Character Designs

The first step towards creating an NSS sting would be the design stage. Without design I would have no central protagonist, no layouts, no backgrounds and without careful and in depth design none of my created characters would have the appeal or depth i wanted them to have. Therefore this stage is arguably one of the most important stages in the whole pipeline. Following are selected pages and drawings from my sketchbook from which i began to design my piece.

Here we can see my original sketches for designing the robot I would later call "Chip". I decided to start with the head as this was, in my eyes, the most important element of the character. It is where I would be doing most of the "acting" and emoting so it needed to be a solid design to allow me to get the most form my character. I tried to keep to quite a traditional "loony tunes/disney" round shapes style as this is what appeals to me most and feel will appeal to a lot of people out there. It also gives me more scope to push the poses and movement in the animation to give a more entertaining performance.

first design sketches for "Chip's" head

Shown below are some more concept work sketches from my design sketchbook. My aim with the other robots in the piece was to give them a more boring feel, like they were blending into the background and part of some mundane life that never changed so I opted to use angular shapes, more boxlike to give a sense of old technology but not push that too much so it still gave the futuristic impression I wanted.

top left: "generic bot" initial designs, top right: concept landscape, bottom right: first storyboard

Here is a final coloured draft of my storyboard. Although finished, this storyboard actually belonged to a project that existed before and was changed into the NSS sting project. Because of this I took this finished storyboard, scrapped the story but kept the initial designs and setting and morphed it into the NSS sting idea. Although this saved me some work and didn't have to start from scratch again, it did mean i needed to go back to the drawing board and refine characters and rethink plot lines.

Finished coloured storyboard that was scrapped

These pages from my sketchbook shown below contain the finished "Chip" design. once i had finished his design I started to draft other characters to accompany him in the piece. Some of them are shown on this page however a few didn't make it as I designed them to go in a storyline I ended up scrapping in favour of a simpler, more solid one. Also shown here are some drafted keyframe poses I would be using in the shots i would be doing. In doing this careful planning of poses it would make it easier when it came to finally animating as I had all the key poses ready to draw and I wouldn't have to waste time thinking as I'm drawing. By the end of the piece these key poses will have changed slightly anyway because of the differences in screen and pages but with the initial poses there I had a strong foundation to work on.

top left: key poses for one of my scenes, bottom left: more key poses, right: page from sketchbook showing final design of "Chip"

 The following pages show my in depth development of "Chip".

top right:key poses for shot 2 showing attitude bottom left:some angled poses for turnaround bottom right:poses for upgrade shots

These are more of the key poses I described before. There are a fair few as I wanted a detailed understanding of how he was going to move in these shots well before I went in and animated them so I chose to refine these key poses quite early on. Also on this page is the first digital version of "Chip". I drew him into Flash using the sketches as a template and also began to think of a colour scheme. I used fairly heavy black lines to outline him as I like to use heavy lines in my style of work, I like to use them almost as a hierarchy so that in my piece it is possible to tell where your attention should be from the thickness of the line round the object or character, I like to use the lines to draw the eye to the action. In terms of colour I wanted to go for a rusted, old feel like he was battered up and on his last legs so I went for the rusty browns and muted colours. I gave him a hint of gold but muted this again into the brown just to give a sense that this robot once was new and sparkly etc but had become worn and old.

top left: key poses top right: close up key poses bottom: digital character sheet for "Chip"

 After developing "Chip" to completion, I then needed to think about some of the ancillary characters that would star in the animation with him whether it be far in the background or part of the action too.

top: character designs for "Camera bot"

colour test for camera bot

It was after experimenting with colour on these designs that I realised colouring my animation in this realistic way was going to kill me to get it in on the deadline and probably wasn't even possible. Therefore I began to start thinking about an alternative way to colour my piece. My design stage however was over and I moved on to the next stage in the pipeline.

