02/09/2021 - Animation (Intro)
The fundamental principle of video and animation is that a series of images are played one by one to give the illusion of movement.
Frames-per-second (Framerate/FPS) refers to the number of frames that make up a single second of video/animation. Different forms of media have different common framerates:
TV: 25
Cinema: 24 / 48
Games: 30 / 60 (but can go high as the monitor & game allows if it is uncapped)
There are two common animation methods: Hand-drawn and Stop motion.
Hand-drawn animation entails drawing everything by hand, frame by frame. It can be done physically or digitally.
Stop motion instead has you make physical models and sets (generally made of clay or even lego), which you then pose and photograph.
Bouncing ball animation:
06/09/2021 - 12 Principles
In today's lesson, we learned about the 12 principles of animation, most of which I knew already.
That doesn't mean I know how to use them effectively, which we were tasked to do. I chose to do a jumping animation but even though it was fun, I have zero confidence in my ability to draw--let alone animate. Regardless, I'm hoping what I've learned now and in the future will help me with different personal projects.
The 12 Principles of Animation:
Squash & Stretch: Gives a sense of weight and flexibility.
Anticipation: Prepares the audience for action. Wind-up for motions/movement. Actions appear more realistic
Staging: Direct the audience's attention to make it clear what's important.
Straight Ahead & Pose-to-Pose: Two different approaches to animating. Straight Ahead is animated frame by frame from start to end. Pose-to-pose instead starts with a few keyframes and filling in the gaps later.
Follow Through & Overlapping Action: Follow Through is the logic that loosely tied parts of a body should continue moving after the character has stopped, then come back. Overlapping Action is the habit for parts of the body to move at different rates & speeds (E.g. clothing and hair).
Slow In & Slow Out: Objects need time to accelerate and slow down when moving. Realism is achieved by having more frames near the start and end of an action
Arc: Natural actions tend to follow a trajectory, so a character's joints/body parts should have some angling to replicate the arc.
Secondary Action: Having secondary actions support the main action can give the animation more life. Someone walking can swing their arms or keep them in their pockets, or express emotions/mood through facial expressions. It should not take attention away from the main action.
Timing: Timing refers to the number of drawings or frames for a given action and relates to the speed of the animation. A faster object would naturally have fewer frames.
Exaggeration: Motion that replicates reality perfectly can sometimes appear dull/boring, so exaggeration is used to transform it into a wilder, but still somewhat realistic form.
Solid Drawing: This means taking into account how your characters fit in a three-dimensional space.
Should also avoid creating 'twins', characters whose left and right sides are perfectly mirrored.
Appeal: Self-explanatory. Characters should be appealing to the audience. There are multiple 'tricks' to achieving this, including giving them a baby-like face.
Jump Animation:
08/09/2021 - Sound (Intro)
Today we had an introduction to sound production so we have a better understanding of what it is and how it is done.
I had never used a recorder before so it was fun, albeit stressful to find some good sources of sound and make sure they come out okay.
It was also a bit awkward working in pairs/groups, but I got through it.
Fundamentals:
Foley: The reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added in post-production.
Music: Soundtrack playing in the background
ADR: Automated Dialogue Replacement. Involves re-recording audio in a more controlled environment to improve or make changes to the original recording, as well as inserting voices for animated characters.
Types of microphones:
Shotgun Mic - Directional
Boom Mic - Directional
Reporter Mic - Omnidirectional
Directional microphones focus more on a single direction, while Omnidirectional microphones pick up sound from all directions equally.
Recorded Foley Sounds:
13/09/2021 - Sense of Speed
What's most important here is the use of Timing. Despite the rocket itself moving fairly slowly on the canvas, the background speed lines move at an intensely fast rate--creating that sense of speed.
Regardless, I personally think this came out rather well.
13/09/2021 - Lip Sync Animation
Regardless, the final outcome of the animation exercise worked, which was more than I expected.
14/09/2021 - Advert Project
We have been put into groups and tasked with creating an animation for a product or service, real or not. It must utilise the animation principles we have learned thus far and must be between 15 and 30 seconds.
Our team has decided on a fictional product called "Pop!Milk", a fizzy/soda milk drink.
The general idea for the advert is a bank robbery is stopped by someone taking the drink and becoming buff as heck.
I've decided to do the sound for it, so my starting point is looking into sound production as I want unique sounds/music, even if it's complete garbage.
List of sounds I need to do:
Door Slam Open
*bonk*
Bones hitting ground
Drink pouring
Power-up
Giga-Grandma Eye-opening
I worked on the laser/power-up sound today, which was much harder than I expected. Apparently making a laser sound is very easy, but I'm an idiot.
Here is the link for the eye-open SE in Beepbox. I lost the others, sadly.
I heard that it was praised for its general quality and expressions, which I sincerely hope the others were happy to hear as I personally think they all did a great job; tremendously better than I could do.
I hope the sound effects added just that little bit more personality to the animation--I will very likely reuse the death sound in the future.
I wish I had made more sound effects and a mini-tune for the end, but me being too unfamiliar with BeepBox (despite its simplicity) and me getting unwell threw a wrench into that plan.
In this lesson, we learned about the process of editing sound in Adobe Audition and the ways sound can be used. The main objective was to understand how to apply sound effectively to our own animations & games in the future.
