OUAN406 - Nearly Complete Idents:
Monday 28 April 2014
OUAN406 - A Tale in The Sting: Final Crit
OUAN406 - Final Crit:
After managing to finish two out of three animations, I was finally able to show them to the class and receive some constructive feedback on how to improve my animations, other than the obvious of finishing the Discovery ident of course.
I showed my E4 and Cbeebies idents after explaining the issue of not being able to finish the Discovery channel ident due to corruption of a nearly finished file. (I have certainly learned from this and will try and back up my files a lot more often than usual due to the unreliability of my hard drive and laptop!) The feedback I received was constructive and helpful and some things were picked out that from a creator's point of were not obvious to me. Things such as the run cycle of my E4 girl could do with a bit more squash and stretch as she almost floats across the screen in a very linear fashion and doesn't bob up and down like a person who is running would. Her head stayed in pretty much the same place throughout with little movement or emphasis. He legs also stayed on the ground all the way through despite the contact point being the only point through the cycle that is meant to stay on the ground. She definitely needs some work leaping through the air and maintaining an anime-like style. The E4 monster also loses his arms half way through the ident and then regains them for no clear reason at the end! This needs to be fixed! Some sound effects could also do with some adjustment as some don't quite fit with the timing of the animation.
In terms of the Cbeebies ident, this got some positive comments such as the style was nice, it was cute, the colours worked etc. However, the logo does pop off the screen at the end, a feature that occured with a lot of Cbeebies idents probably because the logo has two long protruding "b"s that stick out wherever you place the logo... The Discovery channel ident will take up most of my time this week and then corrections will finally take place along with a presentation for my PPP module and other tasks for the end of year show.
In terms of time management, despite the mishaps with the corruption and loss of work, and the issue of me having flu for nearly a week and a half due to parents and partner passing it backwards and forwards to me over the Easter holidays, I feel that I've done rather well at managing my time and think this has been one of my stronger modules and I can finally see a slight improvement in my animation skills! I hope that this can only get better and I can only keep improving!
After managing to finish two out of three animations, I was finally able to show them to the class and receive some constructive feedback on how to improve my animations, other than the obvious of finishing the Discovery ident of course.
I showed my E4 and Cbeebies idents after explaining the issue of not being able to finish the Discovery channel ident due to corruption of a nearly finished file. (I have certainly learned from this and will try and back up my files a lot more often than usual due to the unreliability of my hard drive and laptop!) The feedback I received was constructive and helpful and some things were picked out that from a creator's point of were not obvious to me. Things such as the run cycle of my E4 girl could do with a bit more squash and stretch as she almost floats across the screen in a very linear fashion and doesn't bob up and down like a person who is running would. Her head stayed in pretty much the same place throughout with little movement or emphasis. He legs also stayed on the ground all the way through despite the contact point being the only point through the cycle that is meant to stay on the ground. She definitely needs some work leaping through the air and maintaining an anime-like style. The E4 monster also loses his arms half way through the ident and then regains them for no clear reason at the end! This needs to be fixed! Some sound effects could also do with some adjustment as some don't quite fit with the timing of the animation.
In terms of the Cbeebies ident, this got some positive comments such as the style was nice, it was cute, the colours worked etc. However, the logo does pop off the screen at the end, a feature that occured with a lot of Cbeebies idents probably because the logo has two long protruding "b"s that stick out wherever you place the logo... The Discovery channel ident will take up most of my time this week and then corrections will finally take place along with a presentation for my PPP module and other tasks for the end of year show.
In terms of time management, despite the mishaps with the corruption and loss of work, and the issue of me having flu for nearly a week and a half due to parents and partner passing it backwards and forwards to me over the Easter holidays, I feel that I've done rather well at managing my time and think this has been one of my stronger modules and I can finally see a slight improvement in my animation skills! I hope that this can only get better and I can only keep improving!
Thursday 3 April 2014
OUAN406 - A Tale in The Sting: E4 Lip Sync Solution
OUAN406 - Lip Syncing:
A dilemma I came across when thinking about speech and voice acting was that it would take me an immense amount of time to labour over every little mouth movement for my E4 ident. I got around this by thinking about anime I have watched. Not all anime have elaborate mouth movements and most just have a simple two movements. Take Pokemon for instance: the characters' mouths move very simply yet still give the effect of speech. This method doesn't ruin or distract you from the fact that it is not a very detailed lip sync. I like this and will study this more to see how anime characters' mouths are animated.
A dilemma I came across when thinking about speech and voice acting was that it would take me an immense amount of time to labour over every little mouth movement for my E4 ident. I got around this by thinking about anime I have watched. Not all anime have elaborate mouth movements and most just have a simple two movements. Take Pokemon for instance: the characters' mouths move very simply yet still give the effect of speech. This method doesn't ruin or distract you from the fact that it is not a very detailed lip sync. I like this and will study this more to see how anime characters' mouths are animated.
OUAN406: A Tale in The Sting: Discovery Background
OUAN406 - Discovery Background:
In order to create the Discovery channel background, I used a various amount of inspirations to fuel my ideas for the background. One of which, oddly enough was music. After spending a day listening to Asia, Toto and Fleetwood Mac, all of which are predominantly 80s rock bands, I had this strange sense of inspiration to create a beautiful savannah with orange sands and gold skies. Also, looking back at old photographs of my many holidays to mainland Spain, Ibiza and various other hot climate destinations, I was really in the mood to create something gorgeous.
