Applied Animation 20: Titles and Credits

For the titles and credits i simply made sure that the font stayed consistent with the font used for the subtitles of the astronaut sequence. It didn't need anything else other than a black background and a white font for the title, which was simple and easy to make, and effective.

Applied Animation 19: Sound Design

I always enjoy adding ambient noise, its an area I can really push my creativity but without much effort needed, so i was very excited when Greta said i could do it. Compared to other projects i kept this one quite simple.

For the professors office i added some fire and a clock ticking in order to give the impression of elegance. It was quite hard because there was nothing in shot that would indicate it is giving off this sound, but i still feel that it works.

The least amount of sound was added to the cosmonaut scenes because space is silent, i did however take the liberty of adding a NASA beep noise (which i now know is called a quintar tone) at some of the starting points of the cosmonauts talking. I didn't add the beeps to every time they started and finished talking as it would be too much. I also added one at the very end which was a nice touch. While i remember i also made sure that each scenes audio faded in slightly before the animation begins in order to give a nice transition.

The sound i am most proud of finding and editing was that for the surgery. Finding a heart rate monitor was quite difficult, but eventually i found a royalty free download online, but i didn't feel like this was enough, so i attempted to find an oxygen mask sound effect, which i could not find, so in order to remedy this i downloaded the sound effects of a man breathing heavily, and simply slowed it down and lowered the pitch, giving the impression of breathing inside of a mask.

I always thing environmental audio is important, and i really feel this work has helped push our animation to a higher level.

Applied Animation 18: Animating the Face

Animating the movement in the arms wasn't anything new for me, my technique often relys on the length of frames themselves rather than the amount of inbetweens so i simply draw the position of the arms that is in the middle of the other two positions, and it seems to work well, it was simple and effective. The really new thing for me was animating facial expressions, and the lipsyncing talk really came in to practice for it. I first focused on the mouth. I kept it simple, switching between mouth shapes for the noises at the time without focusing on any in betweens. I then added some extra little touches, such as his eyes looking across the room, and scrunching up when he gets passionate. In the end i feel like this was a very successful scene, and it was extremely time effective.

Applied Animation 17: Animating in Flash

Animating in flash was a very new and quite scary concept to me. I did use flash a little for PPP1 last year for the building breaking through the ground, but i wasn't very confident with it, and when i first began using flash for this project i wasn't very confident, and in turn made me less motivated. However once i got started i found flash to be quite fun, though there are still moments where i am unsure exactly what has gone wrong, i feel much more confident animating now i am around half way through the Ethan scene, and after getting used to vectors from colouring backgrounds. Though i am still unsure exactly how to animate symbols and tweening, the ability to select entire segments of a character by colour alone is a very nice touch, and i can definitely see me using flash again in the future.

Applied Animation 16: The Final Crit

The final crit was extremely frustrating. After no one had anything new to show we were all given a lecture on the importance of organisation. I felt that the crit itself was a waste of time, and would much sooner had been working on the animation itself in the morning, rather than sitting around listening to peoples excuses for not getting on with work, and the unfortunate repercussions of Martin and Sara telling us all off as a class like children. It was embarrassing.

Applied Animation 15: The Final backgrounds

For the final backgrounds i was extremely happy. Though the colours were all quite flat it works well with the characters. I am particularly proud of the colour schemes for all of theme, but the background i'm most happy with is the surgery, i have often struggled with perspective, but i have still managed to make something i am proud of. Next stop is animating.

Applied Animation 14: Cutting Out Granddad

Because its getting so close to deadlines and we still haven't made very much progress, Sara suggested we cut out a scene, which seemed like an obvious suggestion but we just hadn't considered it, so was very useful to chat to her. We decided to cut out the scene with my granddad as it was the only scene that didn't have any kind of comedy element to it, it was also going to be the hardest to animate because he was so wrinkly, and despite all the planning i was still unsure of what background to do for him.

Applied Animation 13: Lip Synching

Though usually i zone out whenever Martin is talking, i found this tutorial he gave on lip syncing to be quite useful. Stuff like making the mouth shapes appear a few frames before the sound itself in order for the brain to register it properly, and using a limited number of mouth shapes to still convey talking.

                                      

Here it an example of my attempt at lip syncing with the assets martin gave us of some of our audio.

I feel like with the limited number of mouth shapes we were given it is a little bit choppy, particularly at the end, but this exersize definitely helped my understanding of lip syncing.

