Final Reflection on Semester 2

At the beginning of this semester I set out to create lessons teaching story telling and animation principles to children using video tutorials as the media to do so. This was to give me a greater understanding of animation as I would have to break it down to the most basic parts. I have ultimately evolved my initial goal to creating a professional presence with showreels and developing more high quality animation. This hs not changed my goal I wished for at the beginning of the year of ultimately improving my own animation abilities, I have just found another way of doing so.

I am overall happy with how I have worked on this project although I really could have done a better job interacting with peers on Behance. I found it difficult to show animation development on what is ultimately a very visuals based blog site so ended up posting work to more animation centric forums. I have certainly missed out of interacting with classes mates but have also learned a many good lessons about putting your work out in the web where people really dont hold back with there criticism. My animation abilities have definitely improved since I began this project and I have a lot of new pipelines I can use in the future when undertaking animation work.

In the end i have ended up with something very different from what I started with at the start of the semester but I am glad to see where its ended up.

Final 3D Animation Showreel

After taking into consideration the feedback I have previously received I have now gone down a route of splitting my show reel into two separate videos, one showcasing my 2D Animation work and the other my 3D. This not only gives the show reels a clearer visual style but also means I can use each show reel to more specifically target any positions I may be applying for whether a 3D Games developer or a 2D narrative animation studio. I will be producing a little more 2D work specifically for the showreel before I complete it but have finished my 3D one in time to send out a few applications for internships along with hand ins. In this showreel I decided to use open source music instead of creating my own as I dont want to distract myself too much from the visual content and also using music done by professionals just ups the quality a great deal not that I wont continue to try and improve my own music abilities.

Feedback on Eddies Quadcopter Reflection

I have now got a decent amount of feedback and am very happy with how my animation has been received. I have yet to get any negative comments about the video, in fact people have been commenting on how smooth they found the animation to be which was one of the biggest things I set out to accomplish. As well as this its incredible to have people finding something I created being actually effected by it in some way whether that's finding it funny or in some cases feeling bad enough for Eddie that they feel the need to comment on how sorry they feel for him. Thats something I will always like about animation is the ability to interact with an audience I have never met and to create worlds and characters real enough to illicit actual feelings from the audience. The process I used for this animation Is clearly one that works well for me and I will be taking the lessons I have learned from it forward and possibly considering to do another feature on Eddie in the future.

Eddies Quad Copter Final Animation w/Sound

Final cut of Eddies Quad copter. This is one of the first animations I put heavy focus on the sound design instead of it being a last minute thought and Im very happy with how it turned out. I had set out to create a very smooth animation and feel I achieved that, the initial blocking out stages of the animation and doing everything in 24fps has helped tremendously. I will be putting up on various forums for animation and seeing how it is received by fresh eyes. I think it will go down quite well and Im very pleased with the outcome of this project.

Jonathan Cooper Showreel Inspiration

This animation showreel by Jonathan Cooper the Animation Director at Ubisoft gives me a good indicator of how to present 3D Animation work focusing on animation for games. As my 3D showreel will be mainly targeted at games animation this is a good piece to study for inspiration. One thing I definitely want to also try and get across with my new showreel will be giving my animations personality and life as that was definitely something my previous attempt lacked.

Feedback review from First Animation Showreel

I have now received some feedback in regards to my showreel and it seems I have certainly missed the mark in many aspects of what I was trying to accomplish. Most feedback I received was towards the 3D parts of my Showreel, comments highlighted I was shooting myself in foot by focusing too much on using my own rigged characters which although show I know more than just how to animate mean I am using less emotive rigs and those sorts of things would do far better at showing my animation abilities. Also using only small parts of my 2D narrative work gave an unfinished impression to my work and it would have been better to focus on a couple solid finished pieces instead of trying to cut together as many pieces as possible.

I will now be looking at some more professional showreels and try to find a way to better showcase my work based on the feedback that I have received. One of the first tasks I will be doing is finishing ' Eddies Quadcopter' So that I can add more of my most recent animation to the showreel.

First attempt at an Animation Showreel

I will be posting this Showreel to a animation forum to get some feedback on what could be improved. I created the music myself for this showreel as more of a personal challenge more than anything as sound production has always been a challenge for me. I think this is a decent attempt and certainly adds something to the reel although I do think it ends rather abruptly.

Showreel Opening

From what I have seen from the showreels I have watched, a solid animated opening is very popular so I have given my own attempt at doing one for my showreel. I will be adding sound to add to the look of the clip and have tried to keep everything clean and crisp while also highlighting some of the principles of animation such as squash and stretch.

