Reflection

This semester was very enriching for me. I had the chance to work with like-minded people and gain an insight on basic 2D animation. I realised that animation is not a simple thing to do. It requires lots of careful planning and good time management skills. Although I was busy at school, I tried to work on my project at least a couple of hours every week. I liked the lessons and presentations in this course. I acquired new knowledge that is useful in my career. I have started thinking about giving instructions to students in the form of animation. Adobe Flash CS6 was helpful for me to translate my storyboard into an amateur animation project. I am aware that there is a lot more to learn so I am happy to have at least touched the tip of the iceberg. I can confidently claim that I know the principles of animation and how tweening can be done. Aside my friends, both the lecturers were very approachable and friendly. I must particularly thank Dr. J and Dr. Shah for their patience and endless encouraging words throughout the course. They were very humble and helpful. It saddens me to bid goodbye to this semester as it marks the end of the Animation course but I am glad to have learned a lot and made good friends along the way. Animation was fun, engaging and a bit scary but I am glad I went through the whole cycle :) 

Visual Effects vs Special Effects

I had the opportunity to compare both, visual and special effects. My other friends presented on morphing, wrapping and advantages & disadvantages of Visual Effects. Here are the slides that we have compiled:

1. Visual Effects vs Special Effects

2. Morphing 

3. Wrapping 

4. Advantages and disadvantages

Visual Effects

This week was on Visual Effects. There are many visual effects and I was assigned to research and present on Motion Capture. This is the slide that I have prepared. Please click here: Motion Capture

Here are some of the slides that my friends have shared with me:
1. To learn more about Matte Painting, please click here  
2. To learn more about CGI, please click here
3. To learn more about Compositing, please click here

I also found this website to be very useful: Visual Effects

Transition from Toon Boom Harmony to Flash

This week was spent by working on the animation project. During the pre-production stage, we did a lot of brainstorming to come up with a suitable story line. We finally agreed on the metamorphosis of a butterfly. 

This was one of the pre-production document that we (as a group) have agreed on.

Here's the initial presentation of the project: Part 4 

Although we have been introduced to Toon Boom Harmony, Dr. Shah mentioned that the cracked version might have lots of problems when we complete the project. Therefore, learning to animate using Adobe Flash CS6 was the proposed alternative. I have to admit that Flash was very challenging for me. Since I missed a class due to illness, I found it very difficult to catch up as I do not have any basic knowledge in animation. With the support of the lecturer and my friends, I managed to slowly improve.  

Week 5

I devoted this week to brainstorm and complete the storyboard. Here's the initial draft of the storyboard for the final part:

Part 4-Animation Project



I also looked up suitable images that would be useful for my animation project. I am happy to share a few here:

This could be the stream where the butterfly looks at its own reflection 

This could be a background

Another possible background 

Pupa hatching into a butterfly 

Butterfly sees its own reflection 

Possibly flying away?

An angle where the butterfly sits

Over the mountains 

A sample butterfly 

Butterfly (flight)

Butterfly with shadow

Butterfly on a leaf

Week 4

In Animation, there are 12 principles that need to be mastered. They are described as follows: 

1. SQUASH AND STRETCH

This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions. How extreme the use of squash and stretch is, depends on what is required in animating the scene. Usually it's broader in a short style of picture and subtler in a feature. It is used in all forms of character animation from a bouncing ball to the body weight of a person walking. This is the most important element you will be required to master and will be used often.

2. ANTICIPATION

This movement prepares the audience for a major action the character is about to perform, such as, starting to run, jump or change expression. A dancer does not just leap off the floor. A backwards motion occurs before the forward action is executed. The backward motion is the anticipation. A comic effect can be done by not using anticipation after a series of gags that used anticipation. Almost all real action has major or minor anticipation such as a pitcher's wind-up or a golfers' back swing. Feature animation is often less broad than short animation unless a scene requires it to develop a characters personality.

3. STAGING

A pose or action should clearly communicate to the audience the attitude, mood, reaction or idea of the character as it relates to the story and continuity of the story line. The effective use of long, medium, or close up shots, as well as camera angles also helps in telling the story. There is a limited amount of time in a film, so each sequence, scene and frame of film must relate to the overall story. Do not confuse the audience with too many actions at once. Use one action clearly stated to get the idea across, unless you are animating a scene that is to depict clutter and confusion. Staging directs the audience's attention to the story or idea being told. Care must be taken in background design so it isn't obscuring the animation or competing with it due to excess detail behind the animation. Background and animation should work together as a pictorial unit in a scene.

