————Week 1————
Introduction:
In the beginning, we were told that we would be creating a short 10-15 second animation with an audio of our liking. There were a handful of audios to choose from but I wanted to search for one that I like on the internet. After finding one that matches my taste, I waited with anticipation for approval that would be granted by my teacher. My tutor liked what I have chosen but to my dismay, she pointed out the down sides of choosing a soundtrack from a previously animated cartoon series after knowing where I got it from. She added that it would be hard for the audience to not think of the original character from the animated series behind the voice of the audio. I agreed with her point and went on another journey to find a “better” audio as I accepted the hard truth.
After going home, I continued a four-hour search on the “perfect” audio but it felt like luck was not on my side. Knackered, I decided to give the sample audios a listen to see if any ideas would spark up. As I listened, I tried sketching out random doodles that’ll pop up in my brain. Slowly, I came to realise I started to fall in love with one of the audios. In the end, I chose the second audio.
The audio I picked:
Brainstorming & doodling rough ideas:
Mood-board designs:
Background/ Environment idea designs:
As I was listening to the chosen audio multiple times, i find there is an indescribable tranquility or softness in the tones of how both characters speak. It quickly came to mind that using comforting colours or art mediums like soft pastel might be suitable to match such an audio.
I tried to create a background scene of a park after rainfall during sunset times, just to visualize how I would want my backgrounds to look like. The style I used was hugely inspired by the artist- Louie Zong who is famous for his utilisation of soothing brush strokes, calming atmospheres and cozy hues, as if being served a cup of hot cocoa when you look at his works.
Primary Character Designs:
The Protagonist (Bunny):
Some more sketches and doodles of the loveable and round cuddly bunny! Isn’t he very loveable? : )
The Antagonist (Hyena):
The audio has a captivating clarity of tenderness, but I wanted to add an element of surprise to the tale instead of merely making it really wholesome with beautiful pastel surroundings. Consequently, I chose to create an antagonist to liven up the narrative.
Storyboards/ Animatic:
I produced two storyboards just to see which one is stronger. the first storyboard has a twist to it while the other is just wholesome. Both storyboards feature the lovable bunny character.
The Narration: Characters: Mellow the Bunny and Gunner the Hyena
Mellow and Gunner are both waiting for a bus at a bus stop as the sky darkens and the rain ceases. Mellow is alone, and Gunner observes this, making him extremely vulnerable. The hyena smirks and engages Mellow in a conversation, scrutinising his body language and pointing out any possible weaknesses in him. Taking note of Mellow’s youth and naiveté, Gunner takes his chances in luring this fat bunny into his arms for a satisfying feast.
This is the initial animatic of the first storyboard created.
————Week 2————
Revised Character Design & Turnarounds:
Bunny:
I stuck with the initial design of the bunny and gave him simple colours for me to work with. His curious yet slightly oblivious expression matched with his huge round body makes him look very adorable AND a bit blockheaded. I’d say he’s pretty aDORKable.
Hyena:
I did some sketches of my hyena character with a combination of basic shapes just to experiment whether I could improve on my charcter design of him and make him more malicious, dangerous and menacing looking. The sketching exercise helped me step out of my comfort zone and provided me a better vision of how much my art style could be stretched.
Revised Animatic:
After getting my animatic reviewed, my teacher encouraged me to strengthen some of my camera angles so that a feeling or mood could be pushed and the message could be expressed more prominently. My teacher aided me in pushing the hyena to be more of a dominant character who doesn’t give you enough enough space to breathe, by changing some camera angles. The experience once again concretes the fact that good camera angle usage could provide a better story experience to audiences as messages are conveyed in a clearer manner.
————Week 3————
Learning about backgrounds, Colour Theory & X-Sheets:
It was genuinely quite hard to paint a background with a limitation of just the colours just o black, gray and white since I’ve never done a value painting before. The exercise helped me realise the importance of colour usage to avoid having an over-saturated drawing.
I wanted to see how would my painting look like with colours so I tried adding some just for fun. I chose the darker hues of blue, purple and pink. The tone suggests its cold, mysterious environment where one could expect danger pouncing out at them at any time.
Background designs:
I tried to create a background scene of a park after rainfall during sunset times. The style I used was hugely inspired by the artist- Louie Zong who is famous for his utilisation of soothing brush strokes, calming atmospheres and cozy hues, as if being served a cup of hot cocoa when you look at his works. This atmospheric design practice introduced me to a better understanding of how colours can be manipulated to make people feel certain ways. I desire to apply this in my animation.
Overall, having to paint backgrounds with my newly acquired colour theory knowledge assisted me in paying more attention to whether my paintings would be “low-key” or “high-key” in context of lighting. I also avoided choosing overly saturated hues, which might clash with the intended depressing mood. Designing background scenes is not my forte, but painting was an enjoyable experience that pushed me farther out of my comfort zone to test my abilities.q
X-Sheets:
Constructing X-sheets was one of the most boring, irritating, and aggravating aspects of an animation‘s pre-production process to me.
Despite the drawbacks, the x-sheets give a clear breakdown and layout of when the characters would begin speaking each syllable or phrase, so I wouldn’t have to guess how their mouth shapes would operate. I’m confident that the x-sheets made animating lip-syncing a lot easier.
Creating Mouth Shapes:
Although I have been doing quite a lot of lip-sync animations over the years, this elective challenged me surprisingly. The audio I chose does not have an easy script. The conversation is very fast-paced, so even by scrubbing the audio at a slower pace, it still required great effort to grasp the sounds or syllables in each frame. In addition, I am not particularly used to animating with 24fps. Therefore, even with the help of X-sheets, my characters’ lip-syncing to the audio would sometimes be slightly inaccurate. To improve, I plan to spend more time practicing animating lip-syncing on twos and developing stronger skills in drawing mouth shapes that match up with the phonetic units of the audio.
————Week 4————
Let’s ANIMATE!!!- Work In Progress:
Animation Key Frames:
Line Art Cleanup:
————Week 5————
Coloured Animation w/ background:
FINAL ANIMATION- w/ colour grading + editing + sound effects:
After colouring my animation, I added some sound effects, colour adjustments and video effects to it. With all of this hard work done after weeks, I am very content with my final outcome! : D
Version w/o Subtitles:
“How long did it take for you to animate this?”
“One eternity!” :,)