FINISHED ANIMATION- 'CAPTURED'

Here is my finished animation uploaded onto YouTube. I feel it represents my three key words 'mysterious', 'strings' and 'oriental' and moves with the piece of music. The lighting and quick movement creates drama and pace. The initial concept, illustrated on the my storyboard, was maintained and is a easy 'story' to follow. For my first ever animation and first time using After Effects I am pleased with the results.

I added a pale murky green colour to the light throughout, this intensifies as the tentacle appears.

LIGHTS & CAMERAS

LIGHTS & CAMERAS- Due to the 3 waves being on separate layers the camera and select '2 view' was important, this enabled me to position the waves in distance order to the camera. To this I then could place the ship and tentacle.  I followed my original intentions and added a light, starting at the left, it follows the ship and then directs at the bottom right as the tentacle enters. As the sea rises the spot light lowers then widens as the eyes appear. Finally as the eyes blink shut, the spot light closes central and the frame ends in black. 

BACKGROUND- SKY & CLOUDS

I decided to use the softer crumple light blue as the sky, the texture darkened looks similar to smudged charcoal and this is a nice subtle effect. I simply cut the clouds out the other papers using the Lasso Tool. I think the block white will fit better with the design of the boat and sea rather than a feathery, realistic cloud I could of created with the brush tools. The first shows the lighter paper clouds, this had a   light blue photo filter and then I used the filter 'rippel' to create a softness to the lines. The second is the darker paper and the brightness was lower with a darker blue photo filter applied. The darker clouds with come into the animation when the tentacle enters to show the mood changing.

BACKGROUND- SKY & CLOUDS

TEXTURED PAPER

These are crumpled pieces of paper which I scanned in, the top two and last one are the same piece and the third was gently pressed to create softer, less frequent crumples. I put these on Photoshop and applied different contrasts, brightness's and photo filters to make different effects suitable to use as clouds and sky. These four pieces were the most successful as they have the right balance between light and dark and won't take too much attention from the animation. 

END SCENE- blinking eyes

Digital Paintings- The first one I did and thought they looked too cartoon like and cute. The eyes to the right are the same but with more of a eye lid created and bags under the eyes. The effect of this is sinister, it ages the eyes and add more mystery. Next to this are the eyes shut, covered by the eyelid, I did this to use for when the eyes blink. 

Tentacle Puppet Pin Tutorial AE

I found this tutorial really useful as it showed me how less puppet pins worked more effectively to create the worm like motion, he also copied and pasted frames so that the original puppet pin stayed in the same place. His result is a really nice movment and the motion blur helps this.

My animation so far...

So far I have got to where the boat enter from the left to the center  zooms in the waves splash. I have started to introduce the tentacle but am struggling how to have part of it behind the boat and part of it in front. During all this the waves move up and down along with the boat. I have done this by changing the position and rotation. I am happy with the circular motion the waves are making as the three layers of them work nicely together. However rotating the boat back and forth just isn't working. When the music's pace quickens I have done it so does the boat but the quickness distorts the movement and the result isn't boat-like. So although I have come so far I have decided to delete all of the boats key frames and use motion sketch.

Motion sketch will enable me to play the music at the same time I want the boat to move by moving the cursor back and forth along with it. Below is a tester I did on a block shape, it shows the arch movement that the boat will follow.

MOTION SKETCH

PUPPET PIN TOOL

On the tentacle I have placed the puppet pin tool five times along its center. Along with this I have changed the position and rotation so that the tentacle enters from the bottom right reaches towards the boat and then curves to drag itself back down. I am currently looking at tutorials on YouTube to figure out how it'll drag the boat down with it. My initial thoughts are that I could parent it but I don't want them stay together at the start. I also need to see how I can put the tip of the tentacle in front of the boat and the middle behind as it drags it down. I could possibly do this by having the tentacle as two sections on different layers and parenting the tip. 

WORKSHOPS;

Unfortunately I was unable to upload the results of the workshops, instead I’ll show some print screen shots and write about the processes and my thoughts on their impact to my animation.

AFTER EFFECTS BATMAN LOGO

This was my first ever After Effects tutorial. The task was to make it fly in, spin and then fly out. This wasn’t as daunting as I initially thought and it introduced me to the transform options of rotating etc and key framing. It eased me into After Effects and helped a lot.

AFTER EFFECTS PARENTING AND THE PUPPET TOOL

For this tutorial we had to animate a 2-D character. We did this by parenting the body parts to other body parts to make them follow each other and move as one. We then learnt how to use the puppet tool and this was basically selecting the joints on the body where we wanted it to move such as knew, elbow etc. These were both good techniques and I will try and use the puppet tool to move the tentacle in my animation. The idea of using a character in my first ever animation is far too complex but hopefully just the tentacle arm will be achievable.

AFTER EFFECTS 3-D LAYERS, LIGHTS, CAMERAS AND TEXT

This After Effects tutorial was more difficult than the previous as it involved firstly removing Spiderman from his cityscape background. I learnt a lot from doing this as I didn’t know how to feather the edges when selecting or how to spot heal the background to blend it in. We then made him move from the top left to bottom right using the position tool and others we had previously learnt. I then learnt how to add 3-D elements such as cameras and lights to give a dramatic realistic effect. I shall defiantly use lights in my animation as it creates mood.

AFTER EFFECTS GREEN SCREENING AND MOTION SKETCHING

When I first heard we were doing green screening the process seemed advanced and ‘Hollywood’ but to my surprise and joy it was simple and enjoyable. We experimented doing it in two different ways. The first was by creating a mask around the man’s head using the pen tool and then moving the points throughout the sequence to make sure no green could be seen as the head moved. The second was using the key light effect and high-lighting the green of the background to remove it then replacing it with a different background.

After that we did motion sketching and this involved creating text and a path trail for it to follow. It was simple and really effective. To this we added a shape and changed the size to make it increase and decrease throughout the sequence. This made me think that this technique could be used to make my boat move as it could achieve a nice fluidity bobbing back and forth in the sea.

STOP MOTION- I Can Animate

This was a really fun and simple workshop. The programme I Can Animate is very simple in comparison to After Effects and therefore was quick and easy to learn. However the time consuming aspect of stop motion is its downfall. We produced a Tetris game using Lego and this meant repeatedly moving the Lego pieces down slightly. I could of done my animation using stop motion but I felt it didn’t fit my storyboard as it couldn’t provide justice to splashing waving and fluidity. 

Here is the sea with all three layers combined, the two larger waves layers will be infront of the ship and the smallest waves will be behind the ship. This will give perspective and appear that the boats actually in the sea.



FINAL CHOICE-

After making the woollen sea this boat seems the most suitable choice. It is oriental, traditional and the white of the sails will fit nicely with the peaks of the waves. 

Here is the waves I created out of wool combined with the digital drawing.

TEXTURE- wool waves

WOOL WAVES:

After experimenting with digital painting my thoughts were that having it all in one media made it look flat, lack texture and have no variation. In effort to fix this I went back to one of my original ideas of using string. String is one of my key words so it fits perfectly. I chose a dark blue and navy wool and followed and glued to my previous wave drawings to create curves and peaks. After this had dried I scanned them in. The pieces will have digital painting added over the top to create the white peaks and stay coherent with the other elements of the animation.