Production Work

Formative Comments on Feedback

From my second presentation for formative, I received some helpful feedback. Here are my notes from it.

I didn’t want to fall back on the character animation route because that would be my comfort zone. I wanted to go outside my comfort zone in order to learn new experiences and better myself as an animator.

I did take a break from the cat animation and did a test animation for my friend Nadim for his project. More on this in the Collaboration section. Here’s a preview of it.

Production Process

It’s been a couple of weeks and months with me just not touching or even starting my animations. My lack of motivation has wasted so much time but I have a plan from the help of my peers. Given the time I have left, I’m going to put more effort into the first idea of the cat.

Before I get into the production side of things, the new plan will have the first idea have a longer time duration combined with the other dismissed ideas I came up with. It’ll jump from 5-10 seconds to 15-20 seconds.

My first design of cat wasn’t really drawn and designed well so I went back and looked at some references of cats with headphones as well as faces from Cartoon Networks show called Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart and The Amazing World of Gumball seen in Initial Ideas.

From this, I was able to create a ‘rule in style’ for the animation. I wanted the cat and everything else to have no outline meaning their just shapes with no border in reference to Monstercat’s Uncaged logo. I also restricted the colours to 3; yellow, black and white, in reference to Cartoon Networks 25th Anniversary animation.

After receiving feedback on my ideas it would be easier to animate a classic helicopter compared to the normal ones as its shapes is a lot easier to move around in 2D animation. Here are some images I used for reference.

For the explosions I looked a lot of tutorials on in my research segment but here are some images that I found helpful.

The sword in the stone idea had some production too although it’s being tossed aside now. I did some simple sketches of the character that was going to be animated. The references were Adventure Time, Dragon Ball Z, Thunder Cats and Scott pilgrim. You can find more here (Second Idea)

I kept in mind the shape rule when it comes to designing a character primarily because she’s in a cave and it’ll be hard to spot here unless she has a good shape and silhouette.

I also had a concept art piece of my own to go with the idea for the setting of the animation, along with references of underground caves.

For the third idea, I didn’t get a chance to design some characters, but if I were to I would reference them from these two helpful videos in research Hero and Shuriken255.

I would design the two characters similar to stick men but with noticeable shapes that would differ from both characters. While also having their unique jet packs.

Before I jumped into the animation I wanted to see how it’ll look like polished for each key moment in the animation. For my follow up the presentation (formative), I displayed my semi animatic in key moments.

Animation Process - Keyframes/Inbetweens

Keyframes/Inbetweens

Here are some steps I took on the sketch animation of the cat.

I had the cat bob his head up and down at first and after some feedback from my peers, I added some slight squash and stretch at the peak of each keyframe (top and bottom). I also added a fun smear frame lasting for 3 frames for one of the head turns. I made sure the timing and build-up was correct for this frame to work. Here are some references for smear frames that help me create it.

Note: while animating the cat to perform, I referenced Mao Mao and Gumball movements and they act in certain points of their show. For example, when Gumball feels sad, his cat ears drop to show his sadness or if he's shocked his ears would perk up.

When I animated the cat anticipating to scream, I made him squash his head as much as possible before I did a more exaggerated squash and stretch when the cat screams on a 3 frame loop.

This was in reference to the infamous animated show called Tom & Jerry, where Tom yells and there is some form of squash and stretch on the face or staggers frames. (I've timestamped the YouTube video so it should take you where to places I reference the most). Also for the headphones, I wanted it to come off the cat and spin slowly as it gradually increases in speed. (If the timestamps don't work go to these times in the video (2:08) and (2:39)).

After I finished the keyframes and in-betweens for the head and face, I went and added the fur and ears with overlap. I followed reference with the characters of Tom, Gumball and Mao Mao (all from their respective shows called Tom & Jerry, The Amazing World of Gumball and Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart) of how their fur and ears move.

I received feedback from both my peers and friends I added some missing overlap with the bottom fur and added an ease out after the smear head turn frame.

The difficult part was the transition between the cat to the helicopter. I wanted the motion to seem seamless in the sense that its transitions naturally. To do that, the body of the helicopter will also have to be in motion of the spin.

