ANIMATING THE NOVEL!
NOTE: THIS UNIT CONTINUES ON FROM THE PREVIOUS UNIT, UNIT 55 GRAPHIC NOVEL, THIS IS THE SECOND PART OF THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, THE ANIMATION STAGE.
Following on from the last project which involved the creation of my graphic novel, i now embark on a quest to animate this as an expansion on from the previous unit.
Audience, Age, Genre: The target audience that i've decided and considered basing my Graphic novel around is a teenaged base, I feel that the theme of my story, being a science fiction based story is fitting to that age group, 12 to 18 year olds, then again i could say it could interest those twelve and above.
The audience i think that i'll settle on is a age range twelve and upward as a story that i devised wouldn't really be suitable due to some of the themes within.
Interests: This animation is for mainly those who enjoy silly, hand drawn flash animations.
Viewing contexts: I'll be publishing this animation straight to youtube once i have finished the combination of songs, sound and so on.
PLANNING:
1: What part of your panel will you animate?:
The section of my panels ill be animating is the first two-four, i've chosen these because they're relativly easy to get animated and sound for, I'll be animating this using the flash professional CS6 program.
2: Storyboarding the content of animation - What will happen...?
The following....
3: Consider movement shots that are needed and how will you keep the continuinity?
The way in which i'll capture the movements is using a frame by frame movement system in my graphic novel animation, the way it'll pan out is it won't take place in the panels itself, well this may change depending on how it looks and whether it is aesthetically pleasing or not.
4: What perspective will you use?:
The perspective that i've chosen to use is a 3rd person perspective so then the audience will be watching it as if they're just a passerby witnessing the events that play out in the animation.
5: What changes or extents of an action or movement will you include? And how smooth do you want it to be?
The movements i'm going for in this graphic novel is a choppy sudden movement from panel to panel and it'll give the illusion of movement and the kind of FPS i'm going for is a steady default of 24 FPS.
6: Where will you publish it?:
I'll publish this on YouTube.
7: Soundscape design, what sounds do you need?
The sounds ill require will be a sort of wind sound, Narration of sort, crashes, a bit of music
How I made the animation.
[0]: Before beginning my animation I was conceptualising ideas for my animation and deciding as to which two or three frames I was going to animate for this UNIT, I decided to return to my hand drawn designs as I wanted to give it that hand drawn style, here is the hand drawn version to give you an idea of the first two to three frames to which I decided animating:
[1]: To begin with I began with a blank canvas, I set the document specifications to a nice and healthy 1920x1080 HD Setting, to not only increase my page size but to also ensure that the animation when it comes to export, stays nice and crisp at a High definition level. Another thing to note is that during the creation process I kept the background at the default colour because otherwise I would run into problems such as being unable to change the background colour later in the animation. I hand drew everything with a graphics tablet from the backgrounds, to the characters and even the speech queues…
[2]: I then began to structure my animation by messing around with it, drawing some characters to get familiar with the program. A side note; this animation is the first animation I’ve created with Flash and prior to creating this I haven’t had any experience with the flash animator either. It didn’t take me long to get used to the layout or controls as being familiar with the adobe programs such as Photoshop, it was already a familiar setup. Getting setup and used to it I created a short walk cycle of a little happy man walking along and talking using speech bubbles, it was a nice animation, unfortunately it was a rough piece and a warm up.
[3]: I began working on my title sequence, as you can see below I decided to go for a multi coloured frame by frame sequence using different Reds… Yellows and Blues. I decided to animate this in the form of a wobbly effect by creating multiple copies of the same frame and adjusting the position of the outline, background, letters and pictures after doing this I changed the colour of each single frame which would add another flashy effect to it, all of this is down to the basis of illusion of movement which you can find if you refer to the ‘History of Animation’ topic I created a while back it will explain clearly what the Illusion of movement is.
[4]: After solving the title sequence and brushing it up and smoothing it out I then began on laying out the two frames I was going to animate with a few between, the few frames between would be fillers however the majority of the frames in the sequence are stretched out by out 10 times what they were this is to lengthen and slow down the animation itself, these are based off of my original hand drawings which involved an off screen explosion followed by two characters that would argue back and forth about the event that just happened. I started with a cityscape frame and duplicated two-three iterations of the same frame which were slightly tweaked to again, just like the title sequence have a wobbly effect and give the illusion that the cityscape was moving, half way through creating the City scape sequence I was debating what FPS to set the animation to. After a lengthy discussion with Connor Chadwick about what FPS is best for a flash animation I settled on 10fps, this is because it blended extremely well with the stretched out frames and gave a smooth slow pace to my animation by the end of the production the animation came to a nice 41.1 Seconds in length.
[5]: After completing the FPS and title sequence I quickly moved onto the first proper frame where I would introduce my first character, John. John like many men in my hand drawn version differs from the animation version as in my hand drawn version he is wearing a Red military cap, whereas the animation version isn’t wearing any caps, I accompanied my first character with a ‘Kaboom’ to the left of the screen which would kick start the first frame, I later recorded sounds and this sound is the voice of a class mate; Liam Mills voicing the majority of my characters in different styles except one character of which I voiced. The voice replicated the script I wrote down which the line was of course ‘What the Hell’ this was the characters reaction mirrored to that in the hand drawn version except no explosion is seen in the first frame.
You can compare both the digital and hand drawn versions to see what I cut and what I kept.
