Green Screen and Lighting Workshop

Food for Thought - Pre Production - Gantt Chart

I put together a rough Gantt Chart after today's session so that my teammates and I can refer to it over the next few months. Initially, I tried making one on Excel, but it proved to be too much of a hassle (Or maybe I am just that tired...) and so I made one through Smartsheet instead. It definitely made things a whole lot easier, though I wish they had some colour options so that I could decorate it a bit like I normally do with the schedules I make in Excel.

Hopefully, we can at least get all of our concepts confirmed (Characters, backgrounds, etc.) by the end of next week, so that we can finally commence animating over the next few months (And there will definitely be a lot of animating). We wish to shorten the animation to a more suitable duration, and have already been deciding on what scenes to cut out (So this task should not take too long). I decided to at least give a month in recording the voices, as we still need to confirm our voice actor for Cake man, as well as pick a good day for him to record his lines for us.

Obviously this schedule will not be followed to a T, and if my teammates wish to make any changes, they can do so with the link I provided to them through our Facebook group.

Rigging an Arm in Maya

• nDynamics menu, "Create Passive Collider" and "CreatenCloth" to create a cloth simulation 
• In Animation menu, create the armature using a Joint Chain
• Skeleton >> Joint Tool (Shift+Ctrl to add to menu bar)
• Animation >> Join Size (Size the joints 
• Three points can already create a basic arm
• Will be parented to the very first point that is created
• X Ray joints just allows you to see the joints within the mesh
• Always place joints in the orographic view (Top for arms)
• Hold shift down to create aligned joints
• 4 Joint Points (3 knuckles and a finger tip) from the palm join for each finger, make sure to hold shift when doing so, otherwise the rotational values will be all over the place and will eventually start to bend weirdly
• You could put the mesh into a separate layer when adding these joints
• Move Axis in Tool Settings will allow you to control the direction for where you want to rotate the joint points
• End joint will not have an influence on the geometry, and is merely there to show where it all ends
• No need to be particularly accurate when it comes to the number of joints in a body
• Try to get it central within the geometry
• Perspective view might work for this part
• Do not translate, rotate
• Root joint is the first joint
• Mirror Joint O>>YZ Plane
• Select L change to R
• Place the joints, name the joints
• Right Click and select Vertex to see purple coloured points
• Select Root Joint then Geometry
• Skin >> Smooth Bind
• Interactive Bind are for more complex objects
• Bind To >> Joint Hierarchy 
• Bind Method is how the mesh will be affected >> Closest Distance
• Max. Influence >> 3 (Rule of Thumb)
• Paint Skin Weights Tool to adjust influence of areas that should retain its shape when bending
• Look more into weight painting
• Adjusts the joints of the mesh
• Constraint >> Orient, then Freeze Transformations and Delete History
• Orient Constraint >> Y
• Create >> CV Curve Tool
• Hold D to move pivot about
• Constrain >> Orient with Wrist Join and Mitten Shaped Outline
• Add Attribute:Lone Name: FistData Type: FloatNumeric Attribute: 100 (One in the middle)
• Set Driven Key >> Load Driver >> Select Attribute (Fist)
• Select all of the joints >> Rotate Z
• Adjust thumb where it should be
• Skeleton >> IK Handle Tool
• Current Solver: Rotate Plane Solver

Food for Thought - Pre Production - Pitch Time and Critique

Our pitch today was pretty well received, and I think everyone enjoyed what they saw, despite how tongue tied I was, Anna and Cara saved me once again when it came to explaining our concept. We have also gotten some helpful feedback as usual.

Aside from finishing up the remaining design concepts and finally commencing with the animation itself, we will have to double check on whether the backgrounds and characters will go well together, as mentioned by Mat, they are both done in such a different style (With the characters being flatly coloured with strong outlines, while the backgrounds have a painted look to them) that they will clash more than nicely contrast to one another. Though I am sure that we will be able to solve this issue in a timely manner.

