James Curran

We've finished our final project and have placed all our things on the wall for assessment on Thursday. I didn't have as much to physically present because I didn't have my larger drawings from the first animation brief.

I've very much enjoyed the animation discipline work we've done and the overall process and pacing of the workflow. It was a little bit jarring in the beginning but once you started getting into it, it felt productive and consistent.

Final Brief "Nursery Rhyme"

I have to admit I was a little hesitant with doing group work that is often either really good or really annoying. I was blessed to be in the former of groups.

In the beginning I was a little withdrawn perhaps because my mind was on CCS and the prompt of

Three Blind mice

Epic/Historical

Space Age

wasn't something that sparked many ideas for me. I don't have a great pool of reference for space themed bits of media so I didn't feel super comfortable coming up with ideas. The first day we were supposed to make draft scripts to which I opted to do some research instead of. In the beginning it didn't feel like I was pulling my weight as such but during the weekend we had a call on Sunday to show off our newly written script, of which I did do.

It was my first time writing a script but I was actually really enjoying it towards the middle. I finished after an hour and didn't really revise it because I was occupied with CCS work I needed to get done. There's a couple of things I learned, from the time I spent.

I'm not supposed to write descriptions of shots. (in the beginning)

My dialogue was really long and wordy. (I wanted to get my ideas of characterization across and didn't give myself time to revise and edit it which I would've done usually.

On Monday we finalized the script after taking different aspects of each of our scripts that we liked. From my script they took:

The beginning shots of the space craft showing characterization through visuals.

"Some of the characterization and dialogue ideas such as "is that Russian?"

I spent Monday working on CCS and then on Tuesday my group had storyboard stuff done but I didn't have much of an impact on it besides revising the argument scene between Ridley and Latimer in the buggy. I found myself although not contributing as many new ideas to a discussion but rather looking at the ideas we had and seeing if they fit in with an overall vision. I suggested having an overall theme for the story as it is an Epic and came up with the idea of blind beliefs and the consequences that can lead to.

I knew I had to start pulling my weight for the group and we started doing research. I was put in charge of landscapes as well as spaceships and their interior.

I found the Observing the Moon book to be quite useful for looking at the Apollo missions, reasons for its' discontinuation and the geography of the moon. Moonshine was a Dreamworks background art book that more so served as inspiration and motivation for my future background work.

We put together a google slide consisting of the research we did and these were the ones I made.

We then went onto look at style/aesthetic and once again I felt like I didn't contribute much to this discussion although I was okay with going for the Star trek, Akira hybrid we settled on.

We then started going into concept art. I was put in charge of landscapes and backgrounds along with Mik. I focused on the moon surface and the spaceship interior and exterior. I found this youtube video to be quite useful for getting started as I wasn't too confident in my abilities to make background art.

I found this process quite fun in keeping loose shapes with wide brushstrokes and practising stroke economy which aims to show great detail and imagery to the viewer with implied detail. I also tried playing with values. It was also my first time really using the gradient tool which add a little interest to the sky as opposed to just a flat colour.

I feel like I could've experimented more with composition but I wanted to get more work done so I took one of the compositions and changed the hue/saturation/brightness to show different colours and palettes to see what type of feel we want for the background. I did try and place the ship in different spots to see how it'd look composition wise but that was the extent of it. I settled on a closer view of the ship for my master shot.

My group liked the bottom three particularly the bottom left purple hue. I then took this and fixed the sky to make it pop more with stars.

I also spent time working on the space ship itself. I sketched them out traditionally based off the video I had in my research to get used to the shape and structure of the exterior and then went to do it digitally/. I quickly sketched out my shapes and then went over them with a paint brush. I didn't do line art and kept it pretty basic.

I think I got the basic look of it down here and once again played with the hues/saturation/brightness to see how it would look differently.

I went over it again but took more time to make it fit the Akira aesthetic more. I used airbrushes, with a lack of line and tried to make it more detailed in spots. In the end I finished it early and was mostly happy with the top half.

