Soundtrack Brainstorm

This was the exercise we did to decide which soundtrack to use for our animation. We listened to several soundtracks and wrote down the ideas that came to mind while listening. I believe this was a valuable exercise as it allowed me to practice my creative thinking skills and capture initial ideas that could serve as inspiration for further idea development.

Transcript

The soundtrack I ultimately chose was number 3 because it resonated with me the most and evoked the strongest imagery. The first scene that came to mind was the two main characters communicating while a third character was heard eating in the background, to show some connection with the soundtrack.

I felt that this would create a strong contrast in the atmosphere. Since the sound file sounded like an adult and a child, I thought setting the story in a school would be appropriate and add more context.

My chosen audio: 3

A: What kind of food do you have to eat to have a baby?

B: it’s just dinicone really.

B: Carrots, any vegetables, and then a mix it with gravy and eats it.

B: (pause)

B: and then you can have bread and something, but you got to have bread every day if you want to get baby.

Final transcript:

A: What kind of food do you have to eat to have a baby?

B: it’s just dinicone really.

B: Carrots, any vegetables, and then a mix it with gravy and eats it.

I chose to delete some sentences because our project called for 10-15 seconds of animation and this speech is 21 seconds long. So I decided to cut the speech short, but I also took care to break the sentences so that the whole dialogue made sense.

Moodboard

This is my initial mood board, which shows my preference for non-human creatures as the main characters in my story. I initially favored using animals for two reasons. Firstly, I have a personal love for animals and I believe they can bring a comedic element to the story without being too scary, unlike the part where they eat other animals in my plot. Secondly, I thought that drawing animals would be slightly easier for me in terms of my style and level of difficulty, reducing the pressure during the production process and allowing me to focus more on details and refining the overall work.

The images I selected were more exaggerated in terms of color and style. I wanted my characters to have a slightly exaggerated look and feel, leaning toward the style of picture books or children’s animations. This would better match the overall aesthetic that I envisioned for this specific project.

Class Exercise

Character Design

In this activity, we were asked to choose an object and design a character based on its appearance. I found this to be a very interesting and useful activity. Previously, designing characters was very difficult for me because I felt that I couldn’t escape my usual way of thinking, and I didn’t know how to make characters look more lively and expressive. However, through this activity, I discovered that by trying to match the appearance of an object, I could more easily imagine a character that was very different from the characters I designed in the past, and I think it was much bolder. Therefore, I believe that I have greatly benefited from this activity, and I will continue to use this method to practice my character design skills.

Background Design

This was the exercise we did to practice our background design skills. We will design this illustration with an adjective in mind, and change the volume of the color to create that feeling. The reason I think this exercise is necessary is because although I have always enjoyed illustrating, but sometimes I will purposely avoid drawing backgrounds because I don’t think I really know how to create a good background. I think a good backgrounds need a lot of detail and control of light. Not only must they not distract the audience from the main characters, but they must also act as a guide to the scene. The style of the background must also be consistent but not too fancy so that the whole picture is not strange and the characters and the background are one. Therefore through the exercise, I was able to learn how the light and shadow could possibly impact the image, for example, in the first picture, I wanted to have the feeling of looking up from the darkness, so I focused on the light colours in the upper part of the picture. In the second image, I wanted a sense of being an enemy of the world. I had the protagonist standing in the light, and the darkness felt like there were countless people looking at him, and that’s the kind of oppression I wanted to bring out. I think the challenging part of this exercise is that I am not very good at controlling light and shadow, so I need to practice this part more.

Working Process

Character Design

First Draft:

This was the character I created for the story. The first animal I thought of when I heard the audio was a chicken, because I thought it could be very flamboyant and cute, and that it would be a big contrast to them in the real world. However, after I had shown it to my mom for some feedback, she thought the character design was too generic and that there seemed to be a lot of similar design already. She felt the design was not special enough. After listening to her thoughts, I abandoned the animal character design and designed my own unique creature instead. I am much happier with the character after this change, so I understand the importance of feedback.