[6]: Once I completed these three frames I went back and cleaned them up slightly, they were rather messy and rough with multiple overlapping animations which were leaking into the next frame without intention this caused the next animation to play over whilst the current animation was playing. This was a rather easy problem to fix I just had to space them wide apart from each other so their animations wouldn’t clash. I then imported to the library my sounds for these three frames these consisted of the following lines;
-My Bad
-Fires out
-Uh… Alright…
These lines were recorded and voiced by myself and Liam Mills in the sound studio the same day these frames were created.
[7]: At this point I got stuck as how to smoothly link the first frames with the second frames because in the hand drawn comic version I link them up with a meanwhile but I felt this was rather boring, but after reconsidering I decided to the same as my title sequence and link the frames together with some wobbly effect meanwhile screen sequences. My next frames would consist of a character in a yellow shirt and military cap with sunglasses, the reason I did this was sunglasses tend to symbolise a person as being a badass, so I essentially gave my character sunglasses for that exact reason. I posed him towards the camera with military air support drops parachuting in the background.
The original concept for this originated in the hand drawn version with a less fat version of a military man, but in the hand drawn I changed his clothing to green as opposed to the yellow in the animation and this was because I wanted him to prominently stand out against the background in the bottom right corner of the screen.
[8]: After creating the first part of the second frame I duplicated it and created a version of the man with his glasses on his forehead and shocked at the fact hi supplies had just blown up mid drop. I took this frame and further duplicated it and from doing this I created a back and forth loop of his eyes looking at the disaster and to the audience, essentially breaking the fourth wall rule.
Originally in the drawn comic this character only had one frame to himself and that was the last of his fame, but I decided to develop his screen time further here in the animation and give him a good part in the animation.
[9]: Here you can see the multiple layers, the majority of all these layers are sound clips for the voices of my characters and the music that I decided to use these were ‘Clap to find car keys’ and ‘X-Files’ theme I chose these two different pieces of music firstly because I needed a soundtrack to run all throughout the animation to give it that jumpy cartoon feel that you usually see in some older cartoons and the second reason Is with the X-Files theme I placed it into my animation because it is a particular soundtrack that is associated with conspiracy therefore I placed a snippet of this soundtrack at the end of my animation in the credits theme whilst presenting my made up ‘Company name and logo’ for my animation.
[10]: Here we are, at the end of the construction process, you can clearly see my production frame of which appears at the end of the animation, I chose the theme of MLG; Major League Gaming and 2Dank Productions accompanied by a custom illuminati logo. I did this because among the class it is an inside joke and well the production frame could be anything right?
THE FINISHED PRODUCT! BE AMAZED BY THE ANIMATION!
EVALUATION:
Self Evaluation
1: How have your drawing and editing skills developed during the project?
- Since the graphic novel creation i think that this project focused primarily on my drawing skills and to be honest i think i've managed to adapt my drawing skills to the classic cartoon child like style and i think overall they have improved slightly, Not alot i did choose to go back to my hand drawn styles and i can admit that it isn't upto the scratch of what my artwork for another tutor is like.
2: Are there any ideas or techniques that you wish you had explored further?
- Well i think if we were allowed and had more time that i'd animate the ENTIRE of page one of my hand drawn designs because i think that with the aid of more silly voice acting would make for a top quality animation.
3: How was your time management for the project?
- Time management was spot on i managed to finish everything before the date in question and prepared for the animation screening without any problems, i also managed to create a survey for my Peer evaluation on SurveyMonkey a site that easily allows for the creation of questionnaires.
4: What techniques and materials did you use, and why? Did they work successfully? What effect did they have?
- Well the materials i had at my disposal for this project was primarily Adobe Flash and Photoshop as well as my own Graphics tablet that i used to animate and draw out all of the frames and such, The techniques i used were ones i learnt from a nice little tutorial series called 'Harry's HuHa's' a series in which a professional cartoon animator on YouTube explains how beginners can animate simply with Flash. Many of the techniques i used range from the Wobble effect and illusion of movement, these are two elements that my animation is dependant on without these elements it would essentially just be a base slideshow with audio queues.
5: Do you think that your drawings and story you have produced are creative? Are you happy with your final images?
- Following on from the hand drawn designs and replicating that into a digital animator i think it worked very well, i have explained the process in which i created the animation above in the 'HOW IT'S MADE' section and what techniques i used, i think they are creative my novel in animated form takes the creative comedy effect of a silly cartoon with some funny sounds and movements.
6: What feedback did you receive from other people and do you agree with it?
- Below is one snippet of feedback i've received prior to the screening of my animation mainly because i wanted to know what a friends thoughts were on it, I'll update on the remainder of the results once the screening has been completed.
Here is the Link to the results: https://www.surveymonkey.com/analyze/dlYS07_2BZjkeePJRxNyVTEHvVqBgr6HTHhM2LWiM82zs_3D
Overall the feedback has been positive, bar the few problems my animation had where it would cut off slightly, I have since addressed this issue and have fixed this.
7: Is there anything you would change about your images if you were going to do them again? Why?
- Not really because looking at it, you'd think it was just a rushed sort of animation, but i'm pleased with the way it turned out the roughness is its strength and the cartoon childlike art style is too so, no, no there isn't anything that i think i'd change if i were to redo them, unless adding more is a option.
Prior screening Review:
Zeeshan: I thinks this is a highly detailed produced animation which you have made. The audio that you have used for your animation is clear and well recorded which works well with the frames for each individual one in your animation .
You have also made each frames timing accordingly which makes the whole animation work flawlessly and effectively.
I would give you a D for your animation as there are not mistakes or errors for your animation which I could have mentioned for your animation, as you have followed throroughly through the assignment brief criteria.
