gracemaller-blog

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Just some more doodles I did as part of a gift for my friends birthday a few weeks ago. Been really enjoying doing more illustrations. Have missed spending time on stills like these✨

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This is my poster for the independent study to summarise and look back on our first year of Animation at NUA. I have greatly enjoyed my first year and everything I have learnt. I can’t wait for the second year and to learn even more about animation and improve my skills so that I can learn to visualise the stories and characters I come up with.

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Just some doodles I've done in my spare time ✨

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This would be an example of a good show reel as the work is stunning and interesting to look at. I like how they include unfinished then finished work to show the process and detail they go into. However again this show reel is far too long to sit all the way through. There aren't any tags/ mini titles on the work to suggest where it is from, i.e previous job? The title slates at the start and end are cute and have a nice minimalistic design to them but there are no contact details shown so how do you contact them if an employer decided they liked their work. The song  is catchy and helps not make the whole thing feel too long. 

So while the work is amazing I would maybe have to classify this as a bad show reel due to the reasons above, if it was shorter, had contact details and maybe some little titles on the work, then it would be a perfect example of a good show reel. 

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This is what I would personally also classify as a bad show reel. Although all the work is very visually pleasing and impressive, the showreel is far too long and they also spend too long looking at each thing in the reel.

The name slides are very plain and not very exiting, coming from a creative person you would expect them to spend some time showing off their skills and putting their most effort into something that is advertising them to a potential client. 

Perhaps they didn't want the name cards to distract from the main animations and that was a personal choice but I think if it was shorter and had some interesting name cards then it might be more effective as they have a lot of great work to show off.

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This is an example of a bad show reel. However it does keep the viewer interested but for all the wrong reasons. The only reason you watch till the end is to laugh at it and laugh at how bad it is. (although I don't think I would be able to animate like that in Maya so he is a step above me, haha)

The animations all feature the same character and very similar scenes. It is a bit long, a show reel should be kept short to make sure the viewer stays engaged for the whole of the reel and sees all your work.

Also the animations themselves aren't that great so this also places it under an example of a bad show reel.

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This is my first attempt at a lip sync, which I had already posted but it seems to have disappeared of my blog? So I am posting it again and from what I remember I enjoyed using after effects with the pre made shapes and slider as it made it very easy for a beginner to figure out what to do. At the time I was still finding after effects quite confusing so it was nice that we didn't have to do much with the programming as such on this one. So we could focus on getting used to listening to sound and getting the correct lip shape.

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These are my lip shapes for the lip sync project. I looked at my own mouth in the mirror and drew what I looked like saying certain sounds. I think I did enjoy this project but I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn't stressing about getting all my other projects done too. But otherwise I found it oddly relaxing to just scrub through sound clips and try and guess what each sound would be. It was drawing the mouths and trying to get those shapes I found harder as my accent isn't the same as Vincent price so I think certain ways we say things look different so not everything matched up totally and I could have done with an extra mouth shape or two.

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Here is my animatic for my mystery box, I wasn't there for the lesson we did this but from what I can understand it is just a few key frames without the in-betweens of our animation sequences. So mine is very simple due to time constraints but I think it gets the idea of what the movements are across.

Next time I would not leave this one to the last minute and would like to spend a little more time on it. However I do kinda enjoy the sketchy look of it.

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This is my final animation for my mystery box unit. I had to upload it in 480p as tumblr couldn't handle the size of the file so the quality isn't as good as it should be. However I am very happy with my final animation and love how the background of the garden works well with my puppet. I tried to make the backgrounds colours similar to my puppet so I muted the saturation and tinted it pink slightly to make it blend in with my character and her world. I am very happy with the movement of my puppet and the box. 

I used Adobe after affects to edit the video as if you saw earlier I posted the unedited clip on the green screen with the white board. The green screen was fairly simple to key out, I did have to do slightly more to it as my character is so pale so there were small elements which had a slight transparency to them from reflecting the green screen. I then had to mask out the white boards which was very simple as they were just rectangles. But there is a moment where she falls that her skirt falls on top of the white rectangle, which from masking out meant that I lost part of her skirt. So to remedy that I had to create another mask and “add” rather than “remove” but this then brings back the white where the skirt lands before the skirt gets there. So I had to use key frames to move the mask to fit each frame of where the skirt covers the white, so that we didn't have any white board showing or any skirt missing. I feathered the edges of the skirt mask to soften it and blend it better to the scene. If I had more time I would have liked to have masked the shadow that is missing slightly under my character due to the white boards cutting it off. However when I went to look at it there were pins under the shadow which could be seen. So i decided that I would rather miss the edge of the shadow than have a full shadow but also have big golden drawing pins appear randomly mid scene. This is something I will have to take into consideration while filming next time. But seen as this was my first ever attempt at keying and masking I wasn't aware of the issue i had caused myself; luckily a very minor issue.

