Final Piece, Life Begins In The Middle

Elements used

Here is just a list of some of the textures and elements we used and animated

Animation Part three (Editing)

The files were then rendered keeping data loss to a minimum. Which was another complication of working on this platform with so many people that Adobe's fantastic feature Dynamic Link was almost impossible to utilise which would have allowed us to transfer the files without rendering and (almost) without the loss of any data. Moving onwards we transferred the files to premier and began cutting the scenes together, after some speed alterations (we implemented camera movements at different paces during animating) we had a rough cut. The editing stage was very simple and straight forward and in a matter of 45 minutes we had a final cut, after adding a title and credits it was time to add audio and music.
  
Finally some polishing off with fine cuts and last minute adjustment to sound and ready to render we were.

Animation Part two

Something we all found ourselves using a lot was the pre-compose tool, as it has two main benefits that we took advantage of, space saving and the ability to add one effect to multiple files and have them all work in the same way.

Firstly, we were able to transform this
 
into this

all of those gradient files have now become on composition called Pre-Comp 1 and all those files can be accessed and changed just by clicking on pre-comp, and when working with several layers this became a godsend, we obviously labelled everything later to clear it up even more but this alone allowed us to work with many layers in an organised manner.

The second benefit can be seen in our wiggle pre comp, here the drop seemed to static but we had manipulated and animated several elements within the drop, therefore adding a wiggle effect to each part may have caused them to act in different ways and would take several sun sets and rises to complete, instead we pre composed it and added the effect to the composition, making the effect the same on each layer within the pre comp and taking a matter of seconds.    

Animating Part one

Through sources such as Facebook and Skype, we have been able to maintain contact with each other including the now abroad Ashley and keep discussions open as we edited and animated, with many cuts being uploaded to a chat on Facebook to share opinions.

Here is the first scene we animated, it shows our character coming to life and soon to grow limbs. A benefit of using After effects would be the tools it provides us with to really bring this animation to life such as the focus pull from cloud to cloud or the Wiggle - Position effect that was added on shortly after this render.
 

Style of animation choice

As discussed in our groups its difficult to align all of our schedules, therefore our choice for style of animation may not make a particular amount of sense. We came to the agreement that we would be animating using Adobe's Suite of products. Photoshop to modify elements, bring them into After Effects and animate them and finally edit them together in Premier Pro.

The choice is perhaps confusing as transferring projects computer to computer would prove difficult as we all use different operating systems and versions of the suite but for the style we were trying to achieve there was not much other choice. the elements were photographed and manipulated in Photoshop by Ashley assisted by Alex and along with a story board given to the rest of the group. After some updates and compatibility issues sorted the animation could begin and with relative ease it did. They had both organised the elements into a After Effects project that meant we could begin arranging and animating the scenes straight after allocating who would animate what scene.

Then we planned the individual renders would be cut together by Alex and I then the audio mixed in by Stuart.

Defined roles

As production develops we feel the need to set roles, they are as follows

Ashley:Background Animator / Director

Alex: Animation Senior Director

Sam: Animator/ Sound

Stuart: Animator/ Sound 

Outline of the story so far

1. To start off with, we would have the main character (a raindrop) happily bouncing along a cloud when he is to meet an evil drop and be forcefully removed from the cloud (a powerful kick should work) as if to demonstrate the injustice of this world.

2. As our raindrop falls his/her eyes widen as if to suggest discomfort and we see the limbs detach and fall away to suggest the trauma our little organism endeavours.

3. The drop falls down a umbrella,  which acts as a metaphor for overcoming a struggle. he/she could have broken into many droplets but our little protagonists fights through as one piece.

4. The adventures of our raindrop end in a puddle unfortunately, and we begin a slow zoom out, changing shots as we get a wider and wider perspective of the puddle, to the park the puddle is in and a wide shot of the UK and eventually earth and space.

The idea really puts us into perspective. Us as part of something greater, much greater.

Clearer storyboards

Idea development

A member of our group (Ashley) put forward an idea for the plot. The main premises of the idea is to display a mid-life crisis in the form of a raindrop, though that may be putting it simply. The plot is about what little effect a raindrop (metaphor for us humans of this earth) we have in our short time on this planet and the original idea showed a rain drop falling into a puddle to cause nothing but a pathetic little ripple but have it contribute to the billions of ripples caused by the metaphor of billions of people to eventually end up as a giant tide.

As this idea developed it became more focused around the drop itself and its changes during its life and from this we moved on to changing the main centre of the attention to the drop itself. What was just a "transition" (as Ashley called it) became the main opportunity to portray our story and we see the drop lose its limbs and eyes. With the drop having more of the spotlight it simplified the rest of the story by default and the plan to show a tide was changed to a gradual zoom out to show the size of the puddle in contrast to the overpowering size of the earth. Storyboards were exchanged and the idea was nearly ready to be executed

Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects was a program I was already familiar with as in conjunction with Premier Pro, it was my go to suite for editing, though rarely did I animate when using them. Learning about their animation capabilities was fascinating and allowed me to develop and refresh my editing skills and also learn about animating within the program. It is indeed a shame I haven't the quality of work to reflect such a statement but the following video wasn't made without it's struggles and thus I believe it allowed me learn things that will help me when working on the final project.

Despite the quality of the video being quite frankly terrible there are three elements I learned/developed working on this, Focus of the camera layer in AE, Camera movements and layer movements, three things I believe will be important in future projects and my final one.

Stop motion animation

We have all seen stop motion at some point, its the art of stopping motion, in a quite literal sense. We stop motion, capture it, adjust and capture, rinse and repeat. The difficulty of this is what do we stop and capture? In today's lesson we learned how to design and create a wire character, as simple as it sounds it presents a few challenges. Given enough time any fool can transform a wire into a potentially believable character (depending on your imagination of course) but in order to animate, a wire character needs certain characteristics such as the ability of standing on his/her own two feet or even sitting down and bending the metal in a way it doesn't wear out over time. our final result came to this

A proud moment as my creation sits unassisted. He has this strength due to the home-made bones he has which were creating with wooden coffee stirrers and masking tape, this allows him to have strength and the ability to animate realistically to some extent.

 

Different styles of animation

To begin with it was difficult to understand how beautiful animated moving images were made. Animation comes with the opportunities that are somewhat infinite but this also means they are rather intimidating, its almost impossible to even imagine how an idea starts and how the development goes through.

Watching various animations educated me, some have had enough care and love invested in them that they are designed and created frame by frame, some others have assets and allow applications such as Adobe After affects to fill in the gap once the beginning and end of a shot have been decided.

The main methods behind animation we have discussed involve the following

- Hand drawn stop motion animation
- Stop motion animation
- Adobe After Effects animation
- Anime Studio Pro animation

Each come with their own benefits and drawbacks, such as stop motion being time consuming and After effects limited RAM previews. but once an idea has been discussed and developed we can decide which shall be the best choice.

Anime studio pro

Adobe After Effects

Stop motion Animation