Storyboard

What follows are a few pages of select drawings from my storyboard. being 100 drawings in length there would be no point screen-shotting all of them so I have compiled all of them into a slideshow at the bottom of this section. I drew each frame manually into the computer using "autodesk sketchbook pro" as it had a nice image sequencer and playback so I could see how the storyboard was moving and ended up with a fairly accurate summation of what the final animation would be like. As with design, this storyboarding was essential for me to realise my final animation as I would use this as my layout design to achieve consistent, aesthetically pleasing camera angles and basic layouts. This stage would also allow me to see all the designs come together and see if they worked well against the others.

Now that my storyboard was complete I had a rough idea of how the thing was going to look. The next step from here was to get a better idea of the movement and timing which the storyboard couldn't give me. To do this I would have to take my storyboard and turn it into an animatic.

Animatic

The next stage of the pipeline was the animatic. this would give me the timing of my finished animation and would be used as a guide for the rest of my team to follow so I wouldn't have to be in constant communication with them. Normally the storyboard could be taken and then literally put in order and then have a certain amount of time dedicated to each frame and that would be your animatic. I decided that although my storyboard was fine, there was a lot i needed to refine so that it would translate more to the finished piece for example the first shot was going to be done as one long continuous pan so therefore having the frames of the storyboard which didn't do that wouldn't be as helpful to me or my team so i decided to completely redraw all the frames to the necessary formats. I used photoshop to draw the new materials and then imported those into after effects to add movement and flow.

This is the full frame redrawn layout for Shot 1. This actually turned out to be the most ambitious and most problematic shot to do simply because of its size. Having never done anything of this size before it was like diving blind into something I had no idea how to do.  I drew all the lines in photoshop and then blocked in a white fill so everything was clear and not the messy jumble that leaving it as transparent line work would have given. This was important on a shot of this size with so much detail. Whilst blocking in the white fill I changed the background colour to a random colour so I had a contrast between the white background and the white of the fill. It was when I had finished the white fill when I stepped back and saw that I really liked the look of this white line work against such a bold, block colour. I had found my colouring method. I decided to use these block colour backgrounds behind the white line art to give my animation a unique look and style and also a handy way to reduce the work load on colouring.

top: the full frame of shot 1 that would be panned across bottom: the print bot and print booth he sits in from the shot

This is the animatic layout for Shot 2. In keeping with my newly decided colour scheme I took a block colour as my background. I didn't take too much care picking complimentary colours at this point because I knew that would come at a later date when I wanted to tie the animation together. Shown below is also my method of getting ti to move. Instead of going through the lengthy process of doing full rough movements (seeing as I had already planned those key frame poses extensively in the design stage) I redrew the main key frame poses all on this scene as shown below in photoshop and then in after effects I revealed just one, then hid it and revealed the next pose to give the sense of movement. This gave me the directions and proportions of the movement within the scene and also gave me the timing as I timed it to how long the movement would take. I would use this information a lot when it came to roughing my final animation. It was this shot where I also took the opportunity to add some movement into the background as I wanted quite a nice level of detail in all areas of the animation including the background so I drew a flock of bird bots which would flock out of the dead tree trunk. Little touches like this would give my animation quite a nice depth.

top left: the three main key frame poses in Shot 2 bottom left: my redrawn background bottom right: a section of the background for shot 2 which contains the movement of the flock of bird bots

 For one of the shots I had planned out and realised a sequence of three upgrade shots where Chip received a number of upgrades from the arms of the NSS machine. Once the first draft of my animatic had been completed it was clear it was far too long. I then decided these three separate shots which took up almost a minute of time could be condensed into one shot split up into three sections all playing at the same time. On pitching this idea to my team they agreed but it was brought to my attention that the shot of him being painted looked more like he was being sprayed with perfume so I went back to my sketchbook and drew these key poses for a battery replacement instead which was more robotic and gave me more of a chance to play around with movement and expressions of chip and therefore made it a better shot. These would be put into after effects in the same way as the others and timed out.