4. STRAIGHT AHEAD AND POSE TO POSE ANIMATION

Straight ahead animation starts at the first drawing and works drawing to drawing to the end of a scene. You can lose size, volume, and proportions with this method, but it does have spontaneity and freshness. Fast, wild action scenes are done this way. Pose to Pose is more planned out and charted with key drawings done at intervals throughout the scene. Size, volumes, and proportions are controlled better this way, as is the action. The lead animator will turn charting and keys over to his assistant. An assistant can be better used with this method so that the animator doesn't have to draw every drawing in a scene. An animator can do more scenes this way and concentrate on the planning of the animation. Many scenes use a bit of both methods of animation.

5. FOLLOW THROUGH AND OVERLAPPING ACTION

When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail (these follow the path of action). Nothing stops all at once. This is follow through. Overlapping action is when the character changes direction while his clothes or hair continues forward. The character is going in a new direction, to be followed, a number of frames later, by his clothes in the new direction. "DRAG," in animation, for example, would be when Goofy starts to run, but his head, ears, upper body, and clothes do not keep up with his legs. In features, this type of action is done more subtly. Example: When Snow White starts to dance, her dress does not begin to move with her immediately but catches up a few frames later. Long hair and animal tail will also be handled in the same manner. Timing becomes critical to the effectiveness of drag and the overlapping action.

6. SLOW-OUT AND SLOW-IN

As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like. For a gag action, we may omit some slow-out or slow-ins for shock appeal or the surprise element. This will give more snap to the scene. 

7. ARCS

All actions, with few exceptions (such as the animation of a mechanical device), follow an arc or slightly circular path. This is especially true of the human figure and the action of animals. Arcs give animation a more natural action and better flow. Think of natural movements in the terms of a pendulum swinging. All arm movement, head turns and even eye movements are executed on an arcs.

8. SECONDARY ACTION

This action adds to and enriches the main action and adds more dimension to the character animation, supplementing and/or re-enforcing the main action. Example: A character is angrily walking toward another character. The walk is forceful, aggressive, and forward leaning. The leg action is just short of a stomping walk. The secondary action is a few strong gestures of the arms working with the walk. Also, the possibility of dialogue being delivered at the same time with tilts and turns of the head to accentuate the walk and dialogue, but not so much as to distract from the walk action. All of these actions should work together in support of one another. Think of the walk as the primary action and arm swings, head bounce and all other actions of the body as secondary or supporting action.

9. TIMING

Expertise in timing comes best with experience and personal experimentation, using the trial and error method in refining technique. The basics are: more drawings between poses slow and smooth the action. Fewer drawings make the action faster and crisper. A variety of slow and fast timing within a scene adds texture and interest to the movement. Most animation is done on twos (one drawing photographed on two frames of film) or on ones (one drawing photographed on each frame of film). Twos are used most of the time, and ones are used during camera moves such as trucks, pans and occasionally for subtle and quick dialogue animation. Also, there is timing in the acting of a character to establish mood, emotion, and reaction to another character or to a situation. Studying movement of actors and performers on stage and in films is useful when animating human or animal characters. This frame by frame examination of film footage will aid you in understanding timing for animation. This is a great way to learn from the others.

10. EXAGGERATION

Exaggeration is not extreme distortion of a drawing or extremely broad, violent action all the time. Its like a caricature of facial features, expressions, poses, attitudes and actions. Action traced from live action film can be accurate, but stiff and mechanical. In feature animation, a character must move more broadly to look natural. The same is true of facial expressions, but the action should not be as broad as in a short cartoon style. Exaggeration in a walk or an eye movement or even a head turn will give your film more appeal. Use good taste and common sense to keep from becoming too theatrical and excessively animated.

11. SOLID DRAWING

The basic principles of drawing form, weight, volume solidity and the illusion of three dimension apply to animation as it does to academic drawing. The way you draw cartoons, you draw in the classical sense, using pencil sketches and drawings for reproduction of life. You transform these into color and movement giving the characters the illusion of three-and four-dimensional life. Three dimensional is movement in space. The fourth dimension is movement in time.

12. APPEAL

A live performer has charisma. An animated character has appeal. Appealing animation does not mean just being cute and cuddly. All characters have to have appeal whether they are heroic, villainous, comic or cute. Appeal, as you will use it, includes an easy to read design, clear drawing, and personality development that will capture and involve the audience's interest. Early cartoons were basically a series of gags strung together on a main theme. Over the years, the artists have learned that to produce a feature there was a need for story continuity, character development and a higher quality of artwork throughout the entire production. Like all forms of story telling, the feature has to appeal to the mind as well as to the eye.

Week 3

This week was important as I learnt what needs to be done before working on an animation project. An interesting script, well-thought storyboard and realistic animatic are essential prior to producing an animation.

Script

In any movie or game, the script is of utmost importance as a good storyline will leave a lasting impact on the audience. Therefore, as animators, it is important to come up with a good script to attract the target viewers. When drafting the script, the characters should be developed in a way that will be appealing to the audience. Emotions should be delivered accordingly. For example, Dr. J spoke about Thai-based advertisements that can evoke strong emotions with a good message. These stories will stick to our mind and therefore deemed as good animations.

