Book Project (Overview and Rough Animation)

Hello! My class is completing a book project for this quarter. We had to think of a book to animate. It has to be short and sweet. We will be later be giving the books we animated to Children's Mercy Hospital.

At first, I was planning on animating Jim Carrey's book How Roland Rolls. As I talked to my teacher about what I should do for the book I realized that, with the excessive details in the book and the complications of animating water, I decided to change my story. I changed to Bob and Larry's Silly Slides by Cindy Kenney! I have always loved VeggieTales, so I thought this would be the perfect animation! The programs I am using are After Effects and Illustrator.

VeggieTales logo for the animation

Here are my storyboards. They aren't exactly like the rough animation, but there are some aspects of it that are similar. These are drawings of how I want the animation to look. I did not add Bob and Larry bouncing on screen for the rough.

Page 1

Page 2

I also used Illustrator to color in the pages. It was fun to see what I could do with this program, since I have never used it before for a project. What you see below are before and after pictures of the book, like this example. I did not draw every single detail in each page. There are some bits and pieces of it that seem crooked, and I will fix those pieces for the final animation.

Before

After

And last but not least, here is the rough animation, fully recorded with sound. This animation is very fun to work on so far, and I can't wait to see what I can do for the final animation!      

I would say my rough animation is okay. It's not the best, but hey-what are rough animations for? It's simply just practice for how you want your final animation to look! As for what I will do for the final, I will make sure it will definitely be better than the rough, using creative camera movements and an effect that will make the flaps pop. I am done with the Illustrator pages, so completing everything and making the animation perfect will be my main plan of attack. I am currently in the process of how I want my new and improved animation to look. I am thinking of moving objects in After Effects and maybe making some typography.

Jim Carrey Stop Motion

Heya! This was a mini-stop motion project that I completed over Christmas Break. It is an animation to Jim Carrey's movie Liar Liar. During the editing process, there were a majority of frames I had to delete since the dialogue was too fast at times. I also captured a bit of shadows while I was taking pictures, partially due to the fact that my hand was in the way of the shot. 

But what I loved about this project was that I got to be as creative as I can. It was so much fun to use a camera, markers and various other utensils at my disposal. You never know what you can get from the final product! I think it turned out very well! 

I have always loved stop motion and I have animated many more in the past at the spur of the moment, like this one. I will post some more animations later on. 

Let me know what you think of the stop motion!

Stop Motion Class Project Summary (The Notebook)

Hello! I am working on a group project in my animation class. We created a stop motion animation! It's a pretty neat project and stop motion is my favorite kind of animation! We set up storyboards, an animatic and shots of still and live action footage! It's about three objects (a highlighter, notepad, and stapler) that are transported to a doodle world and have to try and find a way out. Along the way in the doodle world, they meet different sketches. They seem pretty neat, until scribbles start attacking them. That is the turning point in which they have to find a way out of the dangerous world. At first, we discussed our own ideas for what we could do with the project. We finally ended up on this idea on a group agreement.

During Pre-Production, we got to work and began drawing storyboards, discussing shots, and where the camera will be angled. We shot some rough footage for what our project is going to be like.

For Production, we mixed stop motion, live action, and hand drawn animation for this project. We had a notebook, a highlighter, notepad, and a mini stapler. We then began to record their movements frame by frame with the camera for stop motion. We used video for live action scenes and Photoshop and After Effects to animate the doodle world. Shooting was a bit of a challenge. We had to pay TONS of attention to detail. For example, we had to make sure the lighting was good during every shot. And when we came back to shoot the next day, we had to make sure the objects were in the exact same position the day before. We had to get all the right camera angles from our storyboards and we could not move the camera when we were shooting our shots. I would say it was a bit of a pain to shoot sometimes, but that is the challenge of animation. During this time, we had a bit of a rough time with time crunches, an inconsistent stop motion environment, and some trouble finding sound effects.

During Post Production, we imported our frames into After Effects to begin editing our shots. Once all the shots were completed, we set them into one composition. We began to add sound and visual effects for the final touches. Some of the effects we used were crumbling text, overlay, and getting the lighting to be somewhat similar to all our shots.

I learned a lot from this project. I learned how to correctly use a camera (stop motion-wise) and collaborating with my team as to what shots we can take, where to position the camera, and how many shots we need to take to get however many seconds of film. (15 frames=1 second, for example.) I also learned how to edit a film in After Effects and color correct lighting.

As to what I would do differently, I would have picked a more bright room to film in. Sometimes the room was so dark there were tons of shadows that we could not control. For example, when we filmed the introduction of the notepad scene, the lighting was way too dark. The shadows were interfering with the shot. We tried to make it a bit brighter in After Effects, but it was still too dark. The lighting and shadows were sometimes beyond our control.

I don't think I would do anything the same with this project. I am going to improve on what I can do to create a better stop motion. I will learn from my mistakes and see what I can do differently.

