Applied Animation: Progress Meeting 27/02

Katy and I sat down to go through what we had done since our last progress meeting. I also wanted to go through all of the look tests I had done in order to finalise textures and move on to production. In the last few weeks Katy has done a wonderful job of 'catching up', as she states (despite the fact that she wasn't that far behind me at all). She has managed to complete the final storyboard and produce Phonemes for the Boar and the Robin, which I was really pleased with and was glad to hear that she was half way through doing a lip sync test for her character (the Boar).

I then showed Katy everything I had done and she seemed really pleased with my Phoneme chart and I received really positive feedback from her on my lip sync test. I also received some positive feedback on my look tests, which made me feel a lot better, as I didn't know if they were working or not. We discussed which environments and characters we were most leaning towards and went through which aspects of the environments we liked the most.

Boar Texture Tests

Wolf Texture Tests

Wolf Texture Tests

For the Boar environment we preferred the lighter sky colour with the darker ground, as we felt that these both worked the best together, however, I still need to experiment with the trees in order to see if we want a mixture of shades to help create depth and try and make our environments look less flat. We were also leaning more towards the lighter coloured boars, as we felt that these would stand out more against the background, but this will also be dependent on where we position the character. In terms of the wolf character, we preferred the darker shade on the top of the character and the lighter on the bottom because it gave us a little diversity between our characters. We were also drawn to the more vibrant shade of green for the grass, as we felt that this matched the research we had done more and also helped to make the character the focus. However, we need to be careful that we don't make the environments too vibrant and distracting, as we want it all to work well together. We also felt that the darker sky worked well with this character because we wanted it to be set later in the day and we also wanted to make the scene foggy. Having said this however, we were a little concerned with the rock and felt that I should experiment with making it darker and removing some of the greenery to help distinguish it a little more.
In terms of the Robin, we felt that all of the different shades worked really well with both environments, but we had to consider which shade would work best with both the boar and the wolf character. We also wanted the colours to be different. as we didn't want all of the colours to look the same. However, this will take a little more experimenting to see which will work the best with both characters. As an after thought, I also suggested that we give the wolf and boar digitally coloured elements like we have done with the robin in order to make the characters all the same, so they all look like they belong.

Katy also brought up the changes she made to the Boar and what I think would make the character look more like the other two. I suggested that she look at getting rid of the eye lids and eyebrows and use her line work more to suggest features like eyebrows and such. She did this and the end result seemed to have a lot more appeal than her previous character and we are both happy with the end result, as we feel that all of the characters work well together and have the same style.
Overall I am pleased with what we have and feel that we are in a strong position to start focusing on production. However, I do realise that we are working quite slow and that we need to pick up the pace, as we only have two weeks until our interim crit.

Applied Animation: Lip Sync Testing

To kick start production I have gone ahead and started to create a lip sync chart to refer to for the wolf character (Katy will be doing the Boar character, as this is the character she is animating). By doing this, I feel that it will help animating the speech a little easier because I will have the basic mouth shapes to refer to already, rather than having to animate from imagination or having a mirror with me everywhere I go. Using the reference I collected earlier in the week and using a mirror, I was able to come up with a range of different mouth shapes that I feel are a good starting point and from there I decided to draw those mouth shapes on a wolf's snout.

Phoneme Sheet

They aren't perfect, but they give me a good understanding of what kind of shapes I should be aiming for when I begin to animate my character. They also helped me a great deal when I conducted an animated lip sync test.

I found lip syncing to be quite fun if I'm going to be honest. It isn't something I've ever done before but I was really excited about trying something new and challenging myself. I was also really excited about animating again, as I feel that it has been a while since I've animated something this challenging. At first I found it a little difficult to match up the mouth shapes with the audio but I got there in the end and it didn't take me as long as I thought it would, but it did take quite a while to complete. However, with practice, I feel that I will be able to pick up the pace as we go through our animation. 