Storyboard

After developing a good script or storyline, it is important to complete the storyboard. A storyboard is a graphic organizer in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence. Well, Dr. J mentioned that it is very important to complete the storyboard before thinking about animation. The storyboard will be the main structure with all the information before attempting to create animation. Length of a frame, motion, direction, time taken and expression to be delivered will be annotated in the storyboard. Every little detail will help the animator to produce a good final product.  

Animatic

Animatic is essential before producing an animation. It can be very simple but must contain necessary information that will be featured in the animation later on. It does not need to be coloured fully because this will give a brief idea on how the final project might look like. In its simplest form, an animatic is essentially a rough draft of a film or sequence, consisting of simple storyboarded panels (sketchily drawn images of each shot in a sequence) that are timed out with a temporary soundtrack (voices, music and some sound effects). This then creates a crude draft of a film allowing the filmmaker to test timings and see if the intended meaning of the sequence is conveyed and if, visually, it flows.

By creating this draft, you can identify any issues within a sequence before the time consuming process of animation takes place. If a sequence of shots doesn’t work you can draw some new storyboards and tweak it very quickly. You may find that an entire sequence may be unnecessary, or, that to increase the emotional impact of a scene, altering the framing makes a greater impact. Within the animatic you can refine quickly and effectively the structure and content before the commencement of the animation itself.

Week 2

Animation Production Process 

Week 2 was rather fun too because I get to learn more about the process of animation.

Animation production process can be generally divided into 3 stages which are outlined as follows:

•          Pre-Production
•          Production
•          Post-Production

This is what basically happens in the Pre-Production stage:

•   Concept and Planning
•   Generate Ideas
•  Story development

o   Develop the plot and characters

o   Adapt to medium

•       Visual development

o   Visual direction and style

•        Character design

o   The look of characters

o   Props by assistant designers

•          Writing the script
•          Prepare storyboards
•          Record dialog
•          Rough sketches
•          Produce animatic

Animatic

In animation and special effects work, the storyboarding stage may be followed by simplified mock-ups called "animatics" to give a better idea of how the scene will look and feel with motion and timing. At its simplest, an animatic is a series of still images edited together and displayed in sequence. More commonly, a rough dialogue and/or rough sound track is added to the sequence of still images (usually taken from a storyboard) to test whether the sound and images are working effectively together

The next stage is the Production stage and it will be outlined as follows:

·         Creating Art

o   Character development (create character sheets, pose sheets, facial expression sheets)

o   Work on backgrounds, sets, props

o   Creating Animation

o   Record Sound/Music

The final stage is the Post-Production stage and it encompasses the following:

• Clean up
• Editing
• Add Special/Visual effects
• Final testing
• Presentations

Week 1

This week was a hectic week for me. Nonetheless, I was looking forward to attend the Animation class. Today formed the basis of the entire course. I learned about the basic concept of animation, types of animation and the hardwares and softwares that can be used for animation.

The word "animation" has been originated from the Latin word which means ‘bring to life’. Animation is a process to create illusion of movement in film/movie from a combination of images. We can add motion to a static image to enable more dynamic and live-like motions.

Keyframe 

In media production, a key frame or keyframe is a location on a timeline which marks the beginning or end of a transition. It holds special information that defines where a transition should start or stop. The intermediate frames are interpolated over time between those definitions to create the illusion of motion.

Tweening 

"Tween" is actually short for "in-between", and refers to the creation of successive frames of animation between key frames. The process of generating intermediate frames between two images to give the appearance that the first image evolves smoothly into the second image.

Onion Skinning 

Onion skinning is a term for a technique used in creating animated cartoons and editing movies to see several frames at once. By doing so, the animator can take decisions on how to create or change an image based on the previous image in the sequence.

Frame by frame

Frame by frame animation is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. 

Frame rate

Frame rate is the measurement of the frequency (rate) at which an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames. Frame rate is most often expressed in frames per second (fps). In Flash, the most common frame rate is 24 frames per second. For television and media production, 24-30 frames per second can be used.   

Types of animation

1. Traditional animationTraditional animation, sometimes referred to as cel animation, is one of the older forms of animation, in it the animator draws every frame to create the animation sequence. Just like they used to do in the old days of Disney. If you’ve ever had one of those flip-books when you were a kid, you’ll know what I mean. Sequential drawings screened quickly one after another create the illusion of movement. In traditional animation, animators draw images on a transparent piece of paper fitted on a peg using a coloured pencil, one frame at the time. Animators usually test animations with very rough drawings to see how many frames they would need for the action to work. The animation process of traditional animation can be lengthy and costly. Once the clean-up and the in-between drawings are complete, the production would move on to photographing each individual frame. Today, though, traditional animation can be done on a computer using a tablet, and does not requite actual photography of individual frames. 