The gifs did not work for some reason when I downloaded the presentation off Google Docs (And so I ended up showing the animation tests through my blog instead), I will have to investigate into this later on... seeing that pptx is the only possible format that will allow gifs to work. I'm so disappointed especially when Cara and I were so excited about showing the ending slide to everyone!

Anyway, I better get started on that Gantt chart, though I could really use a little break after this... it has been an insane week for all of us.

Next Course of Action:

1. Gantt Chart
2. Edit Duration of Overall Animation
3. Find voice actor for Cake Stand man
4. Experimentation with Characters and BG
5. Design Title Cards for Opening and Ending
6. Confirmation of Characters and Cart Design and Colours
7. Start on other Setting Designs
8. Animate

Food for Thought - Pre Production - Putting Together the Pitch

I don't think I would have used Pinterest and Behance as much as I did until I started working with Anna and Cara, nor would I have learnt about the online presentation making feature that Google Docs had, it definitely made putting this Pitch together so much easier (I can't imagine how awful it would have been if we had stayed at school till 9-10pm (What time does school close anyway?)).

We still needed to finish up on a few more concepts and animation tests, and so we definitely needed to go our separate ways for the time being before we could put them altogether in our presentation. And so once again, thank god for Google Docs.

It was such an interesting experience just seeing what the others were doing with other slides while I worked on mine, whilst chatting with them too about what should be adjusted and whatnot in the chat box. Sure, the connection was a little wonky at times, but it was nothing that got in the way of our preparations.

Strange as it maybe, we even enjoyed ourselves working through here. You are probably getting sick of me for saying this every time but I really am glad that I decided to work with Anna and Cara, this has been the most wonderful experience so far.

Cara and I synchronising as one yet again.

Food for Thought - Pre Production - Animation Tests

I managed to do up a few simply animation tests for Johnny and Cake Stand Man, just to show a little bit more of the personalities as well as how the character animation style will mainly be for them (As mentioned before, they will be animated in a more fluid manner, while After Effects will be used for the animation of objects and backgrounds).

The first one was done about a week back, I was asked whether I could do a cleaner piece, and so I decided to switch to a pencil look instead (Especially after looking up professional examples done by such well known studios as Disney and Dreamworks). Johnny will still have his glasses, but right now, I just decided to exclude it to give a better view of his eyes.

Cake Stand Man has already proven himself to be incredibly fun to animate, and I suppose this is all thanks to how well Anna had designed him (I seriously, seriously love his design!). The second gif shows extra movement in his left arm as he strokes his chin, seeing that the hand lowers itself with each stroke.

A lot more work could be done with this one, Cake Stand Man's movements are definitely still too stiff (Though I did refer to Ace Attorney sprites when sketching this out), and so I will look up better references later on... though I don't think there are any scenes in the script where he's actually laughing (Utterly enthusiastic, yes, but no, no laughing, because that bit got cut out).

Food for Thought - Pre Production - Background Concepts

After discussing with Cara and Anna the day before yesterday on what we found to be the best features in Cara's concept sketches for the first setting of the animation, I volunteered to combine them together and paint out some colour concepts. Aspects I had to consider was to make sure that it would be appealing enough, but not too distracting that the attention will be taken away from the characters themselves.

I am sure however that that issue can be avoided, while the characters will be flatly coloured, the background designs in contrast will be given textures, which should allow the characters to stand out even more.

Caca's Lovely Sketches

The moodboards I had put together awhile back proved to be extremely helpful, I also however took into account Cara's little note about how her designs were based on Scott Wills' works in "Samurai Jack" (A little bit more about him can be read here).

After hearing what my teammates had to say, I then combined together the best features from each concept piece, cleaned it up a tiny bit and added in a little more detail (Like the details at the back of the cake cart behind the cake display). As Johnny and Cake Stand Man both have quite a bit of pink on them, I decided to add in a bit more blue to the cake stand itself, to create a proper contrast between them.