I decided to animate to a clip from our animation, as I thought it would be relevant and give me enough practice. I started by planning out the key frames to match the text at the side of my animation, which helped me a lot and made it easier for me to match the mouth movements to the audio.  When I began to animate (without audio) I felt that it went too quick, so I exported the small clip at 12 fps and placed it with the audio and I instantly realised that it was too slow. So I kept it at 24fps, but held some of the frames on the vowels to make the mouth sty in certain positions for longer. 

Animation at 12fps

As I was animating and looking back through the clip I noticed that I had placed a mouth movement for the 'A' in 'humans' and I thought that it looked a little strange, but I couldn't be sure, so I exported the clip and put it with the audio to see how it fit.

I realised that the 'A' shape wasn't needed at all and removed it from the sequence. This made the mouth movements look a lot more natural and it looked a lot less confusing to watch too. I also feel that it matched the audio quite well and I was pleased with how it looked, which made me want to finish the sentence, so I did. 

I'm really pleased with my first attempt at lip syncing. I feel that it matches the audio quite well and I've learnt a lot about re-using frames and animating efficiently. I've also learnt that you don't necessarily have to place in every single mouth movement but focus more on the sounds that create the syllables for that word and focus on those shapes instead. I've also noticed that it works really well if you 'pop' from one shape to the next and ease out of them rather than easing into them too. 

It's not perfect and I feel that there is room for improvement, but I am confident that I have a good understanding of how it works to start production. 

Applied Animation: Look Test

Now that I have the majority of our textures, I was able to get on with the look tests to see how we could use the textures for both the characters and the environments and experiment with how these textures work together. But first I had to create a digital version of Katy's characters. Whilst drawing out the characters, I realised that the wolf character was lacking something that I couldn't quite put my hand on and I felt that the character still appeared quite feline. I decided to experiment with changing the line work a little and making it look more 'furry'. Once I'd done this I also decided to change the eyes, as I felt like they looked too human and made the character look less frightening than what we wanted. After I'd made these changes I showed Katy and she was happy with the final result and said that she felt that the character had a lot more appeal now that I had made some adjustments. I also suggested that we change the Boar a little to make him more appealing by making his ears slightly larger and possibly changing the eyes. However, we haven't made any definitive decisions about this character yet so, for now, I worked with my sketch simply to test how it would look in the environment. I then did a character line up to determine size and to see how the characters worked together.

Character Line Up

Whilst I feel that the Wolf works with the Robin, I feel that the Boar is too realistic and makes the Robin appear more cartoon-y than the other characters. Katy also agreed and will work on refining the Boar character a little more. From here I began to add textures to the characters. 

Boar Textures

Wolf Textures

Original Wolf Texture

Robin Textures

Looking over the different tests I did for the Boar I prefer the two lighter colours to the brighter one (2nd in) and the original (4th), simply because I feel that they will stand out more against the background and the facial expressions will also be clearer to see. I also think that that they are just generally more appealing. After showing them to Katy she also agreed that the lighter ones might work better, however, she also liked the brighter coloured one too (2nd one in). However, I don't agree with this choice and believe that it would blend in too much with the backdrop. 

Reflecting upon the Wolf textures, I personally prefer the textures with the darker shade on top and the lighter on the bottom even thought the latter makes the facial features more noticeable. This may change once the character is placed in the environment however, so I am still going to test the different textures except for the first test, as the colours are too vivid and bright. At this moment I am leaning towards the original texture because I really like the colours and the way that they blend. I also like the appeal that the darker face gives to the character and I believe that it creates a sense of mystery and helps to imply that this character is dangerous.

In terms of the Robin character, I wanted to create colours that didn't match the Boar's or Wolf's but that also seemed quite natural. This proved a little harder than expected because the base colour was brown, just like the Boar's. After altering the textures I relaised that I much preferred the lighter colors I had created, which was the opposite of how I felt when Katy had done a lighter colour in her digital tests. However, seeing the textures in a lighter shade has changed my mind. I feel that the lighter shades give the character a lot more appeal and I am definitely drawn more towards the lighter tones characters. I also feel that the lighter tones will work better alongside both characters and the environments.