2. 2D Vector-based animationThis style has become very popular in the last decade due to the accessibility of the technology and the growth of online video. Flash is cheap and easy to use, as are other vector-based animation programs.2D animation is the term often used when referring to traditional hand-drawn animation, but it can also refer to computer vector animations that adopts the techniques of traditional animation.Vector-based animations, meaning computer generated 2D animations, uses the exact same techniques as traditional animation, but benefits from the lack of physical objects needed to make traditional 2D animations, as well as the ability to use computer interpolation to same time.

3. 3D computer animation3D animation works in a completely different way than traditional animation. They both require an understanding of the same principles of movement and composition, but the technical skill set is very different for each task. while traditional animation requires you to be an amazing draftsman, computer animation doesn’t. 3D animation is more similar to playing with puppets rather than drawing.3D animation, also referred to as CGI, or just CG, is made by generating images using computers. That series of images are the frames of an animated shot. The animation techniques of 3D animation has a lot of similarities with stop-motion animation, as they both deal with animating and posing models, and still conforms to the frame-by-frame approach of 2D animation, but it is a lot more controllable since it’s in a digital work-space. Instead of drawn or constructed with clay, characters in 3D animation are digitally modelled in the program, and then fitted with a ‘skeleton’ that allows animators to move the models. Animation is done by posing the models on certain key frames, after which the computer will calculate and perform an interpolation between those frames to create movement. When the modelling and/or animation is complete, the computer will render each frame individually, which can be very time-consuming, depending on the quality of the images and the quantity of polygons in the scene. A 3D animator will spend most of their time looking at curves that represent the movement of different body parts over time. Another big difference with 3D animation is that unlike traditional animation, the character’s body parts are always present and should be taken to consideration.

4. Motion graphics

While still considered a form of animation, motion graphics is quite different from the other types of animation. Unlike the other types on our list it is not character or story driven. It’s the art of creatively moving graphic elements or texts, usually for commercial or promotional purposes. Think animated logos, explainer videos, app commercials, television promos or even film opening titles. The skills for motion graphics don’t necessarily translate to the other types of animation, since they don’t require knowledge of body mechanics or acting, but they do have some attributes in common such as understanding good composition and the all the important camera motion. The process of creating Motion Graphics depends on the programs used, since video editing softwares often have different UI or settings, but the idea is the same. Motion Graphics usually involves animating images, texts or video clips using key framing that are tweened to make a smooth motion between frames.

5. Stop motion (Claymation, cut-outs)

Stop motion is done by taking a photo of an object, and then moving it just a little bit and taking another photo. The process is repeated and when the photos are played back one after another they give the illusion of movement. This is similar to traditional animation but it uses real life materials instead of drawings.

Stop-Motion animation can be referred to any animation that uses objects that are photographed in a sequence to create the illusion of movement. The process of stop-motion animation is very long, as each object has to be carefully moved inch by inch, while it’s being photographed every frame, to create a fluid sequence of animation.

Here are the different types of stop-motion animation:

Claymation

One of the most popular stop-motion form is Claymation. Working with clay or play-doh characters that can easily be manipulated for animation. Advanced claymation (such as The Neverhood or Armikrog) uses metal skeletons on which the clay is then molded for more sturdy rigs.

Puppets

Some animators use regular Puppets instead of clay ones, usually also built with some sort of skeleton rig. The faces of the characters can be replaced based on the expression, or controlled within the rig.

Cut-Out

Another popular form of stop-motion is cut-out. Using construction paper or cardboard characters and placing them on paper while shooting the animation from above (that’s how South Park was made before they switched to computers). The cardboard is then moved a little each frame to create the illusion of movement.

Silhouette

Similar to cutout animation, silhouette animation uses cardboard or some kind of flat material, but the objects are all black and the shot is depicted with silhouettes only. This is one of the oldest forms of stop motion and is rarely used today.

Action Figures / Lego

Some use action figures or lego characters for animation. This genre is very popular on YouTube with many channels dedicated to creating funny skits with Lego characters. Robot Chicken is a great example of that. They use famous action figures to make fun of pop culture.

Pixelation

Pixelation is a form of stop motion that uses real people and real environments to create unreal videos. It uses the stop motion method of taking a still photo, moving things around, and then taking another photo, but the subject matter is usually real people instead of puppets.

First Animation Class

Well, I am pretty nervous about this course because I do not have any basic knowledge about animation. But, hey! I will never learn if I never try something, no? So, I decided to give it a go. I am lucky to have another partner in crime: Inani :)

At least I have a friend holding my hands to go through this journey with me. 

Dr. J was such a cool guy with a good sense of humour. He made me feel at ease on the first day. I will not be dropping this course :P

I hope to learn as much as I can from this course and share the knowledge with my students in school.