This is a very small goof on my part, but I think the tree should be brought further to the front, especially since Cake Stand Man will be falling out of it and landing nicely into his stand after. Though, it is still possible to fall forward and into the stand from there... oh well, this is just a colour concept anyway.

Food for Thought - Pre Production - Going Ons

I had several meetings with my teammates in between our Applied Animation sessions over the past week or so, and I am glad to say that things are progressing quite smoothly, the colour schemes for both main characters have been confirmed and the design for the cake cart is almost finalised, we have also gone through the script and removed whatever does not seem appropriate to our young audience.

Cara and I had a discussion on the storyboard she did based on the script I wrote, and while many of the scenes she drew out were lovely, we decided to simplify quite a few of them so to make animating less of a hassle later on. Most shots will be done from the front (Which a lot of cartoons actually do, with a seemingly flat looking backdrop, but with better focus on the characters as they converse with one another, such examples include "Peabody and Sherman" and numerous living room scenes in "Family Guy"), as it seems unnecessary to include overly complicated perspective shots in such an animated short.

We also held a brief discussion on what animation style to go with, whether we should go with one where the movements are a little more limited, or actually add a bit more fluidity (While still keeping it fairly simple) as seen in most 90s animations.

Obviously we decided to combine both together, the character animation will of course be more fluid, while scenes such as cakes popping out of thin air will be waving back and forth in a very cartoony fashion.

After that, to help Cara with the animatic, I then did a quick read through of the script, so to better figure out the timing. In the end we realised that it actually lasted more than 2 minutes (Even without the opening and closing titles), and so after this pitch tomorrow, we will start cutting out scenes to shorten it to a more suitable duration.

I will also be putting together a Gantt Chart that we can all refer too after this pitch has been presented.

Competition Brief - Macmillan Children's Books - Interior Illustration 2-1

Whew! I finally got back to this brief, hopefully I can finish it once and for all by the end of this week! I also took some time to clean up the first two the best of my abilities, though I am already reaching that point where I will be glad to never see these drawings again.

For my second interior illustration, I was originally going to illustrate the scene where Alice falls down the rabbit hole, before realising that aside from the fact it would take up way too much time for me to draw all those floating bookshelves and cabinets, it is another scene that has been illustrated hundreds of times.

And so I decided to go with something simpler and instead illustrated the scene where Alice finds a small cake upon shrinking, hoping that it will help her grow back to her original size. Again, this was a simple choice, considering that I only needed to draw the bottom part of the table legs. Though I suppose the perspective proved to be a huge challenge for me, especially when I was trying to figure out how large the floor tiles should actually be.

Cleaned her up some more and added in more details.

I should have drawn the floor on a separate layer.

Gave up eventually and removed it completely.

Threw in some shadows in hopes that it wouldn't look so plain.

... yeah, didn't work, still trying to figure out what to do at this point.

The challenge now is to figure out how to make this piece detailed enough so that it would match the other two as a set... something tells me that I will probably have to try to draw in those floor tiles again... Perhaps I could also add in some sort of wallpaper further at the back as well.

WWF - More Examples

While After Effects is definitely one of the best software to use when designing animated infographics, I tried looking into other examples where other methods are used:

A cute little toy stop motion piece, I suppose it just depends what we have in our own arsenal. Because I seriously doubt that either of us have any legos or tiny dolls to reenact anything, nor we will want to borrow any from anyone. Still it's a really interesting idea to consider, and again bears similar principles to the "Food Rules" one where real objects are used. No voice over is needed either, with only a few captions added in.

Another awesome object stop motion piece (ABOUT PIZZA NO LESS), this makes me think of those fruit stop motion shorts that I use to watch as a child, albeit a tad simpler. There is just something so appealing about seeing fresh looking food being used properly in an animation... also extra points if they don't actually waste that food afterwards.

Once again, we should probably consider whether we will really need anyone to narrate or whether it will be enough just to show it all through visuals alone.

This is pretty much like any other infographic, where data is slowly presented as if it is being written out by someone right then, save for the fact that it is presented on a photo background ("Gumball" anyone?) with the data placed over it with the use of some digital software (Again, probably After Effects, or even Premiere).