To test all of these ideas I placed the characters into the environments with all of the textures. 

I experimented with adjusting the levels of the ground only, as I originally felt that the trees were a nice colour as they were. I gradually increased the darker slider whilst very slightly decreasing the lighter one to make the colours appear darker. I much prefer the darker shades to the ground because it highlights the textures more than the lighter and original textures. The trees also appear to blend in better with the darker textures. In terms of character texture, the lighter shades work quite well against the lighter trees and darker ground. However, the original texture (4th along) also seems to stand out against this background. I still don't feel that the brighter Boar works, as I feel that it contains too much contrast and doesn't fit into the environment very well. 

I also tested how the darker floor and the boars would work against darker trees. Personally, I prefer the far trees in the darker tone, as it adds more depth to the environment. However, I'm not sure I like the darker foreground trees, as they draw attention away from the characters. However, I am going to discuss these thoughts with Katy first before I do any more tests to see how she feels about what I have done. 

As before I experimented with all of the textures together. The original texture was too pale and didn't show much of the texture so I immediately changed the levels of texture to make it darker. I also adjusted the levels of the tree textures to make them darker too, as we were thinking of placing this character in a darker setting. 

So I focused on making the texture appear darker and I also focused on making the colours the little brighter, as this is what we found when doing our research. Looking at the three tests I did, the first and the last stand out to me the most simply because I feel that they work really well with the all of the textures of the characters and the trees. However, the rock does seem to blend in with the ground a lot, so I will have to look at playing around with the levels of the rock texture to help it stand out a little better. Having said this however, I really like the deeper green in the second texture and think that it helps to make the characters texture stand out more, however it may also be too overpowering and draw attention away from the character. 

With the darker ground textures, I wanted to experiment with how these, and the characters, looked with the paler trees. I feel that the lighter foreground trees work really well with the characters and don't draw as much attention away from the characters as the darker foreground trees. I also really like some of the paler background trees, but I also like the darker ones too. I'm having trouble deciding, I know. In terms of the ground however, I think I prefer the slightly paler texture when used with the paler foreground trees because they blend together better than the darker ground texture. I also feel that the original character texture works better with the lighter trees, but we can't make any decisions on this yet because we don't have a sky or fog texture yet. 

Overall, I feel that I have explored the textures well enough and have come to the conclusion that the textures work well together if the background textures aren't too overwhelming to give the focus to the characters. Having paler foreground textures and darker background textures seems to help to create depth within the environment, however, I feel that I should experiment with adding different shades of the two textures to help create more depth. I also feel that I should experiment with them in After Effects to see how adding depth through 3D layers works. 

I also need to add in a sky texture for both environments and experiment with different methods for the fog in the wolf environment. During our next progress meeting, I will show Katy what I have done with the environments and see what she thinks about them and take my experimentation from there. I also didn't get around to placing the Robin into any of the environments yet and will need to do this before our next progress meeting.

Applied Animation: Final Textures

Earlier this week I asked Katy to work on producing some final textures so I could get on with creating a look test and move on to production. Katy managed to get most of the textures done quite quickly and I was grateful for her enthusiasm, as it meant that I could start to test how we were going to use our textures. Having said this however, Katy did forget to do the final textures for the floor and the sky, so I offered to do them for her whilst she focused on something else (I also forgot about the sky and the fog and will have to add them in at a later date). For now this is what we have in terms of final textures. 

Texture for Boar trees

Texture for Wolf trees

Texture for rocks

Boar environment texture

Wolf environment texture

Robin texture

Wolf and Boar textures

Alternative Wolf texture

Although these are the final textures, I want to experiment with the levels and saturation in Photoshop to see how they all match up together. I also want to experiment with the two different Wolf textures and find which one best suits our needs and the environments. Overall, I'm pleased with the textures that we have and I will start to test them later this week.

