Finished Products

Whoops, been a while since I last posted. In that time my deadline's come and gone, so in this post I'll be sharing my finished animations.

First up, we have my final third year film, Three's A Crowd. The majority of my progress on this was documented by blog posts, but as the deadline began to draw near, I ended up just focusing on working on it, figuring that it'd make the parts I didn't post about more of a surprise.

I had a lot of fun working on this project, and I'm kind of surprised I managed to get so much done, considering I didn't have any second years to help me and so had to make all three character rigs and backgrounds and things by myself. I learned a lot of things in the process of making it and my animation skills improved too, which I feel becomes apparent the further into it it gets, considering I mostly worked on the scenes in chronological order. I also stepped out of my comfort zone quite a bit, especially with the backgrounds, which I don't normally have much confidence in doing.

From concept through to finished piece, this took about 3 months to produce. The programs I used were a combination of Paint Tool SAI and Photoshop for backgrounds and rigs, Toon Boom Harmony 10 for the animation, and Adobe After Effects and iMovie HD for editing.

Next up is the finished music video that my friends and I created for "The Flower Temple". While I only animated a few scenes, I contributed a lot of ideas while in the storyboarding process, and created several set pieces that could be used to put together backgrounds. I also created and rigged my character for the credits, made the end title, and helped with final editing.

The scenes that I did animate are both of the night sky scenes (shown in the video preview), my character's movements in the credits sequence, and the movements of the flowers in the end title. 

The aspect of this project that I enjoyed the most was the style we'd chosen to use, where everything looked home-made and practically was, since we'd bought lots of felt and buttons and things and used them to make various pieces in Photoshop. It was also interesting animating the hands, what with them being photos and all.

This isn't necessarily an animation per se, but a presentation I put together for the final part of my course, and it details the process I went through to develop and make my final film. I had to make it on my laptop using Adobe Premiere Pro, and it didn't quite export properly so some parts aren't on-screen for as long as they should be, but otherwise the important stuff's there.

Aaaand last but not least, here's my updated showreel, comprised of my best works from my three years of studying at Staffordshire University.

Updated Showreel

With my comedy brief animation all done and dusted, I put together an updated showreel comprised of my work from my second and third years of the course. I think it's a lot stronger than my first one (shown below), as I had more to work with and the overall quality is better. That, and my first showreel was a mish-mash of Maya playblasts, stop-motion cutout animation, drawn animation and Toon Boom work, since I hadn't decided what aspect of animation I wanted to specalise in at the time. Now I know that I want to specialise in 2D digital cutout, so my showreel reflects this.

I also created my first showreel in Adobe Premiere Pro on my laptop, and I didn't know the correct settings I needed to export it properly, so overall the quality is poor.

Which brings me to another point - one of the things I was displeased with when it came to my Onomatopoeia and 9 Prepositions animations was the framerate. It got affected pretty noticeably for me, which meant that when my tutor told me that Biscuit needed more anticipation before she jumped in the air for my Onomatopoeia animation, I opened up the Toon Boom file to fix it and I realised that there was actually anticipation in there - it just got lost in the process of exporting it out in iMovie HD.

The framerate was definitely noticeable for me in my 9 Prepositions animation, with animations that looked fine individually but became choppy when they were exported, so recently I re-exported both of them to run at a much smoother rate, as you can possibly tell from the clips used in my showreel. I'll be updating the files on my Vimeo soon.