I found that this module has taught me a lot which is quite surprising because I thought I knew quite a lot about After Effects before. I have had quite a lot of experience animating using Flash and had an ok understanding of After Effects before we even started the module, however I didn't realise that there was still so much for me to learn.
When the module started I was really confident about it and tried to get into it straight away. I took the conscious effort to pick a topic really early on so that I didn't spend ages being indecisive, which is something that I always end up saying I wish I wouldn't do. This worked out well for me because I got it into my head that I needed to be decisive and then I didn't end up needing to change my ideas or my approaches as much as in other modules and I think it shows that my processes and developments are much more focussed around my subject area.
I picked a subject area that i am quite interested in: Movie Villains. I love cinema and villains are obviously a big part of that so I found the subject quite interesting. This helped me feel focussed on the subject and I had a bit of previous knowledge that helped me decide on particular villains and know some of their attributes and personalities to start figuring out how best to represent them.
As well as picking the topic early, I also picked the style of animation that i wanted to create. I decided quite early on that I wanted to use simple shapes and colours to represent the villains and that I wanted it to be a light hearted animation which shows off the more harmless, cliched side of villains. By setting myself these restrictions it left me a lot more time to focus on developing the work in one specific direction and again stopped me from procrastinating by deciding on ideas that go in loads of different directions.
In the past I have wasted a lot of time on coming up with loads and loads of different idea directions when they aren't necessary and then ending up regretting it later when I start running out of time. This is something that i will definitely take forward into the next brief and onwards: Be decisive and do it quickly.
Unfortunately I found it difficult to become motivated in the middle of the brief and this led to me falling behind by quite a lot. This has definitely affected the quantity of the work that I have produced and the quality to a degree, however I took the time to catch up and engaged a lot more with the course as a whole over the last 2 weeks which has definitely pushed me to make much better resolutions to the brief. Spending a lot of time in college definitely helps with motivation, especially around the studios where others do the same and people can constantly give you little bits of feedback or even just say that they like what are producing which is motivation in itself. In future briefs I aim to spend considerably more time around the studios just as I have in the last couple of weeks and I think that it will improve noticeably improve my resolutions.
All in all I am quite pleased with what I have produced. The style and simplicity of the animations is almost exactly what I had in mind when developing my ideas and the use of colours works well to relate the resolutions back to E4 and give it an exclusive E4 appeal. I definitely prefer my Idents to my Title sequence as they were obviously more thought through and they were the starting points of the title sequence. I think the idents each work nicely on their own as teaser trailers to the show and they are kept short and precise and fit the 10 second gap well, however the Title sequence just seems to be missing something in comparison.
I am also relatively happy with the sound effects and packaging. The simple design in the packaging is very similar to what I originally had in mind, only there were a couple of more elaborate plans that I hadn't thought through well enough and couldn't be applied to the final thing.
To extend the project I would definitely rethink the title sequence and spend more time trying to make the packaging work as I had originally intended.
How would you grade yourself on the following areas:
5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
Attendance = 2
Punctuality = 4
Motivation = 2
Commitment = 3
Quantity of work produced = 3
Quality of work produced = 4
Contribution to the group = 4
In the next module I aim to make all of these numbers much higher.
Showing posts with label OUGD202. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OUGD202. Show all posts
Wednesday, 16 February 2011
Cruella Ident Development
After a lot of indecisiveness, I decided to focus my last ident around Cruella de Ville as I thought that she had some of the most notable characteristics and connotations of a villain. Also, she is the only female villain in the group and it just mixes things up a bit.
I started by producing a couple of basic storyboard ideas for how I could represent her a best and as simply as possible. I decided to focus on this storyboard and see how it turned out.
To start The storyboard I worked with creating the spots to represent the dalmatians. These pretty much worked out exactly as I had hoped and keep the flowing cartoony style of the other idents.
I found the hair a really difficult aspect to try and animate. I started by trying to use the hair effect that after effects comes with but this created a really defined and detailed kind of hair that was actually really difficult to manipulate properly. I also tried to use a single mask so that I could move vectors to try and create the hair but it looked really static.
So eventually I had to use several masks (17 I think) to make up the hair and move each one individually to give the hair flowing effect. I think that it does represent hair quite well but as someone pointed out it does also look a bit like tentacles. Hopefully teh rest of the ident will work enough around it to show that it is hair.