key frame poses of Chip getting his batteries changed

 This is Shot 3 and for this shot I had decided I wanted a P.O.V shot form Chips perspective of him seeing the NSS machine just to give the animation a change in view and break up the backgrounds a bit and also speed up the pacing which was slightly lacking at the beginning of the first draft of animatic. Doing this also meant there wasn't much to animate so it was an easy shot. I didn't want the shot to become boring hoever so I drew a robot whale creature and asked my other animator to add it into the shot making it rise or jump out of the water just to add more movement into a fairly static shot. It was also redrawing this shot where I came up with the design for the NSS machine. I wanted something that would stick out and look new and modern against the industrial and broken down backgrounds so I gave it more curves and lots of sticky-out flashy details to give a sense of this brand new, flashier alternative to survey machines.

top left: the full composited shot bottom left: the shot without the POV screen over it bottom right: my design for the NSS machine

In these shots I wanted to give the impression of intimidation and caution Chip would feel towards this newcomer and also a sense of power and domination over the old method of surveying which is represented by the uncaring, run down print bot of the first shot. Where we look down on that method we look up at this one. Both of these shot were fairly simple with Chip moving firstly towards and then away form the machine as it began to upgrade him etc so to add a bit more excitement to these I added a camera move that played with the already forced perspective of the machine and made for a much more interesting shot.

top left: the shot of chip about to get his upgrade bottom left: chip intimidated about to use the machine left: extended chip

 If you look at my original animatic and this page of the same shot it is clear to see that it has been drastically changed. The problem with my original draft of shot 5 was that it was far too long, lingering on a static shot that got boring no matter how many flashy screen effects etc we added. Therefore I went back to my sketchbook and came up with this idea of a turnaround shot where the camera does just over 180 degrees from over to chips shoulder to facing chip and we see the survey being completed inside chips head screen. this was much more interesting but it also called for a lot more animation and planning so I had to redraw some key poses for the movement and also multiple angles of chip to show the turnaround which can be seen here. I would also have to work closely with my background artist to get the background right on this.

top left: final key poses of the turnaround top right: beginning key poses of turnaround bottom: key poses before turnaround

 These are closeup shots for Chip being upgraded. As I mentioned before, these individual shots were eventually refined into one single shot for times sake and also set them apart from the other shots and made for quite a nice, entertaining montage shot. most of the animation would be done on after effects anyway for that smooth mechanical feel that's difficult to achieve with Flash so i took care to get these done to the highest standard.

top left: chainsaw upgrade top right: getting an extra finger bottom: battery changing

 This was the final shot of the animation and because of the quality of the storyboard I had drawn previously I used the key poses I had already drawn and the background simply for ease. It was then a matter of timing it out to give the smug walk I wanted Chip to have, proudly displaying his new upgrades to the generic bots who abandon the old survey to take the NSS.

top: the composited shot bottom: my makeshift, temporary NSS logo that appears throughout

Now I had the animatic complete  I was now at a stage to begin the finished animation. I gave a copy of this to my entire team to work from and set about delegating shots and backgrounds to the individuals and began work on my own shots. I took the role of an animator on this project as I felt I had the emotion and feel of the movements in my own head being the creator and felt I could better portray those than some of my team mates. I got another of my team to act as an animator also as there was a lot of animating to be done and then split the other two between backgrounds.

Animatic Progression

These are the three different versions of the animatic I put together. The first being the first draft and the last being my completed final animatic that the final animation was based on.

First draft:

Second draft:

Finished Animatic

Animating - Shot 2

One of the first things I chose to do as the director of this piece was to get my team together and delegate the specific tasks out amongst them. I chose to animate. Once I had done this I then divided the shots amongst me and the other animator so we would get the piece finished for the deadline. This is the first of my shots which is Shot 2. In this shot I needed to continue from shot 1 where we establish Chip at the back of the long queue and as this is a mid shot rather than a long shot I needed to show the frustration Chip is feeling from being stuck at the back of said queue.