Applied Animation 11: Interim Crit

When it came to the interim Crit we were quite behind schedule, we had an animatic to show, and some of Greta's key framing and an animatic made from my background sketches. i felt that we were behind because we had focused on other modules going on, such as responsive which quite frankly i was enjoying much more, so i was focusing a lot more on it.

The feedback wasnt useful. Granted if we had done more we would have had more useful feedback, but we both just wanted to be left to get on with it.

Applied Animation 10: Background Plans

Despite the moodboards i made in order to help decide on the layout of some shots i was still unsure for the fisherman shot and the professor shot, in order to remedy this i decided to draw out a few plans for how they could be sat in frame and what kind of objects could be around him. I then showed these plans to greta and she helped decide of a final plan for each of the shots

 The other two shots were easy, using the moodboards i roughly planned out the shots so i knew the plan to draw them properly in flash next.

 I was most happy with this drawing, i almost felt it could be used as a background itself, however Greta wasn't happy with it. She didn't like the earth (despite me thinking it was a nice touch) so i simply chose to re draw it in flash when i do the others.

Applied Animation 9: Reference MoodBoards

In order for me to plan out exactly what should be in the backgrounds i compiled a bunch of reference images to get a feel for the background. Because i haven't focused on backgrounds before i was quite daunted by the idea so made sure that i had plenty of reference images of the things i felt i would need to draw in the background. For some of the backgrounds i had already gotten a good idea for what i wanted in them, and the layout of the room, but for others i was completely lost, this is why i made these moodboards, to help decide on a background for some scenes, and to reinforce my knowledge of what to draw for the scenes I already had an idea for.

Applied Animation 8: Reference Filming

Because its such a heavy character based animation we decided it would be best to film ourselves as reference to animate from. Because Aardman films a lot of reference footage we also felt it would be helpful to do so. We also made sure to place ourselves in frame to get an accurate idea of the movement and what would be seen.

Acting out exactly what we wanted the characters to be doing and the mannerisms we wanted them to have was a lot harder than i was first expecting, we had to re shoot so many times because we either forgot the words, didn't act out the actions we wanted to, or generally just felt a touch uncomfortable doing it. I heard that the last years second years had an acting workshop, though it would be daunting to have had to "act" in front of people i feel like it would have been helpful for this exersize.

We ended up with a lot of reference footage, and after we compiled the best elements of all of them we have an accurate idea of how we want out characters to move.

Applied Animation 7: Moodboards

As we approach the end of pre production i began to take less of a leading roll, after idea development and audio. I felt that Greta should take more of a leading roll because she is much better at character animation than me, and had decided to animate in flash, and i don't know how to use flash very well. We decided that she would character design and key frame, generally taking a leading creative roll, and i would do the inbetweens and backgrounds. 

In order to get a better understanding of what Greta wanted for backgrounds i put together a quick moodboard of particular styles we had mentioned in previous meetings. Though the selection was small i all felt that they were the kinds of backgrounds i would be capable of doing. Greta said she prefered the style of the bottom left, so that is the style i shall attempt to replicate.

Applied animation 12: Backgrounds In Flash

Having never used flash before i was quite daunted using it, which again contributed to my late start in production, however working on backgrounds before animating was a very useful order for me to work in. I also chose to work on the simpler background first. I also first made the back space background and nebula in photoshop as i wasnt sure if flash could do smooth colour transitions or gradients, however when i got stuck in to drawing the space station, and with help from Greta i really started to become more comfortable with flash. I had some trouble with some elements becoming symbols and was unsure how to fix them, but overall it was smooth sailing getting the background done. From here i feel very confident in completing the other backgrounds.

Applied Animation 6: Audio Editing

Before we had picked the interviews we were going to use, i decided that since we had so much time i would go ahead and cut down most of the audio i had recorded so that when Greta comes back to the UK it will be easy for us to decide on which interviews to use if all of the best bits were there.

When it came to editing the audio some were easier than others, some had obvious points that were extremely funny, such as my dads audio which has a good bit about italian food, some were short enough to cut something together like my nephew, who didn't say much but what he did say was cute and funny. however some had no particularly good bits, or too many good bits such as my sisters interview that had nothing particularly funny stand out but was still a decent interview.

i used audacity as its a program i know how to use and it was as simple as cutting out long pauses, my questions, and umms and aas. I also tried to make sure all the audio was at a similar audio level by increasing the volume and judging the waveform, i didn't need to do this too much however because i forgot a pop filter for some of the interviews i just had to make sure they were at a good audio level.