Final:

The design of the aliens in this final character design was inspired by my previous illustrations, it was like a collection of wried creature. Those creature have really random looks and shapes, but mostly are rounded shapes. However this was also one of the challenges I faced while I tried to draw the animation. Because I am not familiar with the tablet, which is hard to draw the round shape smoothly, I spend a lot of time redoing the stroke to make the shape smooth. I designed all the characters, except the teacher, to be about the same height, so that the teacher would stand out. I was most pleased with the character of the eating student, who I gave a long tongue and large eyes. I wanted to convey a sense of ‘silliness’ so that there would be some contrast when he showed his sharp teeth later on.

Artists Reference

Wiebke Rauers

These two illustrations are drawn by Wiebke Rauers. A big part of my character design inspiration comes from her work. I really like her lovely but somewhat flashy style of drawing, she always emphasises the eyes of her characters, therefore I chose to use pure black and white for the eyes in my characters to make them stand out more in the whole picture just like her illustrations. Moreover, I really liked her style, the why that she draws her character without the clear outlines. This was one of my original ideas, but as I realised that I might not be able to draw the whole animation in this style because of the time limitation, therefore at the end I chose to draw in solid colour.

Garten of Banban

Another major source of inspiration for my characters was the horror game Garten of Banban, which is made in a very simple 3D style, but it’s the simplicity of the game that adds to the sense of terror and horror to the player. Most of the main characters are smiling, but they have the same look on their faces when they are hunting the player, which gives the audience an even more unnerving feeling. Although my story is not primarily about horror, but I took the idea of eyes wide open and black and white to draw my characters, especially the classmate eating monster. I wanted to have a darkly humorous atmosphere and I wanted to convey the contrast between the protagonist talking about what to eat to have a baby and his classmates eating other classmates. Another thing I was inspired by was the colours, although not as bright as in the game, I chose more saturated colours to give it a childish, kids cartoon-like feel.

Storyboard

This is my final storyboard, and it is not very different from the story I had in mind when I was listening to the audio. There was actually a first version of this, but after discussing it with my teacher, she felt that some of my camera angles were not very smooth, including the teacher’s head facing right at the beginning, but then suddenly facing left at the third frame. This would affect the audience’s visual perception, so I thought carefully about the camera angle and made sure I only kept it within 180 degrees. I like this storyboard because the plot is relatively simple, that I can easily draw the angle I want, and there are no complicated transitions, the whole process is relatively simple.

Background Design

Sketch:

Originally I would like to envisaged a cartoon-style flat background. However, when I was drawing it, I realised that I didn’t understand the flat space well enough and even with the use of auxiliary lines the angles were still strange. To get a better idea of the space, I chose to lay out the general position of the objects in Maya and then rendered the angle I wanted so that I could draw it with reference. But as I was modelling, I suddenly thought of the Garten of Banban’s style and that maybe I could blend 3D and 2D together. I decided to add more detail to my scene and use black lines to outline the model to give the whole thing a 2.5D feel. I liked this idea because the final result was much better than I thought it would be, and I also toned down the saturation of the background to make the characters stand out more. The only problem is that I’m not sophisticated enough in 3D to produce some of the detailed stuff that I’ve been drawing in draft, but I don’t think it’s a big deal because most of my shots will be close-ups and there won’t be a lot of backgrounds.

First Version:

These are the first versions of the models I designed. The main colour palette is cold, but I also chose yellow as a contrast colour to add richness to the image. For the lighting I used a white area light to create a cold feeling similar to the feeling of a hospital or laboratory. For all the models I turned up the roughness so that they would not reflect too much with the light. When I finished this version, I also finished tracing the lines very smoothly. But when I placed it in Toonboon, I found that the angle was not what I had planned. I had designed the layout of the classroom too narrow to show distance between the characters. When I realised this, I also realised the difficulties that my 3D backgrounds could cause, I couldn’t change my backgrounds easily and if I changed something I would have to re-render the lines completely. So I thought about it for a long time whether I needed to change the camera angle of the storyboard to match the background. I found that there were no changes I could make that would satisfy me, so I decided to rearrange my 3D scenes and recreate the background again, which took a lot of time, as it takes a long time to render a high-definition 1920×1080 image.

