Assignment 3: Documentation of work

Research:

For our assignment for this module, we are to research a chosen art style/movement, and conduct some analysis using primary and secondary sources. My chosen art style is Minimalism. Generally the art style is used by artists and designers in artworks and illustrations, but this has been taken further by architects whom now specialise in minimalistic house designs as well.

According to Tate, (Tate.org.uk, 2019) Minimalism began to develop in the late 1950's, having significant links to that of conceptual art, a technique which also was becoming more popular around this time. Artists such as Frank Stella began to turn away from the art of the previous generation. Minimalism thrived in the 1960's and 1970's with influential artists such as: Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Robert Morris, to which Tate claim they were "becoming the movement’s most important innovators." Minimalism challenged the existing conventions for creating and viewing art, with artists arguing that "the importance given to the art object is misplaced and leads to a rigid and elitist art world which only the privileged few can afford to enjoy."

The official definition of Minimalism is 'a movement in sculpture and painting which arose in the 1950s, characterized by the use of simple, massive forms.' However, a more broader explanation comes from Pufikhomes (Pufikhomes.com, 2019), which suggests that "The style of minimalism is a design approach that is characterized by austerity and laconism in decoration." - Which I believe is another way for describing very sharp and simplistic designs. Pufikhomes explains that "It is mainly achieved through the use of functional furniture and interior objects, geometric shapes and a combination of usually not more than two basic colors. Minimalist interiors are usually compact, black or gray, and have a strict geometric shape."

We can apply this to popular minimal artworks, such as Robert Morris' famous artwork: Untitled (also known as 'Mirrored Cubes') (1965, 1977), which you can identify follows many of the criteria listed by Pufikhomes, such as the use of geometrical shapes and the use of very few colours in the piece. Officials at Tate claim that Morris "typically arranged these into ‘situations’ where ‘one is aware of one’s own body at the same time that one is aware of the piece’ (Tate.org.uk, 2019). This work demonstrates the principle. As the viewer walks around the four cubes, their mirrored surfaces produce complex and shifting interactions between gallery and spectator." The piece is very clever, as technically the piece is always unique to the viewer, as they are always seeing a distorted version of themselves, other viewers in the gallery and the gallery that happens to house the art piece at the time, giving each person a unique personalised experience. I find that this art piece has a large resemblance to the House of Mirrors, in which you also can also warp reality through the use of many mirrors.

There are many examples of modern minimalistic artworks that can be found (and even purchased) online, but one piece that caught my eye was the piece shown above. Dominic Joyce simply titles this as a 'Minimalist Painting' (Saatchiart.com, 2019), which the artist claims has been painted with high quality acrylic paint onto a  canvas frame. The art piece again uses a limited colour range, as well as simple and sharp geometric shapes. The particular aspect I appreciated about the art piece is that there are two perspectives that can be drawn from the artwork. The artwork could be depicting a 3D shape at a tilted perspective, or it could be a 2D cutout folded to point inwards/outwards at the viewer. This is important as it demonstrates that there are multiple meanings to be derived from the artwork.

Other cultures also use minimal art styles in a similar way. Take this piece designed by 'RevLevel' titled 'Spirited Away' (TeePublic.com); You can clearly see a lot of similarities to previously discussed traits of minimalism. For one, the colour palette is very minimal, only using highlights of yellows, reds and whites. The design has also been designed using lots of geometric shapes, rather than perhaps curved lines. The artwork has been made in the form of a poster, using Japanese test along the side. An interesting note is that this artwork is the first I have examined to use shading in the design, as most other artworks use solid colours instead.

This art style is not limited to artworks however, as this style has become an inspiration for designs of furniture and decoration styles for houses as well. Pufikhomes demonstrates some good examples of minimalistic house designs, both exterior and interior. I have selected a particularly interesting example above which highlights the recurring use geometric shapes in the design. The style deviates from a more conventional housing design, using more geometric shapes instead. In addition, the colour scheme is also limited to only a few different colours (not including the interior).

One of my own personal experiences of Minimalistic art styles was the artwork 'Large Split Relief', created by Sergio de Camargo during 1964-1965. I came across the artwork on the 8th of July 2018, at the Tate Gallery. The artwork is listed online by Tate, but viewing the piece in person amplifies the experience; You are able to view the full artwork at any scale, at any angle. For one, the picture does not accurately present its true size, which is much bigger than the picture might indicate. The piece uses a singular geometric shape positioned in different places, being cut or split in particular areas. In addition, the piece is monochromatic, but the piece is still nicely varied with the simple but effective use of shadows, giving the artwork depth. The artwork is very simple, but the large size combined with the random variety of shapes makes for it to be quite the interesting piece.

