Food for Thought - Production - Marketing Materials

I came in early today in hopes of printing out all the DVD Covers, and booklets for Cara, Anna and I, little did I know that I would be spending the next hour or so wasting quite a bit of money attempting to print out the DVD covers in a suitable size for the casing. Strangely enough, Cara's original file turned out a little too smile, and so I made numerous attempts in trying to fix it, despite what seemed like a proper template, the damn thing still wouldn't fit...  until what was possibly the 20th attempt did it manage to fill out the casing decently, it wasn't perfect, but at least it is better than the very first one I had printed out.

The booklets weren't too troublesome at least, especially after my experience with printing my project report for Responsive, the ordering of the pages was easily done. I did do a few tiny tweaks based on Annabeth's feedback (That being the removal of the black border on the back page), and so printed them out a second time.

Below you will see all the failed attempts on the right, and one the left, you will see what I deemed to be alright enough for submission.

At least the poster shouldn't be too much of a hassle to print out...

Food for Thought - Distribution - Animation Progress 5

So I helped out at the last minute on a few more things, seeing that there was no way that Anna and Cara could finish cleaning and colouring everything, I spent the entire night trying to at least neaten the last 9 files that they have yet to work on, so hopefully these slightly neater sketches can still be used for the animation. Seeing that Cara was already working so hard to edit the animation as well as work on the promotional items, I then helped to colour at least one scene as seen below.

As I coloured the cleaned up lines, I was however a little saddened to find out that the clean up took away quite a bit of the exaggeration that was in the original sketches I did... I will take note of this for future projects however. I also actually wanted to fix up some of their expressions in the clean up versions, but it was going to be a little complicated trying to ask them to pass me their files just so I can fix the eyes or mouth, I could probably ask about it another time if we are still interesting in submitting this for competition.

Food for Thought - Sort of an Evaluation

This has been an absolute frenzy of an experience, for this module, I took up the tasks of researching into most areas (Such as the subject matter itself, sources of inspiration, title cards and sequences, animation and visual styles, etc.), scriptwriting, a little directing (Such as helping Cara out with the storyboards since it went through so many changes based on my vision and figuring out the audio itself), organising (Such as putting together the gantt chart), background designing and animating. I do not think I multitasked as aggressively as I did for this module.

Despite how incredibly heavy the workload and the little amount of time we had left, I still however enjoyed everything I did throughout, I have also gained a newfound appreciation for background designing and directing, and have also grown even more appreciative of other areas such as scriptwriting, voice acting, and of course animating.

Aside from that however, despite how the odds were against us most of the time (Due to unforeseen circumstances), I think my first time working with a group has been a rather enlightening experience. I do not regret quickly taking action when it came to putting together my team, especially as they have been absolutely amazing to work with this entire time. And I do believe that we will be happy to work with each other again in the future once this project has been completed.

I wish I had been a little more involved during the final stages of this project, I especially felt awful leaving most of the editting to one of my teammates. But then again, I just feel the need to be involved in almost everything, despite how it makes sense for each of us to focus more on our own tasks.

From the very beginning, I had immediately wanted to incoporate our interests into this project, and that was a silly, fun, back to basics and overall entertaining 2D animation that catered to a younger audience. And based on the fact that a majority of the animated documentaries we have seen after of a rather depressing nature, this felt like the perfect opportunity to work on something that was not just educational, but also fun and lighthearted.

It is always said that our works should invoke our audience in some way or form, to make them think about what they have just seen, and true be told, it always seemed to me that only shocking, depressing or disturbing works are used to create such a response out of the audience... But I also believed that, in this day and age, that more works should be created for people that simply want to come back to watch something that would entertain them, but will simply make them feel good, perhaps even comforted, especially after a long tiring day from school or work. It is understandable to make people think about certain subject matters, but I think it is just as important to make the people in the world feel entertained and contented to forget about their own troubles, if not for a brief moment.

I was glad that my team and I could work on something that was meant for a younger audience, something that could perhaps entertain them as much as cartoons from the 80s and 90s did for me. I still hope to work on similar animations in the future, and hopefully my old teammates will be willing to join me when I do so.

Food for Thought - Area of Process

There were many areas that I actually found myself enjoying throughout this experience. While my memory is rather fuzzy, I was surprised to realise just how much I enjoyed designing backgrounds (Especially since I have always been so much more focused on character designs), I feel that this could be start of something for me and I hope to improve on my background designs as I go along (As I was still struggling to fix up one of my backgrounds so that they could be made to repeat smoothly in After Effects).