Before starting my master shots at home, I wanted to look at other parts of the project for my time in college. I felt like we were lacking some of the civilization development and ideas and started drawing up designs for that.

Basing it off roman architecture with elements of irish stone carvings with the idea of rat/mice imagery and looking at how a language could be formed from this with writing. When it comes to writing I knew the writing would be composed of scratches as if done by mice. The writing I thought would look like symbols not too dissimilar to kanji or Chinese characters but in a more primal less sophisticated form.

I knew the pillars would be the most opportune asset in our storyboard to illustrate a culture or some form of civilization. I played with shapes and tried relating them to Ryan's work so they would feel connected. (Ryan's work below).

I then took these designs and tried making very quick digitized versions but I didn't quite like how they turned out. I also tried seeing how their look in a dark environment being lit with flashlights to the same result.

This was all the concept and design work I was able to get done and I was quite happy with the results. If I gave myself more time to work on this I would've liked to have breached out to other parts of the project such as character work, cave interiors and the city itself. I think it would've been interesting to see what we all would have come up with for each part of the project but with the time we were given I would've liked to have experimented more with composition I think.

After preparing for the pitch presentation I focused on the master shots I was responsible for. I did the exterior of the ship on the moon landscape in the composition I picked out earlier.

Liberty did the sketch for the interior of the ship taking reference from the video I had seen for research.

I went over this in my style to keep it consistent. I found this workflow to be more efficient.

I think a big thing I learned from doing these backgrounds and something to keep in mind for next time is to use darker colours against the light ones to create more contrast and create depth. I feel in some parts of my work certain things don't pop out as much as I would like them to.

We then had our presentation which went well. I wrote down a scripts and practised it multiple times until I felt confident In what I was saying and could talk around it if I forgot any words. I used a Q card to help prompt my sentences with words that I knew I blanked on during my practises written down. I felt my part went smoothly and I remembered my points. I did speak too early for one of my script lines during the animatic but I don't think it that much of an impact.

Coming to the end of this project I learned quite a bit working with my group. I was quite happy with the work I did do and wasn't used to the actual good communication and enthusiasm my group displayed overall. Although I faltered in the beginning, all members in our group felt they had a moment or moments they weren't doing as much. We still covered for each other and always had new work to look at each day. It was really nice to work on something with people who were equally as dedicated to making something together.

If I had to change somethings for next time it would definitely be how much I contributed to new ideas in the group. I did come up with ideas but I felt I kind of took a back seat and looked at the ideas we already had to see if they would fit without coming up with much of an alternative.

I felt also that there were some things I was thinking that I didn't quite vocalise at times but as I grew more comfortable with the group I was more relaxed in sharing my ideas and criticisms.

This might be my last Tumblr post but thank you guys for the support and love you've all given me throughout this journey.

Signing out,

Today we had our pitch presentation in front of the class and our tutors. Our group was last to present and I think we all found it neve-racking to watch everyone go before us and waiting a couple hours.

With that being said our presentation went really well. None of us fumbled our words too much and kept in the time constraints we were assigned. We may have been a little off with the timing for the animatic but we still got our ideas across and I think our audience was still entertained.

Our only critique really was that we could've been more concise with our ideas and pushed the logline and marketing of our work more. We had a lot of ideas and work done that we wanted to talk about and present so perhaps we could've cut it down to what was important for our investors so know and let any follow up Q&A questions answer any further things we wanted to say.

Mikayla also made some merchandise for the group and tutors in the form of two shirts for our tutors and two variants of pins with our art on them.

Yvonne is wearing the shirt below.

Today we prepared ourselves for the pitch we're having on Monday. Our group divided the topics of discussion amongst ourselves and spaced the order of us saying things so it felt like there was an even distribution of speaking.

Ryan would do the introduction.

Liberty would briefly introduce the characters.

We all contributed to the animatic sequence.

James talked about the tone atmosphere and style/aesthetic.