We were initially keen on including some paper cut out stop motion into our own animation, and I still think that it's not that bad an idea. Despite how simple this looks, I honestly love the overall look of this little short, there is no need for complicated backgrounds (Heck, we could green screen it if we wanted to!) or overly detailed paper cut outs. And once again, it is one of the least stressful methods of animation, especially when working on a considerably lengthy animation, and if done right, I am sure that people will find it unique and appealing.

Again After Effects can create an effect similar to cut out stop motion, and seeing that we recently learnt how to use the puppet tool, this would be a good opportunity to familiarise ourself further with this incredibly helpful piece of software. Should we find ourselves running out of the time, we can probably just throw everything into After Effects (I know, I know, I'm sort of contradicting myself, especially considering what I wrote in the beginning).

WWF - Infographics

Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly. They can improve cognition by utilising graphics to enhance the human visual system's ability to see patterns and trends. The process of creating infographics can be referred to as data visualisation, information design, or information architecture.

Here is another mood board I decided to put together about various types of infographics:

Aside from the usual charts and graphs, there are some simpler types of infographics where there are far more illustrations and graphics than text, colour seems to play a pretty big part in all of these examples (I mean one is already colourful on its own, but after putting them all together as seen here...). Frankly, the best examples are definitely the more playful ones (Where various types of silhouettes are used instead of the usual pie charts and histograms), though of course you will probably need to be or have a decent illustrator to design those little cartoon characters and whatnot for you (Which will not at all be an issue for my teammate and I, hehe).

Perhaps the first thing we need to do is to make sure that our animated infographic is eye catching enough that it would grab the attention of our audience within a split second, before we can finally start forcing various information and data into their heads (Apparently I type like a villain when I'm tired...).

Questions we need to consider (Once more in some cases):

1. What tone?
2. What art style?
3. What is considerably the strongest content to focus on?

And our next line of action will probably be:

1. Pick out bits of the report to focus on.
2. TRY to sketch out some concepts.
3. Storyboard like we have never storyboarded before.

Applied Animation 2 - Animated Documentaries

The animated documentary is a genre of film which combines the genres of animation and documentary. Normally such a genre would be used for topics that are too difficult too visualise, even in real ilife.

Documentary mode is a conceptual scheme developed by American documentary theorist Bill Nichols that seeks to distinguish particular traits and conventions of various documentary film styles. Nichols identifies six different documentary 'modes' in his schema:

Poetic Mode
Subjective Interpretations to the Subject with Little Dialogue
Expository Mode
The Voice Over/Authoritative Voice/ Rhetoric (Think David Attenborough)
Observational Mode
 'Simply Observing' - Not Interpreting - Fly on the Wall (Late 60s and 70s)
Reflexive Mode 
The Documentary is aware of itself or process
Performative Mode 
The 'Director" is in the middle of the subject (Think Michael Moore)

The first recognised example of this genre is Winsor McCay's 1918 "The Sinking of the Lusitania", which uses animation to portray the 1915 sinking of RMS Lusitania after it was struck by two torpedoes fired from a German U-oat; an event which no recorded film footage is known to exist.

Since the 1920s, animation has been used in educational and social guidance films, and has often been used to illustrate abstract concepts in mainly live-action examples of these genres. Early examples of fully animated educational films are Walt Disney's "Victory Though Air Power" and "How to Catch a Cold" (I actually really liked that one as a kid!) and Max and Dave Fleischer's "Evolution".

"Charley Says" was a series of very short cut-out animated cartoon public information films for children, produced by the British government's Central Office of Information and broadcast in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the topics dealt with everyday safety issues children tend to face, such as not going off with strangers or not playing with matches. They featured a little boy called Tony and his cat Charley, who would meow the lesson of the episode, which Tony would then translate and explain.

Despite its good intentions, we definitely cannot help but find this more entertaining than enlightening, and not in a particularly good way, perhaps this is due to the somewhat odd animation style, or the way that cat meows... Either way, it has definitely paved the way to slightly better PSAs as time went on.