While a considerably stressful aspect, I still find animating to be another enjoyable aspect, there is just never enough time to carefully work on them however, and so I find myself rushing most of the time. Still, I actually enjoyed working on certain scenes in the past few days, and especially learnt how surprisingly fun it was to do lip syncing (Making dope sheets is a whole other story however... so bless Cara for helping me out with that), as well as animate expressions (Which I can still improve so much more on). 

I still of course have a long way to go when it comes successfully applying the 12 major principles of Animation, I know this particularly animation could be better exaggerated in some scenes, but again, I was just really aiming to finish sketching all the key scenes so that we have a decent amount of new material to show for the screening tomorrow.

While I did not really get the chance to get involved in the audio editing process near the end, I did enjoy doing a rough recording for the very first animatic that we made for our pitch. And I was glad that I had the opportunity to sing for another group's project. While I maybe an amateur voice actor, I still hope to get more opportunities for this area.

You might find it surprising that me, of all people, also enjoyed writing the script for this project, after the first few brainstorming sessions I had with Anna and Cara, it did not take long to write a script that all of us actually found decent enough to be used for an animation. And I absolutely had a blast figuring out what jokes to put in and where to place them. Considering that this is actually a narrative aspect of animation, I do suppose that it is not all that surprising how much I enjoyed it...

True be told, I absolutely enjoyed everything that I did for this module, even those last minute tasks I took over for others.

Food for Thought - Production Process

What I have learnt from most recent visiting professionals is just how incredibly important communication is when working alongside others so that works can be produced a little more efficiently. That, and just how much research is required even before the design process commences.

For the majority of this module, I have tried organise our workload to the best of my ability and to make sure that I was able to stay in contact with my teammates no matter where we were (So that I could keep check on their progress and to make sure that they were not too stressed out). While things have definitely changed and did not go at all according to plan, I felt that drafting up a rough gantt chart for our group after the first pitch gave us a little more guidance in finishing up what needed to be done, instead of blindly working on whatever came to mind first, if this was so, chances are that we might have finished as much work as we have been able to now.

As they worked on storyboards and character sheets during the earlier part of our Easter break, in the meantime, aside from my own design works (Which was backgrounds at the time), I made sure to complete the preparations for some of the behind the scenes aspects of the animation, particularly the audio and music, so that we needn't worry about it later on (I try my absolute hardest to remain efficient and to not get things done at the very last minute, especially when working with others).

Throughout this experience, I felt that all three of us have been incredibly understanding, courteous and accommodating of one another, while also making sure that we would actually listen to one another's opinions when it came to working on the animation itself. While it might appear that I have merely chosen my teammates due to our chemistry with one another, from the beginning, I chose them based on their skills and due to the fact that we shared incredibly similar interests.

Due to the lack of time, there was only so much that we could do when it came to the animation, but considering the fact that we were all working back in our own accommodations and communicating with each other mainly through Dropbox and Facebook for these last few days, I still felt that we managed to do an awful lot.

If we had been given enough time, I felt that my team and I could really dish out something amazing... not that what we presently have isn't already lovely.

Food for Thought - Distribution - Booklet

After I had finished sketching all the key animations, I went to see what else I could do to aid my teammates as the deadline drew nearer, and while Cara and Anna worked hard on the other promotional items, I was asked to quickly design up a simple little booklet to go with the DVD cover, where some of our best developmental work could  be shown.

And seeing that I have pretty much saved most of the works that we shared with one another through Facebook and Tumblr, it didn't take too long to quickly design up something. There wasn't any need for any text either aside from a few headings and the page numbers, so I only needed to focus on the layouts of the images as well as figure out a simple little decorative element that could be added to each page (I decided to use a black version of the border that has been used for our title cards and presentations).

Unfortunately, I did not have any of the fonts that Cara had used for the DVD cover and biography page, and so, at least for title, I simply saved a png of the title from the DVD cover file and used that for the cover of the booklet. I tried finding a close enough font for the rest that was similar enough to the font used for the body text in the biography page.

Again, kept it really simple.

The only changes I made was for Cara's page spread, the colours turned out strange, so I was given some new images to replace them, I also had to crop up most of the template as I felt that the school template would ruin the overall look of the booklet.

Food for Thought - Production - Animation Progress 4

So I was a ninny and realised that mov files would be too big to upload up here, but I believe these two will be enough to show how the lip syncing animation went, I will however try to include some more scenes on my submission disc.

I managed to finish sketching all the key scenes this morning (I had to sadly exclude the hop and spin scene due to its complexity and its need for lip syncing as well, but I believe we can still connect the other two scenes together smoothly without it), and as you can see here, there are numerous work files on both my hard disk and dropbox account. They have all also been ordered properly for our reference (And for my OCD) so that it would easier to put them all together later on as one animation.

