More amended animatic scenes

More lovely work today guys, fair bit of reference filmed. Jae wasn't able to join us today but gave us the go-ahead to film some reference videos and has also very kindly offered to film some reference herself, so she and Sam should both have plenty of material to work with when they meet on Friday.

Jazzy and I worked on some more of the animatic this morning — I'm now really beginning to realise how tricky some of these scenes are going to be...

A little more alteration to the timings on the first scene, based on the reference video from last night and our recent discovery of the keyframe velocity and curve/speed editors. It's still not quite right but hopefully it's looking a little better!

I'm not sure about the timing of the birds — I found that delaying the one lonely crow for too long resulted in too much happening on-screen. It was a little disjointed and, to me, didn't seem to flow properly. It seemed to be most 'readable' if the crow followed fairly closely behind the flock (at a slower speed, so as to lag behind) but then break off as they flew away. Of course if you guys would prefer a different timing please let me know and I can amend as appropriate :] I think I've gone a bit blind to things like timing at the moment... straining my brain too much.

Looking at it again, I think the lonely crow comes in perhaps just a little too soon, so I'll probably delay her by just a little more and see if that works any better.

This was the biggest pain in the arse, but finally it fell to our mighty power. We started simply by experimenting with a fun little camera effect — a sort of pan that would reveal the sprawling landscape below. In the final animation we may toy with a slightly different perspective of the farmyard/trees, by having it stretch to a single vanishing point in the distance to give the idea that the hill is very, very high. It took a little while to get the speed of the camera movement right — we started by rotating the camera on a 3D Y axis in addition to moving the actual background itself but this caused the effect to be too fast (and gave me slight motion sickness), so we removed the camera and stuck to simply slowly shifting the trees up and the hill down which accomplished the same effect at a much nicer speed.

The jump was a huge headache and it's all thanks to Jazzy for fixing it up — adding the little bounce before he leaps gives it more the impression that he's launching himself off the top of the hill. Looks much nicer now we think. :]

This was just a quick and simple little experiment from this evening — I simply removed the moving  background from this shot of the crow, mostly to keep it in check with the next scene (overhead shot of the crow as the shadow creeps over). I also thought that, generally, scrolling backgrounds are used if the character is walking/running on the spot to give the impression of movement. Seeing as the crow is actually moving across the screen, I wasn't sure if the moving background was necessary? I could very well be wrong though and if you disagree or prefer the other version then it's no problem at all, just figured I'd stick this up as an option! :]

Jazzy and I are going to add in the extra shot of the crow pecking the bug from the scarecrow's hat on Friday which should hopefully give us an idea as to whether we need to alter the ending scenes at all. In the meantime, I'm going to try to figure out how to get the ground texture to scroll into the distance on the hang glider scene.

Expect to see some rather amusing videos on the blog very soon ;]

Alex

Meeting 6 - 29/2/12

Today, me Alex and Jazzy did some animation reference by recording how we think the Scarecrow would move and react in some of the scenes of the animation. For example, we all did a running scene for the beginning of the animation where the Scarecrow runs from the distance towards the camera. These exercises proved to be very helpful and we all came up with some really good recordings which me and Jae can look at to see what kind of poses the Scarecrow will be doing in the animation.

HMK

• Meet up with Jae Friday afternoon to discuss poses for the Scarecrow

Scarecrow Facial Expressions

Hey guys! Here are just a few facial expressions that i came up with for the scarecrow! Not had chance to experiment with the hat yet for these expressions but if you guys are happy with them as they are then I shall leave them as they are :)

Scarecrow Model Sheet Coloured

Hey guys! Here is the finished Coloured Model Sheet of the Scarecrow!

Reference — running towards camera

Apologies for the God-awful quality but it's the best reference I was able to find...

Having a lot of difficulty getting the timing on the intro scene right. It's an annoying video to be sure, but it's actually a fairly good example of how the mechanics of this sort of scene work. Look at how many steps she's taking in comparison to how far she's approaching the camera — the run cycle should be very fast but she's still getting closer pretty slowly.

I think the trickiest thing about our shot is the perspective — he's running sort of diagonally, so we have more than one direction to contend with.

