Responsive: Collaborative Practice: Finishing off the Final Animation and Submission Boards

Finishing the Animation

With the majority of the background assets done, I finally got on to doing the character animation in Photoshop. I decided to go with Frame-by-frame over DUIK, partially as a change of pace, but also to lend to the tangible aesthetic I was going for with the background assets, with imperfect motion sort of reminiscent of cut out animation. To start off with I imported the character models from the model sheet into a blank PSD file, separating the head and body onto different layers in order to make animating them separately a lot easier. Part of the reason I designed the character's arms and legs as a sort of pipe cleaner shape, reminiscent of Pendleton Ward's character designs, was to make animating the character easier without having to worry too much about volume or proportion. Character's are animated at 24fps, but on twos, so technically they move at 12fps, which I feel lends to the more cutout style I was going for.

One problem I had animating the character was that roughing out the key poses was particularly difficult, mostly due to the art style I decided on. Without line work, there is more pressure to get the poses right on the first go. Extra care must be taken when using a vector style that everything is consistently in proportion to the frames coming before and after.

In order to keep the branding consistent across all three of our animations we created our own typeface to use for the title cards shown at the beginning of each of our animations. Molly had the neatest handwriting that was the most on-brand with NAS's fonts, so she created a sketchbook page of characters, both upper and lower case, which I translated digitally (by tracing the Sketchbook scan) and she made into an actual font we could use and uploaded the .ttf file to Google Drive. We debated applying a line boil to the text, but felt it worked just as well without.

Molly's Hand Font

To composite my animation I imported the PSD files containing the background assets and character animations into After Effects directly as individual compositions, partially due to the fact this allows me to edit the Photoshop file while its in the After Effects project without having to reimport everything every time I make a change. The compositing process is where I essentially make the animation; where I arrange all the objects in the frame, transition between scenes and edit the pace to the audio clip. Composition is where most of the direction happens, it is the stage of animation, I feel, that gives the most leeway for improvisation and deviation from the storyboards and animatic.

For this shot here I composited two PSD compositions, parenting them to the background so when the camera pans down from the title card to them, they stay in the same place and move up together. I also had to make sure the frames within the compositions were all aligned, as the silhouettes are supposed to act confused (displayed by the question marks appearing above their head) once Alex has started talking.

For the camera pan to the right of the screen I parented the two PSDs to one another and simply tweened them to the left of the screen. The incoming PSDs were already pre-comped so they didn't have to be parented to each other.

For the next transition I had to get creative with the use of coloured backgrounds. Here I deviated a little from my storyboards where I didnt clearly outline how I was going to transition between the two shots, simply saying I was going to fade between the two shots. However I came up with a more dynamic and creative method in the compositing process.

As the camera pans down into empty space the background changes colour from purple to the turquoise sky colour of the next shot. This had a much more seamless effect than my original plan which was to simply fade from one scene to the next.

I made a few changes to this shot after the feedback I received during the crit the other week, changing the direction and shape of the reflection to better reflect the placement of the moon in the night sky. I also added a few finer background details such as the flocks of birds you see moving in the background. These are all the same PSD, flipped and deformed slightly, consisting of only around a dozen frames, however the effect of more lateral movement in the background I feel makes the shot much more dynamic and pleasing to look at, not to mention dreamlike.

Initially I was to have another scene in Alex's bedroom showing her doing her day to day activities, however I felt that letting this shot of Alex floating in a bubble, more time to breath was more effective, and that shoving in another scene would have a detrimental effect on the pace of the animation, so I decided to linger on it a little longer. The shot then fades to white to a scene which I drew as a part of my concept art, rescaled and redrawn to more closely fit the storyboards.

Another deviation from the storyboards comes at the end, when the camera pans up towards the moon just as Alex says 'It's like being on a different planet'. The pan past the asteroid belt now acts are a sort of reveal at the end to punctuate the reveal of the National Autistic Society logo.

While the D&AD brief doesn't outline specifically which video codecs to use when adding to the render queue, I used the .H264 video codec, exporting the final animation at 1920 x1080 pixels, 24 frames per second as a Quicktime .mov.