Now if you will excuse me, I still have other tasks to attend to, despite how badly destroyed my hand by now...

Food for Thought - Production - Animation Progress 3

As mentioned in the previous animation progress post, I soon enough went back to finishing up this scene, there were a lot of subtle and jerky animations I added in aside from the lip syncing, such as Cake Man's sudden movements and Johnny's own startled reaction when he suddenly cuts him off. 

There were some complications with the posing of Cake Man, as I felt that he didn't have anywhere to lean his arms over based on Anna's cart design, and so I made do with him bending rather unnaturally over like some snake. I will try to fix this scene before we submit it in for competitions if it bothers anyone when watching it.

I simply did the icing animation, Anna will be drawing the hand and icing bag while Cara will animate it to follow the motions of my animation on After Effects. I made sure to give a few pauses in between, especially when the details of the train are added in.

Scenes such as this focused more on the transitions of facial expressions, they were simple to do and also quite fun. Hopefully I will have the confidence to animate more complex expression in the future. I still can't say the same for my turning animations however, as you notice how warp they tend to get sometimes...

The running cycle took awhile to figure out, especially since I had trouble getting use to drawing Johnny's incredibly slender body shape (If you noticed in the original walking cycle, I gave him a much more bean shaped torso), as well as the placement of his arms. The original showed them much higher in the air, but when I started drawing in the details, they just looked really off to me, and so I had to reposition them.

The panting animation wasn't too bad... it could be better, but it will have to do for now, I made sure to label what frames to duplicate, so that Anna didn't have to clean up 4 of the same frames and waste time doing so.

I thought that this would turn out horribly, and while it could probably use a bit more squash and stretch (Mainly squash), I think this scene turned out pretty well, I am also once again please with how his expressions turned out.

This was probably one of my better turning animations, his head doesn't horribly warp like it normally does in the other sketches. Also I realise I will never draw his glasses exactly as how they should be in Anna's references...

I reused the first walk cycle and simply changed his expression. I do hope however that Anna or Cara made the necessary changes to the first walk cycle, as he is humming in that scene, his mouth should be closed and not open. And since I don't have the fully coloured file for that animation, this matter is all up to them.

I was trying to connect together as many scenes as possible for this one, and it definitely took a little while to finish up, seeing as there was quite a bit of motion going on when compared to the other scenes.

Seeing that Johnny was going to stay pretty still throughout these time travelling segments, we all agreed to add some basic animation for each setting. Thanks to Cara, each baker would do something differently and in a way would connect to one another (Eg, baking in th Egyptian setting, taking out the baked goods in the Medieval settings, and finally setting the baked goods onto the table).

Fire glow animation.

Baker and smoke animation.

Food for Thought - Distribution - A Mixture of Things 4

I volunteered to draw up some new portraits for the crew biography, and once again, as there wasn't much time left and I still needed to continue animating after, I had to scrap the pixel portrait idea (And scrap the idea of even fully colouring them) and instead did these really quick sketches for each of us (As you can see I sort of gave up on my own portrait). But anyway these work better than the original doodle I did at the very beginning of this team up, seeing that all of us are sort of facing forward this time round.

Last night, Cara and Anna started working on our promotional items, seen here are the poster concepts, which I initially mistook for the DVD cover. As mentioned before, those textured backgrounds I had quickly painted up for the title cards can also be applied here. So while it appears that it looks like there is a lot of negative space now, particularly on Johnny's side, it will look fine once some textures are applied (Just call me the Texture Queen...).

And here is the gorgeous DVD cover Cara did, I was admiring it for far too long last night when she had sent it over to me for my opinion... While black might be a tiny bit dull for the text, I believe it remains the best choice for the sake of readability and clarity. Other than that, all she will have to do later on is simply replace some of the images on the backside of the cover, and we all should be able to print them out by tomorrow for our submission!

And here is the crew biography page, we decided to add silly descriptions below our names and roles to go with the overall silly and playful tone we already have for our overall project. Seeing that we all practically played key roles, I believe none of us specifically took on the role of the director, and so that role was not listed for any of us.

Later on, I will be putting together a little concept art booklet where most of our developmental work will be featured in, which would go great along with all the other promotional items for our animation.

Food for Thought - Production and Distribution - A Mixture of Things 3

After the designs for the title cards were confirmed, Cara started working on the credits next, we decided to keep things simple and simply listed down our most major roles (So not to make matters too complicated). And seeing that were wasn't much time left, all three character voices were credited to our dear voice actor, James Wood. It was a good thing that I had asked him to voice Johnny just in case I did not have the time to do it myself.

