Finished Final Piece...

Unfortunately I never solved the frame rate issue, so I added some hair and a cross shape to show the direction of the characters face as he moves. This gives a better illusion of a 3rd dimension in the animation, but still doesn't show the full detail I intended. The final piece is missing the jacket, collar, pointer and facial expressions which appear on the storyboard/plan in my previous post.

Animation Final Piece... Continued

After having finished animating the characters general movements to the sound clip, and added the colour, I came across another problem. As the animation has to be on a video layer that is that shows 12 fps (frames per second), but being played at 25 fps for standard UK TV viewing, there is a set way in which the frames from the video layer are played to allow for the fact that there will be an extra frame that needs to be filled at the end of each second. It does this automatically by making each frame repeat twice, except for the 2nd frame of each second, which will be repeated thrice. I understood this when making the animation, and it should (in theory) make no difference to how you make it. However, somewhere along the line there was an error in the way Photoshop adjusted the frame rate, and any new video layer I added ended up quickly becoming 1 frame out of time.

This was massively frustrating, as the sole reason I chose to make a 2D animation for my final piece was to be able to put highly exaggerated expressions on the characters and make a visually entertaining piece. This might still be possible to do (all on the same video layer, which is dangerous, as I cant afford to make any mistakes), but the amount of time spent trying to recover my original animation, and then trying to solve the frame rate issue, has left me behind in my other work, so I may have to leave the animation as it is for now. I hope this is not the case, and I will continue to work on it if I manage to complete my other projects earlier.

Animation Final Piece

After deciding to create a 2D animation, I picked my sound file (no. 2 "He's, he's tough... He's a brute, but he's got a good heart... And at the end of the picture... He saves the girl"). Although this clip had no sound effects other than voices, I felt it's fast pace would allow me to make quite an energetic animation to.

My first Idea involved 3 characters: The first character was the 'talking' one (he would do the gestures, but I was instructed not to attempt to lip-sync. any characters) who is based on a 50s style movie writer/director , in a grey suit, with a smart comb over hair cut. The second was the character who the first character is talking about. His role was to react to the first character with expressions, and occasionally morph to become a metaphorical representation of the description given by the first character. An example of this is when he says "He's a brute", he would morph into a gorilla. The third character would be "the girl", who would be a 50s movie stereotype damsel in distress, who would fall into the second characters arms on the que: "He saves the girl".

I liked this Idea, and began animating on Photoshop. I got to the stage of having fully animated the movements of the second and third character to the sound clip, with the intention of creating a new video layer to create the first character to interact with, and then add colour, when somewhere along the lines of moving files around they where corrupted. This happened to coincide with the server I use to back up the files being temporarily down. This was very unfortunate, as I felt it would then be impossible to make an animation as complex as this plan in the time I had left, so I created a new storyboard for a similar Idea with only one character.

The new storyboard basically consists of just the writer/director character, where the audience is in the position of maybe a producer, who is judging his idea. In this storyboard, the character is pointing at a flip-board on a stand, and pulling faces to fit with the lines.

My Animation 3D

Later, I made a 3D animation of a bouncing ball. I used Autodesk Maya to do this, with a 'ball rig' that had created specifically for this kind of animation. Similarly to animating traditionally, you start by setting key frames at points on the timeline, which show the objects position at that time. Unlike animating in 2D on Photoshop, the computer fills in the middle frames for you, approximately calculating the ball's acceleration. This doesn't mean it's easier though, as the movement the computer calculates is usually simple and unrealistic. You then have to go through a process of looking at the position vector graphs, and tweeking them to increase or decrease the acceleration at certain times (like making it accelerate quickly as it drops, due to gravity, and decelerating as it bounces back up).

This is actually a pretty fun process, especially when you know that this kind of process is what the proffessionals use to make CG animated films, and (of course) computer games. However I decided I would create my animation in 2D on Photoshop, as I wanted to be able to concentrate a lot on facial expression.

My Animation 2D

My first mini-project was to create a 2D looping animation of a ball bouncing, using the Photoshop animation feature (available in Photoshop CS3 to CS5). This was to practice traditional hand drawn animation. I made it at a frame rate of 12 fps (frames per second). This is a good frame rate for traditional animation, as it is enough frames to be smooth, but not too many frames as to make the process painstakingly slow.

The process of making a 2D, drawn animation appear full of movement involves using all of the 12 principles. In the bouncing ball exercise, 'squash and stretch' was the most important part. This is used, not only to create the illusion of physics working upon the ball (it squashes as it 'hits' the floor, and stretches and deforms as it rises), but to replicate effects that a camera would usually put on the image, such as motion blur, which is replicated by stretching the ball as it moves.

I found animating traditionally, drawn and 2D, to be pretty fun, and its simplicity allows you to be creative. For the ball bouncing, I did a very simple scene, as there is a floor (rough horizontal line) and a white background. Finalized and televised cartoons however, have detailed scenes and backgrounds, which give the illusion of a three dimensional environment. I would have to bare this in mind if i chose to do a 2D animation for my final project, as a visually pleasing setting, to which characters and objects can seamlessly interact with, is an important part of the animation.