Beginning our final project for ‘Production Principals’, myself and my partner, Abby, selected the words ‘stars’, ‘boat’, and ‘moon’ to theme our story around. We decided that we should make a simple story with a children’s storybook feel, so as not to overcomplicate it, and to ensure it would fit in the 20 second time limit. The story we decided on was that a small character, based on an otter, would go out and put the stars up at night, but one day a space whale begins to eat them, leaving the sky empty. The otter then turns the whale into the moon to save the sky.
We had several variations on this story to begin with, and had to test out several endings, to make sure that the ending would be clear for every possible audience. To design the character, we researched several different artists which used animal characters in their work. We wanted to keep the design simple so that the character could easily be replicated in multiple frames, and wouldn’t be too complicated to draw in multiple frames. The colour scheme for the character was also based on the space setting, being predominantly blue and purple.
Deciding on our roles within the project, we wanted to work to our strong suits, so Abby focused on backgrounds, colour palette, and some of the close up animated work, such as the zoom in on the face of the otter, while I worked on the main animated areas such as the boat bubbles and flag, otter movement, and whale. After each element was complete I sent them over to Abby who would fit them into the background and order them in Adobe After Effects. The sound we used was a space themed music from a sound website. I enjoyed working with my partner as I think our skill sets worked well together, allowing us to produce a film that we were both happy with.
I chose to animate my sections in Procreate, as I am familiar with the programme, and can use the tools most efficiently. When animating the flag and bubbles, I duplicated the layers approximately every 4 seconds of animation, so that they would loop back to the start. To make this work within the animation, I made sure that the positions at the start and end were the same. I used the colour codes from Abby’s original colours for the otter, boat and whale to make sure that the colours stayed consistent throughout the entire piece. We ended up using greenscreen to add in the different animated elements, due to the limitations of file types. I would have liked to have learnt to use a programme for my animation which is used in industry, such as Photoshop or Animate, but due to time constraints decided that it was not wise to use a programme I was unfamiliar with.
When including elements that were the same as in the backgrounds, such as the stars, I made sure that they were cross-checked with the backgrounds so that the art style was consistent throughout. I think we both were able to change some aspects of our art style, such as my shading colours, and shapes used within the work, to make sure they aligned better with each other. I also think this allowed me to learn more in this project, by drawing inspiration from Abby’s work. It was also great practice as an example of what working on a team in industry would be like.
One thing I would like to improve on going forward from this project is stepping out of my comfort zone, as I feel I could have learned more from the experience if I had pushed myself more, and challenged myself to be more experimental in my work. Things like using stop motion, creating backgrounds or characters through 3D Computer or Sculpture modelling, or hand animating assets with many moving parts would have made this work more challenging, but may have also meant that we would have struggled to meet deadlines. I also think that this may have made the work more exciting to both create and watch, as ‘easy’ outcomes can sometimes not hold the attention of the viewer.
Overall I was pleased with how the final piece in this project turned out. Myself and my partner managed to work well together and create a film that worked with both of our visions, and I think well displayed both of our skills in animating and collaboration.
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