I also added some smear frames to show the speed of the helicopters body before transitioning to its key frame.

I broke down the helicopters main shapes down so it was simpler to animate in the sketch animation.

The propellers of the helicopter are on a separate layer as it moves differently compared to the body. All the layers will be put together using a simple tweening motion after the frames are complete.

I added the other parts of the helicopter which was the skids and rocket launcher. Also using the simple tween tool to put together.

Referencing how cartoonish rockets are animated, I found two good scenes from the shows of Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes. From that, I animated accordingly. The difficult part was adding the recoil frames from the shot of the helicopter; as I had to keep it in proportion as well as the perspective, but the simplified shapes really did help me digest that. (Loony tunes time stamp (1:30))

The explosion wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. With the help of my research, I was able to put the correct frames of an explosion from the impact frames to the clouds.

Transitioning to the thunder cloud was a simple task. I added the thunder silhouette of the cat and moved on to the next transition. One change on the thunder cloud was shaving its frames so it strikes faster. (here's the old version to new comparison).

Old

New

Animating the cloud transitioning into a puddle was also quick to do. Knowing already how water drops are animated I animated fairly quickly too.

For the cat skull, I looked at some references before sketching and refining the concept keyframe. I did the skull in a cartoonish style to go with the cats face.

3c9f3ec90941f255252e3b71a4620ab8--cat-sk

p-117903-1490648576-T30020_01_Cat-Skull-

Domestic-Cat-Kitten--Main__SM-093__1_500

The last part was animating the puddle coiling around the skull which was also fairly easy as it was straight ahead animation to the first frame.

Animation Progress - Polishing

I think that’s the fun part of transitional animation; straight ahead animation. Even if there is a mistake in the transition; it happens so fast it almost looks like its intentional natural.

I was able to finish the sketch animation within a week, which surprised me. This gave me more time on the polishing phase of the animation which I know I’m not going to be a fan of, due to how long it may take.

Going back to the rule I have for this style I had made the cat have no line art and have a shape/silhouette. I made sure the silhouette was a noticeable cat.

Over the sketch, I would just draw line art around the face and use the bucket tool afterwards to fill it in to make the shape.

My plan in polishing was to fully complete a scene; then move to the next one so I don’t have to go back.

The headphones were tricky because I couldn’t decide whether they needed frames or not. I tried a new frame with the headphones at the peak of the cat head.

Playing it back it looked clunky. Then I thought of another idea where I kept the frame of the headphones the same while morphing it slightly (tween); on some frames to make it more seamless in motion with the cat.

Polishing

With New Single Frame

Same Frame Tweened

After looking at the cat animation for a while, I started to think the animation on 2s were too clunky so I went back to the sketch animation and did it on 1s. I also forgot to add the whiskers and added that in too.

But then it looked too smooth, so I went back to do it on 2s.

The rest of the cat polish was just going over the sketch with white line art. The tedious parts were adding the correct white lines between the cat and headphones. While also adding black over the headphones so the ears can be seen. Here’s my messy layer management (it gets worse, but it manageable). Tasks like this appear throughout this animation, especially for the helicopter which became an nightmare at some point.

Without Overlay

With Overlay

Basically anywhere that had black mixing; a white line would need to be there so that it can visually be seen; that there is depth from behind, middle and front of the headphones to the cat.

After completing the head bop loop of the cat I received some more feedback from a friend outside of my university who does traditional and digital 2D animation at Portsmouth University named Klaus. He pointed out that the fur on top of the cat wasn’t overlapping properly compared to everything else. He also stated the left eye/eyebrow and right ear were moving incorrectly which created noisy motion in those areas.

To show what he meant, we went on call on discord where we could share our screens. From there I, Klaus and another friend called Nadim continued to do sessions like this daily, where we could show our progress and give feedback to each other. (below I was helping Nadim with his animation project while he was showing his screen). (We also had our screens shared so that we can voice our opinions whenever we made progress together).

Here is the updated loop of the cat. What helped the most was that the cat no longer looked clunky after I changed the top part of the head. Now the overlap of the top fur is corrected, the left eye/eyebrow is stationary in motion and the right ear moves in depth of the head.

After that I added the headphones and some of the transition.

