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Sound

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Animatic

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Storyboard

I started by trying to plan things out verbally since I was struggling to get anywhere but I did manage to get a floor plan figured out for the cell and the surveillance room. I ended up keeping the floor plan for the office with the screen at the top and the coffee machine on the counter behind and the door on the right, but the cell is very different now.

Things started really terribly and I couldn't get anything together, I couldn't visualise the flow of the story and started to become concerned the I wouldn't finish it all in time.

After getting the first 3 pages out of the way my mind was running faster than my hand could draw so I quickly wrote out my ideas following the flow of the story, it felt great to finally have something I liked. I let the feedback after my pitches failed get into my head which knocked my confidence for a while and I kept trying to think of the perfect idea but since then I've pivoted into going with the flow and making something I think I would enjoy and learn fun things making rather than trying to figure out exactly the right story, dialogue, character design, sound design, etc... for me to make the "perfect" first film. That was never going to happen but what I have here is something which I know I can build on and I think I'll enjoy animating.

Fortunately I managed to find a rhythm and figured out both the flow of the story and the corresponding shot. This is the finished rough storyboard spanning to Animation start to finish which I will remake in maya for clarity's sake for a more polished version better demonstrating the poses and camera angles which are lost by my rushed sloppy drawings.

This is the floor plan for the cell at the end, again another simple room and this one won't need much decoration. I'll just need to make sure the view from the window outside looks good.

[mi6021tomberry]

Locations

I was struggling to get started on the storyboard so I looked into some locations for inspiration especially for the exterior because that's where I was really at a loss. I like the ADX Supermax Prison as a design because it looks simultaneously modern and intimidating.

I'm thinking of going with this sort of shot for thr establishing exterior, splicing the two together to make it my own.

I already have ideas in mind for the control room but it's useful to visualise things alongside some real imagery.

[mi6021tomberry]

Character Designs

I had always loved the character designs in TF2 because the faces match their personality and I wanted to achieve that. I also like the strong chinned proportions used in their designs which I wanted to incorporate as my templates for my models.

Again I looked at another game with characters whose design matches their personality well, although in a very different and style, the same shapes appear for the villainous characters and the trustworthy ones.

I wanted to pinpoint the inmate first expanding upon my very cartoony sausage people in my previous designs but they were hinting at the basic essence or characteristics which I wanted to flesh out a bit more so that I'm not stretchy a boring spherical head without any character on the design before its manipulated. The drawing on the right was my favourite of the lot and I plan on fleshing them out with the modelling and texturing throughout the coming month.

These are the first sketches for the two guards on duty, I had originally planned on a guard and a sergeant but I'm not sure hoe the character dynamic will end up after the storyboard.

I'm going to use the middle and right hand drawing for my two guards and use the previous drawing of the villain because this one turned out a bit odd.

I did some basic sketching of the body shapes to get an idea of their presence. I'm not going overboard with drastically different shaped bodies because I had a nightmare with previous rigs that weren't skinny. I'm hoping that a slim and slightly muscular build will make animation much simpler. I can honestly start modelling from these sketches, I prefer to figure out all the kinks as I'm sculpting it because it will inevitably change in the process and since I'm quite slow at drawing anything that looks good, I think this is enough for me to work with modelling wise. I'll keep the textures very simple to not cause any issues as I feel confident in my texturing abilities after spending time working on them in other modules.

[mi6021tomberry]

Stretch Tests on Previous Rigs

I had a go using maya's built in rigging system to see if it sped up the process at all, I really like some of the additional features that it added with the red boxes that allowed me to bend previously stiff limbs and a pinning option which I could use to attach the feet to the floor. However the blend shape made prior to rigging was completely broken so I need to keep that in mind when I make my character and rig it.

I had a go at morphing a character I made for another module to get a better idea whether or not I could distort a rigged character made entirely by me and at first it was looking horrific.

I tried to scale the joints in single directions and actually came up with something which I can use moving forwards. All of these right now are very over the top as I'm limit testing what's possible for me but I think it should be possible for me to manipulate a rig made by myself for my characters to move like rubber.

In most SFM animations they tend to break the character rig with some features clipping through which will also be the case here but if I can find some balance between distortion and believability then that's what I want to explore to caricature my 3D characters.

I think the main thing I need to add is a lot more controls to the face so that it can be stretchy enough without being too malformed as I'll be able to exaggerate more precisely. This is after a few minutes of messing around without being able to reset the character to default but if I learn how to make blend shapes on a rigged character then I will hopefully be able to morph from shape to shape. Alternatively, I can just cut the shot and import a new rig.