I was thinking that it might be a good idea to tackle the first scene of the animatic once we've actually got some proper reference to work from. The timing and perspective is potentially a bit too tricky to work out in our heads. What do you guys think about taking Jazzy's camera to one of the fields behind uni and acting out this shot when we go to film those references tomorrow? Could be a lot of fun... ;]

Amended animatic scenes

Hi guys! Jazzy and I have been slaving away over a hot After Effects to bring you an amended version of her wonderful animatic. Major props to Jazzy for being so patient and enduring my harsh lashings with whips made of knives and fire. I'm sorry. :[

I just figured I'd upload what we've got so far, just so you can compare with the old versions and give us any thoughts/feedback that you have :]

Beginning scene, altered timings! This was quite a tricky one to do — we wanted the scarecrow/crows to enter from the distance quite slowly and pick up speed as they approached the camera (in line with Ron's advice from last week) but, without use of a curve/interpolation editor, the only way to do this was with multiple keyframes which caused a lot of weird pauses at points in the animation where the speed changed. We've luckily discovered the curve editor now, so hopefully we can go back and re-tweak the speeds so that it's a little more accurate. Personally, I kinda think he approaches the camera just a little too quickly. Not sure if anyone else agrees?

Few tweaks to this bit — the standing up was altered to give it a little more lifelike movement/timing (had a bit of a giggle standing up from chairs repeatedly trying to figure out exactly how it worked) and slowed down the pan/zoom a bit. This will hopefully allow a little more "breathing space" for sounds/music to be added. It's much easier to cut down on time than add it in, so if we've got too much of a pause it'll be relatively simple to cut it out.

We also altered the "running uphill" section to flow a bit better — we opted not to show the scarecrow reaching the top of the hill at this point as in the next shot, he emerges over the top, which wouldn't make too much sense if he was shown to reach the top here as well. If that makes sense...

In accordance with Ron's feedback, we've altered the hang glider scene. This is probably the biggest change (and the cause of the biggest headaches) — not going to lie, this has been an absolute bitch to animate. Getting the timings right is incredibly tricky and don't even get me started on those God damn bushes! Originally, Jazzy (bless 'er cotton socks) was pushing them into the distance and scaling them down by hand in order to give the effect that they were scrolling into the horizon. This was incredibly laborious for her though so we desperately sought a more automated option. I've kind of figured out half a solution — After Effects has an amazing effect called "motion tile" which can basically be used to create an endlessly repeating loop or scroll of an image. I used a simple circle shape as a placeholder (just to test the effect) and, happily, was able to get the bushes to loop relatively seamlessly but it's still not quite right. The biggest issue we're having is getting the perspective right. We've sort of worked it out, using something called the 'Corner Pin' tool (which works something like Photoshop's perspective option). Jazzy pointed out that the bushes should be taller at their closest point, but this is mostly fault of the shape itself — the circles I used as bushes are wider than they are tall, so when we come to replicate the effect using actual bushes we'll make them taller which should fix the problem.

Not too much difference here; just some slight timing alterations (hang glider comes in a little slower and the crow pauses a little more). Biggest change is that the background doesn't move — I thought that having it stationary helps to bring the focus onto the crow. What do you guys think?

This scene isn't definitive yet; we both kind of agreed that the previous version was lacking in something and I suggested that maybe the hang glider's silhouette against the sun should mimic the movement of the shadow as it creeps over the crow. We're still not 100% sure — seems to flow a little better, but tweaks and changes can of course still be made!

We did also attempt a dolly zoom (is that the correct term?) which would probably have looked lovely, but because the background is so simple it didn't really make much difference. I still have the file, so I may well upload it just so you can have a gander.

Last change for now — again, almost exactly the same as Jazzy's version, we just tried a slightly different method for the focus shifting to make it a little smoother. This one was done using a fancy-shmancy camera with the crow set as a 3D layer and pulled closer to the camera than the backdrop. This allowed us to keyframe the focal point/blur level of the camera, creating a nice depth of field effect.

