OUAN505 - Applied Animation: Evaluation

OUAN505 - Evaluation:

Throughout the module I feel that I have participated a reasonably fair amount by kickstarting the project, coming up with the idea, and starting the pre-production phase. I managed to gather a team of three of us in total that would each have individual roles and have unique skills to bring to the project. I focused primarily on the research and development, set design, and character design stages.

Due to absence and general need of advice and assistance, Alex asked me to join her in the stop-motion suite to assist her with the animating and I feel that together we managed to combine our views and opinions of animation to create reasonably well animated scenes. I focused more on straight ahead animation when shooting scenes on my own instead of meticulously planning each scene out second by second. This meant that I could really 'feel' the animation and get in the zone rather than worrying and stressing out too much. However, this sometimes meant that I made subtle mistakes such as prolonging a movement or some parts being too short. I easily corrected these mistakes by deleting frames and redoing them in Dragonframe.

Time management was very good to begin with but ended up being poor near the middle and end. This could be down to the fact that although we had a drawn out plan, we were still negotiating roles and ideas for the animating stage. It took two weeks too long to create the set which was entirely my fault as I was too shy to visit workshops and tutors on my own to ask for help, and I had to save up money for the supplies which took time.

Team communication was good as we contacted each other via a group chat using social networking sites. We drew pictures and created content using Google Slides which was incredibly convenient as we could share this between us and show where we were at in the project. However, there were some minor hiccups with communication and I think parts of the project caused tension between us due to absences, lack of animating, last minute storyboards, and animatic problems.

I believe that I pulled my weight and put a lot of time and funding into this animation. I focused more on the beginning as I feel that I was able to use my skills of character design and team management more effectively. I kept the team organised and well informed, eager, and tried my best to keep them happy and looked after as I felt it was important to make sure their welfare and needs were thought about. One area that I didn't do too well in was the animation production stage. I felt very 'pushed' into animating by tutors despite protesting that although I wasn't an animator and I would happily make attempts at it, I had spent all my energy and effort on the pre-production and I was drained. I still gave it a go to help out the team and feel that the few seconds of animation that I did create wasn't too shabby.

I enjoyed stop-motion overall, however it can be incredibly expensive and materials aren't cheap! 2D animation might be the way forward for me as I do prefer drawing by hand. However, creating models is always enjoyable too...

OUAN505 - Applied Animation: Academic Texts

OUAN505 - Academic Texts:

After having read through some of the academic texts posted on eStudio, I chose 'Drawing Voices' by Jacqueline Goss as my favourite as I found it particularly useful having done a bit of a sound production and animating to those sounds.

The article's main observation is that of immigration and travelling to the U.S. Goss explored stories from that of her friends, colleagues, and students of their experiences getting into the country. She asked them to use the popular World of Warcraft online game to create a character to tell their story as she believed this would be more interesting than filming them and so on.

The article talks about how it is good to leave in some of the flaws of a recorded interview such as 'ums' and 'ahs' as it represents a more natural flow of speech and conversation. Pauses indicate thought and allow the audience to understand what is happening and how the speaker feels and reacts to a situation. When those slight imperfections are taken out, a piece of speech can seem quite flat and monotonous making it harder to assess the situation.

Goss looks at how her interviewees go about choosing a character and how this may or may not suit the tone of the story being told by said character. For instance, she took note that one person used an ugly, savage-looking orc to represent their recollection of events even though the speech didn't match the appearance of the character - soft tone, warm. She described this phenomenon quite similar to that of the 'Elephant Man' of which an appearance might be very deceiving from the personality of the person, but we somehow seem to 'match' them together and an often uncanny opposite eventually becomes the perfect accompaniment. After some time, the orc eventually fits in with the voice and we see past it's grotesque appearance and have a connection with it.

The most prominent point I think was made in the article was that it is relatively achievable to obtain a different hair colour, style, different facial features, eye colour, and anything physical. However, if someone truly wants to know the real you, they should listen to your voice as your voice never really changes and will always reflect how you truly feel and act towards others and situations. I completely understand this and connect with it very much. I think the interviews Goss carried out represent this statement very well as although each participant was able to choose a character to represent them, their voice was the most honest and realistic as it couldn't be changed.

OUAN505 - Applied Animation - Post Production: Final Crit Feedback

OUAN505 - Feedback:

During our final crit last week, we received some very valuable feedback that will help us with our animation. The first was that it would beneficial and add to the cheesy vibe to add a silhouette of a cheering crowd at the beginning to ramp up the happy atmosphere and get the audience in the right frame of mind. Some cheering could be found online and a silhouette from a royalty-free site could be used and slightly animated to bob up and down before the camera zooms in.