With the hair I added a similar set of masks to make the streak of white flow down through the hair which I think worked really successfully.
After figuring out these main parts of the ident I realised that none of it had any purple to link back to E4 like the others do. So I went back through and tried to change some aspects of the animation to purple and see how it looked.
I started with this by making the background purple but it looked more like a strange planet or something than dalmation spots.
I also tried to make the spots purple but obviously this just made it look like something ill or something alien.
In an attempt to get purple in to the animation somewhere I decided to use lightning effects to add flashes and link back to evilness as well (as there are often lightning storms and stuff when villains are around).
I used a lens flare effect set really mildly to give the purple more a flash. I thought it worked well but tried it without the flare anyway.
As you can see it makes it look a lot less flashy so a lot less lightning-y. I went with the above slight lens flare instead.
At the end I also incorporated a tiny little bolt of lightning to make the E4 logo stand out slightly as different from the regular one. To make it I used similar effects to the way I made the lightsaber.
I started by producing a couple of basic storyboard ideas for how I could represent her a best and as simply as possible. I decided to focus on this storyboard and see how it turned out.
To start The storyboard I worked with creating the spots to represent the dalmatians. These pretty much worked out exactly as I had hoped and keep the flowing cartoony style of the other idents.
I found the hair a really difficult aspect to try and animate. I started by trying to use the hair effect that after effects comes with but this created a really defined and detailed kind of hair that was actually really difficult to manipulate properly. I also tried to use a single mask so that I could move vectors to try and create the hair but it looked really static.
So eventually I had to use several masks (17 I think) to make up the hair and move each one individually to give the hair flowing effect. I think that it does represent hair quite well but as someone pointed out it does also look a bit like tentacles. Hopefully teh rest of the ident will work enough around it to show that it is hair.
With the hair I added a similar set of masks to make the streak of white flow down through the hair which I think worked really successfully.
After figuring out these main parts of the ident I realised that none of it had any purple to link back to E4 like the others do. So I went back through and tried to change some aspects of the animation to purple and see how it looked.
I started with this by making the background purple but it looked more like a strange planet or something than dalmation spots.
I also tried to make the spots purple but obviously this just made it look like something ill or something alien.
In an attempt to get purple in to the animation somewhere I decided to use lightning effects to add flashes and link back to evilness as well (as there are often lightning storms and stuff when villains are around).
I used a lens flare effect set really mildly to give the purple more a flash. I thought it worked well but tried it without the flare anyway.
As you can see it makes it look a lot less flashy so a lot less lightning-y. I went with the above slight lens flare instead.
At the end I also incorporated a tiny little bolt of lightning to make the E4 logo stand out slightly as different from the regular one. To make it I used similar effects to the way I made the lightsaber.
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
Logo Development
To bring everything together I wanted to create a logo that would represent the show. In my earlier villain research I found some information on typical villain imagery and decided that i could use it to unify all villains under the one representation and then use it for the DVD and packaging as well as the end of the title sequence.
The stereotypical villain look is very simple: A top hat and a long thin moustache.
I started by finding some examples of a top hat and a villain moustache that I could use for inspiration. These are the images I found
I liked this style a lot more as the 'facial shape' became more defined, but I still thought it looked a bit much like a posh gentleman rather than a villain.
In this example everything was pushed further together to make them touch, theoretically making them easier to cut out if I take that direction with the packaging, although the counters would still be lost.
I thought this example made the face too wide to be a stereotypical villain shape.
Again this example was even wider and I decided to go back to using a thinner, more definer structure.
Here I started to incorporate the words "top 10" into the design to be used under the moustache as a kind of chin. I thought this was one of the stronger designs so I started working with this concept from now on. The chin gives more definition to the shape of the face which is much more villain like.
To counter that tried to increase the size of the 10 to make the jaw squarer but the typeface is quite long and the chin became to elongated.
The stereotypical villain look is very simple: A top hat and a long thin moustache.
I started by finding some examples of a top hat and a villain moustache that I could use for inspiration. These are the images I found
Next I changed and vectorised the images very simply so that I could make them it with the theme of the animation. I started by designing them for use on the DVD sticker. I tried using two examples, one with scary looking eyes and one with just the hat and moustache.
I think that the one with just the hat and moustache is the most relevant to the show as the other is much more menacing looking which isn't the idea of the style. It has been pointed out that the top logo looks kind of like a magician more than a villain but I think in the context of the packaging it will work well.
Once I had this done I started to work on using the logo along with some type to create the title sequence and packaging logo.
The concept behind the design was to try and use the hat and moustache incorporated with type around them to try and make up a face or facial shape.
I started with this simple 'movie villains' type in Bernard MT Condensed as I thought the slight serifs fitted well with the theme as well as the bulky characters. There is a bit too much space around the moustache which breaks up the image too much.
I liked this style a lot more as the 'facial shape' became more defined, but I still thought it looked a bit much like a posh gentleman rather than a villain.
In this example everything was pushed further together to make them touch, theoretically making them easier to cut out if I take that direction with the packaging, although the counters would still be lost.
I thought this example made the face too wide to be a stereotypical villain shape.
Again this example was even wider and I decided to go back to using a thinner, more definer structure.
Here I started to incorporate the words "top 10" into the design to be used under the moustache as a kind of chin. I thought this was one of the stronger designs so I started working with this concept from now on. The chin gives more definition to the shape of the face which is much more villain like.
I started to work with using the TOP and 10 on different levels to make the chin even longer but thought that this made it too long and it started to move away from looking like a face again.
To counter that tried to increase the size of the 10 to make the jaw squarer but the typeface is quite long and the chin became to elongated.
This shows all the examples that I tried to work with and redesign to make more appropriate.
Eventually I settled on this one as I think it creates the most face-like look and works well as a logo. I will now put it into the end of the title sequence to show the title.
Friday, 11 February 2011
Jaws Ident Final (No sound yet)
I think that this works well as an Ident because it is simple and represent Jaws in a really basic way. It also sticks to the colour limits although I did create a slightly lighter purple to give the animation more depth and slightly more detail.
As far as it goes with the other Idents I think it might be one of the least interesting. hopefully once I finalise the sound it will become more interesting to watch.
Jaws Ident - Logo Test
In this test I have changed the background to black which fits in more with the other idents and the theme of colours. I have also tested using the teeth to reveal the E4 logo.
I think this works quite well in the animation as it links it back to E4 and its a bit cheesy and light hearted which is the direction i'm trying to go in. I will test adding some purple water or something to relate it more to the rest of the sequence.
I think this works quite well in the animation as it links it back to E4 and its a bit cheesy and light hearted which is the direction i'm trying to go in. I will test adding some purple water or something to relate it more to the rest of the sequence.
Thursday, 10 February 2011
Jaws Ident - Teeth test
In this video I have tried to incorporate the teeth idea from storyboards. The teeth are there to come in and cut the scene up so that they can reveal the E4 logo afterwards. It isn't very serious and its kind of cheesy which fits in nicely with the theme of the show.
Jaws Ident - Splash Test
I wanted to create a sort of splash and trail to go behind the fin in the water to make it look more like it had actual water consistency. This is the first test I made.
To create this I just frame by frame rendered the splash in a separate comp and looped it over so that all I had to do was position it in the main comp and then parent it to each fin layer.
To create this I just frame by frame rendered the splash in a separate comp and looped it over so that all I had to do was position it in the main comp and then parent it to each fin layer.
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Swimming test
In these tests I wanted to experiment with different kinds of movement through the water. In The first test I tried to create a realistic swimming action by simulating strokes through the water.
I think this does well at representing a more realistic swimming action in terms of physics but i'm not sure if it represents the film very well:
Skip to 2:04 in the video above to see what I mean.
The shark in jaws swims with a much smoother motion as it glides which I think all sharks and dolphins conform to. So I made this other test video to show it a bit more accurately.
I also want to include a lighter coloured streak behind the fin where it cuts through the water.
I think this does well at representing a more realistic swimming action in terms of physics but i'm not sure if it represents the film very well:
Skip to 2:04 in the video above to see what I mean.
The shark in jaws swims with a much smoother motion as it glides which I think all sharks and dolphins conform to. So I made this other test video to show it a bit more accurately.
I also want to include a lighter coloured streak behind the fin where it cuts through the water.
Water rising test
To start the ident I needed to come up with a way to represent the water rising into the scene. Originally the water just rose slowly in one line while I used the masked vector graphic to manipulate points and transform them over time to create wave effects. It looked a bit static for water so I created this effect of gradual filling up instead and I think it works a lot beter.
Im still not sure if the animation represents water that well but I think it does the job for now.
Im still not sure if the animation represents water that well but I think it does the job for now.
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Vader Final Ident (No sound)
After realising how to incorporate the E4 logo properly with the style of the clip I have come up with this finished Darth Vader ident for the show. It works quite well in my opinion, however the only issue here is the colour of the lightsaber. Vader is well known for having a red light saber and in the star wars universe this is a classic sign of a dark (evil) jedi. I have changed the colour of this lightsaber to purple in fitting with the running theme of black white and purple used in each of the idents.
My main worry is that people wont associate the light saber with Darth Vader because of the colour and it could be confusing. On top of that, The character Mace Windu from Star Wars episodes 1, 2 and 3 uses a purple lightsaber and he is a pure good jedi so this could make the imagery even more confusing.
I think that with the correct sound effects the animation will still work in representing Vader and not Windu.
My main worry is that people wont associate the light saber with Darth Vader because of the colour and it could be confusing. On top of that, The character Mace Windu from Star Wars episodes 1, 2 and 3 uses a purple lightsaber and he is a pure good jedi so this could make the imagery even more confusing.
I think that with the correct sound effects the animation will still work in representing Vader and not Windu.
Vader ident - Lightsaber logo tests
I wanted to finish the Vader ident using the lightsaber effect to somehow create the E4 logo. I took the effect that I had already created and recreated it into several other parts to make the video like this.
I really like the effect that it creates but I'm still not sure if this represents the E4 logo very well at all, it kind of just looks like a shape. As a second test I tried to incorporate my own vectorised E4 logo as a mask and used some changing opacities but I don;t think that the result was as successful.
I think I will need to rethink exactly how to create this ending properly.
I really like the effect that it creates but I'm still not sure if this represents the E4 logo very well at all, it kind of just looks like a shape. As a second test I tried to incorporate my own vectorised E4 logo as a mask and used some changing opacities but I don;t think that the result was as successful.
I think I will need to rethink exactly how to create this ending properly.
Final Alex Ident (no sound)
After a lot of experimenting and struggling with aftereffects I have created the final Ident for Alex representing A Clockwork Orange. I have gone with the Idea of using only black, white and purple to help link the show with E4 as though it were an E4 specific exclusively made program.
I have also gone with the concept of using the ident as a teaser for the show.
I have also gone with the concept of using the ident as a teaser for the show.
Eye test- E4
After making the eye animate and adding the lashes, I tried to change up the colours a bit to make it more interesting. One idea is to have the simple colours black & white & purple across the range of idents and maybe for the title sequence as well. This way it would represent E4 through colour and fit in with current existing E4 idents and programs and the logo. I found the E4 logo and tested a few colours to try and get it right. Eventually I got it down to the colour hex-coded 6d368f which is pretty spot on.
To start with I tried changing the eyelash colour to purple like this.
I like the purple eyelashes as they are kind of subtle but I'm not sure how well it represents the film as the purple makes it look a bit more like the Joker or something. As another test I tried to change the colour of the pupil to the purple colour.
I think that the biggest problem with this video is that the pupil being purple makes the eye seem really alien and dehumanises the animation a bit more. If I were to use either of these examples I think it would be the purple eyelashes.
To start with I tried changing the eyelash colour to purple like this.
I like the purple eyelashes as they are kind of subtle but I'm not sure how well it represents the film as the purple makes it look a bit more like the Joker or something. As another test I tried to change the colour of the pupil to the purple colour.
I think that the biggest problem with this video is that the pupil being purple makes the eye seem really alien and dehumanises the animation a bit more. If I were to use either of these examples I think it would be the purple eyelashes.
Simpler eye test - Alex
I have tried to simplify the eye of Alex even more in this small clip. To start with I have a small section which shows how the eye scene was going to come in from the original Vader clip.
This was maybe a bit complicated for the concept of the animation so I started to create a simpler version. I have started by showing the eye open and then some movement to build more of a character for the eye and to personify it beyond simple vector shapes.
Then I added the eyelashes to make it represent alex's eye.
This was maybe a bit complicated for the concept of the animation so I started to create a simpler version. I have started by showing the eye open and then some movement to build more of a character for the eye and to personify it beyond simple vector shapes.
Then I added the eyelashes to make it represent alex's eye.
Thursday, 3 February 2011
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
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