Final Version:

In the second version I made a lot of changes, I widened the whole background and the floor. Originally this section (storyboad 6) was supposed to be at a flat angle, but I thought it would be too crowded and difficult to draw animations, so I adjusted it to a diagonal front angle so that the audience could see the classroom from the teacher’s point of view. For this change, I also needed to add new decoration to the back wall. I designed a cabinet with a pair of eyes to emphasise the style of my animation. The whole seat section is also more separated so that there is a distinction between the foreground and the background. This is because my idea is that the main talking character would be in the foreground and the alien eating the students would be in the background. I also placed the objects more loosely so that the painting is not too complicated and has a more spacious feel.

Final version with outline:

X-Sheet

I think this part is difficult because I am not very familiar with the X-sheet and how it works. When I was drawing it, I didn’t quite know where to put the information. However, by consulting my teacher, I understood the purpose and usage of the X-sheet. I also found it useful later on because I could understand better how each word in the audio I was using sounded and how to pronounce it, and I thought it would be more accurate to read it out myself when I wrote the X-sheet. However, I think my X-sheet at the end was not very accurate and there are still some parts that I don’t understand. I also understand that this is used in the real animation industry and I hope that I can practice it more in future projects to make it more useful to me.

Mouth Shape

These are the mouthshape sheets I drew for the characters that speak, that I could have a clearer idea of the mouth shape needed for each character when I drew the animation. But I didn’t have a very clear mouthshape sheet before I started drawing the animation, therefore when I finished my first rough draft, a lot of the mouths shape didn’t match up with the audio. I re-drew a new mouthshape sheet and changed the previous ones to make them look more consistent with the pronunciation of the words. I think the difficulty with this part is that many of the sounds are actually similar in shape, but only slightly different, and I had to keep trying and observing my own mouth to get the best results.

Keyframe

I originally wanted to make this keyframe animation on Toonboon which I could get familiar with the software. But I found that I was spending too much time on the a clean outlines. To reduce my time consumption, I created an animation on Procreate first and then traced the lines on Toonboon. I thought it would save time and give me a neater line on the Toonboon. The problem I had with the keyframe was that I didn’t create it against the background, that I found out later it didn’t match the background and had to redraw it.

Rough draft

This is the rough draft I drew on Toonboon. Since I had already drawn it on Procreate, this version is much tidier. Since Procreate doesn’t have the ability to import audio, I was able to place my keyframe in the corresponding section via Toonboon at this stage.

This is also the first time I have used Toonboon and I think it is a very interesting and powerful software. Although we are just now learning the basics, I find that it has a number of features that I like. The first is that after copying one of the layers, I can then make changes to the layer I copied after it and the previous layer will change as well. This saves me a lot of time when I have to go through the process frame by frame. However, this feature often makes me forget that it exists and draw on the duplicate frame without unlinking it, resulting in the previous frame having to be redrawn. Another feature I find useful is that each line I draw can be selected, which allows me to easily copy the lines I want or move them around, reducing the amount of time I have to spend redrawing.

In-betweens

Inbetween means that I have to draw the rest of the piece according to the keyframe I have drawn. I found that the biggest problem I had with this part was that my keyframe was not clear and precise enough, it was almost like redrawing it all over again. However, I am happier with the redrawn version which have made some changes. I used clean lines in this section to save some drawing time for the next step which is cleaning up, and also to give my work some integrity at this stage. The changes I made at this stage was in the fifth panel of my story board, the monster would have had a single shot and then slowly turned around before moving on to the next distant shot. But when I got to this point, I found that the animation for the distance shot became too fast. Therefore I changed th close up shot to the action of him turns around and shows his teeth, and then create a match cut to a distant shot where he eats his classmate. I think this is a more comfortable and in a reasonable speed, and it also looks smoother.

Clean up

I found this step very time consuming as I had to go through and fix all the lines that I had not drawn properly or the lines that were messed up. Although I had deliberately used a cleaner line technique in the previous step, there were still many parts that needed to be reworked. But I think that’s where Toonboon comes in handy, as I can just select the line on one frame and paste it onto the same angle. This step is also important because it helps me to fill in the colour in the next step, because only completely closed lines can be painted, so there is no need to paint by hand.

