Monday, 6 December 2010

November 11 Second Club Results

November 2010 11 Second club competition

I got 244th out of 295.. Not bad. I think I would have got better if I added in more frames for the inbetweens.





Here are a few comments:


  • Ruud Harbers 2 days ago
    Love the idea. To make it more smooth you could add more frames, it would deserve it.
  • Great idea!
  • Justin Rochon 4 days ago
    Great idea!!!
  • J Richardson 4 days ago
    Funny idea, animation needs work, good poses
  • Lorena 4 days ago
    really funny, the chicken face is hilarious
  • Sam Caudill 4 days ago
    Great idea! Work on more breakdowns and add more keyframes and you'll have a good piece

Friday, 3 December 2010

Animated Exeter

Check out our Animated Exeter blog for our work on the trailer for the festival..

11 Second Club - Final Animation



I'm pretty happy with this. It kept me up to the last minute and I uploaded it at around 4.30am before the 5am deadline.

I did it by going over my final Animatic drawings in Flash using a Wacom tablet. I was happy that I could just do each final drawing in one go and so it wasn't too time consuming.

11 Second Club - Final progress

Since the last post I have now completed the final Animation in time for the deadline. This post will show my Works in progress and feedback I received up until my final piece.

The last Animatic showed my animation just keeping to the timings I predicted on my dopesheet. On this one, I changed around some key poses onto different frames and swapped some poses around. It definetly resulted in a slightly smoother animation.



After receiving some feedback both from Cathy and my girlfriend Nina, drastic possible improvements were identified. Mainly, that the fox was not reacting enough. Cathy helped me to visualise the Fox showing more fear/dread of the Chicken saying to imagine its like a child getting told off by their Mother. She also mentioned that it would be good to make the Chicken fly.

So I went home and took some more video reference of me acting the scared Fox. Then did the following drawings from them:



I also looked at some very handy YouTube videos featuring a Chicken flying in slow motion. YouTube is such a great tool for research! I did the following drawings from the YouTube videos:



I also posted these in to the 11 Second Club forum and got some useful feedback saying I needed to give it fresh poses on the 'why would I put it there' from the Chicken and also the last 'Youuu stole it' from the Chicken.

With all this new reference I was able to construct a whole new set of Poses for both the Fox and Chicken. Here is my final Animatic I did before constructing the Final Animation..

Our final experimental music animation

So, here it is the result of all our labours :) Sit back and enjoy...

To see it without the right side of the frame cut off, its best watching it in YouTube. (Click the link in the bottom right of the screen.)

Experimental - jet pack penguin + progress

This post will report on our last couple of weeks of experimental work leading up to the deadline...

I worked on the following:

-The Smarties tube creature Animation (This took 2 attempts to get a good version.)
-Helping with Animating and photographing Ryans Toilet roll Loch-Ness monster
-Layering a 'Live Action' grass background for the Frog
-Animating Bird cycles and filming live action back drops to layer behind them
-Creating and filming the jet pack penguin (see below)
-Photographing the last scene
-Editing and compositing, fitting the visuals to the music

I was a bit concerned about the time running out and wondering whether we would actually complete our project before the deadline, but it all turned out allright. We organised a full day of going out and animating.

On the night before this day I had an urge to create another creature for the animation as I knew we may need a bit more footage to help fill the 55 seconds of music. I came across Ryans accidental 'Jet pack penguin' he had created in my bag of Origami creatures and decided to give it a bit of a funky makeover:



I cut out and stuck coloured paper on every face of the creature, initially I thought 'yeah.. this won't take long' but it took about 3 hours and kept me up til 2am..

The next day we met up and went towards the beach. We were lucky as it was nice and sunny. It was a highly successful day as we managed to get most of the rest of the footage needed. On the way to the beach we filmed the Jet pack penguin taking off - using wire. We got the toilet tube creature animated and we animated the final scene where all the creatures come together. This included Scotts DJ turtle and a paper fire. It was a good day as we got a lot of the missing parts done and dusted.

The only thing that remained with about a week and a day left was all the editing and animating Ryans Toilet roll monster going into the toilet ! Ryan and I did this a couple of days later. This was surprisingly hard to animate it as we had to work against gravity. We got around this problem using blue tack and thread. We also decided to have two seperate cuts of the creature. So you end up seeing one shot of it forming itself out of toilet rolls, then you see another shot of it diving into the toilet!

Thursday came along and we all did some editing and got most of it done except a couple of clips. Later that evening/night I spent a couple of hours perfecting the synchronisation between imagery and sound by cutting clips and speeding bits up and down. I quite enjoy this side of things matching the sound with the visuals. I worked again at this on Friday morning for another couple of hours. The following Monday, Scott and Ryan handed me the last couple of clips and I spent another couple of hours working them into the final composition, then on Tuesday we were able to render it out and hand it in before the deadline :)

A working process of creating visuals to fit sound

Here, I have posted up a sheet that I think made a difference in terms of helping with the timing/synchronising in the first half of the piece. I did this after we created some of the creatures and after doing preliminary tests with the origami bird. I also had the idea of the Loch Ness monster in my mind.

These little thumbnails helped me to visualise how it could work with the sound before actually doing the animations. Then when we did them we followed these storyboard thumbnail ideas and in the end, with a bit of editing around it worked with the music quite successfully.

I couldn't start with a storyboard sheet like this without first creating some creatures/and doing preliminary tests to see what was possible. Therefore, the first step is to be inspired to make whatever comes to mind and to try it out then you have something to work with.

I will remember this working process for future projects involving working to sound.



I have posted our final experimental film in its own blog post.. Check it out :)