I had already completed the animatic for all the shots and so I started by taking the timings from shot 2 in the animatic and translating these into Flash so I could animate around them and keep it to the same time length. I drew the keyframes at these important times according to the key frames I had already planned out previously so I now had the movement of Chip. The next step is to rough out the entire shot. I used grey lines to rough it out as i could then draw over these lines in black to get the finished animation. There were several drafts of these rough movements which i scrapped and restarted until I was happy with he final movement and composition.

rough keyframes from shot 2

Shown in this keyframe is one of the rejected roughs I scrapped. the image on the far right shows an ending pose I considered too far and too pushed. I was going for the looney tunes squash and stretch fun animation style but I thought I'd gone too far with it so I dropped it for a more subtle finishing pose.

Left: rough keyframes from shot 2 Right: the rejected "pushed" rough keyframe

Once I had my roughs, I could then begin to draw over the grey lines with a clean smooth black line to get the finished image. Because I already had the movement exact with the grey lines it was simply a case of tracing over the roughs with his black line. Saying this however I did choose to cleanup some areas that weren't quite right and to keep track of volumes and stretch etc so some lines were changed but the majority were right already so I just drew over them. After I had the outline done I then needed to delete parts of the line that wouldn't show through like the rear shoulder etc (this overlap of lines occurs because I like to work on individual layers on Flash because its easy to correct and select different parts if they're on separate layers) and once this was done I blocked in a white fill to match my character to the background because I was going for the black and white line art style.

Top left: final animation image Top right: more final images Bottom right: colour swatch for Shot 2

After I had the final animation completed, I then added my animatic background into the Shot so it was as it would look in the final animation. I was going to be using the pink I had already decided on so i took swatched of this and used it to spot colour onto Chip to tie him into the background and bring unity to the whole piece. Shown below is my first attempt at spot colour, I was going for a proper shaded effect however because flash is vector based I couldn't get this result convincingly, with the shapes of the spot colour warping and distorting all over the place distracting form the animation itself so I decided to reject this for a different effect.

Top: working view of shading on flash Bottom: finshed shaded frames before rejection

I began work on the background for this shot next as the background I had used to animate against so far had been the animatic background sand would not be the finished one. Jason had drawn a selection of backgrounds and set pieces that I could cut and paste around to make new backgrounds and modify his existing ones. I needed to take this and modify it to fit into this shot. I took his drawing of a robot slum and a landscape, put these together and coloured this pink according to the swatch. I then took the trees and front hill layer from my animatic background and put this over the slum as I felt this filled out the shot and the composition of the trees frame the shot nicely. I alos felt that because of the time I had put into the backgrounds of the animatic, I was able to use them in the final animation because the quality was good enough to match jasons backgrounds and didn't look like a mismatch of styles or clash. Once I had merged these two I had my finished background for Shot 2.

Top left: my original animatic background Bottom left: the final animation background Bottom right: jasons original background

Once I had added the finished background into the piece it started to look a lot more pleasing. I now needed to readdress my problem with the colour on Chip. I decided that instead of the shaded effect I should just block certain areas of Chip in the spot colours. Because the background is blocked in this way with no shading, I thought that Chip should have the same method. I took my design of Chip and blocked colour into areas that would be dark anyway, for example areas that were faced behind other surfaces on Chip casting shadows etc. I then graded these according to their darkness and coloured them with the appropriate colour swatch.

stills from final Shot 2

Shot 2 was now complete. I feel that the movement and attitude I have conveyed through Chip reflects his mood perfectly and shows the frustration and boredom felt waiting at the back of a never moving queue. I also feel the background composition is appealing and perfectly balanced with Chip with details in the right place and offsetting the level of detail to balance the frame nicely. The colour scheme also looks awesome with a perfect set of complimentary tones and amount of colour which creates a unique style and an eye catching look to the piece.

