The technical side of making the animations is solely down to me rather than both me and Tamar, as its something she wouldn't be able to fit in as she has never done it before either. I am a lot used to using adobe programmes every day than she is, so it seemed appropriate that it be on my end, obviously with back and forth feedback from her and making important visual decisions to.
To start off, I digitally drew a background in Adobe After Effects.
I've learnt the basics and am able to move it along. However, I've discovered that Adobe Flash/Animate will be a lot more appropriate for a drawn animation, so I moved to that programme.
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| I read many online tutorials to figure out how to make objects simply move back and forth, which is a tween animation. |
I started again and learnt how to create a motion tween from a rough sketch of a backdrop.
I experimented with different backdrops to see what would look appropriate when moving. Being new to animation means there is a lot of trial and error. I tried out different speeds and was able to play around with it.
The next step was creating the basic walking frames of the character. I did a little research into this and was able to draw some initial legs.
Creating these stages of walking make sure that when the animation is moving, the character's movements have a sense of realism.
I learnt about onion skinning - frames before and after the current frame can be seen so that smooth transitions can be made.
I created a short sequence showing the figure walking. The figure is a little too scruffy and needs to be redrawn, but I got the hang of how it works better. The gradient sky is also not to my liking.
From Tamar's different stages of hair that she drew, I organised them into size order. From this I overlaid them and made a gif to see how they would look moving fast. My thinking is that it is too busy and messy to be put into an animation that has many other elements, but it is quite interesting when isolated.
I explained this to Tamar and she agreed that it seemed better when it was just an idea… which is quite disappointing. We agreed that we could edit it so that it is a lot slower and less frames.
I sorted the jackets and made them all into separate pngs to lay over each other in the animation. This took a really long time, as I had to cut them all out and crop and change small details so they will work well with the overlay outline of the jacket.
I put them into the animation and played around with different speeds. I said to Tamar that it seems that using both the jacket and the hair together is just not necessary… This turned into a discussion about how losing one or the other would mean we would have to change a lot, and they do make the animation stand out as its so colourful. We agreed that cutting out some of the jackets and keep the best patterns was necessary, just as we cut down on the hair.
With the face that Tamar drew, I have slowly edited it frame by frame so that at the beginning the head is down, to reflect how the character is unhappy. This creates more of a contrast and communicates the story better. Later on in the animation, the head moves around to show them taking in their surroundings as they get larger and the jacket transforms them, to communicate their surprise and emotions.
After much trial and error, I created a transition of the jacket from the bin to the body. The jacket is changing colour to show its magic abilities. I did this by drawing directly in flash every 3 or 4 frames to make it quickly move (and relatively smoothly).
We talked about how the background colours should be quite dark at the beginning to encapsulate how dark their world is before they are rebirthed.
Background is too bright and reminiscent of the default colours in photoshop.
Created a different shade to show the street and ground and create more dimension. Colours aren't quite right, too bland and washed out to communicate anything.
These colours are painful together but the blues of the building and street aren't too bad.
Went ahead with these colours - they are quite dark and dreary, but don't drown out any features. I suggested that the sky and buildings could gradually change colour as they are being rebirthed to show their world turning brighter and happier.
I created different stages of the buildings so that they can melt away and get smaller to show the figure growing and getting powerful. By using these different techniques I have created more of an interesting visual display.
As we are partly way through the Overcoming the Monster animation, we took the colour we picked for the background and used it in Rebirth as the ending colour so that they link together - the brief says they should work as a trio.
At the end of the animation, we want to create imagery that finishes it off well. We thought of creating clouds, showing that they've got really high up and that they are uplifted and rebirthed. Tamar drew some that I scanned in and put straight into the animation.
I suggested that we could take the key colours from the jacket and hair to put a background on the clouds - after looking at all the designs we found that the colours were red, yellow, blue and pink. I used the dropper tool to get the exact colours from the scanned images.
At first I thought that they could just slowly float into frame before it cuts off at the end, but Tamar said they should move around a bit more than that, so i made them float a little and also flash the different colours as they move in.
I made sure to make them hang around and float for a second or two at the end, just so that it doesn't end too quickly.
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