Due to the recent events at the end of University, this had a bad effect on my mental and physical health. Due to my doing, I took on way too many projects throughout this module and towards the end, I ended up burning myself out. Unfortunately, due to this, I have not been able to complete my final year short film. As I have worked hard up until now on this film, I have decided to continue this process without all the stress of University deadlines after the hand-in. I hope to solely focus on this project and have a finished animation before the end of June. The events that took place have made this whole process a little more difficult for me and many other people, however, the support of the teachers has allowed me to push through this module and deliver as much as I can at this point in time.
This is my list of things to do after the hand in:
For my last competition brief, I continued with my last 'Character Design challenge'. The theme for May was 'Final Fantasy'. The character I decided to focus on was 'Cloud Strife' however, I wanted to put my own twist on it. As most children love to dress up as their favourite character I decided to create my character as a young girl that is dressing up as 'Cloud Strife'. I was not completing happy with this design as I think there are many factors that I would change about this character to improve the design. I think I could be more creative when entering these competitions and even consider trying to think: 'more outside the box'. As I had no time to redo this competition brief, I decided to enter it as there is always room for improvement. I will improve this drawing my practising certain skills and learning new ways to make imaginative characters. I will come back to this character design at some point and try and improve on it.
After discussing beforehand about my recent decision of completing a background and then animating on it, I started to get confused about how long each scene was and what I was left to complete. As a director/producer, I made the decision to create a production tick list similar to my pre-production one. I started by splitting my animatic into a number of shots and the duration of each shot. This would allow me to tick off each scene as I go along with a clear understanding of how much left I have to animate. I then completed the tick-list by creating three rows which consists of the rough, clean-up, and the colouring of the animation.
If I was to restart this project I would create this production tick-list as soon as the animatic was complete. This would have made my project more clear and organized. It was have also saved me some confusion and may have even allowed me to create some final pieces quicker.
There are eight backgrounds for me to complete for this project. These are the four finished backgrounds that have been digitally painted:
I have really enjoyed working on these backgrounds as it allowed me to spend some time away from my own project where I have worked mostly on my own. This allowed me to develop a style based on the mood and concept boards created by me and Gabbi. Gabbi originally wanted backgrounds that weren't too detailed and not too much colour as she wanted the characters to stand out and be the main focus. This is the reference I used to create my backgrounds:
She gave me this reference of 'The Simpsons' background as inspiration for how she wanted the final backgrounds completed and what she wanted them to look like aesthetically. I decided to study some of these backgrounds as I wanted to learn how to make block colours look less boring and more eye-catching to the audience. I did this by adding in little details such as shadows and lighting where needed as well as, a think black outline. I was happy with the outcome of these backgrounds and will continue this process with the last four.
Following my concept boards for the Reality World in 'The Portal', I begin creating the final backgrounds. As I was currently unsure of who was able to animate on my film, and I was having to complete my final backgrounds myself, I decided to complete a background and animate what was in that scene. To me, this seemed like a productive idea. As soon as a background was completed, I could animate the scene and place it into my final film on Premiere Pro.
I started with the scenes in Grandma's House where the Little Boy is in a montage of situations in which he is trying to occupy himself with stuff to do:
Final Background
Final Background
Final Background
Final Backgrounds
Final Backgrounds
I soon started to realise that this method was not working for me however, by this point I had agreed to complete the tasks for the other projects I was working on. I decided to focus more on them as I want to specialise in background and concept design more than animating when I leave University. Doing the backgrounds for me was more important as this allowed me to add to my portfolio and gave me more experience when working on different projects with my peers.
As I was unable to find anyone in my class available to create my backgrounds I had to gain this responsibility myself. At this point, I started to worry that I had taken on too many tasks throughout this module and this would become too much for me to handle. I currently am working on or have completed the following projects for the other peers in my class:
Concept Artboards for 'Sal & Peppy'
Concept Artboards for 'Blair'
Concept Artboards for 'The Portal'
Final Backgrounds for 'Blair'
Final Backgrounds for 'The Portal'
As I couldn't find anyone else available, I created a pre-production background tick-list. I wanted to use this as a guide so I could clearly see how many backgrounds would be needed and what ones had been completed.
I started to prepare the ideas for the title sequence of my movie, as I didn't want it to be a last-minute thought. As the title sequence starts the film, I wanted it to be eye-catching and interesting for the eyes of the audience. My aim was to grab their attention and make them want to watch further to get a better understanding of what the story was about. As my storyline is based around the idea of a portal that takes my character from one world to another, I came up with the idea of using a glitch effect on my title. This glitch normally happens when a tv set cannot find a connection or something in the server is disturbing the connection causing the picture to glitch. Using other movies as reference such as, 'The Matrix's' title sequence, it shows a computer glitch and how to effectively use one:
As I was unsure of how to begin constructing my own glitching title for 'The Portal', I started to research what a glitch on the computer appears like as well as, how it works. The more realistic the glitch appears on my title, the more effective it is to the aesthetic appeal and the audience. This is when I came across the video on Youtube:
This Youtube video by 'Made my Mikey', fully explains how to creatively put together a glitching word or sentence by using the Photoshop software. I followed each step to creating the separate image files for each transition when moving them into the animation workspace:
After each separate image was completed I stopped following the Youtube tutorial and started to play around with the glitch effect until I was happy with my end result. When I was happy with the glitching effect I noticed that something was missing from the completed animation. Without a sound effect on top of the animation, the glitching effect wasn't as aesthetically appealing and it really was rather dull. To improve on this I collected sounds from Freesound. I used Freesound because of the current situation. As it was too late to use a sound booth at this point and create my own sound effects, I improvised and used Freesound for the time being. Later on in the project, I plan to create all my own sound effects for my completed animation. This is the finished title sequence:
