mi4011minadigajaweera - Tumblr blog

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Final Animation

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Additional note

After a few months and weeks of hard work on this module, I'm quite happy with my final animation and I really enjoyed the whole process of working on this project where I learnt quite a lot of things that helped me explore and improve my skills as well!

In my opinion, I feel like it was really interesting to work on an Animator who made one of my favourite childhood cartoons - that was also his major hit work The Powerpuff Girls. It was kind of like my inner child's calling that I felt connected, with that being my main inspiration through my animation, I feel like I was able to illustrate his PPG art style combined with a bit of my own without making it exactly the same as PPG too to highlight some important stages throughout Craig's artistic journey with my narrative. There were a few challenges, especially with time management and even meeting the time limit of my animation. I was able to analyze different animators work and my own work progress and also take in feedback for areas of improvement that my lecturers pointed out which was very helpful. Overall this was a really fun project and learning process :)

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End Credits Scene

I didn't want to leave it quite plain but since we had to include a title screen including our name, module and animator etc, I went for a similar theme used in the ppg end credits with the black background and a similar font style in white, but added the green whoosh for a small extra touch since I wanted to end it on a special note.

reference ^^

my ending title screen^^

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Editing the Final Animation on Davinci Resolve

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Audio/Sounds for the Animation

Aside from the voiceover and free sound effects of pouring liquid, door opening, applause,pencil writing etc, I used an explosion sound from PPG and a whoosh. Since cartoons have different sound effects that makes it entertaining, I thought of using them instead of just a voiceover since my animation sort of has a cartoony style inspired by PPG.

I noticed the PPG used different instrument sounds such as orchestral and drum beats too as bgm but most of them were for dramatic or some normal scenes. Since my animation is about telling Craig's artistic journey and not an action packed too fast paced animation, it still includes different elements of my main inspo PPG.

I used a free background music audio in the beginning and end of my animation that gave a cartoony vibe and also was an instrumental quite similar to the theme I wanted.

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Animating on Krita

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Animating Progress

Although this is a very short part, it was possibly the hardest part to animate since it took quite a while to get it how I wanted.

Genndy opening the door and holding Craig's first PPG sketch as he shows it to him, shows their close friendship and Genndy's contributions to PPG as well. In the time of Craig in CalArts, I feel like including Genndy even briefly was still important since this is where Craig's animations and work blossomed, it was the main starting point of his career, and before PPG's success he worked with Genndy on his Dexter's Laboratory work that gave him experience and was helpful when he started PPG as a series.

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Making slight adjustments pt. 5

EDITED FINAL ANIMATION SCENE

I didn't want to use the iconic moving hearts reference since that's basically one of the main PPG elements. As Craig is waving bye, I added a stars falling background animation as an inspo from the PPG ending scene having a stars falling background. (And also Craig is a star in the industry so that's a slight hint behind using it as well!)

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Making slight adjustments pt. 4

EDITED FINAL ANIMATION SCENE

I added more movement, blinks and mouth movements to this scene as well to make it better.

The green sparks around them are a reference to the green whoosh soaring in the sky in the beginning - that green spark is like a something that makes a person special, that creativity. Also an inspiration directly from the Powerpuff Girls.

In the beginning it was flying in the sky before searching for those with creative hearts and it goes inside Craig's house and then he's born. In this scene where he's celebrating his success of PPG and his work with Lauren (his wife who also worked with him in PPG), the spark is still with them as a slight indication of them being special.

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Making slight adjustments pt. 3

INITIAL TEST ANIMATION SCENE

(speed not adjusted this should be much slower) but this was the initial test animation of the scene but I realized it looked quite stiff as Craig and Lauren pop out from the back, and the waving bye scene afterwards looks quite plain too since there was a lot of negative space around him as just his hand moves, so I made a few adjustments.

(see next post for the edited scene since tumblr allows only one video per post)

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Making slight adjustments pt. 2

EDITED FINAL ANIMATION SCENE

In comparison to the previous clip, I added blinks, mouth movements and hand movements to make it more alive and animated instead of a still shot and also explored how the background lighting might change with the bright white explosion taking place.

(side note: the explosion happens a bit faster than this clip I have adjusted the speed later during editing)

The reason I didn't keep the parents in frame after the explosion is because I wanted all the main focus on Craig - especially since this is the moment he's born and having the parents even on the sides might be a bit distracting even for a second, it's his time to shine :) - and also this is like a cartoony narrative so it's not too realistic to question too much about it.

Craig in the center with the background also slightly darkened as the white sparkly aura illuminates around him grabs all of our attention towards him and that was my main intention.

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Making slight adjustments pt. 1

After receiving small feedbacks time to time as I showed my work progress to my tutors, I made some slight alterations such as slightly adding more movements to some scenes that were still or had much less movement.

INITIAL TEST ANIMATION SCENE

This explosion scene initially just had a slight second of a still frame of Craig's parents with the potion, but I ended up editing it a bit more.

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Editing the Audio on DaVinci Resolve

My friend helped me with recording the voiceover since I wanted a male voice narration a bit similar to the one in the ppg intro. We took a few trial recordings and I finally put together parts of his voice recording for my narration.

I had to cut down some words and lines from my initial voiceover script to meet the time limit as well.

I also used some free sound effects and the ppg whoosh sound as the green spark of color moves in my animation.

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Final Stop Motion Animation

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Creating the Set up and the Weapon Room background

After we finished setting up, we filmed it using Stop Motion Studio and also used one of my hair strands to move the miniature sword in the air when our character summons it so it won't be that visible in camera instead of like a thread.

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Adding Wings, Arms and a Viking Hat

We used a bottle cap wrapped in foil to make the hat and foil arms to add a "metal arms" look since she's a warrior. We also used wire and paper to make the wings so we could bend them slightly when needed to show the wings movement.

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Making the Base of the Puppet

We used various materials we could find such as cloth, cardboard, toothpicks, wire, foil, separated threads from this yellow thing for blonde hair etc.