Coloring

I really like this part because I think it makes the whole piece look more complete and gives me an idea of what the final piece will look like. With Toonboon, all the colours are nicely organised in a list that I can choose the colours I want at any time, which saves me a lot of time from having to choose colours by hand. When I want to adjust a colour, all I have to do is to adjust it on the colour palette and the whole animation where the color have been used will be changed. The problem I had with this part was that even though I had cleaned up in the previous step, there were still a lot of lines that I hadn’t close properly, which I couldn’t use the paint function. To solve this problem I used Toonboon’s close the gap function, which draws invisible lines so that the colours can be filled in successfully, which I found very convenient.

Exporting

 I thought this would be the easiest part, but it turned out to be a part that stressed me out.  A problem appeared when I tried to export the video in the normal way into a movie, but my animation could not be exported. 

To solve this problem, I chose to export my animation as a PNG sequence, which involves first adjusting the file image format and storage location via the write section in the Node view, and then selecting render write notes in export to render my work. This way did work, but the problem was that when I imported it into After Effect, my animation suddenly became very fast and didn’t work with my audio. To resolve this issue I first made the PNG sequence into MP4 format via After Effect and then merged it into my usual Capcut software. In order to match the audio and the animation itself, I had to adjust the speed of the animation, I slowed it down to 0.8x to match the audio. However, I think that this method is still inaccurate, but due to time constraints I was unable to solve the problem with Toonboom quickly. This may be one of my minor regrets, but it also taught me how to use Toonboom to convert to PNG sequence format.

Final Animation

Final Keyframes

This is the final keyframe of my animation, I didn’t change it much from the original storyboard, mainly I changed the part where the classmate eating monster turns around to a match cut with the next part, and switched the order of the second and third classmate being eaten. 

The reason for this is that I think the third student has a lot of eyes, and the student-eating monster has a particularly large pair of eyes. The effect of so many eyes adds up to a more comical look. I have also changed the angle of the classroom. Instead of the original version where the class is viewed from the side, I have changed it to a first person view of the classroom from the teacher’s point of view, with the classmate speaking as the main subject, and then let the eating of the classmates happen in the background. I am happy with the end result, although I think my lip-synch could be strengthened as it still looks a bit stiff and imprecise, but I am glad I was able to actually make my idea into an animation.

Reflection

I think I have learnt a lot from this project. It was the first time I had the opportunity to learn about Toonboon and all the professional steps of making a 2D animation. I think because of these steps, I feel more organised. I used to worry if I would not finish in time, but with these procedures I feel more confident about my progress and I know what to expect and how I am progressing. I also did some artist searches for this project, which I think is useful for every project. To analyse the strengths of these pieces and then use them to make my own work better.

For this Lip Synch concept, I had seen a lot of animations with this technique before and I really liked the effect. It was also the first time I knew that there was a unique approach to this kind of animation, and I enjoyed the process of making it. Although I didn’t choose my own audio this time, but I think the audio that our teacher provided gave me a lot of room for my creativity. I had a full story idea the first time I heard it, which made me more sure of my choice.

I’m happy with the character design, I think with my mum’s advice I was able to come up with a more distinctive character and make the overall style stand out. However, the first challenge that faced was about saving files. I lose my file many times at the beginning of the project because I didn’t understand Toonboon’s saving system. On the advice of my teacher, I chose to create a separate folder to store all versions of my backups in case the same thing happened again. This experience has made me aware of the importance of saving files, especially when working on a computer.

The second area I think I need to improve is my animation skills. I think I have tried harder to incorporate what I have learned, such as the 12 principles of animation, into my animation than I have in my previous 2D work, but I think I don’t have enough understanding and skills on lines, movement and camera angle. There were some movements that I could have done more smoothly, for example, my main character’s hand movements, although I filmed my own hand movements for reference, the end result still looked a bit stiff. Therefore after this project, I have a better understanding of what I need to work on, and I will make up for these deficiencies in my own free time.

Overall I really enjoyed the project and I am happy with the final outcome. I think I have learnt a lot of new things in these five weeks, including a more professional and detailed understanding of the use of such important elements as colour, lighting and movement. I also think that through these 10 weeks I have learned more about the two electives that I am interested in and have a better choice of direction.