References:

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/minimalism [Accessed 22:29 23/10/19]

https://www.pufikhomes.com/en/stili-interera/minimalizm/ [Accessed 21:07 16/10/19]

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/morris-untitled-t01532 [Accessed 21:23 16/10/19]

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Original-Framed-Modern-Minimalist-Painting/555701/3790958/view [Accessed 21:51 16/10/19]

https://www.teepublic.com/en-gb/wall-art/3670273-spirited-away-minimalist-japanese-poster-qian-toqi [Accessed 21:44 23/10/19]

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/camargo-large-split-relief-no-34-4-74-t00797 [Accessed 22:41 23/10/19]

Pre-Production:

My aesthetic of my story is going to be very minimalistic, using flat colour and a limited colour palette. It will also use basic geometric shapes and sharp lines similar to minimalistic designs that I had previously researched and analysed. I have created a concept frame to show what my aesthetic might look like.

For my story, I wanted to avoid a cliche story and create something different. I decided I wanted the story to have a ‘bad ending’, as most conventional stories will have a conflict in a story that is resolved by the end, but in my story this would not happen.

Furthermore, I wanted to use a very minimalistic aesthetic in my story, and for this I would like to draw inspiration from the video game ‘Limbo’, which mostly involves black or faded grays for its colour, as well as a minimal art style too. In addition, the dark colours match the darker theme of story I am creating.

Synopsis:

The main character of the story recently lost his wife in an unfortunate car accident, for which he blames himself over. This is not helped by also being overworked at his job. Eventually, he manages to pay a visit to his wife’s grave and mourn. There is a moment where things could be looking up for the character, but this is short lived when - due to slacking at his work - is fired from his job. The frustration of this combined with his guilt becomes too much for him, and he tragically makes the decision to take his own life.

For the storyboard, I opted to draw this on paper as I am more accustomed to this despite my lack of skills in drawing. I created a few dozen frames and arranged them in chronological order above. Understandably these images are hard to see, but all of these frames can be seen clearly in the Animatic I am going to create below.

Animatic:

I have combined the storyboard frames into an Animatic, which has also the inclusion of sound and music, to give a feel as to what my animation could look like after production. I did this using Sony Vegas which is a solid choice of editing software. Arguably Adobe Premiere Pro is much better suited to video editing, but unfortunately I was having issues with the university supplied Adobe software, and therefore could not use this at the time. Though I was very familiar with Sony Vegas, and the software was able to do a good job in this instance.

For my character design, I wanted to take inspiration from two existing characters. The first is the character from the game Limbo, a character that is completely black except for white eyes. The second is the character ‘Sad’ from Inside out, which has a suitable body shape and expression. I’d like to take aspects from both characters and apply it to my character design.

 Here is a first draft of my main character. I decided to use a less realistic body shape/size similarly to the Inside Out character ‘Sad’, and applying this to a black character with white eyes, in similar fashion to the character in the game ‘Limbo’.

Though I decided that in this design, the proportions of the character perhaps would not be feasible when animating, as the character being mostly a silhouette could cause arms and legs hard to distinguish from the body with no outlines. I therefore decided to keep this proportions for the head, but tone this down for the rest of the body so that the animation would not be hard to follow. This design would work much better with colour or more detail though.

Promotional Poster:

For the title and strapline I made a short brainstorm and decided upon the most ideal title and strapline to use. I did this with a simple brainstorm for the title, looking for words or phrases of key relevance and then using those in combination to form a catchy yet relevant title. I chose the title 'Breaking Point'. I then simply came up with a few suggestions for the strapline, for which I chose 'People can only bend so far'.

I then used this title/strapline for my poster. I started by using a very minimal design and colour palette, inserting the text in relevant positions. I also placed the character in the background as the key image of the poster. I went to DaFont.com to look for some suitable options for font, and was immediately sold on the font choice 'LOUD AND CLEAR', which is a very bold, sans-serif and eroded font choice that I felt suited my poster perfectly.

I then wanted to add an extra layer to the poster, and decided that I should incorporate the idea of cracked glass as an overlay to my poster, as it fits well with the theme and title. I was able to find a suitable glass crack texture and positioned this in strategic points across the poster. I also used a glass screen texture as an overlay so that it actually looked like glass, rather than just cracks. I was then able to mask areas out to make it look like the glass was actually broken, with the masks removing the glass screen texture and slight overlay of colour too. I was very pleased with this result.