When I create a new project, I will definitely make sure I have the right lighting, a good shot, and choose a better environment to work with. I thought the room we shot in was a fine choice, but as we got further into working, we came to the realization that shadows (people walking around in the room that would interfere with the shot, for example) would be a bit hard to avoid. Naturally, we found new and improved ways to shoot that would not interfere with our environment.

In conclusion, it was a fun project, but a bit of a challenge. But that's what animation is all about, right? Filming with cameras, moving our characters a tiny bit at a time, and filming within the classroom was a new and fun experience as to what you can do with stop motion. There were a few bumps along the way, but it was so much fun to challenge ourselves. My group and I (with the exception of one person) were very committed to this project. This project was truly a work of art.

Here is the rough footage and animatic for our concept and ideas!

Here are the storyboards!

Page 1 of storyboards

Page 2 of storyboards

Page 3 of storyboards

Here are some stills!

Here is the first draft of our video! Blogger would not let me upload since the file was too big.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoCEQ0PZCC0

EDIT- We are now finished with our project! It's not perfect movie quality stop motion, but I loved how it turned out! We worked hard on this project and it was a lot of fun! Enjoy the final render! Since Blogger could not let me upload the final product because 100 MB was too big, here is the YouTube link. After many spots we had to clean up after our critique in the class, here is our final animation complete with sound effects and correct lighting!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFwxGU_E_YE&feature=youtu.be

Click to see my group's blogs!
John Pace's Blog
Makella Child's Blog
Emma Johnson's Blog
Brock Townsend's Blog
Nathan Goldberg's Blog

Rumor Weed Song Typography (Test Render)

Hello! I thought I would do a typography just for fun! Here is what I have so far! The song I used is from VeggieTales' LarryBoy and the Rumor Weed! I used the Rumor Weed Song!
Hope you enjoy the test render!

Petey's Song Kinetic Typography (RE-RENDER!)

One good thing that the class said about my animation was that they loved the word type! It went great with the tone of the song! I needed to work on the styling of my drawings a bit, though.

To fix my mistakes, I created masks for the hill drawings in After Effects to clean up any incomplete spaces for consistency. I made a new, clean music note with the shape tool in Photoshop and I enlarged my tunnel drawing to keep the colors the same with my style. It took me a couple days to get everything the way it should be. 

Grass has been removed.

I was told the grass was not a good addition to my typography, so I removed it.

Enlarged tunnel

My teacher did not understand what I intended    to do with the tunnel, so he suggested that I enlarge it a bit.

Music note

Mask on hill

Here is the new music note.

When I created this drawing, my teacher also suggested that I should not remove it, but create a mask to clear out the incomplete hill.

It was the same thing with the hill here-it's the same hill, but create I created another mask. I covered up the incomplete hill.





At first, I disagreed how my drawings were incomplete. I thought at first that they were fine just the way they were. I now realize that they had to look like the style that I went with. I went back and cleaned everything up, and I must say they look pretty darn cool now! They look perfect! I never realized until now that you are never completely finished with something until you learn from your mistakes and try again.

Enjoy the re-render!

Petey's Song Kinetic Typography (OFFICIAL!!)

Hello! Here is my final rendering of Petey's Song from Fantastic Mr. Fox. With this project, I learned so many new things with After Effects! I never knew there were so many options for me to choose with 3D and 2D effects! There were hundreds of effects!

Wes Anderson has been a huge influence to me, so when I learned that we can do whatever project we wanted for this quarter, I thought why not create a typography? I have been wanting to create a project like this ever since my sophomore year in animation. I could not believe that I was finally able to do something like this!

Time management and planning was the key for me with this video. I always manage my time well and did not get behind on anything.

With Storyboarding, I did not necessarily follow my drawing sketches. When I started the typography, I improvised where the words would go and where I would position them. That was the beauty of making this typography.

At times, it could be somewhat challenging to keyframe the words at exactly the right time the singer says them. It could be off even by a fraction of a second. Fortunately, I got the timing and editing just right!

I was going to be animating a fox and incorporating the Boggis, Bunce, and Bean characters in the typography, but they did not work out. Instead, I added the fox silhouette watching the words for a few seconds, then he goes away. He only appears a couple of times briefly.

All in all, the project went extremely well. It was a great challenge for me to explore and strengthen my After Effects skills! I loved how my final product turned out!

Hope you enjoy the final typography!

Petey's Song Kinetic Typography Test Render (WITH FOX!)

Hello! So I was planning on animating a fox and adding some of the characters from the movie, but it just didn't work out exactly as planned. So the characters didn't work out, but I did have the fox appear a couple times in the typography-right at the beginning and towards the end. I did not fully animate him, but I made him look as if he was watching the words and made him sit on a hill. Hope you enjoy the test render! I am now in the process of making any last minute changes and final touches.