And this is not one of them:

As wonderfully humorous and entertaining as "Creature Comforts" is, seeing that the interviews are re-contextualised, is it then still considered a Documentary? Unlike "War Story" (Another work by Aardman Animation), "Creature Comforts" is done for the benefit of humour and is completely out of its original context. 

So, in what point is something no longer considered a documentary? A documentary is meant to inform and educate, but if the information obtained is used for a different purpose (Again, to be merely used as a joke), I suppose this is where we draw the line and simply see it as nothing more than a piece of entertainment (Ouch, I didn't want this to come out so harsh...), though I am sure that people might be able to better appreciate it, and once they have a good chuckle or two, can look further into these 'interviews' that had been used for it.

There were a lot more examples shown during last week's presentation aside from these, but I wish to save them so that I can write about them as part of the 5 research blog posts that we need to do on animated documentaries. 

So expect some slightly more serious examples  later on!

Food for Thought - Pre Production - Scriptwriting

We definitely needed to at least get one script draft done so that we could actually storyboard something to present for next week's session, and so one night, I finally gathered what I could from our discussions and just started writing (While playing Alf Clausen's "The Land of Chocolate" in the background... which was not the wisest of choices).

After getting as much research done as possible about cakes, I then drafted a rough outline that I could follow before I actually began writing, where a mixture of what we discussed about (Such as what sort of jokes to put in, what characters will be used, etc.) and what information I was able to gather on my own (History of cake, types of cakes, etc.) were put together. While I have written scripts in the past, this was probably the first time that I closely followed a more proper script format... which was pretty much just aligning the dialogue so that they will be in the centre and writing the names of the characters in capital letters, from what I can see really.

And once I believe I was done, I then roughly timed the script to see how long it would last, and while it was a tad hard visualising how long some parts would last (Particularly scenes where the characters are not talking), I believe it definitely came to around 2 minutes.

So far my teammates seemed alright with what we got when I showed it to them the next day, but if they desire to change anything while they worked on the storyboard, I am absolutely fine with that. I just wish I had been able to insert in more jokes and puns for them...

Anna and Cara have been doing a wonderful job with the character and setting designs, we also have a cosy little room to ourselves now (Just above the library) where we can put up our research and development work. The Cintiq in there has also made Anna extremely productive and I was absolutely floored seeing how much concept art she was able to throw out in such a short period of time! Seriously though, that thing is amazing, and I really, really hope to get one after I graduate!

So far we have at least confirmed the designs for the main characters, and so I will try getting some animation tests done for the boy and cake stand man over the weekend. We can decide on the colours another time.

WWF - Research, Reference and Inspiration

Considering the amount of information that we will be struggling to squeeze into the duration given (Max. 2 minutes) for video submissions, Anna suggested that we work on a simplistic infographic where a mixture of live-action, stop motion (Possibly paper cut outs and real objects) and some basic digital animation (A little Photoshop and After Effects) will be used, by doing so, the animation process will be quite straight forward, especially once we confirm our script and storyboards.

Below are some decent examples we can refer to as we develop our own infographic piece (Done in a variety of mediums while all the same each having their own special type of charm to them):

"Food Rules" is a mixture of pixilation and object stop motion, obviously some things were edited digitally (Like the sizing of some objects, pft, like they were going to actually bother getting three differently sized cucumbers... as well as some text), but overall this is a really appealing way to present a rather thorough set of information. However, they still really need to get better quality voice overs done...

"Ending Overfishing" is a digital piece. So far I have seen a lot of my schoolmates going for this sort of approach (You know, where they rotate around the planet earth in a dramatic fashion...), so chances are we might try to steer clear of that, or perhaps present it in a different kind of style (A traditional approach still sounds quite appealing to me). This one is a lot heavier in terms of the amount of information presented, even compared to "Food Rules", and I am really hoping to avoid talking too much about specific numbers (I repeat, too much, not completely, because even I eventually lost interest when watching examples that did just that).