We also added a slight pause at the beginning and cushioned the start of the upward pan, to hopefully give it a more organic feel as the crow looks around — as if we're really looking through her eyes. (God, that sounded pretentious). It also gives us a bit longer to admire Jazzy's beautiful backdrop :]

So yeah! That's pretty much all we've been mucking around with so far. Please let us know if you have any thoughts or opinions — any suggestions or whatnot.

I'm going to spend the evening tweaking some of these a little more — not to disrespect anybody of course, or to run off and take control of the entire project — just to see if I can iron out any of the little nuances and such. I'm a picky bastard.

Happy trails everybody!

Alex

General update/progress report: 28/02/2012

'Ello everyone, we pretty much all know where we are right now but here's another one of my super-wordy recaps just to act as a record!

28/02/2012

• Character colour palettes finalised, Jae completed scarecrow's model sheet — Sam to colour and add expressions.
• Sam to work through animatic/storyboard and create reference list of poses for puppets to be created and work out, where possible, which pieces/poses can be re-used.
• Jae to add sound effects (crashes, bangs, crows etc) to rough animatics for Monday.
• Filming reference footage Wednesday & Thursday!
• Sam and Jae to meet up on Friday afternoon with collected reference footage to start rough puppet creation. We'll start some rough animation tests next week.
• Scene allocation to be discussed next week.
• Jazzy and Alex to continue refining animatic, for completion by Friday.

Animatic feedback:

• Extend hang glider chase scene (mostly done)
• Little confusing — need to show crow actually pecking the bug off the scarecrow's hat.
• Ending confusing? Jae suggested altering the ending to show crow actually pecking bugs off the crops and flying back to the scarecrow. The ending may make a little more sense once we show the crow retrieving the bug from the scarecrow's hat. Make current alterations, then review and alter ending if necessary.

Great job so far guys, we're progressing nicely. Still have a few things to iron out of course but hopefully we're well on track. Thanks again for being so engaged — keep it up!!

Remember, tomorrow is "Leap Day" — the 29th of February — so I want to see you all dropping and proposing to me...

Alex

Scarecrow Run/hand glider Reference

Hey guys, was thinking of toy story and found this! It's a scene where woody is running, thought it would be great to use! Also towards the end of the scene, Woody uses a hand glider so we could have a look at how this is done too! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op-KK2go6c4

Scarecrow run cycle referrence

Download this video

I thought this could be a really nice style of run cycle for the scarecrow in the beginning — the body is nice and floppy but we could really exaggerate that! Nice big steps and arm swings which might serve to make him look very clumsy :]

Click on this link to download the video so we can go through it frame by frame, which will be more useful as a reference.

Model sheet for scarecrow

Meeting 5 - 27/2/12

Today, the group and I looked and talked at the first draft of the animatic that Jazzy had created and we suggested some ideas in which we could both speed and slower down certain scenes in the animatic which were to be applied later on. Alex and Jazzy liked the idea that Jae had came up with meaning I am now in charge of all colour palettes for the character designs and that's immediately what I started doing. Here are the finished character designs with both of their colour palettes (on white and one of Jazzy's finished backgrounds)

I really like how well the characters look on Jazzy's background and I think these are the winning pair. now that the palettes have been done, we are planning to do some acting and animating references to help us work out how the scarecrow and crow move!

HMK

• Create a list of poses that we may need to use for both scarecrow and crow
• Draw a couple for experimenting which ones could be re-used

Finalised Character Palettes and Designs (On Background)

Hey guys here are the finalised characters with their colour palettes on one of Jazzys backgrounds. In my opinion they work really well :)

Finalised Character Colour Palettes

Hey guys here are the finished colour palettes for both the scarecrow and the crow characters in their final character design forms!