Planning my Project:

First, I decided to plan out my work so that I would produce my shots in the most efficient way. I started by reviewing my Animatic and listing each shot I need to produce for my animation. Below I am going to list all the shots, as well as how difficult they are to produce on a scale of 1-5. From this I will be completing the easiest shots first as I believe it will be more effective to produce the most difficult shots last, so that I can complete a more complex shot with a series of existing shots to take reference from. 

Listed above are all the shots required to complete my animation. I’ve labelled each shot with a difficulty from 1-5, which will determine the order of shots that I will be working on producing, where difficulties of 1 will be created first, leaving a total of 27 shots to be created. I have also added their duration and brief descriptions of each shot to make it easier to look back on my planning sheet when creating my shots for my animation, speeding up my workflow. I have uploaded these images from a document that I had been using to track my progress, which is why all shots are listed as 'Complete'. But during the production process, I was methodically going through each 'Incomplete' shot by lowest difficulty first and completing them in this order.

I have made some slight changes from my Animatic to my proposed shots. These are slight changes that use different camera angles that were previously inconsistent, impractical or unnecessary. For instance, Shot 3 is the same shot, but the camera is to the side of the character, as previously it was at an angle from behind the character which breaks the 180 degree rule. I also altered Shot 12 to be a combination of 3 shots in my Animatic, as the cuts felt unnecessary and inconsistent with the rest of the animation.

However, a larger change I had made was to Scene 5, which is completely different to the original scene from my Animatic. This is due to some crucial feedback that I had received during my presentation at the end of the first term, in which it was suggested that the ending could be changed to feature a more ambiguous scene, leaving the story more open to interpretation to the viewer. The resulting scene is a similar length, with a similar outcome too.

To begin with the production of my animation, my first step will be to create all the backgrounds required for the animation. I believe this is the best approach as completing all the backgrounds first will help me maintain a more accurate continuity of the art style across all backgrounds. This art style will be minimalistic, using no colours other than blacks, grays and whites, to compliment the gloomy and darker tones of the story. I will be creating the animation in After Effects, and the character assets in Illustrator.

In addition, having the completed background will make the animation process easier, as I will have a better idea of how the character should say walk in the background. After some useful peer feedback, I have decided to work on Shots 1 & 2 for my first shots. These shots are just background shots, with no character animation required. As a result, they will be quick to produce, and will be a good start to my animation as it will give me a clearer direction of the final result of my project, something I can look back at when working on the rest of the shots as well.

Production:

At this point in the project, I had 2 completed shots for my animation. These were background based shots at the start of my animation, establishing the setting to the viewer. These shots are a good start, but more importantly help give me a clearer direction as to the overall aesthetic of my animation. As stated earlier, I decided it would be best to continue with creating the backgrounds to help with the following process of animating the character and placing it in these scenes, as well as also helping me to maintain a better continuity of the art style across shots. I have decided to methodically work though the backgrounds required in a chronological order so that I don’t lose track, especially considering that I will need to create a couple dozen backgrounds.

The next shot was shot 10, which from the shot list, is the longest shot I will be creating by far, despite the animation being relatively simple. The shot will reuse the background from Shot 4 (the main character’s house), and will suddenly switch to the main character’s workplace. With this in mind, I used the background from Shot 4 as a starting point, removing parts which were not useful and adjusting parts that could be reused. For one, the desk, chair, paper and pen are completely reused, but they have been adjusted slightly to show variation. This saved me time in my production whilst also producing a good outcome. I also added a few additional objects such as a clock and a stack of papers, which would be useful when it comes to animating the character in this scene.

The following shot (Shot 11) was an extreme close up of a clock on the desk, with the clock hands rotating very quickly to show time going faster. To achieve this, I first created a new composition with the clock and desk layers copied over. I then separated the hand layers from the clock, so that I could manipulate them individually. This meant that I was able to rotate them without rotating the entire clock, as previously they had been all one shape layer.

However a problem I was having was that they would rotate from their center, and not around the center of the clock. I fixed this by adjusting their anchor points so both minute and hour hands were rotating from the center of the clock. Then to rotate them, I used an expression on both shape layers (as seen above) which increments the rotation of the layer over the duration of the composition. You can change the multiplier to decide how fast it should rotate. After some experimenting, I found that 450 for the minute hand made it look solid, without being too fast. I then did 450/60 in a calculator to get 7.5 to use for the hour hand on the clock to be accurate. The result was exactly what I was aiming for, and I’m pleased with the result.

The following day I worked on shots 12-15. The first 3 shots were particularly simple, where I used the same process that I had been using on prior shots. One thing I did was include some slightly lighter coloured shapes in the windows of the shops, as without them, peer feedback suggested that the viewer would not be clear on what the buildings were, and I think it helps to show that these are windows and not panels or perhaps something else.