I added some smear frames on the headphones as it gains speed. I added on offset smear frames when it reached a max speed that’s on 3s to show that extra emersion that it’s spinning fast. (There's going to be some big jumps in the animation progress because there wasn't much to comment on as it was just me simply going over the sketch animation).

The transition part is simple, as it was just random gloop of the cat. I added the white parts spinning around too. I found it fun mixing the emerging parts of the helicopter from the spinning gloop and that’s the exciting part about transitional animation.

I knew the helicopter will take most of my time, so to save it; I did most of its details on the main body on one layer (this helped especially when I tweened the helicopter hovering up and down and the recoil from the missile shot that I animate after). I added some extra details compared to my concept keyframes from my presentation. I added a slight reflective shine when the helicopter rotates as a small touch.

The longest part was rotating the helicopter as I had to illustrate every frame in detail while keeping it in proportion. The propeller was overlapping the body of the helicopter so I made a correction layer that covers the propellers.

Without Overlay Layer

With Overlay Layer

I polished the missile being shot and tweened the helicopter to show the recoil of the shot. The missile is also fully tweened the two times it passes the screen which saved time. (The tween frames are the purple dots on the timeline shown above).

I added the smoke clouds coming from the rocket. I changed the colour of it from black to white as it’s easier to tell the difference between the rocket and helicopter. On the other hand, the black smoke would mix with the helicopter and missile (as I noticed in my concept art keyframes).

Old

New

Then I animated an explosion. I wanted to keep the explosion simple so I did the first step of animating an explosion from my research.

I forgot the tweening affected the smoke from the movement of the rocket which moved it up out the border where it shouldn’t have; so I corrected accordingly.

After transitioning it to a thunder cloud; everything else had no difficult notions or changes to mention. I used a reference for how to animate thunder and how they flicker from frame to frame. I also quickly added some frames on the cat’s right ear when he first turns his head (in the above pass).

After I finished the polished animation I asked for some more feedback from my peers and friends/family. The first change I did was the shape of the cloud and overlapping the thunder. The old cloud looked clunky and didn’t move in sync with the clouds inside. I overlaid the thunder to come from the white line art instead of being underneath the silhouette of the cloud.

The second change I did from the feedback was changing subtleties of the skull and how it looked. My dad was actually the one who pointed it out and helped me correct the skull (shown below). I smoothed out the rigid edges of the skull and made its head and headphones rounder to fit the cat’s original headphones (key Frame).

The third change was making the cloud more in sync with the white line art clouds inside. I ended up animating the silhouette to pulse in sync with the white line art.

After that, I completely forgot to show the charge up of the thunder cloud before it strikes. I made the colour of it yellow so that it differs from the white line art clouds.

I also found out a small annoying error. My bucket tool wasn’t filling in the gaps properly (shown below) so I had to go back to everything that I filled with it; with a layer beneath, correcting everything.

I got some more feedback from my peers which was to change the perspective of the small propeller on the helicopter as it should look it’s in an angle. While changing that, I additionally found some prospective areas of the missile launcher and changed that too. There were also some highlights missing in the last frame of rotation on the helicopter, which I corrected too.

Finally, the animation was done. Next was the music suitable for this piece. I already had sound friends, Ehi and Anton (also known as AshZone and maybe//anton); who are students outside my university that helped me with the music for the animation. I received quite a lot of music tracks (see in Collaboration) and I had to narrow them down (the ones that go with the animation the most) to 6 versions of the animation (shown below).

Different Final Versions

Version 1

Version 2

Version 3

Version 4

Version 5

Version 6

Ultimately I had two I couldn’t choose between, which was version 1 and 5. For my final feedback, I asked my peers, friends and family on their opinion on these two versions.

Most comments were leaning to the first version; mainly because it was oddly in sync with the animation, so I stuck with the first version. Now the production of my FMP has come to a stop.

I honestly didn’t think I could finish this fast but I surprised even myself. I still wish I didn’t get so demotivated in March; I would have had more time to do the other ideas I had in mind. I believe me not being a fan of my own idea didn’t help, but when I actually got around to animating it; I enjoyed it more than I expected which why I regret being demotivated to start this project sooner.

Also here's the final version of the animation.