PROCESS & PRODUCTION BLOG10
Study Task - 1 Weekly Journal

Process Development

Form and flow:

How my characters express emotion through body language and movement, sometimes to over exaggerate this with considerable body movement for humorous affect.

The waiter trips and falls, a moment before he trips he processed what is happening and then an explosion afterward with large arch's as his arms are thrown out in an over exaggerated way, then he uses his arms to catch himself towards the end. The audience don't have time to register his facial expression, that's why his body over exaggerates and expresses those emotions as he falls. I have tried to communicate most of the plot points without relying on sound, always challenging for animator's.

I have realised that duplicating the same frame to take up time makes the animation seem dry and too minimal because of limited detail in the motion picture, it becomes stale and boring. What I have done different this time is copy the same frame except making small changes in detail if the scene is slow, to create more action and movement also make it seem more realistic.

Using the 'Animators survival guide' to help structure my form and layout when using arch's, around the character performing tasks and actions which suggest the mood or expression by how they execute these tasks and body language.

When the warrior opens the door, I have tried to animate her posture to seem firm around her waist and back but arms and legs swinging in large arch's when she walks off, this is communicating attitude and moodiness that she is expressing through this action. Almost strutting with pride or, given the previous scene, arrogance and annoyance. 

Basic colouring

Based from the sketched drawings for my storyboard, these are then drawn again through a low opacity layer with low pressure on a graphics tablet. These drawings are directly drawn from the storyboard because I wanted to make the storyboard more accurate despite the fact it features mostly only key frames and more detailed animated in-betweens towards the end.

I created a colouring layer and used mostly bold shading and some blending for the tree in the background, I did this because of how simple the background can be around the characters who are the main focus of attention in the scene. They are taking most of the shot so that it seems like the audience is apart of the conversation between the characters, the expressions and actions of their conversation are the main focus because this is a plot point.

Once the background is drawn the characters are refined with full pressure bold black lines with brush size from pressure enabled.

Hiding the background as I colour the characters, I have chosen the developed character designs because of their simple colouring layouts and design.

Now the layers are made visible and sometimes I reduce the background opacity to help the main characters stand out with more contrast, using a coloured layer underneath that changes the overall colour variation for a warmer feeling (red) or colder depressing (blue).


Tonnage and shading