Collaboration
Summary
For collaboration, I went to assist Nadim and Tarryk. As a quick Summery; For Nadims project, he wants me to animate a second character (monster) that interacts with a 3D character. Tarryks wants me to add on smear and impact frames on his 3D animation fight. Most of these conversations speak for themselves but I’ll detail some areas that are unclear. For me and Nadim we talk more over call than message each other so there will be more details to explain.
As for sound/music, I had two friends outside my university who were down to help with my animation called Ehi and Anton.
Tarryk
I found this funny because I thought he only wanted smear frames but wanted impact frames too. Jokes aside, he was really helpful in showing references for me to show how he wants it.
When I found out that Nadim was helping out, I told Tarryk I would be busy doing the report, so nadim could do the other half of his animation. I gave him a warning about exporting sound through Clip Studio Paint. This was my last comment with Tarryk. I believe he was very satisfied with the 2d effects I provided him, which means I did my job as a collaborator.
Nadim
Before I did Nadims actual shot, he had me do a test for him. This was to showcase I would animate the 2D character/monster from the jar. He said the reference will be Venom from Spiderman taking over someone but just as a small blob.
Since he liked the animation I was going to animate the actual shot the same way, when I get to it. From there he sent me his animatic and the first shot for me to see animate towards.
Animatic shot 1
Whole Animatic
At the time I was really grinding my work so that when I finished it I'd have time to do Nadims and Tarryks shots. So there was some delay for me to get to Nadim's shot but I got to it in the end. I let him know this through Discord a call.
It was around the time where I would work with nadim in discord where we could share our progress by hearing our screens. We could voice our feedback and better our animations as a whole. It was then my other animator friend called Klaus joined too to help out. If you haven't noticed already; CyberMidan is Nadim, Rookeyx is me and KlausDGerman is Klaus.
In this shot, I was waiting for nadim to finish his shot while also helping him out by giving feedback. I and Klaus also had our screens shared so that everyone can help each others animation project out.
Doing Nadim's shot was fairly easy as the monster body didn't have a definitive form so I could easily apply my straight-ahead animation skills (from my FMP animation) to this. Here's the Keyframes and Inbetweens. Nadim had already done the background, so I could easily focus on just the monster. The references I have now is Flubber and Venom. I had some videos to watch of them too, but I found images to be better. I asked Nadim for some more references and he sent me these four videos that can be used as references for the slime monster. These were really helpful compared to the videos I tried to find. If the time stamps don't work go to (1:34 for Flubber), (0:22 for Venom) and (2:35 for Stranger Things 3).
Flubber, 1997
Stranger Things Season 3, 2019
Spider-Man 3 - Venom, 2007
Life, 2017
After doing the keyframes and inbetweens I went to the polishing phase. I started blocking out the sketch with the dark green Nadim asked for. I also added drops coming down from the monster as it morphed into its form.
I then added a glow effect around the monster just to show its aura in the dark room.
I received feedback from my teacher to add highlights in the background to show that the glow is bouning its lights on surfaces, make the monster more believable that it's in the scene. Nadim also helped by making the background darker to make the glows more effective.
With this shot done and Nadim being satisfied with it, I was now waiting for him to finish his other scene where the 3D character interacts with the 2D monster. We only Had a week left so I voiced my concerns to him and warned him I might not be able to finish his newer shot due to the time we had left.
Recently Nadim has finished his shots and now he's waiting for me, but I'm currently in the process of making my report. The report shouldn't take too long but if it does, I may have to do an all-nighter to complete Nadims shot for the final stretch before the deadline. Nadim was kind enough to animate the first few things in the 2D shot.
Here is the shot i need to go over.
Sound Ehi and Anton
In the beginning, we were paired with the sound students, so that we can pitch our ideas for them to produce sound/music for. Here are the contacts that I gain who were interested in my ideas.
I was going to contact George but he seemed busy as he was already taken by others. The contacts were only doing sound, not music. So my next plan was to talk to my friends outside my university who were sound/music students. My two friends Ehi and Anton were kind enough to send me their music tracks that could go with my animation.
Out of the many music tracks, I narrowed them down in a selective folder shown below) I then narrowed them further to six versions of my FMP animation which can be found in Production Work.
It was a tough decision to make but Ehi's music; XENO synced too well with the animation compared to the other versions I had. It was also chosen by others from feedback. I myself couldn't decide between version 1 and version 5. Here's the final version playing XENO. You can find all the other versions here.