"The Big Bang" is pretty slick and appealing in terms of its presentation, though it does make use of considerably detailed illustrations (Though it is not to say that we have to do the same). Some slightly more complex After Effects techniques are used as well, complex to me that is, as I only know the basics of that software, and will require a bit more time to learn these sort of techniques (Such as those diffusion effects seen in the graph).

"Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages" mainly presents various images and lightly manipulates some of them with entertaining results, while also working well with the somewhat sarcastically done voiceover and cartoony sound effects. Though then again this is after all focusing on images, so god help us all if they actually needed to make some text/number heavy graph for it...

"GOOD: Jailbirds" is another basically animated piece (Mostly in After Effects from what I can see), it has a pretty appealing art style despite the somewhat serious subject matter it is focusing on, and it overall just feels like one of those stylish infographics (With brightly coloured vector images and some light textures) that had some simple animation thrown into it.

More infographic videos can be found here.

I am definitely starting to see a pattern here with how the information is presented... Perhaps writing out a script from the notes Anna wrote will get the ball rolling for when we actually begin storyboarding the entire thing. While I continue barreling through these detailed notes (Bless her), perhaps that's where I will need to start next.

At the moment, I am still gathering more research, but I do believe that we already have begun to develop a somewhat solid idea. One thing for sure 

WWF - Summarised Notes

Earlier this week, my partner did a fantastic job in looking through the WWF report and extracting out the most important information that we will surely be incorporating into our animation. And now it's my turn to get some new mood boards and visual research done, so that we can finally get some concepts done for next week's session.

But first! Here are some of the helpful notes that she sent me, so that I could better understand what this brief was actually focusing upon:

Human well being depends on natural resources such as water, arable lands, fish, wood and ecosystem services such as pollination, nutrient cycling and erosion control. Ecosystems sustain societies that create economics and not the other way round. Eco systems are the vital bedrock of social and economic development.

Since the 1970s however, species populations worldwide have declined by 52%, terrestrial species declined by 39% no signs of slowing down. There is a loss of habitat for human land use - agriculture, urban development, energy production - continues to be a major threat, compounded by hunting. Freshwater species show average decline of 76% with main threats being habitat loss, fragmentation, pollution and invasive species. Marine species declined by 39% with affected species including turtles, sharks and large migratory seabirds like the wandering albatross.

The world has now entered the Anthropocene Period, where human activities are the largest drivers of change at planetary scale. Given the pace and scale of these changes, we cannot exclude the possibility of reaching critical tipping points that could abruptly and/or irreversibly change living conditions on Earth.

It is apparent that we now actually need 1.5 earths to meet our currant demands on nature. We are taking more than we can replenish, we are cutting trees faster than they can mature, harvesting more fish than the oceans can replenish, and emitting more carbon than the forests and oceans can absorb. And you may have probably heard this way too many times, but we are clearly jeopardising our future.

Ecological footprints are biologically productive area needed for crops, grazing, fishing, build up areas, forest products AND the area of forest needed to absorb additional carbon dioxide emissions that oceans cannot absorb. Countries with a high level of human development face the challenge of further increasing their human development while attempting to keep their ecological footprints down to globally sustainable levels.

Changing our course and finding alternative pathways will not be easy, but it can be done. Nature conversation and sustainable development actually go hand in hand, preserving biodiversity and wild places, safeguarding the future of humanity - well being, economy, food security, social stability and survival.

When so many people live in poverty, protecting nature may seem like a luxury, but it is in fact a lifeline. We are all in this together, we all need nutritious food, fresh water and clean air. And while the world's poorest continue to be the most vulnerable, the interconnected issues of food, water and energy security affect us all.

We need to live and prosper in harmony with nature. We know where we want to be, we know how to get there, now we need to get moving.

You should be able to see all of her handwritten notes on her own blog in due time, as I have no right to post them up here. Though I will however post up the screenshots from the report that she gave me: