Animal Project-Animation

3/30 — Storyboard

For my story board, I just mapped out the frames I am looking to animated and then also made note of different transitions that I want to include.

Breakdown of the storyboard:

• Cell 1: Title page on an arial view of the water
• Cell 2: Title moves off of the page as a black skimmer comes in and skims the water where title use to be
• Cell 3: Close up of the skimmer gliding along the water
• Cell 4: Scene before pans out to two skimmers along the water
• Cell 5: Transition to a flight scene where we see the bird flying to shore
• Cell 6: Skimmer lands on the beach
• Cell 7 & 8: The bird standing on the beach and a beach ball bounces in front when the bird disappears

I think the biggest question I have going into this is whether the ball bouncing and the bird disappearing scene is a bit to figurative. I think right now it has the possibility to turn out really cool and also leave the audience with a few questions.

The overall style and color of my animation will similar if not the same to my poster. I want to have a level of consistence among those two parts of the project.

4/1 -Assets

For this class, I mainly wanted to create the assets that I would put into After Effects later. I started with the title sequence where I have the bird coming into frame and sweeping the title out of the way. Right now I am really enjoying the details on the water, however I do not like the font or the color of the font.

4/5 — Intro of animation and more assets

Intro Scene:

The beginning of the animation starts with the bird flying over the title, and then having it disappear with it flies over. To animate the water, I put the assets of the water shadows into after effects and then used the puppet tool to slightly move the shadows back and forth. This gave the appearance of ocean movement that is small, but effective.

I did run into the problem of loosing some of my assets. There is suppose to be a shadow on the left side of the title, however when I reopened my file, this part of the animation was gone. I am going to have to go back and re-do this, but I thin it’ll be easier this time since I know more about the process.

Scene 2:

Wing Movement:

A main challenge that I ran into for this project was trying to figure out how to animate the flight sequence. At first, I approached it similar to the intro scene by trying to puppet warp the wings, however that didn't really work or look right. So, I decided to do a frame by frame of the wings. To do this I just compressed the fully extended wings and added a second wing behind the front since in a few pictures you can see both at certain times.

4/8–2 Frames and More assets

Wing Movement development:

When I put the previous wing movement into after effects it looked a little off since all I made were compressions. So, I decided to start over and this time, use screenshots from a video to act as a reference. There was a more fluid motion that came from this

Transition Scene:

For my transition from scene 2 to the final scene, I’m thinking of using this idea where the bird is shown from the top view and it flies onto the beach.

Final Scene:

I also started to make the assets for my final scene where the beach ball bounces in front of the bird. Right now I don’t really like the bird, I think its abstracted a bit too much, and the background needs some work as well. A challenge that I continue to run into is trying to abstract the sand. I don’t want too much detail on the beach, but at the same time I think just having the light pink in the background would not directly show that it is the beach.

Progress of animation:

Feedback:

• Confusion with the wings: when there are two wings v.s when there are one → show a bit of the background
• Change the text — line weight is very light and letters are spaced out
• Question about reflection: If I wanted to add reflection in the second frame, I could just add reflection of bird in intro on darker parts of the water.

4/13- Completing all 20 seconds

Screenshots to understand standing motion:

Updated Transition Scene:

Instead of having the original transition where it was the bird flying onto the beach, I decided transition between scenes using the bird walking in at the bottom of the page slowly. I’m a little worried that this is a bit too cheesy.

I also finished the

4/14 Final Submission

For the final submission, the main things I changed were the introduction, the transition pace, the beach background, and the background of scene 2.

For the introduction scene, I applied the feedback that Q gave and changed the color to grey as well as centered and lessened the font of the text. This worked a lot better and made it blend in with the bird a little less.

For each background, I also added a circle as the sun which I think balanced out the composition a bit more.

Beach Background Changes:

Before (L) After (R)

Final Video:

I actually really enjoyed this project. It was a little challenging at first to understand how to make everything, but after a while it was really fun to see all the components come together. I’m very proud of my final project, but I do think the last scene has gotten a lot of laughs, but I think its still works.