, Aventure time Distant Lands 2021, which showed openingly without any restraints the relationship of Marceline and Bubblegum. Industry of animation can learn from this and keep being open minded to LGBTQ+ characters and spread positive awareness to this community. What I learn for myself is not to be afraid and put in  my animations something that I believe is right, can’t be afraid of the negative criticism of people since my content can help other people relate to it and spread more positivism and acceptance to the public eye,. REFERENCE: Cartoon Network (2021)  Adventure Time: Distant Lands - Obsidian Official Trailer | HBO Max Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_6fngGWBrE Acessed at: (16/05/2021)

Forefront 04 The Mitchells vs The Machines This movie came out this year of 2021, it’s about a unique different family that the daughter and the father don’t have the much connection, but during saving the world from the machines they bond and fight together to defeat the machines. What this movie does great is mixing the 2D animation with 3D elements, another example of this was Spiderverse, but they did more into the comic style while The Mitchells movie focus more on an artstyle of 3D mixed with 2D doodles of a teenager. The fact that more and more movies are embracing the 2D elements into their 3D features shows that animators want to prove that 2D isn’t dead and will never be, since as it can be proven through these movies, it’s still a very important tool to use on a movie making it much more appealing and fun to watch.  The parts where they use 2D. are on cutscenes that the main character demonstrates her emotions, and the 2D doodles that appear on the cinema screen demonstrate and express the emotion in a more expressive way than if it was done by 3D only. The textures of the characters are 2D drawings and they give much more life to the design of the character. The glasses are also 2D giving it a flat but interest feel to the character of the mother. What I learn from this is that 2D and 3D are a perfect combo that I can use on my animations. Giving my animations a more 3D feels or more a more 2D feels and mixing both together. It’s important as an animator to be open minded for different technniques. If the animators including me are open minded to new elements like this and mixing tools together, we can became very creative and surpress the industry with something new and unique. REFERENCE: Netflix (2021)  The Mitchells vs. The Machines | Official Trailer | Netflix Available at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ak5dFt8Ar0 Acessed at: (16/05/2021)

Changing ending During my animatic, I talked with my mother about the story as well the two endings I had for the main character. One involved her killing more and enjoying it, although that would result in an open ending which could conflit with the moral of the story. The second ending which is the one I ended up choosing was that it was all her imagination, as she was just reflecting her rage towards her bullies with the monster she drew. But ended up not caring about the bullies and just ignoring them giving them attitude that they can’t hurt her anymore.

Animatic Final Major Project Here’s the finished animatic. The audio won’t have any chances, but I’ll add something to the animation, when I’ll be working on it finalized. Which is I noticed and a friend pointed out that It’s confusing where the monster comes from and it’s not clear that all of that happens in her imagination. With that I decided to add a few more frames either the Monster appearing from her pen or from her doodles drawings, which is where the monster is drawn at the beginning of the animation. Repeating two times where the monster comes from gives a confirmation to the audience that it’s something of hers. During the killing scenes I’ll use After Effect to edit the colors and make them more saturated and darker, to give a more vile sense of emergion to the animation. Although the animation is 1 min long, most frames will be still images as if it’s a comic book , which is my goal. A mix of comic pages and panels along side the frame by frame animation. The background is fairly simple too they are on a hallway so there isn’t much details and the shots can be easily manipulated with the transform tool to fix the pespective.

Inspiration for Final Animation This animation made by: Kinga on their final major project was a small inspiration for my final animation. It’s about a girl that is bullied so she decides to perform a ritual to invoke a demon, only to realize that demon is useless but a cute kind of useless, so instead of having revenge over her classmates she just gains a new friend. Which is a demon. Some parts of this animation can be associated with my own animation, in the sense that my main character girl also invokes from her imagination a little monster friend. Although in my animation it’s all from her imagination, it isn’t real and the monster isn’t friendly at all to others. As it is shown by it murdering the other bullies. REFERENCE: Kinga. (2015)  Maddie Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxdvZR1ncmA Acessed at: (13/05/2021)

using Audacity to edit audio One of the disadvantages of using only After Effects for editing my videos, is that the audio options are very limited as well the animation doesn’t render the audio real time with the animation. It would be a lot of stopping and rewatching the clip all over again. With the help of Audacity things become easier, not only does Audacity give a variety of sound effects but it’s also very practice to cut past and move the audio clips. Thanks to this I was able to edit the audio in less than an hour time. For animation specially animation with a deadline I find it very important to use tools to speed up our process.

Background Concept for Poem Animation For me this kind of backgrounds are fast to do, and textures give them an unique contrast with the flat color animation that I have on the video. Composing these two together would give the animation a more finish look and intriguing with the textures. I make sure the viewer isn’t distracted more with the background than the animation itself, since the character is moving bringing more attention to them as well it possesses lineart unlike the background, these two elements easily bring the audience attention to the animated character.

