As a unit we began to learn about the vast world of animation. This was done by receiving a presentation from an animator from Jersey, Liam Nunn.
Liam Nunn has spent over a decade smashing the creative industry with precision, energy and finesse. Working with many brilliant people on oodles of ravishing campaigns – including multiple locally and nationally award-winning ones. A multi-disciplined media monster, Liam was once described by a colleague as “quite good but sometimes a bit bizarre.” Wait…
Fact #1 Liam once illustrated an award-winning dog poo.
Fact #2 Liam is a three-time professional wrestling tag team champion of the world and he probably owns more spandex than you do. Gosh!
Fact #3 Liam produced a whopping 52 weekly self-portraits over the course of a year just for larks. You can see them here.
He began by giving an in-depth power-point regarding the basics of what animation is. From this I learnt about the intrecacies of animation in as a carreer in the industry and the different types of animators, for example;
2D animator.
3D animator.
Background artist.
Character animator.
Clean-up artist.
Digital ink and paint artist.
Image editor.
Key frame animator.
I gained a unique point of knowledge regarding the nature of how something can be made to look natural when being animated
Liam then proceeded to further my knowledge on Adobe After Effects, an important piece of software for any kind of animation.
He created a template for us to start experimenting with called a rig. I then learnt how to keyframe an animation together using the stopwatch tool
And the rig controls Liam set up for us
The following is my experiment with this animation template:
For my groups NFT Film, we decided to use animation as a part of our video. I made all the aminated clips in Blender. I started off by finding low-poly art models of Sketchfab. then imported them into blender. Once in Blender I used simple animations to move the location of the scene, to give off the impression of the character walking.
This screenshot shows the timeline for the character walking. Every dot/diamond is a different movement of the character to make him walk. The character doesn’t actually move, it just walks on the spot. So I would have to animate the background. He walks on the spot as it makes it easier to only move the direction of the arms, legs etc, instead of the movement and lactation of everything. So the character and camera are stationary.
This is the scene, everything highlighted in orange is what is animated and included in the scene. I added 2 keyframes to the timeline. The first keyframe is where the buildings start, and the second is where they will end after the move and slide backwards. It slides backwards to give off the effect that the character is walking forwards. Each 2-3 second scene takes an estimated 8 hours to render.
This is the node setup for the lighting. I used a HDRI which is a spherical photo taken in real life, and the program works out where is sun is and creates the same lighting situation for inside the workspace. The orange box is the HDRI which is connected to the right two default boxes, then I added a remapping node to make the horizon of the world line up with the horizon I made in the workspace, so there aren’t photos of trees floating in the sky.
The Street Scene
Overall, the street scene is quite small. The scene is colourful which adds lots of contrast. All the scenes use depth of field to blur the background more as the character walks forward.
The left side is the object view, without the colour. Where as, the right side is the rendered, with colour.
The Farm Scene
This scene is more complex, as there is more shapes and objects. There is also larger range of colours, ranging from red to green, etc.
The Mansion Scene
This is one of my favourite scenes, as it features our main character walking outside his mansion. It is visually pleasing as uses a lot of dynamic shapes and contour.
The Beach Scene
This is one of the most colourful scenes as it uses mostly topical/beach colours. It contributes to having a diverse location for the 5 scenes.
The Space Scene
This was one of the harder scenes to make as I had to add a space helmet to him, however it is the most extreme scene as the character is in outer space.
The Zoom Out/In Animated House Scene
This animation was made to replace the original shot idea, to use a drone to zoom into a house, but we couldn’t do it due to privacy rules. So we used amination as a replacement as it fits in with the online/offline format and style.
This is what the scene looks in blender. The greyed out screenshots are the view in shader view, where as the coloured view is the rendered view, which is what it looks like when it is finished.
The camera is animated with 3 keyframes, both for location and rotation. It ends still to let the clouds move in, which allows for a clean transition from this clip to another, using a white fade transition. Overall, this clip took 12 hours to fully render 120 frames in blender.
Overall, this scene is good as it ends with a clean transition, of the clouds covering the screen. The camera is mostly smooth which follows the exponential curve, which allows for fluid movement.
We met the artist Liam Nunn and he taught us about how to do digital animation in Adobe After Effects. Before to create our small video we had to practiced moving a square. We took a look at how keyframes are placedand we exprienced. We had the opportunity to create a short animation of 5-10 seconds, thanks to the little character Liam Nunn had already created. In the whole 5-10 seconds animation we could make the character do funny face expressions, put stickers that disappeared after a few seconds, change the colours and make every part of her face move.
Storyboard
We were ask to develop our group project into a storyboard so that it will provides us a clear plan ahead of what we wish to make onour 30 sec film. We had to included details of individual scenes in our storyboard like shot sizes, the mise-en-scene, the location, props, people, lighting, sound etc.
Storyboard
The term storyboard is used to visually explain and stage a story. This term is used in the world of advertising, cinema and animation. It allows you to cut a temporal sequence or sequence plane by synthesizing the main keyframes and planes that compose it.
Our storyboard
Here is our storyboard, with my group have drawn how our 30 sec video will develop. Then what our project is about feminization decided to cut our video into three parts. Three parts for three different decades on the history of feminism. In group had decided that it could be rather interesting if we link the three decades with doors. Basically every time the model opens a door it opens the door to a better future it was a metaphor. But because of some technical problems we did not involve the doors. We still managed to find another idea to get the messages across in a better and simpler way and it’s what we did in the video.
I created my first GIF following these instructions: 1. Create layer for each image 2. Window > timeline 3. Select > Create Frame Animation 4. Drop Menu > Make frames from Layers 5. Timeline > select Forever 6. File > Export > Save for Web Legacy > reduce image size to 720x 720 pixels
Embroidery
We used embroidery with Yulia Makeyeva and we recorded an image using our iPhone of every step when we creating our embroidery by cutting our figures, shapes, words and re-stitching. Our embroidery had to be related to our groups project which is feminism. I chose carefully my fabric, I chose a fabric with flower pattern to demonstrate that women were compared to flowers because of how “delicate” they were. I also went for a satin white fabric to represent how women had to keep their virginity to be considered as pure, or fit for marriage. And pink for a “for the colour of femininity”. the pieces of frabrics are attached with a red thread that means the blood that women lose once a month. in the middle there is the word Femmes which means women in French.
First intent:
Seconde intent:
After we finished taking several images we re-assembled our images as a GIF on a timeline using Adobe Photoshop. This first intent wasn’t successful since the video wasn’t long enough and didn’t much detail into it. So for the seconded GIF I decide to have a minimum of 10 photos so it could be longer, I ended up putting 14 photos in my GIF and I prefer it than the first one.
