I found using the DUIK plug in in after affects very easy and simple to use. I found the result that you achieve with this tool to be rather playful and bouncy, I should think that use of this plugin for an animation would have to be very carefully considered as the way the character moves using inverse kinematics has a very specific look to it. At this moment I struggle to see how i might be able to accommodate use of this tool into my own projects, but i am sure with further experimentation I shall find a use for it.
Friday, 9 December 2016
Doing DUIK
I found using the DUIK plug in in after affects very easy and simple to use. I found the result that you achieve with this tool to be rather playful and bouncy, I should think that use of this plugin for an animation would have to be very carefully considered as the way the character moves using inverse kinematics has a very specific look to it. At this moment I struggle to see how i might be able to accommodate use of this tool into my own projects, but i am sure with further experimentation I shall find a use for it.
Research - 2D Limitations
The limitations of using 2D assets are that scenes tend to look very flat and it would not be possible to have an object spinning without creating an other assets that would resemble that object's in between frames. If you were to combine 2D assets with a program such as Maya however you would only have to create key frames for the object and the program would create the in-between frames for you once a 3-D model was made using the 2-D asset as reference. This would give an animator smoother movement in the animation whilst still retaining the look of a 2D animation.
Before i started my own animation I knew the limitations of the medium that I had chosen and did not want the characters to move much and have a more theatrical look to the overall scene, therefore i was not pushing the limitations of my medium but rather staying within them.
Before i started my own animation I knew the limitations of the medium that I had chosen and did not want the characters to move much and have a more theatrical look to the overall scene, therefore i was not pushing the limitations of my medium but rather staying within them.
Research - Production Time
Considering that I have opted for a handmade aesthetic it is important to recognise the time that it takes to make something using handmade means, it is such a massive difference between creating something using handmade assets and producing the animation using a process such as stop motion animation, to then scanning in handmade assets and animating those assets using digital software such as aftereffects or Maya. An Example of this time difference that I could point to is South Park's original production time for their first production was 3 months, and over time amassing an asset library that the animators could use and reuse lead to the production time being reduced to just six days - this includes writing the narrative, script, recording voices and compiling audio all in just six days. This is the power of technology being able to speed up the production process.
Character and Narrative - Research - Cut out style animation & sustainability
As I have chosen to opt for a cut out style but rendered digitally, I felt it important to research other animations that use this cut out approach and look into the sustainability of the medium. By sustainability we mean the re-useability of the assets in the animation and the energy needed to produce , for example can cut out objects be reused in further projects of the same nature if we see fit? I have found through my own work that to be more sustainable in regards to not being wasteful of materials, you can use parts of one asset to create others that will inherently have the same texture and therefore still retain the same qualities of the overall aesthetic of the animation.
South Park may be an example of an animated series that by transferring from the handmade to the digital, from construction paper to using Maya in this case, has improved its sustainability. Although for all the waste of materials that could occur when creating an animation using construction paper, perhaps in the long run the power usage of creating an animation in maya would be greater.
As for the reason as to why South Park transferred to using Maya and also photoshop is that it made the process much quicker and by scanning in the construction paper assets the animators could still achieve the handmade effect using the program's shadow controls and other effects. It is also said that the show has a library of props, characters and scenery that have accumulated of over ten years of production that the animators can reuse - this comes from Eric Stough director of animation for the show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park
South Park may be an example of an animated series that by transferring from the handmade to the digital, from construction paper to using Maya in this case, has improved its sustainability. Although for all the waste of materials that could occur when creating an animation using construction paper, perhaps in the long run the power usage of creating an animation in maya would be greater.
As for the reason as to why South Park transferred to using Maya and also photoshop is that it made the process much quicker and by scanning in the construction paper assets the animators could still achieve the handmade effect using the program's shadow controls and other effects. It is also said that the show has a library of props, characters and scenery that have accumulated of over ten years of production that the animators can reuse - this comes from Eric Stough director of animation for the show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park
Production Diary - Week 10 - End of Production and Responses to Feedback
As it is the final week, production has stopped and now I am contemplating the feedback that I received in crit sessions. One bit of feedback that I received was that I had achieved the aesthetic that I was aiming for in the way that the animation looks (good by all accounts), but that some parts of the animation looks jumpy in the way that the characters head movements are a little jerky. Feedback was also given on the audio of the animation and the main issue for many of my peers was that the dialogue audio has a lot of noise in it and reverberation.
mooom
Wednesday, 7 December 2016
Production Diary - Week 9 - Further Audio Consideration and tweeking
This week I have been trying to improve the audio of the animation by placing in non-diagetic sounds such as the wind blowing, bird song and the general outdoor 'hum', to give the animation more of an atmosphere and more emphasis on the setting.