Gantt chartt Starting from March and ending in August. This chartt shows my time schedule and work put into the animation. Most of the work was done during April it’s where I balanced different parts of the animation to see if everything would fit together. Having all the ideas and art concept along with character design all finished, middle of May I focused on finding free copyright audio for the animation, so that I could fit the animatic frames with the music. Syncroning both together so that they could come out as harmonic as possible. Since I already had in mind exactly what audio, and audio effects I wanted in my head, finding them on youtube and checking for the rights was the easy part. A couple hours into researching them and then putting them all together on Audicity where I could freely edit them with the pacing and volumes and pitch corrections. Since most of the pre-production animation is done all that is left to do is actually finish the final animation. I want this animation to look clean so I placed a lot of weeks of June and July to work on it, skipping the first week of July to give myself a person break. Around the beginning of August hopefully all should be finished

Bullies Character Design I wanted the bullies to give a childish yet intimitant look to them. so I used the theory that sharp objects are usually associated with more evil dangerous things. In character design it’s usually the villian that possesses edgy lines and corners, while the heroin has soft corners and curves.  The bullies here will have that grin on their faces, happily bullying the amin character on the story. One thing I wanted all of them to have in common is the fact that they are have a skirt. Which I wanted to show that this is bullying between girls coming from the same school.

Forefront Post - Monster Mesh Monster Mesh is an animation tool created in 2021, it’s used to help animators or other designers or even people who can’t draw at all. It’s a tool for everyone of all levels of skills. This program can help the industry create animations cutting half the time it takes to create them. It’s an impressive tool that although it’s still in its early stages of being alive, it’s already a well developed programmed animation app. It consists on the person drawing a simple doodle (for now it can still glitch if it’s a more complex drawing) and that’s it. The program can do all the animated frames for you and made the doodle into 3D with a click of one button. This program is still new but it can show the public the possibilities of working with 3D animation faster than it was before. The program does all the rigging for the person and all the frames too. The person only needs to draw and decide how to animate it. This tool is very useful for the industry because it introduces a new approach to the 3D animation, faster and efficient and the app shows that it will get better over time. This helps in my practice because if i need a quick 3D simple element for my animations I know I’ll be able to use this program and in just a few seconds I already have a full freshed out animation. It cuts out a lot of time of working on animation. The industry grows more and more giving content to people and faster, giving the audience weekly animations or even faster than that. So to avoid overworking the animators , using easy accessable tools like this will bring a lot of new solutions to the table. It will help a lot of animators to work faster.

ANIMATIC POEM FOX The rough animatic for the final animation of the titleed poem ‘Fox’

𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐭 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭 02 The Midnight Gospel Analyse “The Midnight Gospel”(2020) Is a tv show in netflix in the format of a Podcast, but the catch is that it’s an animated podcasts, with the interview recordings of  Duncan Trussell.  The show was a huge success when published,but not only it brought for me amazing quality podcast where they discuss phylosophical topics but also the unique animation was what brought this series to live and got the attention of the public. Why am I talking about this animation particulary and not any other show? I’ll explain why this animation stands out so much and why it’s a great new trend for the animation Industry. This animation pushes the boundaries of a stantard animated show. instead of focusing on a strict script and drawing the frames and the storyboard based on that. The animation actually completly skips the script and goes straight to the storyboard, the directors give the animators completly freedom of ideas to do whatever they feel like in the storyboard, which is rare. With this several different animators just give their own input on the beautiful bright colorful animation that The Midnight Gospel brings. Because this animation doesn’t come from a script it feels more dynamic and expontaneous, the viewer would never guess what would happens in the next scene and how it could relate. it could be seen as random, but although in the surface it possesses this random feel to it, it’s actually always based in a solid theme of the show. Worlds ending or life point of view. This new method of animation is something fresh and new to the industry, something different that would bring the eyes of curious people to the show, the animation pulls them in and they stay for the content of the podcast. What I can learn from this in my own practice, is the structure of feeling expontaneuous from time to time instead of sticking to a stiff script. Sometimes we bring to the animation something new and unique without even realizing and this unique process can allow people to feel more curious about my work and what thoughts go around my head to come up with the ideas I put into the animation. REFERENCE: Netflix (2020) The Midnight Gospel | Official Trailer | Netflix , Available at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kQWAqjFJS0&t=7s Acessed at: (06/05/2021)

Visual Studies I wanted the animation to have a few comic strips, where they would slide left or right up or down during the animation making it dynamic and mixing it up with the 2D animation. It could look appealing to use the comic strips to add more composition dynamism to the scene. I made the main character get out of frames on purpose so it would pop up and stand out more. I also decided that the powers that she’ll use will be color purple and so will the blood of her victims. So that both connected together, since it’s her magic that is killing the others.

Monster Buddy Design This little guy came naturally, I wanted him to be somehow part of the amin character, so I used her hair as a silhoutte form for the monster,  turned it around and eventually after adding the floating claws it became the monster that is today. I choose dark colors since this comic won’t be that friendly to begin with.

 Character Design Colors The progress of thoughts of the picking colors for this characters started as me wanting to give her a innocent yet daring look. I started with a baby blue then a grey. The blue would represent innocent while the grey a more devilish dark side. But looking at it, it reminded me a lot of Alice in Wonderland which I didn’t want. So I experiemented with other colors, I wanted purple to be involved because it reminded me of witchcraft which the store tells us about dark magic. in the end I managed to pick two completary colors that match together and also a dark grey to reveal the dark side of this character

Poem Storyboard  Here’s the finished storyboard for the ‘Fox’ poem written by  Phoebe Stuckes I made the character basically transform into a fox along with the duration of the animation and as the poem is being spoken. I’m still deciding if I add text to the animation or not, it will depend if I have enough time for it really. I did black and white shading for a few panels when it was more important to know the first or middle and furthest background.