Final Shot:

Animating - Shot 5

Another shot I had given myself to do was Shot 5. This was one of the most ambitious shots in the entire animation as when I reviewed this shot I decided it required a 180 degree camera turnaround. I already knew that this was going to cause multiple problems but now it was time to face them.

Before I started worrying about the background and the turnaround I needed to rough the movement out again as it had been so helpful in the previous shot. I started by roughing out the part of the shot that didn't call for a turnaround.

selections of rough frames from Shot 5

more rough poses from Shot 5

Once I had roughed the movement for the beginning of the shot I added a background so i could see where the action needed to be and where to avoid. I then went over the rough lines with the thicker black outline and cleaned up the shapes to keep volumes and integrity.

working views of animating Shot 5

Once I had reached this point I now needed to tackle the camera problem. Flash itself has no camera tools so its impossible to create a camera to view through and manipulate so I wasn't able to do the camera move in flash. After effects however does have a camera tool so I decided to use it to complete the shot. Now I encountered another problem. The background that I had added as a template was a 2d flat image which is a problem when working in a 3d space as when the camera rotates round the image will be seen to be planar and flat and not an environment that circulates around in 360 degrees which is the effect I wanted to achieve. To combat this I put the image into photoshop and split it into eight equal segments. I then imported these into after effects separately and built the image again using these individual segments. To then achieve the 3d "cheat" I arranged these segments into a horseshoe shape that spanned 180 degrees and enough to be covered by the camera as shown below. This meant that when I added the camera and its movement in after effects the image remained in the background maintaining its perspective and keeping up the illusion that it is moving in 3d space. I originally had a team member working on some 3d environments however due to personal difficulties he was unable to produce anything for our animation so this workaround had to be created which I actually feel fits far better into the line art approach we were taking.

Top:keyframe images form the turnaround section Bottom:working views of the "horseshoe" background and camera in after effects

Once this background had been created in after effects I then exported this as a Flash professional XFL file so it could be imported into Flash as the background. I had to ensure however that I did this background first as I could animate to this to get the angle right and speed etc but alos because I could modify anything in Flash however I couldn't modify this background in Flash because it exported out as a un-editable video clip. The reason I did this however and not importing Flash into after effects because flash doesn't export with transparencies being a vector based program there are no alpha channels so importing into after effects would leave big white boxes around it and therefore making it unusable.

Top: the image seen through the camera Bottom: the arrangement of the segments to get the image above

Once i had imported the background into Flash I then animated the turnaround to match it, white blocked it and spot coloured it. the colour it would end up being.

Top left: finished stills from Shot 5 Top right: another finished still  Bottom: colour swatch for Shot 5

Now I had finished the animation for this shot I now needed to add the real background I would be using. Up until this point I had been using a templated background that had the dimensions of what I needed. Jason had drawn for me a background for this shot however it wasn't not long enough to stretch convincingly into the 180 degree cheating shot therefore i had to send it back to him requesting he add more onto the length of it. Once he had returned the new lengthened drawing I took it and applied the colour to it and split it up as I had with the template and simply arranged it in after effects literally replacing the old templated background segments with the new ones so the shot would remain the same just with the new background.

Top: working view of new background in after effects Bottom: splitting the long image in photoshop

 Once my background had been imported into flash I then ensured that the character turnaround matched the background turnaround and remained convincing. This shot definitely took the longest to complete because of its complex nature however I had made things easier for myself by familiarising myself with the character early on in the design phase and realising him many different angles helped me to achieve this multi-angled turnaround convincingly.

still images from the character turnaround

Shot 5 was now complete and I feel it is one of the most impressive shots of the whole piece. I have had to work hard and it has caused many problems and time wasted on solving these but the end result is all worth it. My original Shot 5 was a static shot that lasted nearly a minute and was extremely boring. This has transformed into a far more interesting 180 degree turnaround shot with 3d(ish) elements, big character movements and impressive text effects added on after effects which holds the audience much more effectively and gives the whole animation a more dynamic and visually appealing quality.

a selection of still images from the finished animation

Final shot:

Animating - Shot 8

Because of Shot 5 being such a pain to animate I left myself little time to complete any other shots, therefore I gave one of my other shots to my other animator as he had completed all of his due to them being easier shots to animate with not much character animation so i gave him the montage shot to complete as it had a good character animation opportunity. I did however take the final shot to animate because it contained a walk cycle which I wanted to do as a challenge to get across the feeling of pride and boastfulness in a walk.