I need to use this sparingly to add to expressions which are already understood rather than making a mess of distorted nonsense. Some of these really look awful so I need to work on it once the final model and rig is completed.

[mi6021tomberry]

Movement and Storyboarding

As stupid as the thumbnail looks, it's this video which helped shape the new direction of my film. I used to watch a lot of Source Film Maker animations when I was younger and this SFM tutorial reminded me of the stupid 3D animations that I used to love. They never make a lot of sense, things just happen but they happen in an unpredictable nonsensical way. I want to focus on that more than any defined narrative, I want to try and let my instincts guide this process and do whatever I enjoy not what looks flashy or technically difficult.

I grew up watching a lot of animations using Valve assets in SFM and this youtuber stuck out in my mind as an animator who enjoyed animating because of how improvisational they are as they hop between actions which they thought would be fun to animate. I want to try and do the same by flipping assets from sketchfab and other places to build my scene into a miniature world with lots of crap to make the spaces feel lived in where applicable.

This is a much more polished animation in SFM with great editing, animation and special effects which I saw last year and I want to try and emulate the fast cuts and closeups alongside the lower framerate and added 2D graphics as a way to cut the render time in half so it doesn't limit me giving me more time to experiment.

The characters in this animation feel like they're made of rubber because of how much the faces change from shot to shot, expressions are exagerrated to the point of caricatures and again the premise is stupid and unimportant. Its another animation where things just happen which is a little different from the guard duty premise I'm working with but I really want to bring this expressiveness into my film because its these outlandish unpredictable movements which I know that I'd enjoy making.

I sketched some of the faces to get an idea how the faces contort throughout looking almost unrecognisable if not for the voice and clothing. I want to bring this into the characters emphasising these expressions above making sure to include a walk cycle or other generic technical displays.

This is the roughest storyboard I've ever made and I don't expect it to make sense to anyone who isn't me but it's this layout which I want to develop and tidy up for the animatic, hopefully with some experiments with facial expressions in the process.

I tried messing around with the Ray Rig to see how difficult it would be to push facial expressions and shape to suit caricature the pose and action and after messing around for just a few minutes I found that it was actually really easy. It'll probably be much harder with my own rig because it wont be nearly as complex and versatile but I'll do my best to push the boundaries of the facial and mould it like clay.

This type of caricature was used in a lot of great animated shows I watched growing up where the shift in design would happen for a single frame. It's this sort of this which is similarly exaggerated in 3D in these SFM animations, I don't want to overdo it but I rarely see 3D characters moving in a stretchy cartoonish manner as realism is more often favoured.

[mi6021tomberry]

Film Changes and Character Designs

After realising that I again couldn't go ahead with what I wanted to do I was back at the drawing board stuck in groundhog day. After my first rough storyboard with 2 hotdog men one of whom can shapeshift I really had nothing other than I wanted someone stuck in a lab being experimented on or something along those lines. Two characters what happens to them?

I thought I could still have a go using a proper rig and thought about having a shapeshifting oddball pet picked out from a pet store like Lilo and Stitch but I was done trying to force a "professional rig" into the film and went back to watching shorts.

I watched a bunch of short animations which centred around 2ish characters to try and figure out the tone of the animation that I wanted. I really like the way Geri's Game flips things on its head by using the same old man playing against himself in chess and thought I could have my shapeshifting morph character doing something similar in an interrogation room.

I typed out a rough premise going along these lines but I wasn't really too happy with where it was going, something again just felt off or forced and I wasn't enjoying it. I liked the setting and the character dynamics with the policemen, deputy and the criminal in my head but I couldn't put my finger on a simple storyline because I kept trying too hard to make things "right".

I had this scene in the back of my mind when I was thinking about the guard on duty slowly nodding off when considering how I can push that.

From this I did some drawing to figure out what these characters might look like, the early ones being closer to my character moodboard but I started to stray further and went with simpler shapes which I still liked from the hotdog characters I drew in my earlier storyboard. So far I like the three in the middle of the final page above, I added the noses on in pencil and I think I'll just add them in where necessary. I'm planning on keeping the characters simple enough so that clothing doesn't hinder the range of motion of my characters as it has in the podcast module.

I still couldn't quite figure out where I wanted to go from my ideas, I just knew that I wanted some sort of a dynamic between the policemen like these two from gravity falls.

Gravity Falls creator (Alex Hirsch) student films.

I had a look at some police academy footage to get a feel for the tone of policemen which I could implement into the characters.

Here's the concept in rough after a long time changing ideas I have something pretty simple to go ahead with now, the parts that I'm going to enjoy will come from the visualisation of this idea especially in the way in which I push the expression and movements of the characters. It's a simple enough basis to expand upon and explore visually through character animation which is what I was I've been hoping to develop as a priority, I want to apply the morph experiments to creating elasticity of expression in my characters rather than having a shapeshifter I want to create simple characters malleable enough to shift between exaggerated expressive faces using blend shapes and/or rigging.

This is Stephen Hillenburg's student film which is great, a very simple premise emphasising storytelling and expression over realism, it's this sort of tone that I'm aiming for.

All I have to start making now are these locations and these characters. I only have a limited amount of time so making this many characters and locations could be difficult which is why I'm going to keep them all very simple, no large characters with clothes that clip and cause issues non stop and break every time they move. All of the will be simple bodies with a few accessories to add some gist of what each of them are like.

Some rough ideas of actions/effects that I want to include if possible.

[mi6021tomberry]

No 11 Second Club

After checking with Chloe, it turns out I can't do the 11 second club stuff as a separate part of my final project, I'll have to see if I can splice my ideas together so that I still get the chance to use a professional rig.

I also had a go at using a professional rig made by people at Dreamworks for free and did two simple poses to get a feel for the rig but I don't think I will be able to animate using a rig this complex because the file size of just the rigged model is 87mb and constantly lags and makes my PC freeze. If I add environments and other characters and lighting on top of that I don't think I would ever be able to render anything.

I either need to find a new rig or just make use of rigs I have already created like this scientist I made for another module, this would work with my early sketches I would just need to pivot back. Either that or I just practise with pro rigs outside of the module so that it doesn't limit anything.

[mi6021tomberry]

Film Changes

I had another think how I could flesh out my storyboard a little further centred around the two characters being stranded somewhere, I thought that changing the location from a lab might steer me into a more interesting direction.

I played around with different situations for a shapeshifter like escaping from a murder scene and having to disguise himself as the victim, a bank robbery situation again using his shapeshifting to hide from bank tellers and police to escape.

I pushed this a little further by twisting the concept to centre around a little blob of play dough trying to escape a toy shop initially I was going to have the morphing character in the foreground with other toys trying to escape in the background. This was because I realised that after spending a bunch of time animating my own rigged characters and simple rigs I downloaded, I hadn't ever used a professional rig. I'm hoping to do animation in future but I've spend so much time learning all the peripheral disciplines that I haven't put enough time into proper character animation/acting. I thought that I could have a shop keeper in the background so that I had the chance to use a professional rig but I knew that there would be a clash in styles so I think I might keep things separate. I ended up overcomplicating the idea in my head yet again into a prison/laboratory escape to the sound of Bugle Call Rag which pit perfectly into two minutes, I like what I can see in my head but I know that there's simply too much for one person to do in the time window because yet again I was thinking of adding more and more characters and complex animations none of which I had ever tried.

This is when I went back to have a look at the 11 second club website that I briefly saw when Hugo mentioned it to me and I'm warming to the idea now. I was stressing about the idea of applying for animation positions without ever having had a stab at acting using professional rigs so the 11 second club is a good way to splice the ideas together. Either I do things separately or try and find a way to incorporate the audio into my animation but I think for my sanity it would be best to split them up and create a shorter shapeshifting animation like Morph's 1-1.5 minute animations and then having 30 seconds of proper character animation practise.

Here's a renewed to do list until the deadline, I feel like I've got a better structure to work within by splitting the final project into acting attempts and a shorter film so that I'm able to experiment with my own ideas in short to force me to create something even simpler and not get carried away.

[mi6021tomberry]

Rendering

Messed around with these tutorials a little but couldn't find a way to make it look right when rendered so I'll keep things simple and focus on animation not texturing.

This is what it looks like in the viewport with a 5 tone shader which is interesting but not really something I'm looking for, it looks like someone's edited a standard render by bumping the sharpness up to the max.

These are the two side by side in the viewport and I couldn't get it to work.

I tried the toon outline which only looks okay when the character isn't smoothed and even then it looks choppy.

I had a look at it on a finished model from a while ago to see if a better model made a difference and it does add some texture but its not really what I'm looking for, it just looks like a mess.

Again it didn't work in the render view.

I managed to get it working and it made a little outline which I could use but it feels redundant honestly, it doesn't really add to the style it feels more like an arbitrary addition. I won't spend any more time looking into this sort of stylisation because even though I'm only looking at the basic setting when first applied, I think I'd rather render things in another way as this might add even more render time which is already a nightmare.

[mi6021tomberry]

Morph Tests

I tried two different morph tests to see whether blend shapes or manual sculpting would work better. The blend shapes do look smoother but sculpting this rough character into just a stop sign was a pain so I know that I can't use this approach for more complex morphs and the manual version will be a lot better I just need to tidy it up a lot.