Shot 15 took a much longer time to produce, way longer than I had anticipated. The first difficulty of the shot is that it is at an angle, whereas most of my previous shots have been fairly straight on with no tilt or angle to the camera. I think my attempt to match the perspective is not perfect, but is a solid effort. I could always come back to this shot later and tweak it if I had time, but I felt that it was not worth spending even more time on this one shot when I could be using that time more effectively by getting the rest of my project done.

The way I achieved the look for the fencing around the cemetery was by starting with a simple shape layer as usual, and outlining the shape in my shot. I then took the Venetian Blinds effect from After Effects and adjusted the settings to create equally spaced out gaps in the solid shape to create fence bars. The result looks good, but I am concerned that this part of the shot is too detailed, and perhaps does not fit with my art style. I could also revisit this later and perhaps remove the black borders of the shape, to maintain the grey fencing only, which might suit it better.

One thing worth mentioning was that another huge time consumer for this shot was the gravestones, which are in the distance of the shot. Creating the gravestones was simple, to which I added a few variations as well. However, duplicating these gravestones across the shot took arguably too much time, as I spent a good portion of that time duplicating individual gravestones so that similar variations would not be next to each other, as well as adjusting the scale for graves further in the distance. The result is good, but I imagine there was a much better alternative method to the one I had used, as it felt slow and unproductive. This is something I will try to keep in mind for future shots and project work.

From this point I followed relatively similar methods for creating the remaining backgrounds, with no new approach, so I have not detailed them all in this blog, as I have already detailed many backgrounds already. After finishing the backgrounds, I began working on the character.

I created the character in Adobe Illustrator as I felt the tool was the most practical, giving the freedom to edit curves as well as being a vector-based program. I created a character for facing right (could be flipped to face left) as well as a character for facing the camera. These could also have the eyes removed in certain shots to give the impression that the character is facing opposite the camera too. I created the layers in Illustrator so that - once imported into After Effects - I could easily access each layer of the arm, leg, upper arm, eyes, etc.

After creating these assets, I imported them into After Effects as a composition. I could access this composition and adjust the anchor points of each joint so that their movement when rotating each limb looked correct. I then proceeded to parent each layer, with the body being the main parent to the rest of the layers, which meant that I could move the entire character by simply moving the body.

My first character-based shot was the ECU of him noticing the cemetery. When adding an ECU for his face, I noticed that the eyes became noticeably blurry. This is because, although created in Adobe Illustrator, the layers did not remain vector-based, and therefore lost quality once scaled up.

I therefore overlayed the pixelated head with a shape layer in after effects which would not suffer the same loss of quality. I then animated the movement of the head and eyes fairly easily as this was the easiest shot.

I did this for both the head and eyes, as the rest of the character cannot be seen in the shot. I removed the arms/legs but I kept the body to move the head with a bit more freedom. I also parented them as usual.

When animating the facial expression, I simply had to take the layer 'EyesAngryUPPER' and keyframe the position so the layer would lower down. The layer is simply two shapes that overlay the eyes layer, and this method specifically works here as the character is all black and you cannot tell the difference in layer, making this a simple yet effective way of animating facial expressions here.

My next task was the photograph shot, which required no animation. However, for the photograph shot, I needed to create the wife of the main character.

Again, I went to Adobe Illustrator to do this. I decided to copy the same file used for the main character, and simply adjust the shapes of the legs, body and arms. I then deleted the hair layer and replaced it with a female haircut, and recoloured the character. I then flipped it and added it to the shot.

I wasn't happy with the brightness of the photograph, as it felt too dark when it most likely would have a glass screen over the top. I simply created an adjustment layer and masked the area of glass in the picture frame, and in this specific region I increased the lightness using a Hue/Saturation effect. I was also able to place the layer from before in such a perspective by using the Corner Pin adjustment, allowing the user to move the corners of a layer.

My last adjustment was to add an overlay to the glass, as it felt too plain and hard to recognise that it was glass. I first started with some simple shape layers with a very low opacity.

I then added a simple Box Blur effect to blur these shape layers, giving the nice faded look you see above.

For shot 3, the animation was relatively simple, as I simply had to position the character in the shot and add subtle movement to stop the animation looking plain and still, by using some rotation keyframes. I also adjusted these keyframes and added an 'Easy ease' which essentially smooths out the animation by easing it in and out, meeting one of the animation principles too.

I then began working on scene 2, with the characters inside the car. I first went back and adjusted the background of the windows to show some scenery in the foreground, blurred due to being in the distance.

I then created the impression it was moving by adding a position keyframe. I also did the same with the background, but I offset the position keyframes so that the background moved slower than the foreground, giving the impression of a parallax. The background/foreground were also blurred so I felt that I could get away with reusing background shots from other shots rather than creating brand new scenery which would've used up valuable time.

I also added the wife character into the shot, in the same manner of positioning the main character earlier. Again the animation was simple, as I simply added a bit of rotation to some of the limbs to make the character feel real and not still. I also added a phone for the character to be holding, which I did with some simple shape layers, to which I parented it to the hand of the character, meaning it would move wherever the hand moved.

It's worth noting that this scene was slightly adjusted from my animatic. In my animatic, the shot involved the characters having a small argument, which lost the main character's focus - leading to the crash. However, I felt that including voice in this animation for only this scene would not fit well, and would not match the rest of the animation. I therefore opted to change this scene a little, by simply having the crash being an accident, and they are simply driving along.

I proceeded to the next shot with the lowest difficulty, which again involved minimal animation of the character on his knees beside the gravestone. In the shot, I animated the chest to become a bit wider/taller briefly to give the impression of the character sighing, and this was done by animating the scale of the character disproportionately as well as slightly adjusting the position of the head and arms to follow correctly the movement of the body when it increased in size.

In regards to shot 4, the first step was to position the character correctly. This was slightly more difficult due to the background needing to be layered correctly. Looking above, you can see that certain limbs/parts of the character were layered above/below parts of the background to give the impression that he was sitting behind the desk, but above the table with his arms for instance. To prevent the background interfering with the animation, I decided to lock some of the layers to prevent them being moved accidentally.

To get the eyes to look towards the photograph, I simply had to adjust the rotation and position of the eyes so it moved in an arc rather than simply to the left (his right), as otherwise you would not get that perspective correctly.

Shot 8 was the next shot listed as a difficulty of 3. Firstly I went ahead and adjusted the backgrounds to match Shot 6 in the same way with the foreground/background scenery the same as well as the truck also appearing behind the windows but above the scenery.

One thing I wanted to improve whilst I was working on scene 2 was the following shot when the truck approaches the camera, as I felt it could be improved. I added an adjustment layer for increasing the Gain in the image. I then keyframed the blue, red and green gamma values with the same keyframes so that the image would gain in only gamma and not receive and colour. I then adjusted these keyframes in the Graph editor so that these values would very gradually ramp up.

This is one of the last frames before the shot fades to white. However, the glow of the lights becomes very flat and unnatural-looking.

My solution to this problem was to add a solid white layer that fades into view so that this would blend in more naturally and be less of an issue.

I then went back to working on shot 8, to which I started on the character expression. I did this by pre-composing the eye layer and simply masking the eyes to create a confused expression.

I then animated the mask path to a later surprised expression. Only one eye can be seen as the other is masked out at this point, giving the impression that she is looking outside the window. I also was able to give a surprised expression as I increased the vertical scale of the eyes to exaggerate it a bit.

For the next shot, I decided to postpone shot 13 despite it being next in line, as shot 12 leads directly to shot 13, and I felt that the animation would be better followed if I worked straight from shot 12 to shot 13. I therefore proceeded with shot 16, which involves the character walking through a cemetery.

Firstly I had to layer the character correctly so it was in-between the background scenery, similar to before.

I then singled out the character layers after positioning the starting shot. I also removed the arms as I felt that this could be animated after and it would be easier to start on the legs and body. To start, I created a shape for the character to be 'stepping on to' to give me a point of reference for the contact point of his foot.

I gradually set out animating a walk cycle with the character. I used some reference but didn't follow it perfectly as I wanted to create more of a slumped and slower walk, which I achieved mostly by spreading out the keyframes more, as well as an arched back/neck so the head was low. 

I then unhid the rest of the layers and proceeded to animate the arms to follow the rest of the animation. My next step was to ease out the animation, which was particularly difficult and took some time to refine to get it looking right. Essentially I started spacing the keyframes out more and moving the character less and less to give the impression of him slowing down to a stop.

To get the character's eyes to appear to be 'moving' I again used a mask and simply moved the eyes across with the rest of the areas being masked out to give this impression. I also animated the scale of the width of the feet to make it look like the feet are pointing the gravestone rather than facing side-on.

The next shot was also slightly altered from the original animatic shot. The original shot featured the character walking away slowly, but based on peer feedback, I received the great suggestion of instead having the character crying until the shot faded to black instead, which I felt worked much better. Since the change was quite simple and arguably easier to animate, I went ahead with this change. To achieve this animation, I simply adjusted the rotation of the limbs to have the hands covering the eyes. However, the arms didn't quite reach, so I had to keyframe the position of the upper arms so they would move up towards his face and reach his eyes. I also animated the vertical scale of the eyes so they would appear to close as well.

On a side note, I also needed to adjust the order of layers to have the arms and hands as the top layers so that the arms would appear on top of the head/eyes in this shot.

I started on some of the easier office shots next, with the first being the second to last shot. I first took the background I had created earlier, and positioned the characters in the shot accordingly. I needed to create a 'manager' character for this shot too, which I did in similar fashion to the rest of the characters made in this project. I decided to adjust the background so that their chairs (and therefore position) were offset and not centralised like before, as - without this offset - the characters would just overlap and you wouldn't be able to see the manager character behind the main character. It also looks arguably a bit more realistic with the chairs not being EXACTLY centralised too.

I also added a simple shape layer resembling a gun which I parented to the main character's hand. The rest of the animation was relatively simple from here, having the main character reach for the gun in his pocket (off screen) with the manager looking confused, and then suddenly surprised towards the end of the shot.

By this point I had been hard at work with all the animation and background creation, so I decided to mix this up a little bit by working on a title sequence now for my animation. First, I went to DaFont.com and sourced 4 possible font choices.

I narrowed this down to the font 'Porter' from the four choices available.

I wanted to have a title sequence which reflected my promotional poster, using the aesthetic of broken glass. I did this by finding a suitable glass crack image, and instead of using this, I used Photoshop to cut out the glass cracks (the 'splinters' around the edge of the main crack origin) and use them as separate layers. I positioned them in a manner that could look like the screen has been cracked.

To clean up the cracks, I masked the layers close to the main 'splinters' to remove the excess noise from the image where possible (some still remained but this was ok). I then took the text layer and duplicated it, then masked it in the locations of these glass cracks. I then keyframed their position so they would move out of place very quickly to the result you see above.

I then added extra cracks so it would crack across the entire plate. I then animated the masks of these cracks so they would quickly 'crack' from the center of the image outwards, in conjunction with the text being distorted (a bit like how glass can distort in real life). I also added a subtle glass screen overlay to make it feel more like glass, and lowered the opacity of the font a little bit so it wasn't too bright or bold. And this was the title sequence complete for the most part, which the result looked quite good in my opinion.

Shots listed as difficulty 4 were next to complete, and the first was shot 23. I firstly positioned the manager in the office chair right in the background. I also added a subtle animation to his eyes which briefly look up before looking back down at his desk.

I then added the main character in. However, this animation was arguably the most difficult, as I had to animate the character from a facing-front stance. This meant that, instead of animating by rotating the limbs, I needed to vertically scale the legs and body to first give the impression of the legs moving up/down, but also to give the impression of the character becoming smaller as it walks further into the room. This is arguably the weakest animation in my project, but unfortunately I am not skilled enough to improve this further, and I decided that once I had it to a good enough point, to leave the shot alone.

However, the one thing I did to help improve the animation was to speed up the composition. This did affect the timings somewhat, as the speeding up of the composition reduced the duration of the shot. This is not an ideal fix, but it helped the animation look better and I was struggling to animate this particular shot. However, I would hope to actually be able to animate from this perspective better in future, and complete this in a more practical manner to a higher standard. A start to this would be to learn how to animate a walk cycle from this perspective, as we have been taught how to animate from the side only, and this is something I can explore in my own time.

I then went to work on Shot 12, which was a particularly difficult shot. I first had to transition the shot from the character's house to the office background. From above, you can see some layers suddenly appearing with others being disabled at the same time. This is the background layers being disabled/enabled from one background to the other. I decided to have this as a 'cut' with the character being pushed out of position suddenly to indicate that the background of the scene has changed.

After sorting this transition out, I then animated it within these two separate 'durations' before and after the background transitions. The first half of the animation is the character gradually waking up, and rubbing his eyes. The second half is the character realising he is at work, to which he sighs and sits back at his desk after looking around.

After the character sits back down and sighs, he starts to slowly close his eyes and bow his head slightly. As this happens, the idea is that time is being sped up to indicate he is becoming more and more disconnected with reality. To show this, I used the clock from earlier and began the animation from this point, to show time speeding up. I also decided to animate a stack of papers beside his desk, by simply duplicating the layer and overlapping a new sheet of paper every so often using a keyframe on the opacity, as seen above. I think these two elements (combined with the sound hopefully from later on with editing) help communicate to the viewer that time is being sped up as well as getting the character's feelings across too. 

I finally went to the last two shots, with shot 12 being the (arguably) most difficult shot to produce, as it involves a walk cycle, a run cycle, and a falling animation. I started with positioning both characters (I created a simple 'pedestrian character' in Illustrator like before for this shot) as well as adjusting the facial expressions of the main character. 

Looking above, you may see it is a bit chaotic in terms of the layers for two separate characters. To help out a bit, I made an invisible layer and locked it called 'NEXT_CHAR' to indicate to me when the next character's layers start, to help my workflow a bit.

I started by isolating the layers of the civilian, as well as using a reference plate of a run cycle, to which I followed fairly well despite the proportions of the character not matching perfectly. 

I animated until I had looped the cycle to which I could copy and paste the keyframes to the point where the character successfully runs from the right to left sides of the frame. 

Here is a screenshot of the keyframes of my efforts of animating this run cycle. It should be noted that about a third of these keyframes are unique, and the remaining two thirds are copied and pasted for now.

I used a similar technique for the main character, but I stopped animating the walk cycle when the pedestrian runs past the character, just before he falls. 

From this point, I animated the main character falling over, using pose-to-pose just like previously, from the initial push of the character, to contacting the ground, then falling to the floor. I then tweaked the keyframes and also eased them out. The end of this shot shows the character gradually getting up too.

I also went back to the part of the shot where the pedestrian pushes past the main character, and added a bit of detail with his arm pushing past the main character. I also added some slight anticipation with the main character's eyes as he briefly looks to his left before falling to the ground. 

Finally, I worked on the proceeding shot 13, where the character picks himself up. I created the initial pose using the last frame from shot 12 as reference, and then animated it from here. After some tweaking, the final shot was complete!

Now that the main animation had been completed, I went back and addressed a couple complaints that I had put aside for the time being. The first involved the cemetery scene, in which I felt the fencing felt out of place and too bold. I removed the black outlines and left the grey bars, which felt more fitting in my opinion.

I also had to adjust the fencing for multiple shots to maintain continuity. 

Another change I made was to the gravestone itself, specifically the font choice. After browsing my typeface library, I founded a more suitable choice and adjusted the text a little bit as well to make it more fitting. 

After addressing some final tweaks to the animation, I rendered it out. I used the Adobe Media Encoder to render the output from the After Effects file with great control over the rendered output, which I could easily match to my project settings (1920x1080, 25fps).

After the output was rendered, I added it to my Sony Vegas file which had previously been used for my animatic, the idea being to match the timings of the sound effects from before since the animated shots were the same duration as they were in the animatic. This helped for some sound effects, but others were a little out of place, which meant I had to manually tweak them. 

I had most of the sound effects in place, but a few were missing, such as the title sequence. I was able to find free sound effect files online and apply them appropriately in my animation. There were a couple instances where these sound effects would come as 'packs' of sound effects, so I used Audacity to easily separate the sound effect that I wanted and export these out as .mp3 files (I personally would have chose .WAV files as the export option, but unfortunately I have run into an issue where .WAV files do not play correctly in Sony Vegas, which meant that format was not feasible despite not being compressed). 

After the relevant sound effects were added, my animation was now a completed 'first draft', to which I submitted for feedback. Most of the feedback was very positive, and therefore the majority of my animation was left unchanged. However, critique came up for shot 24, where the note is pushed into view. Originally this scene was quite plain, so it was suggested that I could add some extra detail, and adjust the font to a choice which looks more handwritten. 

This was the first change I made to the shot, in which the font is changed to a more handwritten typeface. I also removed the first sentence from the message as it over-cluttered the note, and didn't really help to get the point across to the viewer. I left some text in bold so this would be more noticeable to the viewer though. I also added a slight extra detail in the note, adding a border around the edge. 

I then added a bit of perspective to the shot by using a new camera layer, and rotating the cameras position. After this, my last change was to add the manager's arms/hands into the shot, as otherwise the note is just pushed into view from nothing, which looks odd and out of place. This looked simple, as all I did was add the hands and forearms to the shot, with the position following the note then pulling back. However, the shot was already quite complex, and - being a 3D layer - caused the anchor points to become difficult to adjust in 3D space, so I left the shot at this without over complicating it or creating too much work. 

The final piece of feedback was to create a credits sequence, something I had overlooked when creating this animation. I was able to add this in simply by adding a 6 second sequence at the end of the animation shown above. The 'Created by' and 'Luka Feric' both gradually fade into view, with a black shape blocking them and their opacity being keyframed to fade into view. The credits is also animated with a fade in/out too. I then exported this animation again and added it into my edited timeline. 