My first step was to redraw the background for this shot. I had previously redrawn the background for my animatic however I felt that when I imported it into Flash it didn't have the quality I wanted and also look pixellated enough to destroy the link between the vector based character and the pixel based background. Once I had redrawn the background I needed to animate over this. I started by creating a pose that showed pride and boasting. My finished pose is shown below in the image.

Top left: a still outlined from shot 8 Middle: colour palette for upgraded Chip Right: proud Chip pose

A noticeable difference in this shot is that Chip is coloured differently to the background. All through the animation I have used spot colours from the background to colour Chip but here I wanted to show that Chip had been upgraded and was now different from the other boring, same robots because of the NSS survey machine. I used a blue because none of the other colours used in the animation are even close to blue so theres a nice contrast however I have also chosen to tone it down to a slightly more pastel version so it stays within the realms of my other colours and compliments them whilst remaining different. Once I had the animation and the colours sorted I added the background which Jason made for me and the Shot was complete. I chose the green again for the last shot because the colours for each shot go round in a circle ending up back at green which was something I decided on early in production as I thought this was quite a nice idea seeing as the beginning and end shots were supposed to be in the same place but from different angles.

selected stills from the finished animation and the colour swatch for the background

Finished Shot:

Now all my shots were complete and I then collected all the shots together and the music etc and put them all into after effects and edited the entire piece single handedly as I felt I knew best what the cuts and timing should be so I thought this would be fastest. The animation was now complete.

Title Card

The very last final thing I needed to do was to add a title card to the end of the animation with the names of my team members and I and also the required logos and names I needed to get into the animation. I did this using InDesign as this has the best text tools and layouts features.

I have taken the logos and images needed from Blackboard but I have inverted the colours as the originals are black rather than white and I wanted to have White objects and text on a black background. I did this using photoshop and a simple invert tool.

I then added these when I put the animation together in the edit and left onscreen at the end so that if someone is unable to read it while it is actually moving/playing then it can be left onscreen after it has stopped and all the important aspects of the title card are still displayed.

Final Animation

My final completed animation



youtube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjQP-Lq0-Q4

PDP - Personal Development Plan

Professional Development Plan

NSS Stings - ANI1018M Animation Practice 01 & PDP

Overall working on this sting has been an enjoyable experience. I have bonded with the people in my group which I probably wouldn't have done so to such a degree before being put in a group with them. Some friction has occurred between certain members of the group however there was no personal reasons involved, it was simply an issue of attendance. My attendance on the whole was not perfect however I managed to get the work done i needed to and didn't let the rest of my team down and my attendance is something i am looking to greatly improve for next year. between the three of us, the forth unfortunately not particularly submitting any kind of work, i feel we achieved a mammoth task completing an ambitiously long animation with ambitious content. As the director i felt that my team responded positively to my suggestions and i in turn took suggestions from them and I felt we brought a great "team" atmosphere to the whole thing. I could trust the other guys to get on with what id assigned to them and had no worries that it would not be completed. In particular, Jason's Layouts almost made our animation and i commend him highly for them. I also feel that working with another animator has allowed me to see another persons method of working and allowed me to pick up tips and shortcuts as I have passed on to him so I have gained much from this experience. As for my preferred future role, I enjoy the art aspect to animation because it lets you express creativity and achieve much higher levels of beauty etc that would be feasible when animating, however my personal interest is finding the beauty in a subtle movement or getting an expression "spot on". That is what excites me most about animation so I would have to say I am more swayed towards the animation side.