It was also mentioned that some of the lip syncing was out of time. David has now fixed this and has managed to get it back in sync. We were given a mixture of good and responsive feedback of which we could react to which would allow us to improve our animation. Reuse of stop-motion animation was encouraged as we were having some difficulties keeping to our time schedule.

We will keep going with our animation and make sure everything is as complete as possible for Friday.

OUAN505 - Applied Animation - Post Production: 5 Behind the Scenes Images

OUAN505 - Behind the Scenes:

To accompany our post-production archive we chose five images from our behind the scenes files. This is also apparently very attractive to film festivals as it gives them an insight into what the short film is about.

I chose the above five images for my collection of 'behind the scenes while making the set'. However, I plan to take more photographs of us actually animating our work as it would be nice to get some shots of us in action. 

OUAN505 - Applied Animation - Post Production: DVD Box

OUAN505 - DVD Box:

As part of the post-production franchise I decided to create a DVD box based on the feedback we received from our posters. Overall, it was good feedback and the most preferred was the second one with the background of oranges. It was discussed that a photograph of all of the band should be used on the DVD slip.

However, the photographs of the band were not readily available so I made do with the coloured silhouettes without faces so that they were at least vaguely recognisable. We received some feedback that the coloured band silhouette was better and that the colour scheme of blue was not as good as a yellow version. So, we decided to make the DVD box slip a yellow theme instead as it was happier and related more to the band. Also, it was a nice variation instead of keeping the blue throughout all of our ephemera.

We included a tagline, a synopsis, and a team profile as expected of us so that the audience had a rough idea of what was going on.

We did a little bit of editing as we thought that it wasn't necessary to have the bios of the artists so instead we replaced these with an image from the behind the scenes archive along with a brief description of our roles in the project acting a little bit like the credits. I also shortened the spine of the slip as it was too wide when I printed it and tried fitting it in a standard case. 

OUAN505 - Applied Animation - Post Production: The Animatic

OUAN505 - The Animatic:

An unfortunate illness of our head stop-motion animator, Alex, meant that we were a tad bit behind with the animation. David had caught up with the 2D animation which meant that one of us needed to get some more stop-motion scenes churned out. I offered to do this with the help of one of the college DSLRs. Today I plan to get a couple more scenes done so that I can hand them over to David to drop into the animatic.

Annabeth clarified that we didn't have to have the full animation finished for the showing on Friday, which is a huge relief as we all have so much to do for PPP and the blogging side of things. We will all pull through this.

OUAN505 - Applied Animation - Post Production: Final Song Choice

OUAN505 - Final Song Choice:

After Katy had kindly recorded a version of our song, we sent it out to the class for feedback. Upon listening, we got many mixed responses and a varying range of facial expressions. We used these immediate reactions to guess what comments were coming our way.

Some liked the unusual take on it as Katy informed us that she wouldn't be able to manage some of the notes as her vocal range was not that high. We accepted that she would do her take on it and we were happy with certain aspects of it but it was discussed that the chorus was was out of whack by a semitone or few. Some of class said that maybe we should retake the audio with a few more people having a go at it and maybe we hold an 'audition' and pick the best one out of the few we have.

I did a take (not brilliantly!), Katy did a take, and Rebecca Wong did our final attempt of which was the class' favourite overall. They were happy that her voice could hit the notes and stayed as faithful to the original as possible so that it was recognisably a spoof of the classic 80's hit. We added Becky's recording into our animatic and it worked perfectly with the animation.

OUAN505 - Applied Animation - Post Production: Poster Design

OUAN505 - Poster Design:

As part of post-production, I decided to take on the role of making some posters to see which ones the class liked the most and if they had any feedback for us. I went for a graphic-type look with bold silhouettes and toned down, muted colours to mimic the happiness and groovy feel of the band.

I looked at current film posters for reference such as those of Inception, Interstellar, and a few others to get an idea of what layouts would work. I printed my two current designs out and hung them up for feedback. The feedback that we received was that the colours worked really nicely, the layout of the second poster was preferred as it looked more professional and legible (your eye was also drawn to it more easily and all the information was in one concise spot), and that instead of silhouettes as they weren't that easily recognisable, we should try photographing the band in the light box thing in room 203 as it might look more professional. We could then draw the faces on as in the actual animation.

Here are the two current designs I have created. I plan to make at least one more using the feedback given. I will then translate this onto a DVD box slip in the appropriate format.

We attempted different colourways of the second poster (one above), and it was discussed that lime green was a better match as you were able to see more of the detail in the design and it was clearer that they were meant to be fruits and not just a blue, unnatural pattern made to look like fruit. 

It was then decided that an unfinished yet more colourful poster design I had scrapped a while ago looked much better and was everyone's favourite oddly enough! So, I went back and refined it a little and asked everyone their opinions on how it looked and what needed to be added. We then went with this final design: