The final post.

It has come to an end, and I have to say I have learnt a lot from this whole experience. I am really happy with the animation that we made, yes unfortunately we wont be handing in a finished film, but whether or not its finished I am still very proud of it, and everyone that worked on making the film. I learnt a lot about the way I work and plan on taking that forwards with me in the future.

Colours, colours and more colours.

I forgot to mention in one of my earlier posts, but there is a way to apply an overlay using TV paint. To show what I mean here is a video of me showing how I do it.

More or less it is just a drag and drop function where you drop an image on top of another.

I also made a page of all of Anthonys colours.

This made it easier for everyone to keep colours consistent.

We also finally decided on a colour for the overlay, I made a few different attempts of what it could look like such as a purple colour, and then a much more lavender colour, eventually with help from Carla we decided on a colour that we felt matched the background appropriately.

We decided on the last colour and with an opacity of 47% as it gave the best outcome. 

Making the book

The visual journal :-

Ive started making our visual Journal, beginning with our opening page. I did a few rough version for my group to choose from, here are my roughs :

The top one was the groups collective favourite there for I made a final version.

I did however make this on the wrong size, it is meant to be A4 but I made it A5. Therefor Ive had to remake it but it didn't take very long. 

Here it is redone. 

I also put all the pages together, with help from Carla rendering out the images and sending them over to me which made things go a lot quicker. Chloe has also added text where necessary to help explain some of the shots in the book.

Here are a few screen shots.

We used a grey in the backgrounds chosen from a colour in one of the backgrounds Bach made, to keep with constancy of the whole animation.

Contacting a music student.

After the social event that was set up for us to meet the music students of leeds Music university, we found a musician that did the sort of music that we wanted, a very ambient sort of music, with a focus on classical music.

This was the email we sent over to begin with. And we got quite the quick response.

We where really glad to hear that he was happy to help us, so I quickly sent over our animatic.

And with in the week we got a response.

We liked it, but some elements of it we felt weren't working as how we wanted we sent a response : 

Hi Nik,

To begin thank you for doing this for us. 

There are a lot of elements to the music that we really like, such as the music in and leading up to the credits. We do however feel that the music during the middle section is a little to intense for what we are going for. We do have someone to do the narration for us (but thank you for offering) this weekend. We can send this to you, and then you could compose over the top of it, if this would help you understand the tone of the scene. We appreciate the extra effort you have gone into with the extra sound effects in certain scenes but we do have some sounds we plan on using.

Would you mind meeting up with us at some point, as we could better explain what we are going for. 

Thank you 

Chloe, Carla and Medi

He did ask if we could maybe give him the animation at a later date so that he could see it more fleshed out. But we said that it would match the animatic so that would be waste of time for him.

We decided the best solution would be to meet in person and discuss what we wanted to do. We agreed that the 4th of march would be ideal. We meet up with him at Leeds collage of music, as he could give us some examples of what he could do.  We found it to be really enjoyable, he listened to what we had to say and the examples he played for us where exactly what we wanted, we left really happy and looking forward to what he was going to make.
We sent him another version of the animatic a few days later, so that he could do another version using an up to date version.

Unfortunately we made some small changes as time went on and had to send him another version with the updated timing. He was very understanding about it and made the alterations where necessary.

We are really happy with the music, it follows the animation and adds suspense where needed, all in all it was really great working with Nik.

He asked for a few details about us for his work and we asked for the same and plan to add him into our art book.

Here is his website : NikRobinson.com

Another Live brief.

I have actually finished all the live briefs I had to do, but saw no harm in doing another one. I decided character design would be a another fun one to do. This months theme was Kabuki. Which is a traditional Japanese art from, done in dance. 


As I am not well versed in the art of Kabuki, I watched some youtube videos about the topic to get a little more understanding of the art form, for example women are barely ever used in this, men dress up as women and are referred to as onnagata.

I decided to go back to the good old days and did some art with out lines, I definitely think I need more practice to do this again, but its a start. 

Been submitted

Been accepted

Cleaning Up shots for Ally and Anna

Separate to our project I have actually done some work for other peoples groups, not a lot as a lot of my time is taken up by my project with Carla and Chloe. But I was asked by Anna and Ally If I would remove a few rigs for them, which I have done. I have though never done clean up like this before, I have only ever done line art so this I was going into blind and a little afraid.

The first scene I got was of the main character floating out of her chair , I found this relatively easy to do, I used the eraser for the most part but also used the auto correction tool (the plaster tool is how I've been referring to it.) This took me around an hour to do.

Original

Cleaned up

The also asked me to do some clean up of the Jelly fish, but this one I found very difficult to do. The issue was that they had forgotten to take a picture of the background before starting the scene, and I am no clean up expert as I have never done anything like this before I was a little at a loss as to what to do. Even so, I tried my best.