After I rendered this file out, I noticed two issues. The first is in the credits scene where my last name was not capitalised, which I went ahead and fixed. The second was in the note scene, in which I had removed the first sentence and left the second and third. However, I had overlooked in the second sentence it says "Therefore, we regret..." but because this carries on from the first sentence (which is now removed) it doesn't make sense, so I also went back and tweaked that too. I re-rendered this and updated the files accordingly. 

I then rendered out the timeline in Sony Vegas, and this was the resulting animation:

Animation:

I had also uploaded the video to Vimeo.com as instructed, however unfortunately the website appears to have some form of lossy compression where some of the audio was lost, so I have only presented the YouTube video instead here, but both can be found in my submission if needed.

Conclusion:

Overall, I have constructed a solid piece of animation through a thorough process of research, planning, pre-production and production. I started with initial research into the art style Minimalism, which helped me to gain a strong direction for the product. However I must admit that my research was lacking, and more could have been conducted in this area to gain better knowledge and understanding of the art style I chose for a better reflection of this in my piece of work.

After this research, I began with the pre-production, detailing a synopsis, investigating my approach to the art style, as well as other important details needed for my production. I felt that my pre-production work was a solid effort when working towards my initial direction of my animation. Although, I believe that it would have been worthwhile to perhaps approach the story and character arcs more carefully with regards to more industry-level character development. I do believe that my initial story was a solid approach, but this would have benefited from perhaps research into similar and in-dept stories or other media examples in the same field as my story planned to be. 

When developing my story into a storyboard/animatic, I felt this went well. After receiving feedback from my current pre-production, it was suggested that perhaps the ending could be adjusted into something more ambiguous. I decided to go ahead with these recommendations and adjust the ending of my story accordingly. Despite this, I failed to find the necessary time to revisit and update my animatic, as other assignments were taking priority and this was something I had overlooked until it was too late. This meant that I had to use estimates for timings for these improvised shots, which was not ideal, despite it working out in the end. This is something I regret not doing but it is a lesson I can adapt for the future.

When planning the animation, at first my planning was fairly limited, but eventually I was able to use the appropriate planning methods and create a very concise planning document detailing many of the specifics of when each shot would have been produced. This document was something I closely followed during the production and was grateful for the thorough planning I had invested as it definitely sped up my workflow. 

When beginning with the production of the assignment, I immediately felt a regret in the planning. I worked on the first two shots that only included backgrounds. Before moving on to the next shot which was character based, I realised that this perhaps was not the best strategy, as I felt that continuity may be lost if I was to bounce back and forth between creating backgrounds and animating/creating characters, a method of workflow I was not so accustomed to. 

I therefore made the quick decision to adapt my planning to continue with the backgrounds before working on the characters, especially considering some scenes required the backgrounds to be animated in them. I do regret not planning this more concisely like I did with the actual animation of the shots, as some shots (particularly shot 15 and shot 22) took much longer to produce the backgrounds for, but this is due to this being my first individual 2D animation project; In the past a group member would supply the backgrounds for us animators to use. This is something I can look back on when working on future projects. 

In regards to the animating and background creation of this project, I felt that this went very well. The animation (for the most part) was very solid, and backgrounds felt very consistent to me with a clear art style defined within them. In addition, the characters felt like they belonged in this environment, and also fit the story nicely. My only regret is a couple of animations (especially shot 23) that could have looked better, but my inexperience with 2D animation was the cause of this and hopefully I can improve my 2D animation skills for any future projects, some lessons of which I could carry over to other fields as well. 

The title sequence was - in my opinion - very well done, with clear connection to the promotional poster and themes of the story as well. I have done motion graphic based work in the past, so I was much more confident when producing this portion of the work. Though, the idea and thought behind this title sequence was not well thought out, as it was reminded to me from peer feedback later in this assignment. I went through a couple iterations of the sequence before settling on the design, something I could have perhaps avoided and done better with more planning and perhaps research into existing title sequences as well. This goes to show the level of planning that is necessary to provide an industry-level piece of animation work. 

Finally, feedback played a huge part in the development of this project. At many stages I would receive industry-level feedback, as well as worthwhile critique and suggestions from other peers as well. This was especially helpful at certain stages of my animation, particularly towards the end of our pre-production work. Typically this is a recurring lesson across many projects I have worked upon, in which feedback has been vital to the production of a successful piece of work. Some feedback was not taken on board where I felt that it maybe did not fit better than what was already in place, but most feedback was either indirectly or directly inserted into this project to help push the outcome from being an animation I could appreciate to an animation others could appreciate as well.