Applied Animation: Environment Concpets

So a few weeks ago I sent over some environment sketches to Katy to encourage her to start thinking about environment design and begin focusing on those rather than giving all of her attention to the characters (we can't have characters without environments). However, this didn't have the desired effect and although I'd pushed her to start the environments Katy just never seemed to get around to doing them. This means that my sketches were the only experimenting we had done in terms of environment design and whilst I was okay with using similar environments to what I had done, I do feel that there was a huge lack of experimentation and that maybe they weren't explored as much as they could have been. On top of this, there's been no real experimentation with camera angles, meaning we will have to draw environments up as we go if we decide to change the camera angle.

Boar Environment Concept

Wolf Environment Concept

Wolf Environment Concept

I was really disappointed that Katy hadn't been able to do any sketches for the environments and I wasn't aware of why she hadn't gotten round to them either. Assuming because it was too big a work load, I asked if she needed help, which she turned down, so there wasn't much I could do other than keep trying to encourage her to keep going however, this doesn't seem to have any effect on her work flow. I decided to give her a deadline for the final environment designs use my sketches as reference if she needed them. 

Katy's Boar Environment Design

Katy's Wolf  Environment Design

Katy's Wolf Environment Design

Although Katy hadn't experimented with any environment sketches, I feel that we have environments we can work with, however, they are just neater sketches of what I had drawn. I pointed this out to Katy and said that we haven't done enough experimentation into the environments, however she didn't really respond and moved on to other aspects of the project. For now these environments will do as a base to conduct look tests and to use as the main environments.

Overall, I'm unhappy with the development on the design side of things simply because we have minimal environments to work with and the enthusiasm that was there for characters isn't there for environments. This has led to communication between us to fade, which is having a negative impact on work flow. We need to get back on track with our schedule and make more of an effort to keep in touch with each other about our work and to communicate what we are thinking better. 

Applied Animation: Further Research into Lip Syncing

In order to help me with getting to grips with this whole lip syncing business (because it's difficult, really difficult) I decided to sit down and watch a range clips from multiple animations that have talking animals in them. which turned out to help. A lot.

To start with I focused on animations that had dogs, wolves, foxes, etc, as our wolf character would be doing he majority of the talking in our animation. Plus the wolf is my main character throughout production, so I felt it was appropriate to start here. I started off with All Dogs go to Heaven, both one and two. There's a lot of singing within these two films and it allowed me to watch how their mouths moved to lots of speech with ease. I noticed that their mouths focus on forming the vowels and the shape of the syllables rather than trying to form the whole word. Despite the worked not being fully formed it was still really effective and the mouth shapes still represented the word being spoken.

Facial Expressions of Charlie from All Dogs go to Heaven

I found that it was quite similar in The Fox and The Hound, however, their mouths seemed to have a lot more movement, which made it flow with a lot more fluidity and made the words run into one another a lot cleaner. In fact I found this to be the case with all of the Disney films that I looked at including, Oliver and Company and The Lion King. 

The Fox and The Hound

I completed my research by watching Balto all the way through, just to get a full understanding of how the animals mouths were animated by a range of different companies. I found Balto particularly helpful, as the main character is a wolf, giving me a very good reference point to work from. 

Clip from Balto

I also did the same for the other two characters and looked at films such as, The Lion King (for Pumba), Babe, Charlotte's Web, Animal Farm, and Creature Comforts. All of these animations are really good examples of how lip syncing has been done successfully. What I have noticed across all of them is that emphasis is placed on either the vowel of the word or the syllables rather than the pronunciation of each letter. This is something I will definitely stick to when I come to animate my own characters talking. I've also noticed that a lot of the mouth movements are exaggerated, again something that I will keep in mind to practice when I come to do my own lip syncing. I feel that I have a really good selection of reference points to look at and I feel that I would benefit from creating my Phoneme chart for each of the characters, so I will make this my next stepping stone. 

Applied Animation: Pre-Production Critique

Yesterday was crit day. Personally, I felt that it went quite well in terms of how much content we had and how far we had progressed with our work. However, I was disappointed that we didn't have any animation tests to show, nor had we managed to get a look test together. I was also really disappointed that Katy hadn't gotten around to any kind of environment design and felt that we would have received much better feedback if we would have had more concept work to show. 