Rudimentary plans for animation showreel

Lately I have been very reflective of my future outside of university and also viewing myself more as a future professional in my craft. From this I felt I should begin thinking about how to market myself for things such as internships as I hadn't really considered such things till recently. For that reason I will be spending some time developing a Animation Showreel.

Robot Gladiator

I have been trying to get a more gritty realistic style and have always loved the mix of scifi with medieval times since seeing Mikhail Borulko work.

12 Principles Infographic

This little project was just an exercise I undertook to aid in simplifying the techniques needed to create animation. I felt creating an info-graphic was a good way to demonstrate this.

Eddie Animatic

I have now finished getting my Extremes into flash and have pushed some of the poses a little further to make sure Im giving this animation as much life as possible. Unlike past work I am trying to really spend a good amount of time getting the foundations of my piece as good as possible. After this I will go on to fill in the inbetweens and then doing a final pass of the line work and adding colour. 

This is also the first time I will be drawing everything in flash as I usually use Photoshop for sketching as its tools are a little friendlier however I want to try and push myself and this seemed like on way to do so

Trial at video teaching

As a way of testing the waters in a sense to teaching something through video format I decided to create a lesson explaining an effective way to get solid line work using photoshops line tool. This was in response to a post on an digital art forum of someone asking for ways to improve there linework in there digital pieces. I created this video after a few retakes as I discovered I have a lot of ums and aws whenever there was a gap in speaking. I found it is actually more challenging than I thought to record a lesson when you have no way to gauge the intended audiences reaction.

Story for Animation 1st Draft

Open with Cactus Craig looking excitable, pan down to see he is reading a book named 'Why hugs are the best'. 

Craig smiles and sets his book down, confident he has the basics of hugging down. Spotting a big friendly looking red balloon in the distance he waddles his way over. Upon reaching the balloon he stretches arms out wide to engulf it in the biggest hug Craig can muster.  

Pop goes the balloon. Craig looks over the broken pieces of balloon scattered everywhere and lets out a small sigh. He quickly however forgets his troubles when he spots a very friendly looking teddy bear. Unfortunately as Craig approaches the teddy's face goes from a smile to that of shear panic. Teddy runs and hides. Craig sighs again looking more down trodden than before. 

Craig's smile is all but gone now he feels he never will get a cuddle. He returns glumly to his book to read about cuddling once more, a single tear running down his cheek. Suddenly he feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns to see a big round cuddly hedge hog who must have escaped from her cage.  

No words are spoken between the two as the hedgehog opens her arms and wraps Craig in a big firm hug. All that can be seen of the cactus is a big smiling face as the story ends.

Initial Character Designs - Cactus Craig

I am trying to create a likable character which will hopefully get the audience involved in not just the creative process but also the story that we are trying to visually create.

12 Principles of Animation

I feel this being one of the founding basis of animation should be a focus on what Im trying to teach. This video I have come across gives a good example of visually demonstrating the principles. I will want to get across a more informative lesson in which the 'how to' of these principles is focused on and not so much just demonstrating what each principle is.

Example of Animation lessons aimed at children

There is a surprisingly sparse volume of animation materiel aimed at teaching children the basics of the art. I have had a hard time coming up with any solid step by step lessons giving information on the principles of animation or storytelling techniques. This lesson example I have found gives the impression of being aimed at very young children and misses the mark on the age group I would try to target. It seems there could be a real need for structured lessons giving children a way to explore animation before having to pursue it in further education. I will start my research looking into the basic lessons I want to get across and then working on more complex information from there.

Eddies Quadcopter Animation Project

After receiving a small Quad Copter for Christmas I had a few incidents of it going rouge and flying at me seemingly on purpose. This gave me inspiration to try and create an animation about a character trying to control a Quadcopter of there own and inevitably being defeated by it. I hadn't really pushed my animation abilities to any great extent when it came to 2D animation so I wanted to try and really go for a high quality piece of animation. The first thing I wanted to nail down was a solid, simple character design which could be animated in many emotive ways. After I had my character 'Ernie' (Later renamed to Eddie) I was ready to try and block out the extremes of the animation. I wanted to use the Extremes and In Between s sort of animation pipeline as it would let me really push the poses of Eddie and have some really funny scenes. Once my initial sketches were complete I was ready to begin creating the animatics and digitizing what I have on my sketch book. This animation will be done in full 24 fps and will have each frame hand drawn to really push my capabilities and challenge myself.

 First Sketches of Eddie, I was trying to stick to simple shapes which would help with doing squash and stretch animation.

 First pass of how I wanted the animation to unfold, trying to get some really nice exaggerated poses for the extremes.

I wanted to try and nail down what sort of character Eddie is so I tried to put him in various situations and think about how he would act in them.