The original

I started by painting a background that sort of resembled the pre-existing one. I then went and did a block of colour masking the majority of the rig, and then went in to individually remove frames, this did not look good. It was jumpy and just bad.

Attempt 1.

I then went in and did another version where I painted some of the frames and that did work either.

Attempt 2.

Finally I did one painted frame, and moved it along with the Jelly fish, changing it where necessary. This was the best way I could find to do it, I did too, fixing one up a little more.

The final.

These where the only shots id been given, and I feel I've learnt something from this, mainly that I don't want to do it again.

Cleaning Up other shots. - 5,11,13,20,21

Clean up.

Ive decided to do my clean up blogs as one big post as It will just be easier to see it all In one.

I have been given roll of clean up for our animation, this makes it easier for everyone else to do there roughs continuously as I clean up the work.

Shot 5 :-

I began with shot 5, this was a shot Carla had animated, and had done some clean up for, but after some discussion the character wasn't completely accurate it was incredibly close, but it just need some refining there for I took the scene, did some revision of the roughs and then re-did the line art and coloured the scene in.

Carla's roughs

SHOT 5 clean up and coloured.

Shot 11 : -

Shot 11 was another one of Carlas scenes,  this time it was done In a class room which Is one of the two shots we have that actually take place during the day. This one is meant to be a panning zoom, but after looking at it again recently we decided that Anthony was in the wrong place there for I will eventually have to go in a tweak where he is sat, but that will take place after hand in.

Carlas roughs

Shot 11 clean up and coloured.

Shot 13 :-

This one is one of Chloe's scenes. This one was a bit of a struggle to do, reason being this shot has a very close in zoom, and we where debating which would be the best way to animate it. At first we tried taking Chloe's roughs and using after affects applying the zoom to the roughs so that I could draw the zoom frame by frame to ensure the line art would stay crisp. I animated about a second of this, but found it very difficult to do as I couldn't really use onion skins as it was pointless as each frame would get smaller and smaller. I spoke to Chloe and she agreed it was a bit of a difficult solution. We decided to ask Liam our local tech genius, to see what his solution would be. He suggested I do the line art on a normal not zoomed rough and then render out the line art on a really crisp setting such as 4k or 8k. This seems like a really good idea. Another issue we ran into was time, as this is the most recent shot I have cleaned up this weekend is the long weekend meaning Uni is closed on Monday, and as I don't have tv paint at home I cant finish the clean up. I asked Carla if she could finish of the scene, as it is just the friends that need to be finished and they are mainly stills, I drew one frame to give her something to start with. I did though manage just in time to finish Anthony's lines.

Chloes roughs.

The original zoom clean up

The final clean up.

Shot 19 :-

Another of Carlas scenes.

This one is pretty straight forward, I had originally done the whole scene before this one so it felt like just a continuation of that shot. There is not much to say about this one in comparison to my last shot. I did add some texture to the bed sheet to show where is body is and animated it to move with him.

Carlas roughs
Clean up and colour.


Shot 20 :-

Again a very simple scene, another of Carla's. I quite enjoyed doing this shot, it was a simple and It felt relaxing to do.

Carlas roughs.

Clean Up and colour.

Shot 21 ;-

This one was one of Chloes shots. This one actually has the shadow man in, so I was really excited to the clean up for him. It took a little longer to clean up and animate him, as he is completely black, which a few white outlines. What I did for him was did the black outline first, then colour him in completely black, then using a duplicated version of the line art using a clipping mask of sorts to colour of the line art with white where you are meant to see it. I then after completely finishing the shadowman's clean up I went on to do the friends afterwards.

Chloes roughs.

Shadow man:

Finished scene all together cleaned and coloured.

Shot 18

I said in my last post that I had just finished my last scene and was ready to start cleaning up other peoples scenes. But at that point nobody had anything for me to clean up yet, so we decided I should do a another scene so I would have something to do. The shot was number 18, and is a small scene of all three of the children asleep in bed.

Here are my roughs.

I wanted there movements to be subtle and not all happening at the same time so I made sure to offset them with each of their movements.

Here are the lines, Im honestly not to happy with this scene, but as things stand how they are I don't really have time to go back and fix it at the moment, maybe once everything is finished and I have enough time I will go in and correct things.

Shot 14

Shot 14.


This is my last shot of my own, and its just a still image for me, so honestly this took me almost no time at all and there isn't much to say about it. I had to make sure that the camera looked the same as I had done in the previous shot for consistency. The black space in the screen will be filled with footage Calra is going to make to look like a video recording.

I did also add some shadding to the shot to give it a little more depth.