Presentation Slides

Presentation Slides

Despite this, I felt it went quite well, despite not receiving much feedback, the feedback we did received was all positive and there was a few points made that were constructive. The feedback primarily focused around praising us for our strong development and the amount of work we had already completed. However, I struggled to take this as a compliment because I am still worrying about our lack of environments and tests. This is something that our peers also picked up on and suggested that we try and get a look test completed as soon as possible to see how we are going to make all of our elements work together. They were intrigued to how we were going to make the characters stand out from the backgrounds and stressed on the importance of making them stand out, as the animation won't work if they all blend together. 

Katy and I both agreed on this point and will work towards getting a look test done over the next few days. 

We were also reminded to be careful with our textures and to make sure that we scan them in at a high resolution to help keep the texture and quality to a high standard. Overall, they seemed pleased with our character designs and out plans to move forward and they enjoyed our animatic. They did suggest we look at adding in subtitles to prevent confusion, as our characters have very distinctive accents and this is definitely something that I will look into, as I would like our animation to be understood by everyone watching and not just a select few. 

Overall, I am happy with the feedback and feel that very important points were made, however, I'm not wholly pleased with our work flow at present. This has encouraged me to try and create a more productive work flow between Katy and I and to get the production ball rolling once again. 

Applied Animation: Progress Meeting 05/02

Earlier this week Katy and I scheduled a session to sit down and chat about how far we had got and what still had left to do in preparation for our pre-production crit on Monday. At the start of the week, I had encouraged Katy to look more at creating the environments for our animation, so I could move forward and begin to look at creating look tests, animation tests and so on. I had also asked her to create the final textures based on the ones we had chosen from our material testing, as I thought that it would be simple, as we had already created the textures so there was no need to experiment further. However, she had decided to begin work on a final storyboard instead and experiment more with textures on a larger scale. This has put us behind by a week and I was beginning to worry, as we still don't have any environments to work with or show. It is also making my part of the process quite difficult to complete, as I don't have all of the elements to work with. 

With this in mind, I asked Katy if she was struggling and offered my help, which she turned down with a promise to work a little faster and have things completed by mid next week. Whilst she was doing this I suggested that I could possibly start to move forward and create some phoneme sheets that would aid us when animating, of the shapes each characters mouth would make when talking. 

Although I feel Katy is falling behind a little, I also started to think that it may be due to me not communicating properly with her about where we should be at and what the plan is for the week. To try and solve this I made it clear that I wanted Katy to forget about the storyboard for now and have the environments and final textures done by the end of next week. I also asked if she understood what it is that she needed to do this week to make sure that I hadn't been confusing. She seemed clear on her tasks and I'm pleased that I had made things clearer for her.

Hopefully I have managed to encourage Katy to work a little quicker and not spend too much time on one task but rather keep the deadlines I set in mind and try her best to stick to them. As of now, I feel that it is safe to say I have adopted the role of producer and director and whilst I wanted us both to have a say in how things got done within this project, I feel that I have had to tell Katy which direction she needs to take next. I'd really like to encourage Katy to be more confident in her choices and I will do my best to do so throughout the remainder of the project. 

Applied Animation: Storyboards and Animatic

Earlier this week I set about putting together the animatic from the thumbnails that Katy had created from my thumbnails to see how our sound and story worked together and to check that our animation fitted within the time restrictions.

Putting together an animatic to a pre-recorded clip was something that I had never actually done before, in fact I've never actually added sound to an animatic before, so I found that I had to pay a lot more attention to this task than previous times. Having said this, it did allow for me to gain a new appreciation for having an animatic and I actually enjoyed seeing our work come together.