Liberty expanded on the research for the previous subjects.

Mikayla also expanded on the research and concept art.

Ryan concluded our talk by discussing future plans.

We were pretty drained by the end of the week so we briefly practiced reading out the animatic script in character.

Mikayla would narrate what was happening.

James would play as Bennett Ridley .

Liberty would play as Claude Latimer.

Ryan would play as Philip Cranmer.

we spent some time practising later and we had some trouble getting the timing right but figured it was because we had an online practise and it would be easier in person. We proceeded to practise our individual parts until Monday.

We also worked on our master shots to put in our presentation and ended up with 6.

Liberty

Ryan

James

Mikayla

Today we went through the different things we wanted to get done by Monday and discussed our pitch a little. We then went on to continue our concept art further as this is the official last college day for the development of our work.

We discussed our master shots and decided which ones we'll try and get done by Monday.

James:

Exterior of Ship on Moon

Interior of Ship (rendering)

Ryan:

End shot of city

Astronaut helmet reflection

Liberty:

Buggy scene of astronauts

Interior of Ship (sketch)

Mikayla:

Buggy lighting up hall of pillars

Mural

Paul also had us thinking about sound and using it in our pitch to help sell the atmosphere and tone of our project. We started thinking about it with a list of things that might need sound.

Buggy engine

Wheels on ground

breathing of astronauts

radio static as they talk

stone shifting against stone (mural opening)

rumble of cave

cave ambience sounds (scratches to indicate mice?)

clicking of torches turning on

crash sound of buggy hitting rock

When we were thinking up of sounds we immediately thought of the infamous Minecraft cave sounds that are both creepy and ominous to straight terrifying.

This is some of the work we got done today.

James

(work of carvings and pillar designs)

Mikayla

(cave mural painted)

Ryan

(still in progress)

Liberty

Today we all did some concept art in our respective areas.

James continued working on the ship trying to fit it into the Akira style more than before and although the bottom is incomplete it gives a better idea of the desired look.

Liberty continued on character design work, and finished the three main characters. We also finally named them fully, whether or not this will have an effect on the pitch or project remains to be seen. They also continued on the final storyboard.

Bennett Ridley, Claude Latimer (yellow), Philip Cranmer

Ryan worked further on the city, developing individual structures to help differentiate the architecture and make it more visually interesting. They did this digitally with air brush with the Akira style in mind.

Mikayla also spent more time doing cave work.

Today we did a Zine Workshop with the Print students and a few others. The purpose of this workshop would be to create a zine to aid our presentations and help sell our pitch to Yvonne and Paul.

A zine is a self published, low cost booklet that can help display ideas, poems or short stories. We went through ideas of what to include in it including; a concept art book, newspaper to help sell the story and or a mission document explaining the details of the story, background information and worldbuilding.

We decided to keep it simple and decided on just including concept art but we haven't ruled out the other ideas perhaps in a different format. We just started printing the work we'd done and collaging it on the page and Paul suggested we mess around with the shape of the actual zine and composition.

This is some of the work we'd done and the process.

Here are some of the pages we came up with at the moment.

Ryan worked on their own idea of a comic based zine, using paper only and some scissors.

We then spent the afternoon continuing on our concept art.

Ryan worked on developing the undiscovered civilization and playing with colour and vector shading with Akira influence. They had also done the complicated space suits for the astronauts and simplified them to suit better in an animated medium.

The architecture for the city was inspired partly by the Spanish Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi, who plays with natural motifs and shapes.

Liberty spent more time doing character work and continuing on making the storyboard look cleaner and better visually. The character work will be shown next post.

Mikayla worked on the cave interiors more, playing with colour, composition and dimension.

James went on to develop the moon landscape more and played with colour while briefly looking at the lunar module exterior and playing with its' composition in the landscape.

Today we spent the morning assembling all our research together onto the wall. A lot of the images were from the google slides that we were working on throughout the week.