I have also included music accompaniment of which I created myself and based it around the sounds that children's toys make. I have tried to mimic this in the tone of the instrument and in the melody in the way that melodies associated with childrens toys and television programs are usually care free and joyous in their delivery. The musical accompaniment features at the start of the animation, in the middle and at the end. The melodies are representative of: an introduction, a problem, and an outro.
I think the musical element really adds to the childlike aspects of the animation and I am pleased with this result.
I have also included music accompaniment of which I created myself and based it around the sounds that children's toys make. I have tried to mimic this in the tone of the instrument and in the melody in the way that melodies associated with childrens toys and television programs are usually care free and joyous in their delivery. The musical accompaniment features at the start of the animation, in the middle and at the end. The melodies are representative of: an introduction, a problem, and an outro.
I think the musical element really adds to the childlike aspects of the animation and I am pleased with this result.
Thursday, 1 December 2016
Production Diary - Week 8 - Assembly, After Effects & animation
This week I was able to make up for the lack of progress in previous weeks by making a lot of progress on the animated elements in the scene.
First of all I made all my assets,
aside from those that make up the characters, into 3D layers in one composition. This allowed me to isolate the characters in another composition to precompose different parts of their bodies and animate those individually using the puppet pin tool and key framing position and rotation. I could have used tracking to track the movement of one part of the characters body and have another part of the mody follow the movement path of the given body part - this would have automated alot of the animation in the scenes. However I opted to animate each scene manually using key frames for the reason that I wanted the animation of the characters' bodies to somewhat match the expression present in the live action footage of the characters faces.
To save from having to produce more assets for the animation and have the project be more sustainable, I duplicated some of the assets that make up the character for example the flowerpots and the flower petals.
I think the result that you achieve with the puppet pin tool really works well with the aesthetic that I am trying to cultivate with the hand painted assets and live action combination. As the movement
that the puppet tool brings is unnatural looking it adds to the 'uncanny' value that makes the juxtaposition between the childlike playfulness of the medium and the adult approach to the dialogue.
I had the issue of syncing up the audio for the dialogue of the characters up to the footage, this was an issue because I wanted the audio to sometimes cut into the next shot as if one of the characters were talking over the other. The way i solved this was to first seperate the audio from the footage before compositing the footage in aftereffects to be grafted on to the characters' bodies and movements key framed accordingly.
As for the hiss on the audio of the dialogue i opened up the file in adobe audition and took a noise print of a section with no dialogue for the computer to grasp which frequencies needed to be dampened from the audio. With these frequencies removed it will be easier for me to smooth out any remaining noise issues using atmospheric sounds that are relative to the character's surroundings.
In reflection these issues may be avoided entirely in the future if I am to use live action video and audio by using a sound booth which should cancel out any residual noise/ reverberation.
First of all I made all my assets,
aside from those that make up the characters, into 3D layers in one composition. This allowed me to isolate the characters in another composition to precompose different parts of their bodies and animate those individually using the puppet pin tool and key framing position and rotation. I could have used tracking to track the movement of one part of the characters body and have another part of the mody follow the movement path of the given body part - this would have automated alot of the animation in the scenes. However I opted to animate each scene manually using key frames for the reason that I wanted the animation of the characters' bodies to somewhat match the expression present in the live action footage of the characters faces.
To save from having to produce more assets for the animation and have the project be more sustainable, I duplicated some of the assets that make up the character for example the flowerpots and the flower petals.
I think the result that you achieve with the puppet pin tool really works well with the aesthetic that I am trying to cultivate with the hand painted assets and live action combination. As the movement
that the puppet tool brings is unnatural looking it adds to the 'uncanny' value that makes the juxtaposition between the childlike playfulness of the medium and the adult approach to the dialogue.I had the issue of syncing up the audio for the dialogue of the characters up to the footage, this was an issue because I wanted the audio to sometimes cut into the next shot as if one of the characters were talking over the other. The way i solved this was to first seperate the audio from the footage before compositing the footage in aftereffects to be grafted on to the characters' bodies and movements key framed accordingly.
As for the hiss on the audio of the dialogue i opened up the file in adobe audition and took a noise print of a section with no dialogue for the computer to grasp which frequencies needed to be dampened from the audio. With these frequencies removed it will be easier for me to smooth out any remaining noise issues using atmospheric sounds that are relative to the character's surroundings.
In reflection these issues may be avoided entirely in the future if I am to use live action video and audio by using a sound booth which should cancel out any residual noise/ reverberation.
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