The first thing we went through were some new audio theory terms:
Diegetic: The characters in-universe can hear it. (like a gunshot)
Non-Diegetic: Only the audience can hear it. (e.g music that isn't coming from a radio)
Parallel: Sound matches up with what the audience expects.
Contrapuntal: Opposite of Parallel - Sound doesn't match up with what the audience expects. (Upbeat music accompanying a horrific scene)
Next, in Adobe Audition, we learned how to set up a multitrack session and experimented with the various effects that can be applied to the pieces of audio we imported.
21/09/2021 - Video Editing Experimentation
Today we learned and experimented with Adobe Premiere Pro. For the experimentation, I decided to take a silly animation I did in Animate as a pass-time last year and the jumping animation from this year. I learned about Premiere Pro last year, so I don't really have much to say. What you see is what you get.
25/09/2021 - Original Animation Project
Our next animation assignment that makes up most of Units 1 & 2 is to create a short animated film between 1 and 2 minutes.
The twist is that we've been given a unique soundtrack piece that we must start and base our ideas on.
The film must display a clear application of animation principles, sound design, cinematography, and editing. We must also show that we understand the design/pre-production processes we have learned in Unit 2: creating a storyboard(s), character sheets, audio plans, and a script.
Finally, the film must contain one walking animation, one head-turning animation, three pieces of audio, and 5 different shot sizes.
We have until the 21st of October to finish the film--giving us around 3 weeks to plan, produce and edit it together.
This is the (very basic) idea synopsis my team did while I was unwell:
04/10/2021 - OG Animation Progress:
Today, I and our team rented out audio equipment (Recorder, Shotgun Mic, Headphones), went into one of the recording rooms & went outside to record all the audio we theoretically need. We recorded around 16~ audio tracks, which I then manually split up in Adobe Audition into around 58 unique sounds.
It was mostly a success, but sadly a few pieces of foley sound were too quiet and/or not isolated enough to realistically use. Some of it could be made usable by amplifying the sound, but this didn't work every time.
Recording the sounds themselves was incredibly funny/amusing--having us three just make random incomprehensible sounds in the mic to use for the aliens in the animation.
05/10/2021 - OG Animation Progress:
Today, I worked on an animatic in Premiere Pro to give our team a better idea of timing & pacing. It's unfinished as the storyboards are also unfinished, but this covers the first 45 seconds of the animation.
Although I ran into a small issue with the session in relation to the aspect ratio of the storyboard frames, I think it still worked out. This is the kind of technical task I can work with, at least compared to drawing/animating. This is something I'm much more comfortable working on.
06/10/2021 - OG Animation Progress:
Today, my team leader tasked me to draw two backgrounds in Adobe Animate (despite me being probably the worst in the class). I figured two was impossible considering my hypermobility making it just that more difficult to draw, so I set my task to finish at least one.
Apparently, I still overestimated my ability. This is all I could do in the lesson; only the basic lines were done. Someone else will likely have to finish what I started because this simply isn't happening.
My hand was constantly shaking and my arm started to ache much earlier than I anticipated so drawing smooth, curved lines were almost impossible.
I hate this and I hate myself for being so disadvantaged.
It might've gone differently if I used a screen tablet instead, but my teammates are better than me and were actually animating, so they needed it more.
Clearly, I need to develop my drawing skills but sadly that is not something I can just easily do.
12/10/2021 - OG Animation Progress:
21/10/2021 Edit: Looking back at the scene, I forgot about the stick. It's on a lower layer than it should be so it was hidden. Oops.
The character turns into a shadowy figure before jumping up, so I applied some filters to the object to achieve that effect. I also decided to add & animate some tentacle things on it to further show the inspiration for the character. It's disgusting and can't even really be noticed in the actual shot. Oh well.
I keyframed the scales of the still backgrounds to have them zoom out, added cross-dissolves between the first four shots, changed the speeds of practically every scene to time it to the music, added voice lines/sound effects, and adjusted the volume of some sounds.
I did get instructed to draw a background for one scene and the protagonist hiding in a bush in another, which was kind of questionable considering I am abysmal at drawing .
First, I made sure to use a screen tablet whenever possible as I find them to be the most comfortable and for the bush scene I traced the character's head from the final drawing.
It honestly just showed how ambitious the leader was, which I can relate to. They needed the extra workforce. I ran into similar 'this is too ambitious' issues during LVL 2 Media.
The Mannequin drawing made me realize just how hard it is to draw breasts correctly.
I've seen plenty of western & Japanese art with really odd breasts, so this gave me more respect to those who tried.
I'm not proud of this.
I do like the head on the pole the most though--it isn't just a basic shape.
It's just good general practice as it's been years since I've drawn anything.
Main Character Initial Designs:
It's fairly simple and having a bag cover their head means they don't have to draw a face or deal with lip-syncing if it were to ever come up.
Neat thing to know, but I'd still rather let Blender do that for me.
Once we got ours back, we could decide what were good additions.
These were: The eye patch on the paper bag, claws and a tail.
This is the final character design we ended up going with.
My idea is that they could impale you with their spike-hand and then either bite into you or deal some insane damage with their axe-hand.
