Week 2, Month 2

Storyboards.

As far a storyboards go these are sort of pre-storyboarding storyboards, just done in my sketchbook to get them done as fast as I could. They are just the essential visual representation of each of the beats. The challenge for me here was to try and not to many extra ideas in. I kept having to remind myself that I just needed to get the bones of it in so that I can build on it as it goes. I purposefully kept elaborate camera angles or detailed poses out so that it can be understood even at this early stage.

It's an interesting debate that goes on in my head about what frames I need to draw right now and which I will remember to put in later. Each frame to me represents an action not just a moment in time. I feel like ideally animation should strive to do this with every frame but especially here when putting the story together I try to find those moments that feel like they already have build up and release with just one image. For instance, on the first page I've drawn the boy coming in from the right and shuffling on to the scene, it's two drawings but for me that foot coming in and then sliding across is all happening in real time. Also in the second page where the boy goes from holding the boxes to the 'wait a sec' finger, to hand in pocket, I wanna get that feeling of snaping between each movement. So there is already a sense of timing in these early drawing that will help me later on to fill out the frames. I'm going to do a of drawings during animation but I still want to make sure I'm not doing too many unnecessary ones, so knowing where the keep movements are help to create a sense of pacing with the piece.

I have started translating these storyboards into a simple animatic, which is where I will fill out some of the actions and framing, etc. In the interest of time I've decided that rather the do all the animation in a sketchy aesthetic, I will work out some keyframes that really need some thinking and some essential inbetweens that will help the keyframes make sense and from that I will dive straight into doing some finished lines. I'm using Photoshop to create the animatic, and while I initially looked into using some of the free or trial versions of industry standard animation software, after finding a very interesting video on how to animate in Photoshop using video layers I've decided that I will do the complete animation in PS. There are plenty of challenges that come with this but I feel like it's going to give a good result while allowing me to concentrate on the technicalities of animation rather that working out a new program.

Week 1, Month 2

A new challenge. Wooo!

This challenge is to create a 1-2 minute narrative animation with the program of my choice.

The idea for this narrative came to me very quickly after reading the challenge. I wanted to create a character piece with some level of interaction between at least two people. For the sake of drawing different styles of people I immediately decided that it would be a male and female.

The easy choice to make was that it would center around a romance between the two leads, but in my experience the boy meets girls story has been quite played out. So I thought about other stages of a relationship including finding love after already being with someone for some time or how one adapts to learning new things about a partner early on. What I came to though was to explore the idea of 'wooing' someone, which I feel happens at many stages of the relationship.

So my story is about a boy trying to win a girl over with presents not realising that all she wants is him.This is a very quick breakdown of what happens.

Boy brings big stack of presents to girl and gives them to her one by one.
She rejects each one kindly.
The boy goes through all his presents, each one getting bigger until he has one big present lef.
The girl rejects even the biggest present leaving the boy with nothing but empty arms.
With his arms free, the girl is finally able to hug him and show her affection.

As for visual style I am thinking i want the animation to be quite rough, maybe even incorporating alot of my working and structure lines in to the design to give a feel of being unprocessed. I idea with this would be that I can be a little bit more relaxed with the exactness of the models and animation while also giving it a unique style. But I will test it and see if it's worth doing.

I am very excited for this project the idea came to me so quickly and clearly that I feel like it's going to be fun to execute and I haven't done hand drawn animation in a long time so it will be good to practice some core skills in animation.

So I really like the narrative idea I've got. The next thing I think about is the actual visuals of the story. I want to get some interesting animation techniques in there and execute some animation staples to showcase my understanding of them. For instance I want to get a walking animation in there but perhaps do something different with it. Also want to do some character animation where you can see the change of emotion. I want to get a technical bit of animation in like a 3d head turn and also the 2 characters actually physically interacting.

Right away I conceive how these key pieces of animation fit into my narrative. I see the walk happening with the boy bringing in the presents and that can be unique and different in that he will have to balance the presents while walking. I see it being a shuffle with the feet and balancing act with the arms and back. There are plenty of moments where characters can show change of emotion, from when the girl first sees the boy, the boy's face when his first present is rejected and then changes to determination to win her over with another one. Head shakes as the girl refuses will be technical as will the hug at the end.

I've done a few drawings to get an idea of the characters. The first is a sketch of the boy carrying presents.

My aim is to keep the design relatively simple so that I can actually animated them but also flexible enough to show some of those more detailed emotions. I chose to use full large eyes (an easy disney inspiration) so that you can read the direction they are looking and register blinks and squints. It can be a very difficult thing to do with just dots for eyes and requires more style in its execution. Also lots of area for the mouth, for similar reasons. Going for full five fingers for some of the articulate gestures that I have in mind but the the rest is generic body. A simple shirt and pants combo so that my time is spent getting the animation right and not trying to keep on model so much.

The next piece I did as a sort of target render, what I hope the final piece can look like.

In this one I really wanted to try and achieve a balance between finished line work and a sketchy kind of aesthetic. Even from the first drawing I tried to refine the character design already, giving the boy a cleaner hairstyle so that some of the expressions can be read easier. With the girl I'm going for a simple elegant look. I imagine her to be in a dress with and easy to draw hairstyle. The dress is just an effective signifier of gender which will help tell the characters apart. It also helps show femininity in the character while not being overtly sexual. I want her look pretty but not unobtainable. It also has the benefit of being simple to draw but can be used effectively to show movement with secondary action.

I'm working on storyboarding the scenes out which will then become the basis for my keyframes. The idea with this will be to make sure I hit the major plot points and illustrate the major animation moments that I intend to include.

Week4, Month 1

Technically game production on a short hiatus as I further research the skills necessary to complete the project as I intended. So this will be a small placeholder entry so as to allow it to be updated at a future date.

Things I learnt about game development still grow though. I read some interesting information about creating resolution independent artwork for 2d games using flash. Flash has wide array of tools for creating games and I've looked into recreating the game with this program. The same art assets could be utilised and  it would have the same style of design, just that the mechanics behind the scenes would need to be completely rewritten. A rewrite would also have to include learning some amount of actionscript ( the language Flash uses for programing) to execute the same results.

Week 3, Month 1 (Belated)

First up, Here are working files for the Picinic Goodies. As a game design aesthetic I've used 3 distinct shapes and colours to differentiate the items as I want each to be recognizable from the background as well as from each other.

I have attempted to implement some jump animations for when the character jumps and ran into a real roadblock with the program. I seems like it has a lot of conflicts with the run animation when the 'jump' action is activated. This is one is doing my head in because logic doesnt seem to apply here. Currently scouring the internet for possible solutions.

I am currently working on smoothing the run animation a bit more and will probably end up doing twice as many frames as it has currently. Although there is a concern that with more frames of animation the transitions to jump animation will be a little bit more choppy. If I can work out how to put in transition animations for actions this wont be a problem.

I've also put together a target render image that gives some idea of what the final game should look like. Keeping in mind it is design to display on a phone screen the resolution need to be tweaked a little.