My Thumbnails

My Thumbnails

Katy's Thumbnails

Katy's Thumbnails

In terms of content I'm quite happy with what we have so far and I feel that the story is clear and well paced. However, there are a few adjustments to make, such as adding in character movement to capture personality and changing a few camera angles, which I have told Katy about and she will make the amendments in the final storyboard. Creating the animatic to a pre-recorded track has allowed me to see how the dialogue works with the story and place in appropriate pauses for characters to respond to the events throughout the story, as well as pauses for gags/ jokes and overall I am pleased with how it all comes together. If I were to change anything, I feel that it may be beneficial to re-record some of Katy's dialogue because I feel that some of the questions sound lazy and as though the character is uninterested, which isn't the mood we want to create. 

Whilst watching through the animatic, I noticed that the dialogue with the relevant pauses included runs very close to the time restriction and I have suggested to Katy that we could include some of the opening credits as the robin is asking the first question if we need to have that little extra time. We also need to think about background sounds and implement them into the final animatic.

Applied Animation: Editing, Cutting and Re-recording Sound

Whilst Katy was working on creating the textures and storyboards for our animation, I was in charge of editing and cutting the recordings we had gathered earlier that week. Again, this is something that I'm not familiar with, yet I was eager to learn, as it I am genuinely interested in sound editing and wanted to see what could be achieved within the software available to me, this software being Audition. Audition is a program that I didn't even knew existed until I started my degree and it is something, until now, I have never actually used or thought about, or even knew what it was used for, for that matter. Despite this however, I found the software extremely straight forward to use in terms of importing a sound file and cutting it down and I was able to put together a rough cut to accompany our animatic.

Editing/ Cutting Sound

However, this is as far as I have managed to get with the software, although I did learn that I could alter the height of the sound waves as a whole and in certain sections. I feel that this would be extremely useful, as I found that Max's recording is a lot louder than Matt's and Katy's is a mixture of both. I will need to learn how to use this function properly though and I have decided to research how to achieve this and go and see workshop support to see if anyone is free to teach me how the program works.

Adjusting the height of the sound waves

I will also have to research/ learn how to blend together our recordings with background sound to help make it appear as though the characters are in a forest setting. I feel that this could possibly be a factor that will make or break our whole animation because if the sound doesn't match our visuals it won't have the same effect and it will let the rest of the animation down. Sara also stressed that this is a very important element of the animation and whilst both she and Martin are pleased with our voice recordings (they are very clean), I need to consider sound very carefully and try my best to make the two blend seamlessly. Again, I feel that I would benefit from reaching out to workshop support to gain some 'hands-on' help rather than just sitting at my computer reading about what I should be doing.

Whilst editing, I realised that some of the clips weren't as clean as I would have liked them to be, and because the audio has such a huge impact on an animation, I requested that they be recorded again, which our voice actors were more than willing to do. 

Matt and Max recording Audio

These recordings came out a lot cleaner and I was happy with the overall dialogue and felt that it was what we were looking for. I was really pleased with how well the pair did and I'm really pleased with what we have to work with in terms of dialogue. Having said this however, I do feel that some of Katy's clips need to be re-recorded, as I feel that they seem to portray the wrong mood, for instance in one of the questions she sounds incredibly bored and uninterested, which is the complete opposite of what we want our characters to sound like, as this would imply to an audience that the subject matter isn't important or interesting. We also need to record some of the actions that take place within the script, for instance Katy's character attempts to pull up a worm at one point and struggles a little, yet she didn't make any noise to accompany the action.

For now I am happy with what we have and I feel that we can re-visit the sound booth throughout the post-production stage. Right now I want to focus on production and will return to sound editing as we come closer to post-production. 

Responsive: Dazed - Progress Meeting 04/02

During today's progress meeting Molly, Katy and I sat down and discussed what ideas we had thought of during the last week. I feel that we had a few good starting points and we were able to expand on a few of those and develop them into 4 rough ideas for each of the videos. For each of the videos we will require the use of a model/ actor and this led us to start thinking about who should be director of the project. I wasn't personally interested in taking this role, as I am already directing one project and I felt that it would be too much for me to take on responsibility for two projects and Molly didn't seem bothered about the role either, so Katy took the position and was more than willing to do so. From here, Katy and Molly decided that they would both split the load of design, as this is what they are both interested in and we would all work together to create the animations, whilst I focused on post production a little more.
I am quite happy with how we have split responsibilities and I feel that the work load is split evenly between everyone and that everyone is working towards their strength, which we hope will help to keep motivation up, as people are working in areas they are particularly interested in.