I started with a few gradients to distinguish the sand from the sky, but this was very subtle and blurred cleverly to look like waved of heat in the middle where the horizon meets. I then used some silhouettes as mentioned earlier in my blog of trees and branches. I wanted silhouettes so that the warm tones stood out very much from the black and created the illusion of sweltering heat with the trees being the escape from the heat - shade.
After following these steps, I then decided that a foreground of some grass would be appropriate, but because of the suggested heat of the savannah, the grass would be brown and wilted, not green and lush. I added the grass and still felt like the background was missing something. A sun! What better way to inflict heat upon the audience than adding a large, beaming solar flare filter. So, after creating an entirely black layer and testing out solar flares, I found one that was perfect. I set the layer to overlay so it blended over the other layers and made a beautiful orange glow. It worked! I was impressed! I then grabbed the blur tool and made some points where the sun's light refracts and juts off in different directions. This is the outcome.
Here is a tutorial I followed on creating a nice solar flare without it being too harsh: http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/17438/how-to-create-a-realistic-sun-lens-flare-using-photoshop
In order to create the Discovery channel background, I used a various amount of inspirations to fuel my ideas for the background. One of which, oddly enough was music. After spending a day listening to Asia, Toto and Fleetwood Mac, all of which are predominantly 80s rock bands, I had this strange sense of inspiration to create a beautiful savannah with orange sands and gold skies. Also, looking back at old photographs of my many holidays to mainland Spain, Ibiza and various other hot climate destinations, I was really in the mood to create something gorgeous.
I started with a few gradients to distinguish the sand from the sky, but this was very subtle and blurred cleverly to look like waved of heat in the middle where the horizon meets. I then used some silhouettes as mentioned earlier in my blog of trees and branches. I wanted silhouettes so that the warm tones stood out very much from the black and created the illusion of sweltering heat with the trees being the escape from the heat - shade.
After following these steps, I then decided that a foreground of some grass would be appropriate, but because of the suggested heat of the savannah, the grass would be brown and wilted, not green and lush. I added the grass and still felt like the background was missing something. A sun! What better way to inflict heat upon the audience than adding a large, beaming solar flare filter. So, after creating an entirely black layer and testing out solar flares, I found one that was perfect. I set the layer to overlay so it blended over the other layers and made a beautiful orange glow. It worked! I was impressed! I then grabbed the blur tool and made some points where the sun's light refracts and juts off in different directions. This is the outcome.
Here is a tutorial I followed on creating a nice solar flare without it being too harsh: http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/17438/how-to-create-a-realistic-sun-lens-flare-using-photoshop
OUAN406: A Tale in The Sting: Background Reference E4
OUAN406 - Background Reference:
In order to create the most authentic and stylised-looking background for my E4 ident, I had to look very closely at other anime that had a similar cutesy theme to mine. I noticed very quickly that there was lots of running shots just like my ident featuring city skylines and tall buildings that resembled those of Tokyo or New York. The building usually featured pastel colours and light greys, muted tones and very subtle shades to fit with the romantic, cute and girly theme. I watched scenes from Tokyo Mew Mew, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Senpai Club to name a few to see how their use of background set the scene and atmosphere.
After having a good idea of what I wanted to create for my two backgrounds that would interchange a few times during the animation, I set out on a journey to find some tutorials. Then I found this:
This brilliant tutorial allowed me to create a very similar skyline effect but in a style representative of E4. I started out just as shown, with outlines of buildings, slowly filling them in and eventually finishing the foreground buildings of my background (if that makes sense!?) which then allowed me to create the buildings behind the ones just made so that I could create a parallax effect when my character ran, which is also used very often in anime.
The pink sparkly background was created following a series of online tutorials on how to create a sparkle effect, how to create anime-style shimmers and glows and so forth. I do not have the exact links for these, but mostly, I created this from my mind bearing in mind all the anime clips I had watched previously.
In order to create the most authentic and stylised-looking background for my E4 ident, I had to look very closely at other anime that had a similar cutesy theme to mine. I noticed very quickly that there was lots of running shots just like my ident featuring city skylines and tall buildings that resembled those of Tokyo or New York. The building usually featured pastel colours and light greys, muted tones and very subtle shades to fit with the romantic, cute and girly theme. I watched scenes from Tokyo Mew Mew, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Senpai Club to name a few to see how their use of background set the scene and atmosphere.
After having a good idea of what I wanted to create for my two backgrounds that would interchange a few times during the animation, I set out on a journey to find some tutorials. Then I found this:
This brilliant tutorial allowed me to create a very similar skyline effect but in a style representative of E4. I started out just as shown, with outlines of buildings, slowly filling them in and eventually finishing the foreground buildings of my background (if that makes sense!?) which then allowed me to create the buildings behind the ones just made so that I could create a parallax effect when my character ran, which is also used very often in anime.
The pink sparkly background was created following a series of online tutorials on how to create a sparkle effect, how to create anime-style shimmers and glows and so forth. I do not have the exact links for these, but mostly, I created this from my mind bearing in mind all the anime clips I had watched previously.
To create the sparkly background of which an anime character's face is usually shown with a close up shot in these situations, I used a royalty free texture from Lost and Taken, a site that a fellow third year friend showed me. I used this as an overlay. Here is the original file called "bokeh".
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