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This is my experimentation reel for my mystery box project. I edited this on iMovie so it is a tad cheesy and simple, but it is only the experimentation reel so clients won't be seeing this, this is only to view my process along the project, which it does. I added some music in the iMovie library so I assume it is Royalty free but it is quite dreary/slow so I should have chosen a more upbeat clip like in my showreel. Most of my evidence is in photos, I think next time I do a project I need to document more of my early work at the start as i can not find any of my initial drawings anywhere which would have been interesting to see as I had a few different designs before choosing my peg leg princess. However I am happy that this shows a decently lengthen look at the process.

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An updated version of my story board I forgot to post, it's very basic and not very arty looking, but I just need it to show the basic idea of what is going on as I don't have the time to spend hours making a pretty one unfortunately. In future assignments I need to remember to prioritise finishing my story boards to a better, prettier standard as personally i hate to even put my name to something so poorly drawn, haha.

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So this is the final image I have chosen for my background in my mystery box stop motion. I have put a side by side of my original photo and then the edited one, in the edited one all I have done is change the contrast, exposure, offset and saturation and tinted the colours slightly more pink toned so that it matches the pink-ness of my character. I have dulled the saturation slightly so that the colours appear more pastel than bold bright colours. I am very happy with this outcome and think it suits my character and her scene very well

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This is my final animation for my hand in for mystery box. The unedited version as I still need to take the green screen and white boards out to put my background in. But in this animation I wanted my character to have a limp, as she has a peg leg that extends past her knee I would imagine that this limits your movement a lot so I tried to just really focus on the steps of the actual foot and then drag the peg leg along with her once she has started to move forward. I am happy with achieving this. My mystery box is certainly very mysterious as it moves, why it moves we shall never know. But my character reaches roughly half way in the screen and starts to admire the pretty scenery around her. While she does this the box starts to move towards her. She then slowly turns to face the box realising that it is now in front of her, she has a delayed reaction as she is stuck in shock and then she is suddenly hit with the fear and knocked backwards, passing out. While she is passed out the box then exits the scene by crawling over her and leaving. There is then a pause before she then starts to come to and lift herself into a sitting position. Then slowly turning her head to face camera in "the office" style manner (where a character will suddenly pan to camera and give a blank or annoyed expression, to break the wall between the audience and the camera) due to her lack of being able to change expression I thought this was fitting as she has the perfect accidental resting bitch face. So she stares to the camera as if to say "what the heck just happened". I am happy with how my animation has turned out, it's probably the longest animation I have made so far and the only thing I would maybe improve next time would be to have her fall quicker? As the way she falls makes it very much like in the matrix where everything slows. As she falls a little slow, where as if you fall in real life is all happens quite fast, due to gravity. So next time I would make the fall a little faster but I am happy with how smooth it all is generally.

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These are some of the images I am currently trying to pick between for a background for my animation. I need the right side of it to be clear or objects due to a character exit, and I think I am leaning more toward the house image but which one will work better I'm not sure. The images are photos I have taken with my canon camera while on days out, the house images are from a place called Orford which I visited with my family for a little day out and the bottom image of the flowers is at the V&A from a visit with my mum. I wanted a summery, pretty backdrop for my character as she is a princess, despite being a bit of a mess with her plastic surgery and Botox addictions.

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These are the emails with LAIKA lead modeller Ty Johnson. I have colour coded each email so that you can clearly see the different emails. They are very long and detailed, which is something I was very pleased to receive as I had only expected one brief reply but instead got very lucky and ended up receiving several detailed replies to my questions. I wish I could have included these all in the presentation but I have extracted only the parts I thought most relevant to our presentation. I was very lucky with this contact and have learnt a lot about LAIKA as a company but also about how one person has managed to succeed in getting into the industry and creating characters in films I've watched and loved. I still have many more questions which I will ask if I get the chance but unfortunately these won't make it in time for presentation. Perhaps it will be information I can use in future projects.

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These are the notes I shall be reading from to accompany my slide in the presentation. I tried very hard to condense the 4000 words of emails I had received from Ty Johnson and to try and just look at the key points in which he talked about model making and the process. I will also post the 4000 words or emails to my blog later incase there is an interest in reading through those as it is very interesting what he talks about and a shame I can not fit it into my short time of the presentation.