Hand-in

We've done it! Wooooooo :D
Handed our work into the Rave Live team on Wednesday evening and as we have not heard back from them with any problems it seems to be fine.

Jon completed the edit of the animation, there were no real problems although at some points we all wanted a slight change to the edit, and in the end I think we managed to change it enough so that everyone is happy with it.

The only real problem was that the sound designer was not able to complete the music or sound effects in time for us so we had to improvise and use music Emma had found and bought on the internet. I don't think this poses a huge problem though - there is already so much to our animation too many sound effects might overwhelm people! The music goes very nicely with it as well.

From here we are going to go back over the animation and add things we didn't have time for before.. The animation may even turn out a bit longer since we had to cut some of our work to meet the time constraint. There is also the sound to think about which the sound designer has assured us we can expect next week.
Overall I am happy with how our work turned out, the quality of the animation is good and it is consistently in terms of style and humour. It's a piece of work I am definately proud of and am proud of my group for completing :)

Formative - 20/04

Today was the formative with Jared. By this point we had already completed our animation but were still in the process of editing so we had a lot to show him.

Overall I think we did quite well as a group but my blog lagged evidence for some areas - I hadn't posted the animatic Jon made, or commented on our progress as a group but I've since gone back and done that so hopefully I can recover those marks for the summative. It was a good opportunity to see what was missing in my work and to realise I need to begin using my blog to post the status of my showreel! After the hand-in for the Rave Live animation I will start doing that here :)

My team members did well in their formative too, but Jon had marked himself very harshly and Jared had to raise his grades to compensate. I think me and Emma may try encouraging him more since he is always so down about his work when he doesn't need to be.

animated scenes

Since we have such a short deadline for this project, we are going to have to rely quite heavily on tweening. Emma has created some flash templates of the characters faces and bodies from different angles so that all we need to do is tween them and then animate their expressions, arms and legs on top of it.

I've just completed the rest of my animated scenes, but there is still some room for editing;


We still need to add the main character being hit by the words 'spotty' 'greasy' and 'nerd' and we're going to redo the spinning part at the end so that there isn't just a blank block of blue attacking him and instead the entire block has the spinning pattern on it.



This is most likely the shortest scene in the animation so I didn't want to put too much detail into it otherwise it would distract from the main character who doesn't really move. Some of the background characters are cameos of myself, Jon and Emma :)



This is the final scene for our animation and there is already a slight problem with the length but we are going to sort that out properly during the editing stage. I may also try and add a few more effects to the scene like a flash of light appearing with the hobo. I also made the background slightly bigger as at it's previous size you couldn't see the characters clearly enough.

My group are overall pleased with the animations however so if we do run out of time this is how the finals will look..

the funky chicken animation

One of the scenes I had to animate involved the boy dancing at a disco. Emma asked me to animate him doing the funky chicken but after searching on youtube I couldn't find the move she wanted (which she demonstrated one day in class). Then I recalled that The Mighty Boosh featured this dance move in one of the shows songs;


(At the time during 41-43 seconds)

Here is my version of it;


It doesn't look exactly right but since in the reference the character is spinning in a circle it was hard to accurately capture it. I've showed it to my group since and they are happy with it so it's fine to leave it like that. Emma and Jon even suggested that we use it at the end for comedic effect :)

I may have to edit it a little more to see how it looks like at a slower speed but for now that part is finished.

10-16th April

I had one final background left to draw which is for the pedestal scene at the end;


Kept it simple in the same style of the others and tried to use colours that complimented each other.

For the moment we are on track with our schedule and things are running smoothly. We are working well together as a group meeting deadlines and when we have issues to resolve such as details in the background or changes for the character designs we are able to find a way round them to benefit everyone. I am very pleased with this group, plus our shared love of 2D is great since it seems like most of the class prefers 3D.

Jon also finished the animatic;


So now that that is completed we can begin animating properly... We have also gotten one of our classmates Tom Ritchie to do the proper voiceover and are trying to get a sound design student to help with the background music.

This week on the 13th we also have a DVD Studio Pro walkthrough with Alex for working on our showreels. It was a useful experience as I had never used the software before and I know now how to present my CD showreel better. You can change the backgrounds, add buttons to link to different animations, create menus and slideshows.. It was a little complicated but I've made notes and am confident I can work the software.

Backgrounds complete..

Here are all the finished backgrounds bar one which I will try and complete asap (it's the one at the end with the hobo on the pedastal...)



I got feedback from my group to improve most of these;
-adding feet onto the disco people
-zoom out of grannys house
-darken the lighting for the street scene
-add a skirting board and more detail to the 'c-box' one
and i drew two new ones.. a classroom and a random brick wall for the beginning!

We have been powering through the work this week and Jon and Emma awesomely got the sound done with our classmate Tom Ritchie as the voice-over. I feel as though I need to work much much harder, I'm very worried that I'm holding my team-mates back so I'm doing loads of animating this weekend to make up for it.

We've decided to do 10 seconds of animating each and mine is the first ten seconds so it will mainly be focused on the boy and his facial expressions... Should be good hopefully, I intend to finish by Monday!

backgrounds...

I spent most of today working on creating the backgrounds for our animation...


The motorway scene...


Two different shots for the disco.. one for the girls dancing and the other for the main character doing the funky chicken!


Two random shots from the boys house for when he's pretending to play videogames with the box..


Granny's house! for the present scene.


and finally a random street for when the box is used as an umbrella :)

I have posted these images to show my group and after getting their feedback hope to improve and add on these.. I think the designs may be a little too simple in some of the cases like the street and the boys house but I didn't want it to detract from the main animation so I made it simple and had the colours be a little 'wishy-washy' to push the background back a bit.

Weds 31 March - Fri 2nd April

We have completely finished our work on the storyboards now and are beginning to think about the animatic, backgrounds and character designs!

During our Thursday lesson we started to decide vital information about our characters. About a month ago, Emma attended a Pixar lecture that told her about the use of shapes in character design - comical characters are round, evil characters triangular, and sturdy characters are rectangular.. interesting snippets like that. Taking that into consideration we began designs.. Both the hobo and the grandma are quite comical characters so we made them kinda fat..
The designs I concentrated on were that of the main boy and 3 of his classmates..


Here are some quick sketches of the main boy... He's pretty regular-looking which is the point.. but I tried slightly different styles and showed my group, they seemed quite happy with the designs and I think Emma is going to try and develop them further..


Concept art of his friends... The guy on the left is the main friend and he's a bit 'cooler' than the main character and acts more arrogantly so I tried to get that across in his figure and face... The two girls are going to be randomly dancing at the disco!
We have also decided that if we need more characters we might try and cameo some of our original ones made just for fun.. Should be good, we won't make a big deal about that though :)

Anyway, we managed to present our storyboards to the Rave Live team yesterday and they seemed pretty happy with the work. I talked them through it and Jon accompanied by showing images (unfortunately emma had a doctors appointment) but it went very well and the only thing they warned us about was using too many flashing images in case there are epileptics in the audience...

Our aim for the weekend is to finish the animatic and be ready for animating next week..
I am going to work on the backgrounds and have them ready to show.. Jon is going to complete the animatic and Emma is going to further develop the characters... I believe they will continue to do a fantastic job and just hope I can keep up with their enthusiastic pace :)