Before we get into that, the animatic was finished. Before it was 4 seconds per shot but this was adjusted to match the pacing better. We realised that the length of the animatic went to only 2 minutes 26 seconds, which meant we had more room to add to our story than what we originally thought.

We sectioned off different subjects of research to their own areas for clarity and this helped us figure out where we were lacking in research. One of these areas were style/aesthetic, in which Paul wanted us to have figured out by the afternoon. After taping all or stuff to the wall we started researching different styles.

We started looking at animated cartoons in the 60s and came across the star trek animated series. We thought we could use this style on our characters faces.

We also liked the style of Jonny Quest and Georges Méliès for the characters and the shading and folds of clothes from Akira.

We thought we'd take a more painterly approach to the background art as well, reminiscent to 60s retro posters and playing with an overall greyscale tone with pops of colour to add emphasis or interest.

This is the collection of research we've achieved thus far.

Today we spent our morning going through our storyboarding shots. We stuck our shots onto a larger piece of paper so that we could visually see the animation.

We made some edits and were cautious of the time constraints we had of 3 minutes.

We put our storyboard up onto the wall and planned to research different subjects we saw in the storyboard. We divided up this work amongst ourselves.

Mikayla was assigned to creating an animatic using the storyboard shots. This will help to time our animation and pace our shots so that the story is told smoothly.

We all went off to our own research and added them onto a shared google slides so that we could see what we're all doing.

James

I found two books that I found were interesting. One was a book of DreamWorks background artists and the other was about all things of the moon. I took some photos of pages I found were interesting.

Today we edited the script we formed yesterday to flow better and portray our ideas more clearly.

This is our finalised script that we'll be following as we continue working. We also began to explore storyboarding, looking at shots and composition and ways to construct them.

Over the weekend we all wrote our own scripts and came together on a call to read and discuss our stories. These were the new scripts.

Ryan

James

Mikayla

Liberty

The character names of the astronauts (Latimer, Cranmer and Ridley) are based off the three bishops that Queen Mary I burned at the stake because of their blindness in religion with their Protestant faith.

In the morning, different groups were having online meetings with Paul as he wasn't available to come in. With our different scripts and new idea we had a meeting with Paul.

These are the scripts we had come up with.

Ryan

Mikayla

Liberty

Unfortunately, he didn't feel as though the scale was nearly as large enough to fit the Epic genre. After our talk with Paul we decided to change our story idea again. Instead of encountering a mouse creature the three astronauts would stumble upon an ancient civilization shrouded in mystery.

We also wanted to explore this idea of Blind beliefs within our characters, such as blind ambition or blind faith.

We spent more time discussing this idea and dotting down our main story beats. these included

Introduce Characters

Establish Setting

Exploring Cave

Falling Moment (astronauts falls down a hole)

Inclusion of mice (creature)

Wide shot

Today we got our final brief in animation for the year.

For this brief we were randomly assigned to groups of mostly 4, with absentees lumped into their own groups.

I was put into Group 6 which consists of;

James @k00297230

Ryan @k00295632

Liberty @k00296662

Mikayla @k00293579

We would have a team leader that would rotate every 2 days starting with Ryan. We also made a group chat so that we could communicate with each other and share ideas outside of college more efficiently.

In this group we were randomly assigned the following for the project:

Nursery Rhyme - Three Blind Mice

Genre - Epic/Historical

Setting - Space Age (1957 - Present)

We then started coming up with ideas for the project. We started by writing out the nursery rhyme.

Three blind mice.

Three blind mice.

See how they run.

See how they run.

They all ran after the farmer's wife,

Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.

Did you ever see such a sight in your life

As three blind mice?

We took the prompt quite literally and started exploring the idea of three blind mice going on a space adventure.

We settled on an idea of three blind incompetent mice accidently launching into space instead of the other three competent mice. a lot of our ideas were written down below.

We particularly liked the idea of naming the ship the Farmer's Wife to match the rhyme and having their tails being cut off as the door closes on them after they enter the ship, or something along those lines.

We felt pretty confident in our original concept until we had a chat with Paul who brought up two points

There was only so much suspension of disbelief had before realising that the story was flawed. For example, the mice would run on a wheel to power the ship.

It wasn't quite fitting the large and broader scale of what the Epic genre encapsulates.

We realised our idea wasn't going to work so we went back to the drawing board after lunch.

We decided to not make the story so literal and casted humans as our protagonists. The new idea was essentially astronauts exploring a cave on the moon until a mouse like creature chases them out until it's stopped by falling stalactites.

Today we went to FOTA wildlife park to practice some life drawing on living, moving and breathing animals. This was exciting but I knew it would prove challenging with capturing an animal's gestures as they moved.

When we arrived at the park I did two laps around the map, only drawing on my second walk around. I took videos of animals on the first lap and observed them to see the movements they made and what they looked like.

The ostrich was a good example of this, to see how the neck bobbed back and forth as it lowered to the ground. I would show the video but I wanted to include another video later and Tumblr only allows 1 video per post soooo, here are some other photos I took.

There's a joey in the pouch!!

Here's a monkey gang meeting or something.

I took a video of a bunch of chicks that just hatched from some eggs. I don't know what they are specifically but they were just buzzing around with life!

On the second lap I did some drawings but I feel like I could've done more. I was kind of tired at this point and preferred watching them more but I still got a few drawings of particularly the buffalo, zebra and lions.

It's the first day back from Easter and we're getting back into the swing of things. We talked about our trip to Fota and went over what we'll be doing today. We even got some hints at what our next brief is which is indeed a group brief that involves nursery rhymes!

Some people went to finish their lip synching for the previous brief while the rest of us tidied up some of the work we had in the room.

We then did some group bonding exercises and games to get to know one another more in preparation for the next brief.

first we were split into three groups where we were to construct characters. One group would make a random head, another the head and then the legs. Each part of the body were kept hidden from the others so we'd end up with a fantastical combination.

This is how some of them turned out

Later in the day we revisited them and took one combination we liked and drew their character quickly. I really liked the following character whom I have bestowed the name Sandra.

After we did this exercise we took a break and met back at the church gallery where we did numerous activites. Firstly we played with some games/animal figures in groups of 4 where half the group would play and the other half did life drawing of them. I think this was a little helpful in trying to draw something that is actively moving. Here are some of those sketches.

This was a scene of the animals we played with where the lamb would be sacrificed in a satanic ritual.

The next game we played was where we were put into groups that rotated between people and were given a prompt. with this prompt we'd discuss the topic and at the end draw something that peaked our interest within the conversation.

The three prompts were

Airport Security

Sandwiches

Pets

In airport security I drew a story where someone was at a shooting range and their friend left a bullet in their backpack that was then processed in airport security and the girl had to spend two days in a Polish jail abroad.

In Sandwiches we mostly shared our disinterest in the food whereas a member of our group brought up how big their cheese was in the sandwiches someone made for them.

For Pets we didn't bring up anything too interesting until a member of our group brought up how many one eyed cats were living around them, travelling together like a gang.

I found these quite funny to draw up and enjoyed this task.

When we came back we were put into separate groups again and made to list out different things that makes up team work and what could jeopardize it. The main things brought up were

.Communication

.Co-ordination

.Respect

.Compromising

Paul showed us how to assemble our pieces onto Adobe Animate and how to easily lip synch our work. It was a lot of steps but I typed them down so bear with me.

The first step was bringing our photographed pieces onto Photoshop and cutting them out of their backgrounds, and saving them in a PSD file. We then imported them into Animate onto our library. After that we dragged our face onto the stage along with the neutral mouth shape.

This is where we began the lip synching progress.

find your end time and create frame, and name your layer head

bring in your audio file and name the layer audio

bring in neutral mouth and name the layer mouth

convert mouth into symbol and type as graphic

click on mouth properties and go to Looping. Click on play single frame.

double click on mouth symbol and add blank keyframes.

