DV2900 Talking points - Critical review

Today I screened my animation to my class and gained feedback, to improve it. I personally thought that the screening went really well, The animation itself was complete as mention before, with subtitles. My peers were able to give me some good feedback to help me improve the animation and for when i animate in the future.

Overall everyone liked the animation, complimenting the humour, Lip syncing and animation in general, but with good points there are always bad points, but these are there for me to improve. I was told to add more movement in to one of the scenes with the character rocking back and forth; I made sure that the character was moving, but to make sure that it isn't to sharp I applied some ease of the graphic to make it more realistic.

Most of my feedback was to improve my subtitles, for people that have hearing disabilities. I have a person who has a hearing disability in my class and he himself gave me many different things to change to help him understand whats happening. The font was a main part that he wanted me to change; he told me to make it a san serif font, this is a really easy fix and it did make the subtitles look more a appealing. With the subtitles I added the sound effects as well, an example when the door opens and close, that helped him a lot but there was one scene that goes on for a while and he said to add the word 'repeat' to the subtitles to show that he is saying the same thing over and over. An important part of my improvements was to change the colour of everyone thats speaking because if they all talk at once then he would get confused which is understandable, so I gave everyone there own colour for him to know when each person is speaking, but I kept the sound effects white.

All this improvements made my animation better and I'm thankfully for the feedback. I personally thought that it would be better if I had more time and as I have mention previously that all the planning needed to be done early. In the future I want to do the research and planning done in the first few weeks, and to start animation early because I can make it more detailed and I can find new ways of doing new things. Overall the project has been very enlightening, I have learnt a lot of new things, I have really enjoyed learning how to lip sync and I think that I picked it up really well and I personally found it very easy.

DV2900 Talking points - Animating

Today I started to create the animation but it became really problematic.

As you can see from the images above I came into a problem early on while using the 3D tool to create this effect. I used this tutorial for help (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3yrbcxHaKo). To get this door opening I put the center of the rotation at the point of where the hinges would be in a real door. I then rotated it. The symbols and mechanics are not very different from 3D software, but as you can see this isn't working too well doesn't look right and the reason being is that the door isn't long enough, it needs to be as long as a real door because the bottom of it will be in scene.

There should look better

As you can see I adjusted it and now it looks a lot better more like a real door. As you can see in the animatic I will be having a the camera zoom into the room, and I have decided that I am going to do this using a vcam ( Virtual camera ), using this I can create a manner of different types of camera angles and shots throughout that animation itself. I got the vcam from a Youtube artist called Jazza (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhGxKMFOJ84), this tutorial taught a bit more about the vcam, so I can utilize it for my own work. 

As I started using the vcam I came into another problem, the vcam wouldn't show the right parts as you can see in the images above. I nearly gave up with using the vcam because I didn't know how to fix it but my peer helped me to fix the problem by going into the symbol and making sure its the right aspect ratio and that the vcam is centered with the little dot in the center as well as the vcam itself. (see image below)

Once that was sorted and the vcam worked, I then had to put the characters in the room itself, all I did was draw them on top of the background layer.

The characters were just drawn with the brush tool in Flash I didn't have much planning for the these characters in this scene and this did make it problematic because it took long than expected. Once the characters were in place, I decided to add a fade out to and a better transition. I had to create the first keyframe, then make it a motion tween, than I selected where it would be faded out completely and changed the alpha down to 0 and it automatically created the frame and the fading out using the motion tween.

This was the scene right after with having the main character to sit down, but I didn't have much planning for it, so as you can see with the images below I created a wireframe skeleton of the character and for each key frame. 

After creating these and the in between frames I had to flesh it out and give him colour and clothing. The legs of the character in this scene was all created frame by frame. This was the only way I could think of doing it and to be honest I enjoyed it the only problem I may have with it is that its square but that is only a little problem.

After creating the legs I then needed to create the torso for the when the character sits down, this was easily created but just making the arms and tweening them down, as seen in the image below.

To create the other characters in the next scenes I decided to draw over my storyboard / animatic, for a few reasons, one the positions and camera shot will the follow the story board but the main reason is to keep the proportion of the character correct and the to try and make it look as sharp as I want it. 

After this scene there isn't much animation, there are a few frame by frame animation sequence but I had no problems with that. The main section I needed to work out was the lip syncing. 

I created a test of the lip syncing a while back and it don't find it hard at all. When I finished creating each character in each scene I then create all the mouth movements and loaded them into keyframe caddy, all that was next was aligning them with the audio. I didn't really find it that hard at all sometimes it felt weird because the character was in a three quarter position, but after a few tweaks It looked fine.

I didn't just move the mouths I made all the characters blink too, making them blink was hard at all. When I decided to do this I thought that it isn't to different to doing the lip syncing process, so I create the blink frame by frame and then used keyframe caddy to embed it into the animation, to make it look more realistic. 

One of the most important parts was for me to create subtitles for our deaf student, it wasn't just for him it was for all audiences I personally wanted to do it and hopefully it will be fine for screening and he will be able to understand whats happening.

DV2900 Talking points - Animatic

Today I created my animatic for my animation. I used photoshop to change the image size to make it fit the stage size in Flash. The original size was : 995 x 750 which isn't the right size of the stage, I changed it to 1280 x 720, using Photoshop and a batch process. Throughout my studies I have noticed that the resolution of 1280 by 720 is now standard for most TV etc so I wanted to keep to it.

Once all the images were batch processed, I opened flash and place them accordingly to the storyboard. the biggest thing I had to work out next was the sound. I got most of my sound effects from YouTube, All sound effects I used are in a playlist on youtube. (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6ZDsQ2mlyOAcqva1rrTuE1mrwgt0dXfW&feature=mh_lolz). There is a sound effect that I couldn't find on YouTube, but I did find a site that I could of used from the beginning but only found it when I was searching for the last sound effect. I obtained my last sound effect from freesound.org. (http://www.freesound.org/people/datasoundsample/sounds/41632/). This site was a lot more efficient and easier to use.

Once I got all the sound effects and voice recordings I than needed to decide on how I'm going to edit it and what software I'm going to use, my choices are Adobe Audition or Audacity.

I decided to use Adobe Audition for a few reason the main one because I have never used it before and I have used Audacity and I wanted to have more than one software to choice from in the future.

[add screenshot]

Adobe Audition isn't too different from Audacity. It is so easy to use and it is really easy to trim audio; Highlight what's not needed and press delete. The only difference with Adobe Audacity is that the software looks and feels more comfortable, because it is an Adobe software and the interface are mostly all the same.


Now everything is ready, the images and the sound all that is next to do is put it together, I decided to put in together in Flash because I am using Flash to animate, this way I can get use to the stage size and where everything needs to be.

As you can see from the image above I have made sure all the layers are separated. This made it so much easier because I could align all the different parts with the sound effects needed.  

DV2900 Talking points - Background design

I decided to draw my background in flash using the draft below.

I want to create good shading on the background so I tried to use the gradient tool but I didnt know where it was, but after some searching I found out that if you go to the colour window and select gradient on the drop down menu you can then create the gradient.

I found out to use it I had to save it as a swatch by clicking here.

then I was able to apply it, but it didn't look right but to all I did was use the gradient tool to change the movement and position of the gradient.

I also put a shadow on the background by putting a line in the corners of the brown background and i than curved it and coloured it in a slightly darker brown, than you select the line and delete it, this gives it a nice blend. I personally liked that idea better than the gradient tool, one I believe it gives a better finish and two its quicker, the gradient tool is too long winded and takes up too much time. 

After that I created the chairs using the brush tool but I had to make sure that the smoothing was turnt off because the consistency was the same in the lines. 

I kept going over it, with different shades, as well as changing some colours to make it more effiecent to what is actually happening, and ended up creating this as my first background.

After creating that first background I knew I had to now create the chicken shop background, using the same techniques as mentioned above I came up with this.

The chicken menu on the side was an imported image, which one saved time but gave the resturant a realistic feel. I also decided to use a lot of the line tool for this one, it was better because I could create straight lines easier than by the brush tool.