We looked over the time sheet and was shocked to see that we only have 6 weeks (including the end of this week) to complete our brief. This made us seriously think about out ideas and we all agreed to keep it simple and use this as an opportunity to experiment and have a bit of fun. However, I do feel that we all need to start putting more time aside for this brief, as we have such little time to achieve quite a substantial amount of work, which the others agreed to.

With nothing much else to discuss, we decided that we should go away and experiment with creating patterns, animated patters, drawings onto pictures/ magazines to help us decided what we actually wanted to do and to finalise our ideas. We also suggested that we complete and share our mood boards to help us get on the same page with style and colours. We will meet next week and will hopefully be able to start production.

Responsive: Dazed - Idea Generation

During today's session I sat down with Molly and Katy to discuss ideas that we had been thinking of during the last week. Based on what had been said in the previous session, we began to look further into the idea of drawing/ animating patterns and colours over the top of live-action footage. We needed to come up with four separate but related ideas for our brief and we came to conclusion that all four could possibly be live-action videos with animation over the top of them, but in each video it is something different that is animated. Before going further, we discussed what the brief meant when it asked us to 'declare independence' and decided that it referred to creative independence, based on the research that we had done into the company and we kept this in mind when discussing ideas.

The first idea that we explored was Molly's idea of taking a video of someone doing something quite mundane and ordinary, such as reading a book, but possibly having the book as an animated object that transforms in the readers hands. This could be accompanied by animated patterns in the background or certain pieces of clothing being animated to relate to the fashion aspect of the company. I personally like this idea, as I feel that it reflects the magazine quite well in that it demonstrates something extraordinary existing in an ordinary world. The contrast also helps to separate the animation from the rest of the shot, allowing this to be the focus.
For the second idea we looked into focusing more on music and fashion, as these are the forefront topics the magazine focuses on. Again we wanted to create a mix-media video that incorporated animation. We thought about having a video of a person dancing that we could animate clothes onto. these clothes would be inspired by the latest fashion (such as vogue) and would change very so often. We also thought about how the shot framing could be used to help portray the creative side of things and thought it would be nice to explore how this would look.

Idea Notes

We also had an idea which included going into town and gathering footage of a group of people and covering their faces and animating there clothes and other aspects. We thought that we could do this to only a select few to help portray the idea of independence as a collective rather than an individual. However, this would require us to get consent from the general public to do this, so if we ran with this idea, we would gather a group of friends/ actors and film them in a similar environment to avoid consent problems.
For our final idea, Katy suggested that we could create a stop motion/ pixilation of patterns moving across someones chest/ face. I feel that this could turn out really nice, but we would have to explore and experiment with this a little more.

Overall, I feel that we have a good starting block to work from and begin experimenting with and I feel that we have managed to come together successfully to create something appropriate for the brief we have chosen. I'm excited to see what we will produce in the short amount of time we have and I'm pleased that I have engaged in something that is out of my comfort zone and that is going to allow me to learn and explore new skills and techniques.

Responsive: Dazed - Progress Meeting 28/01

Last week we deiced to meet up to establish what we had done so far for the brief and what needed to be done for us to move forward. We reminded ourselves what it was that Dazed Media were actually looking for and started o brainstorm some general ideas that came to mind when we looked at the online magazine. We realised that the magazine was fashion forward and we thought that we could look at incoprporating fashion in some way into our 15 second videos, which Molly suggested we do with animation. From here Katy and I bounced ideas from Molly's about possibly animating over live-action footage or rotoscoping. However, I was less keen on the rotoscoping, as it would take a lot longer to achieve than simply animating onto live-action. Molly also agreed with this idea and we decided that we should explore more into that idea and see what we could create.