One of the changes made was the sizing of the test to create a slightly better hierarchy and to allow the names to stand out more (Much like the title card examples I looked into), other than that, not many changes were made.

Fiona was doing up a promotional poster for all of our animations about two nights back, after much consideration, and despite the funny pun-filled titles that was suggested to us, we decided to go with something simple for our animation so that our audience would understand straight what our animated documentary is actually about, and so we decided to go with "A History of Cake" ("Brief" was taken out as it made it too long).

Fiona later on mentioned that our characters looked incredibly thin as compared to the rest (Which would throw off the balance of the entire layout), and so quickly, I sent in one of the close up shots that we did for our animation of Johnny where he presses his face up against the glass, which I think looks much more interesting and fills up the slot so much better.

While Cara started working on our promotional materials yesterday afternoon, I was asked to at least write a synopsis for it as well as think up of a tagline, and so this was what I came up with (I thought up of tagline after realising a possible running gag should this short continue as a series):

Synopsis:
When taking a bite out of an oh so sweet slice of cake during teatime or whenever, have you ever wondered, just for a brief moment, when and where these lovely things actually first originated from? Join Johnny as he gets taken on an incredibly brief but interesting trip through time to learn about the history of cake, with an overly enthusiastic cake salesman as his guide. But oh, you want more? Do not despair then, as this is just the first of many adventures that Johnny gets dragged along on… without getting any ‘samples’ whatsoever.

Tag Line:
Just let him eat cake.

Food for Thought - Production - A Mixture of Things 2

About two days back, Cara started working on more polished up title cards to replace the ones that I had quickly done up for the final critique session. I was fine with the layout and adored the colour choices and adorable illustrations, but I felt that one thing was missing...

When I suggested that textures of sorts could help make these title cards stand out a little more, Cara said that she would need my assistance in that area (Seeing that she does not have as much experience in creating messy works as me), and so, quickly as possible, I messed around with a few brushes within my arsenal and created this textured background and a pink version of it.

 

With some alterations that Cara did (By making the colours a little less dark and saturated), I honestly thought that it looked better now, especially since it matches the rest of the animation! I was also actually thinking of using the same background for a later scene that showcases all the beautiful cakes, so that it actually links to these title cards.

In the end, we decided to go with the pink one, we might however use the blue background for one of the animation scenes later on.

Anna stepped in to polish it up a bit more.

For a close up scene, Cara did up these adorable gingerbread man illustrations, while I once again suggested giving them a painted look (Much like those detailed still/close up shots you see in shows such as Ren and Stimpy and Spongebob Squarepants), Cara once again was unfamiliar in using such a style, and seeing as we didn't have much time left, decided to leave it as it is for our module submission.

I did however quickly do up a table texture that will be use for the icing scene later on as Cara ever so sweetly asked me to (Seriously though, Cara is the biggest sweetheart to work with, and I'm still giggling over the fact how we both constantly apologise to one another as we worked).

Food for Thought - Production - Animation Progress 2

As the deadline draws near, I know that I needed to work smart, and the first thing I did before I got on with the rest of the animation sketches was to relook through Cara's storyboard and unfortunately... simplify as many scenes as possible.

I worked a little out of order and decided to work on one of the first lip sync scenes so to see just how difficult it would and how much time is required to animate such scenes later on. While I initially struggled a little as the timing for the dope sheets seem to be a little off (They also were recorded based on time and not frames, so that made things a tiny bit trickier), I soon got use to it, and actually started to enjoy it. Sure it took a little time trying to figure out how long some frames would last and so on, but I was giggling to myself later on when animating mouths that required... tongue.

I felt that I was spending far too much time trying to animate the falling out of tree scene, and so sacrifices once again had to be made so that I would have enough time to animate more key scenes for the final submission. If I had more time, I obviously would have liked to finish properly animating the entire thing, but for now, I believe the present scene of him simply sticking his leg out of the tree still allows a smooth enough transition into the next scene (That I have also simplified based on Cara's storyboards).

There was a more complicated shot where we see Cake Man falling through the roof of the cart from above, this was once again changed so that both scenes would directly connect to one another. There was also a slight contradiction when it came to design details, as the storyboard shows the cart having a wooden roof, when our cart designer Anna states that the top of the cart is simply a cloth canopy.

The first few frames actually shows some torn bits of the canopy
as he falls through.

I finally went back to finishing up this scene (This was actually the first lip sync scene) which you will see in another Animation Progress post, Anna thought that it would have been possible to finish cleaning up what was presently available for the final crit session. Needless to say, some hilarious hijinks ensued...

Aside from that, I quickly tried to correct how the Cake Man's body should look for the side, as my initial sketch was too messy for Anna to see and clean up.