Here's the finished background

DV2900 Talking points - Re recording and Storyboarding

Today I re recorded my voices but this time I actually had a script with me, not just to help me but for my voice actors as well. 

The recording this time went really well, everyone knew what they were doing and there wasn't many mistakes. I did something different this time I decided to record in mono instead of stereo, this way I could edit it and make it stereo myself instead of it being stereo but the with the sound still not right. 

While I was doing the recording, I realised that I had to re design one of the characters, because I had to take out the stereotypes so that meant that the Vietnamese character would have to change completely, the other two isn't much of a problem with the idea change it can work. 

With Jill she is afraid of germs so if she is afraid of germs she would be in a hazmat suit so protect her, this also helps with the recording because with the suit the voice would become just murmers so I didn't need another voice actor; the other characters still can understand her, and what shes saying will be subtitled. so I created this model sheet to finalise the her re design.

After having the voices recorded and edited as well as Jill's re design, I am now going to create the storyboard again, unfortunately me and my tutors saw a lot problems with the last one, so I decided to re create it to make it a lot more interesting with different camera shots. 

The storyboard came out very well I spent a lot of time looking at the script imagining the action and movement from each character. The most important part was the camera shots there is a lot that are not named and that because I'm not sure on what they would be called, but nevertheless and I have tried to use different shots. Something that I am using in the storyboard which is different but more professional is the arrows that represent movement, the solid black arrows are for movement in the scene and the clear white arrows are camera movements, this really did help me to understand where the camera is and how I would animate it, in one of the first scenes you see the camera is zooming in, so I know that the best way to do that is use vcam, and I think I will be using that more than once for my animation. I personally feel that this storyboard is definitely better than the last one, its more interesting, professional and helpful. 

DV2900 Talking points - Script

Script for my animation.

The door opens and the camera is first person point of view shot of the support worker, he sits down with three people sitting around in a circle. ( camera pans the room )

Support worker : Hello and Welcome to the support group, shall we begin. ( mid shot of the character sitting on a chair )

Isaac : H...hi my names Isaac and I can't stop folding paper. ( Close up of the character

Liam is drinking his coffee and quickly has to stop to say his part.

Liam : Hi my names Liam and I'm addicted to coffee.

Jill : *murmers* ( Hi my names Jill I hate germs! )

Support worker : Hello all. Nice to meet you!

Isaac is twitching and rocking back and forth, with paper made animals everywhere.

Isaac : I need more paper.

Liam replies while hanging Isaac some coffee.

Liam : Relax man and drink some coffee!

Isaac whacks the cup of coffee out of Liam's hands, the coffee splashes over on to Jill.

Jill looks at her hands and looks back up.

Jill : *murmers* errrrrr coffee!........... The suit protects me! The suit protects me!

The support worker continues watching them and making notes.

Isaac : I'm so sorry! i... i didn't mean to!

Liam takes a sip of his coffee.

Liam : Hey guys Chill! lets get some chicken!

Silence

Jill: *murmers* Okay I'm up for that!

Isaac calms down, breathes in and holds for a bit and exhales.

Isaac : That w...would help!

Support worker : Well ... thats all the time we have today...

Support worker : Lets get some chicken.

fades to black

They all are at the chicken shop sitting round a table (EWS). Liam and Isaac are devouring their chicken and chips bits of chicken flying everywhere (WS). Jill holds a chicken leg and trys to eat it with a hazmat suit on (MS), the chicken just bounces off her mask (Close up). pause. The support worker just smiles and continues to taking notes (Close up).

Credits

DV2900 Talking points - Mood board

I continued to look into the styling of my animation today, and in doing that I created a moodboard.

This moodboard has different cartoons programs, but all the styling is similar to what I would want. From my research I always knew I wanted to have the basic colour styling, base colour and then shading as well. All these cartoons are not a complex design, but the colouring is pretty similar, If you look at the model sheets I have done will match the colouring from this moodboard.

At the very beginning of this project I knew that this is how I was going to have my drawing style, that is because of how the style works so well with all these shows, and the biggest thing is that all the shows are comedy and I want my animation to be funny.

I realize that this should have been done earlier on in this project because of how much it helps me with coloring and styling.

DV2900 Talking points - Lip syncing test 2

Today I tried to do lip syncing using some of the audio from before that didn't come out too well, but as this is only a test i don't think its too important.

This is the image I used to create all the different mouth positions.

This is what I have done, using this i was able to create a little test animation.(https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByaoQfNUre_4bEdOSUtMeEZuM3M/edit?usp=drive_web)

This is only a little test of the lip syncing process, the only problem that i had was that the mouth moved but overall i think i done well, it sounded right and i honestly found it a lot easier than i thought, and having keyframe caddy as well made it so much easier.

DV2900 Talking points - Lip syncing test

Today my tutor gave us a demo on how to lip sync in flash. I am also trying out the lip syncing process today myself.

I decided to follow a tutorial I mentioned in previous posts; Facial animation in flash (lip syncing) with Draw with Jazza on Youtube.

                                         (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3l3txgnf_A)

I am able to download the raw files to follow him in the tutorial.

Straight away he mention something that I wouldn't have thought about, and thats creating a layer just for cues, to help us separate the audio without actually separating it, to determine who will be speaking and where the camera will be; he says its just for the camera but I think this could be great when it comes to speaking as well.

While he is talking about doing the mouth movements on the character he mentions that it isn't just the mouth moving and changing, the cheeks and the chin move as well. He also goes on by saying move the eyes as well because this will help make it more natural in my opinion, we all blink and I think that it would make it better to have the eyes moving, he also says that with the pupils have the dart around not too much but short and sharp movements; this will help make it more natural as well, but only if you do it right make sure you know where the character is looking and who he/she is speaking too.

This tutorial and my tutor both recommended me to download keyframe caddy, to help us with the different mouth positions; and now I see why. It shows us how easy and efficient.  

With keyframe caddy all you have to do is click a graphic symbol and click load thumbnails and it loads all the frames in the graphic symbol, as shown below. 

After I finished the video and went through the raw files, I found out that the file is finished, but I have learnt a lot from the video itself. 

DV2900 Talking points - Idea change

Today I have finalised my idea; because of what my tutors said I changed it to make sure its friendly to all. I didn't want to re design the characters but i will have to re design one of them the Vietnamese one and that wont be a problem.

The Vietnamese girl will be changed into a girl wearing a hazmat suit because she is scared of germs, she will just mumble, not actually speaking but ill put subtitles on the bottom of the screen.

The Jamaican will become addicted to coffee, he is so addicted he cant stop shaking, this way i can still use the character design. 

The Irish man will become addicted to folding paper, like origami. I can still use his character design as well.

The presenter can stay the same as there isn't anything thats changed with this character. 

With these character designs i am not being rude and i wont have to worry about upsetting anyone. While i was thinking and the change to the Vietnamese girl, i had a thought that it would be best to subtitle the whole animation, we do have a deaf student but i also think that it would be good for other deaf people around the world, and i think it will help me practise this for now and my future projects.  

All I need to do now is finish up the script and re record.

DV2900 Talking points - Idea Presentation

Today I had to present my idea and designs to both my class and peers so I can get feedback on my work, a lot of tips was given to me. I personal found the idea good and so did my peers but my tutors thought i could be being racist and rude to certain people. The idea is to make stereotypical people in a support group; and as mention before I wanted to make it funny, I didn't want to be rude.
My tutor said to me that all I need to do is annoy one person about this idea. All my class mates didn't care as much about it and found it more funny then rude, which is how i felt but my tutors said that its not just the class i need to think about the college and the other students and staff; the college has to care about the equal opportunities and this could be classed as going against that. It also didn't help that the Jamaican is a drug addict and the Irish man is a Alcoholic and the Vietnamese girl is getting abused by her husband.

So my tutor gave me an idea to be able to change it make it more interesting and humorous. He said to me to give them all ridiculous addictions instead to make it more funny. He also said to take out the accents completely because then it doesn't sound like your mocking the accents, but honestly I think if i take them out then it will make it more boring and dull, the accents can make people laugh as it is and give the animation and different kind of flavour. The example my tutor gave me was to make one addicted to cake, this is the kind of idea that he meant, something different and funny, but I still will have to watch out because I don't want to do some real conditions that actually exist, or can be rude to disabled students.

This is a big bump in the development of my animation, but i think that its really a good thing because i dont want to come across rude, i want to create something humorous and friendly with everyone.

DV2900 Talking points - Pre Production - Recording

Today i went to record the voices for the animation and create the storyboards as well. The voice recording went very well, I had my four voice actors attend and performed to their best of their ability. The recording process was alright, straight away i had a problem, I booked the sound studio for recording yesterday, but today some one has decided not to check and put other students in there, so i had to go into a different room and hope for the best, and in the end the sound came out alright and there wasn't many people around.

I made sure that i done many takes of the different parts, just in case they messed up or didn't work well. This was the case, while recording there was a lot of mess ups so having more then one helped me to have a range. While shooting there was no problems.

After recording and creating the story i then created the storyboard for my animation.

I now have everything i need for the presentation on Monday, I'm happy to have all this design work because i can now get all the feedback i need to improve my idea.

DV2900 Talking Point - Pre Production - Recording Test

Today I need to start getting all my planning together because we have our first interm hand in, and a Idea presentation on Monday 18th.
The planning is going alright at the moment, as seen I have done a lot of research on the my idea and have started designing the characters. I need to have all the designing done, I need to create the remaining characters and have model sheets for all of them.  My main focus for this week is getting the voices recorded. This is the main part of the development of my animation, because the storyboard is around the speech itself. This is a very important part and probably the hardest part, this is because I need to get my voice actors together, find a good location to record the voices and the equipment to actually record the voices itself.
I had a chat with the technician to discuss what equipment she has that can help me record the voices and where I could doing the recording. She recommended to use a Marantz with Shotgun mics; with this equipment I can record the sound in a very good quality. The Shotgun mics are better for
I can do a test on the marantz to find out about the sound quality and if it picks up everyone. If i use the shotgun mics i can have better quality,  each marantz have two mics attached, i will need three or two , for the five voice actors i have, could two actors share one mic

Photo of the Marantz.

Photo of the Shotgun Mic.

 After I finished the test today, I feel really comfortable with the recording equipment. The test went really well, not just for me to learn about the recording equipment but also for my voice actors to get comfortable and to practice their lines. I was also able to test how many people we could have round one mic and how far the range is on the shotgun mics. There was a lot I had to remember while recording, the main thing was the levels of the voices, as you can see in the picture of the Marantz there's all the little dots; they light up with three colours green, orange and red, these determine how the loud the voice is and if its in the red its too close; with this in mind we ended up having to remember how far to be away from the mic and we had to adjust the levels with the circular switch next to the level meter (shown on the photo of the Marantz). During the testing I worked out that I would only need one Marantz and two shotgun mics, if I used more then one Marantz it would get confusing, with syncing the different parts of audio together and there maybe an echo on the other Marantz, having both the shotgun mics into one Marantz made it possible to record different parts but with the same consistency.

I was also able to use the sound studio for my test and I was able to book it for the actual recording tomorrow. I was told that the sound studio isn't sound proof but when I was doing my test I personally had no problems at all and only picked up the air con but that isn't a problem at all. 

Overall the test went really well, I became comfortable with what I needed to do and with the room, all the voice actors became comfortable with how it was going to be done.

DV2900 Talking points - Character development.

Today I spent the day creating my characters, I also changed around how many characters i have and what ones i have chosen. I have decided to have two men, one Jamaican and one Irish man, and i have changed the vietnamese guy to a girl instead. I changed the guy into a girl because I thought it would be a good range of genders. I also created the social worker for the support group, which i wanted to be voiced with a normal voice.

Here are the final designs

Jamaican character model sheet.

Jamaican character Face model sheet.

Irish character model sheet.

Irish character face model sheet.

Irish character design.

Social worker face model.

Social worker model sheet.

Vietnamese character model sheet.

Vietnamese character face model sheet.

These are all my designs of the characters i will be doing for my animation. I think that these model sheets are good and can help me when animating my characters.