We were struggling a bit with other ideas, as we didn't fully understand what it was that Dazed wanted us to declare independnce on and we all agreed to go away and research more into the magazine to try and figure it out. Other than this, we didn't actually do much in terms of work, other than discuss what action needed to be taken for us to move forward. We all agreed to put together a mood board of styles and colours that we liked the look of that related to our ideas of placing 2D animation over the top of live-action footage and that we should present what we have suring our next progress meeting.

As an afterthought I decided that it would be useful to create a time sheet to help us manage our time between us and around other projects. Overall, I feel that we are on the right track and I am confident that we will work well as a team and achieve the task ahead of us.

Time Sheet

Responsive: Dazed Collaboration

During our final twilight session we were given the task of finding and choosing a person (or persons) to work with collaboratively for the second part of our brief 'Collaborative Practice'. In preparation for this meeting and greeting we were asked to choose and analyse a brief that we were interested in completing for this module. I really struggled with this task because I really didn't want to add anything too big to my already huge work load and I also wasn't sure what skills my partner(s) would bring to the table. In the end I chose Dazed because it seemed to be the easiest to create across multiple disciplines and it also seemed like it would quite fun to play with and give me the opportunity to create some animation that was quite fun and playful.

Dazed Brief

Whilst anaylsing the brief I noticed that the main aspect they wanted to focus on was creating and portraying a sense of independence, now whether that was creative independence or something else wasn't clear at all and the remainder of the brief seemed pretty vague. So I did a little research into the company and Dazed Media is a magazine that appears to primarily focus on fashion and music and focuses on the independence of those areas.

With this in mind, I felt confident that I would be able to team up and come up with a few ideas that were appropriate, so I went with it. 

By the end of the session I had found myself two partners, Molly Fairhurst from illustration and Katy Mulvey from my own class. I'm pleased with the fact that I have managed to partner up with someone from outside of my own practice and I'm excited to see what we can achieve together. I'm also pleased that I will be working with another animator, as it means that we can split the animating between us and make the work load easier to handle. 

From here we filled out the sheets we had been provided and agreed to meet in 2 weeks time to discuss ideas and begin work towards our brief. 

Individual Contract

Applied Animation: Material Tests

In the last two sessions Katy and I conducted some material tests to see how we could use watercolours and Brusho to create the textures for our characters and backgrounds. I found these two sessions to be extremely useful and I enjoyed being able to use traditional media again after such a long time.

Working!

We decided to create small samples of different textures to see how the materials would react to each other so we could get an idea of what kind of textures we could create with them. Using the mood boards we had created we took colours and texture ideas from them began to create our own. I focused more on trying to create depth with the use of lighter shades, whilst Katy focused on textures and colours. I feel that I managed to create a really nice effect by using light blue to draw tress in the distance. This made the foreground stand out a lot more and made the colours seem more vibrant. Katy also really liked this effect and is going to experiment with it when she creates the larger environment sheets. I also did a few experiments for the wolf's texture and colour. I really liked Katy's texture tests for the wolf but I felt that she wasn't getting the colours right so I suggested that she attempt to create something similar but with the colours I used.

Example of test sheets

I left Katy to do this whilst I began to work on other parts of the project and once she was done I sat down with her and looked over everything that she had. I began to sticky-note everything that I liked and encouraged her to help make a decision on which textures we wanted to explore on a larger scale. Taking control of something like this is something that I struggle with quite badly, as I really don't like upsetting people or being centre of attention, however, I feel that I did really in this session and that I gave Kay some constructive feedback and that was both useful and encouraging. Having said this, I do feel that I was making the decisions and that Katy seemed to be fine with whatever I said making it a little difficult for me to really discuss why or why not to choose what we did. Despite this however, we have managed to select which textures Katy should focus on creating on a larger scale and develop further and I'm really pleased with the progress we are making. 

Chosen Textures