Do a blank keyframe for each mouth shape type and frame by frame add them in to each frame.

Click on mouth properties and Frame. In Label name the frames for each mouth shape with the sound they say for ease.

Go back and click lip synching. You then need to substitute each letter with the corresponding mouth shape and put lip synching to audio layer.

the lip sync should be done then and when you're exporting it put the audio layer to the second frame because apparently you won't hear it for some reason.

Also export it as vimeo 1080p

When I did this I realized pretty late that the audio I used had most of my takes on the one file so the bit I lip synched was only the bit where I said my name at the beginning. I tried fixing this by slicing up the audio but I ran out of time so I'll try and do this when I get back after Easter.

In the meantime this was what I managed to get done. I also added the background pieces and motion tweened them rather quickly to get the basic effect I wanted. I would've like to have moved my mini me as well but that required moving the lips and potentially messing with the lip synching and I didn't want to risk that at the time.

I spent yesterday painting out my background for my animation, keeping Alison Friend's style in mind.

I made sure to divide up my background into pieces as certain parts would need to move separate to the background. Almost like having different layers digitally. This is the main part of the background

Basing off my last post of my background work, I added colour and tried to imply depth but I feel like I could've made the foreground of it brighter and but vibrant. I also feel like I could've done the same for the other different pieces but with them being mostly grey I found that difficult.

I also made sure that certain pieces extended more than what would be visible so when I'd move certain pieces you'd still see the background. I was moving forward and slightly towards the right so the stone ground would recede out of frame and expose more of the hidden grass background for example.

I took photos of each piece and then began assembling it digitally.

today I was stressed.

I would be giving birth to my mini me!

I spent the morning finishing up on some of the work I had done yesterday to complete what I could of my sculpture. This was what it looked like before.

Yeah, looking rough.

going off my original base i just went with layering a bunch of paper to create the face shape because I thought it would be easier. I was wrong. I used toilet paper to build up a base for the hair and forehead, which I then layered with paper. I used a scissors to curl paper strips for some extra layers of hair. I must've been colour blind when painting it because I did not mean for it to turn out so orange but here we are. It looks like my mini me was involved in a tragic fire within their family home and got hit by a car after running out onto the road, trying to escape it. ;(

The nose base started off pretty proportionate but somewhere along the way it clearly slipped down a bit and left little room for my mouth. The chin is practically non existent. The body I was using my thread idea to create clothes with a elevated layer for the collar. I had a bit of work done but need to do a lot more before I wanted to take photos of it but I knew I hade limited time so I settled with getting half of it done.

Because my nose was so big and there was little room for my mouth I decided to use the default phenome templates on our Moodle as they were small and thin. I would've liked to have considered other styles for the mouth that may have gone with my illustrators style better but to be honest the mouth was an after thought for me.

I cut these out and brought them to be photographed with Deborah along with my head.

We placed them on a green page flat and shone a light down on all of them to try and get no shadows. I layed out all of them which will then be edited individually out piece by piece which can be used as an asset on top of my head photo. This was a much simpler idea than photographing the head with blue tacked mouths on them multiple times as the head would probably move with every mouth replaced.

I also forgot one of my mouths so I did it myself back in the room. I did it on a flat red background hoping to get enough light that there wouldn't be shadows.

Then we photographed the final mini me piece. against a green background. I angled the camera slightly lower, looking up to hopefully obscure some of the obvious and ugly work behind it.

The final mini me, I was quite happy with. I completed the threaded top and added buttons with loose threads hanging out them as well as using coloured paper as a substitute halfway through.

I then had to attach the head onto the neck and base. This was difficult as the head was heavy behind it so it kept leaning back and needed support. I just stuffed and taped some brown paper to hold it up haphazardly. I somehow did it although you can kind of see the tape behind the neck more obviously.

I'll have to edit that out tomorrow if I can. I also need to individually cut out these pieces digitally and assemble them onto my background which I'll need to photograph tomorrow morning.