[mi6021tomberry]

Character Movement

Little test to get a feel of how the characters could move around in maya inspired by the Lip Sync: Ident Aardman animation.

[mi6021tomberry]

Rigging Motion Tests

To figure out how the little noodles characters would move I experimented with different numbers of joint and subdivisions to get a better idea of the proper balance in my models.

[mi6021tomberry]

Dissertation Final

Other than a few formatting tweaks and minor changes this is pretty much the final essay with the full bibliography and some images from the scenes I am analysing in each paragraph.

[mi6021tomberry]

Dissertation Scene Analysis

Initial analysis of dancing with dwarfs scene.

The first video was a good resource to hear directly from the animators a little bit about the use of CGI in the animation process and the video below it is the scene I am analysing, primarily the shots set inside the clock tower.

The 'making of' documentary was an amazing resource where I could hear directly from the horses mouth about the process of creating Toy Story and the video below is the scene I am analysing.

Here are some of the quotes I picked out from the making of documentary:

8:30 ‘I remember the moment when I first saw computer animation of any kind. Um, I was working at Disney as an animator and two very close friends of mine were working on Tron and the moment I saw it I was like ‘this is it, this is the next step, the next plateau.’ This is the future. I knew that computer animation wasn’t a whole new medium, it was just new tools within the medium of animation. So all the things that I learned as far as principles of animation and film grammar still apply.’ JOHN LASSETER SPEAKING (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

12:24 ‘to test the models, the puppets themselves’ PETE DOCTER SPEAKING, ALSO REFERRING TO THEM AS PUPPETS LIKE WILLIAMS (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

18:02 ‘one of the things we tried to do with this film was to remove it from its computer look. You have so many choices on the computer, its not the choice- its- it’s what you leave out ahah in a lot of ways. It’s not what you put in because you have a bazillion colours, do you really wanna use every one of them?’ ‘What we wanted to do was make it believable’ RALPH EGGLESTON (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

‘We try to find the graphic equivalent for an emotion. We’re exaggerating what’s important in the scene and leaving out what isn’t.’ (Williams, p.376)

18:37 ‘One of the things that makes Toy Story so unique is the collaboration between traditionally trained artists and animators and these amazing computer geniuses.’ JOHN LASSETER

20:00 ‘Our system is designed for these traditionally trained animators with no computer experience whatsoever, to sit down within a couple of weeks and start animating.’ (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

27:09 ‘Toy Story is just the very beginning of what can be done in this medium and its just the first inkling of what we can achieve here’. (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

27:34 LASSETER ‘Everybody’s gonna notice and talk about the fact that it’s the very first computer animated feature film but the computers are just tools, they didn’t create this picture it’s the people that created the picture and we had such a fantastic group of people and I had so much fun working with them and that’s what I’m gonna remember for the rest of my life’(Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

34:00 ‘its not real, people believe it. That’s better.’ (Ultimate History of CGI, 2019)

I'm focusing on the introduction of SMISV from 1:00 to 3:29 which features a wealth of interdisciplinary animation techniques to analyse and break down for this part of the essay.

[mi6021tomberry]

Film Development

I decided to rule out environment design as much as possible so that I could focus on animation. I wanted to play around with a simple character and thought I could have him interacting with the screen, coming forwards and tapping on it, having the top and sides collapsing on on him, etc...

I did a rough storyboard expanding on this idea with an experiment gone wrong splitting the screen into different versions of the same character each animated using a different medium but I still wasn't feeling like I had much of anything.

After pitching this I was told to do some drawing to try and figure out how things could look visually. Some of it was inspired by this surreal aardman animation with simple but really expressive characters.

I watched a bit of morph since I was considering a character which shapeshifts between mediums but after talking with Hugo I think I'll try to utilise each medium for what they're best at.

These little drawings seemed like they fitted the tone of whatever it is that I'm making but I need to push the concept further.

I did a rough storyboard to see how things could pan out from those drawings centred around a shapeshifting character but I need to work on a simple story, fleshing things out to see if I can shape it into something more concrete.

I was thinking of using this scene from inside out as a point of reference since I was focusing on an experiment in a lab with shapeshifting characters.

After rethinking my priorities for this module and final project I laid them all out so I could properly visualise what it is that I want from this module. I started this course because I wanted to learn how to animate but because there's so much more that goes into the process, I feel like my animation acting/performance skills (which is what I'm hoping to do in future) aren't where I want them to be. I want to try and focus on animation as much as possible because in every module I've always tried to do too many things at once and I started again on this module and set the bar to an unattainable level so I kept disappointing myself.