Animation: Narrative Workflow

This week was dedicated to creating another swimming animation and how to composite it into an animation, to do this i took a closer look at Adobe After Effects. To begin with i had a look a several tutorials to help me look through the interface of the program. I really liked the idea of using the puppet tool in After effects, which would help me create a swimming animation in a very short period of time. I also like the idea of using the 3D work space so it gives a sense of depth to a piece, which was really nice. i plan on using that to make things move more lifelike.  After doing research into the program i began to start trying to animate a swimming scene on AE, i began by creating a figure in the vein of haroun in Photoshop before importing into AE. i then used the puppet tool  following the tutorial linked above.  my first test was very clunky and while i was happy with the swimming animation rig i need to make it so haroun doesn't blink and suddenly change direc

This week i began with the actual animation process of the scene to begin i began to try and create forms of life for my animation, above is a design for a light pulsing jellyfish which would nearly disappear when the light pulse completes, i was happy with this design. However, we had a 2nd meeting with the clients and was told that due to the plot of the story, the sea of stories is currently desolate and lifeless due to the plug stopping stories from being released into the sea. In the wake of this, i decided the redirect my efforts into creating a swimming animation for Haroun, i began by finding some references that would help me create my animation. i wanted to create a hand drawn point to point animation, showing what i have learnt in my human locomotion module that i took last year. I spent most of my time these two weeks creating my animation for this. Due to being unable to access the Computers are Uni, i downloaded a 3rd party program comprable to ToonBoom, calle

I began to create my aesthetic for the ocean, i wanted to create a look that looked like it was built up using paper cut outs, i began with experimenting on Photoshop to create things that try and fit the moody feel of the sea. I wanted to emulate the idea of loss of light the further we went down, however, there is a source of light at the bottom that emanates from the plug, so in order to keep these two things, i created a belt of waste and plastic that cuts out the light from the bottom of the ocean. fist i began with some research into oceans I also did some research into the vessel that haroun would be travelling on, as i only have to deal with the submerged part of the ship, i looked at side profiles of boats and fishing vessels and designed the hull of the ship in tandem with my research Here is my design for the bottom of the boat. i added an overlay in Photoshop to make it look like it is underwater, i can say i am happy with how this turned out I experimente

The meeting with the drama students happened this week. We were shown a snippet of their performance to help us understand what kind of performance they had intended. We then discussed more technical details with them as to how our animation would be shown. A showing of how our animation would play was very helpful in understanding and figuring out how to compose our animations. As we found out last week, the 3 places the play would take place were the Real world, Gup and Chup, fantasy cities, forming a ying yang between the two cities. Our group was tasked with working on Chup city, the city of darkness. This fit our groups research last week in which the images we researched were of a dark aesthetic. Continuing with this, our group went off and researched real life places, buildings and other such things to draw inspiration from. we wanted sort of a Asiafuturism landscape so began looking at places such as japan and china, i was also tasked with dealing with underwater locations