Mine and Jae's Meeting 25/2/12

Hey guys, just to update on what happened when me and Jae got together. Unfortunately we did not come up with a Character Model Sheet as Alex had planned as we both found it difficult to try and match our techniques together. However, Jae suggested that instead of the two of us to try and match each others drawing techniques, we could both have a seperate jobs which would be that one of us creates every pose for the character and the other designs the colour palette. This way the character will not change in design and we both have a reasonable amount of work to do. We will discuss this more with you guys come Monday (so tomorrow, sorry for this late post) but hopefully you guys may agree with our plan. overall, I thought the meeting seemed helpful and I can't wait to show off some more colour schemes! :)

Sound collection (1)

A single Crow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbUcxEwMPE&feature=related
A bunch of crows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6R02oko0-Q&feature=related

"How to disappear completely" by radiohead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS8m44KjGGU&feature=related listen from 0:15-0:17, that dying horn sound can be considered to be used as the crow's crying when it falls behind the crowd and gets lost on its own in the animation.

"I lived on the moon" by Kwoon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkSxJ1OeRew listen from 1:37 to 1:50, I really like this blending in to climax, i'm thinking of using this (or something similar) in the scene where, in the animation, the blueprint transforms into the real flying object...

IF THESE DO NOT REACH THE LEVEL OF YOUR ANTICIPATION AND STANDARD, DON'T WORRY GUYS, I"M STILL LOOKING FOR MORE...!! :D

Crow model sheet, V2 4th revision

I am so sorry to keep posting. I promise I'll quiet down now.

Back view! Fixed front beak (minus nostrils)!

That 3/4 view is the worst thing ever. Doing the 'flip test' is a great way to check for mistakes — but unfortunately, in this case, they're plentiful. It just makes no sense. The body is twice as big as it should be, the pose is off balance and the wings have totally changed angle.

Agggh.... Back to the drawing board!!

Crow model sheet V2, 3rd revision

Still plodding along, trying to make changes and fix things up. I've refined the side view which I think is pretty much done now — I might mess around with the eyes and make them a little more girlish in shape — also need to tweak the feet a bit, give 'em claws (unless you guys prefer the rounded toes?)

The front view is getting there but I'm still having massive problems with the head and face as you can probably see. I simply cannot get it to look right — beaks are fairly difficult to rotate with any degree of accuracy! Or maybe I'm just thick?!

3/4 view is still a work in progress. I think the body's angle is sort of OK now, but I obviously need to refine the lines and overall shapes a bit more — I also think the chest is thrust out a little too far. The body is an almost entirely different shape. It needs to be a more subtle curve a little lower down the body.

Sorry to keep changing it before you guys have even given feedback, I'm just very keen to get this one out of the way haha! Please make suggestions as you see fit. Critique is always welcome :]

Alex

Crow model sheet V2, 2nd draft

Made some alterations! I'm far happier with the side view now. The front view is getting there but still looks off — I think it's the face, looks a bit lopsided to me. 3/4 view is still rubbish but much better than it was. It's a really tricky perspective to pull off — I think it's getting there, but at the moment the biggest problem is the angle of the wing and tail. It's pretty much just copied from the side view, when in reality the tail should be more behind the body and the wing should follow that sort of direction.

The head looks weird too but I can't put my finger on it...

Crow sketches #2

Sorry to clutter up the blog with these crappy doodles, but hopefully it goes some way to showing you all my process and might even give you some ideas :]

As I said before I want to really familiarise myself with the crow so I can draw a more accurate model sheet — so I started by nabbing a bunch of images of crows off Flickr and just tracing over the rough body shape. It helped me to really visualise where all of the joints should be placed — particularly the wings, which I've been struggling a bit with. As you can see from the scribbles in the middle, the wings actually have a very similar structure to human arms! They have shoulders on their backs, elbows, wrists and even 'fingers.' They bend and flex in exactly the same way our arms can, so once you get used to that idea it's a lot easier to understand how they fold or spread.

I'm starting to get to grips with the structure a little more now — not too keen on the sketches at the bottom there. The side view is sort of correct anatomically, but lacks all the personality of our crow! I That's always something I could  fix, though. The 3/4 view is just a bit wonky in general — looks a bit off-balance to me? If I brought the head back and spread the legs a little more it might be a bit better.

Feedback and critique is, as always, most appreciated! :]

Crow model sheet V2, 1st draft

Another draft of the crow's potential model sheet. I'm a little bit iffy about trying to draw a model sheet when I still don't feel entirely familiar with her body shape, so I think I might just return to doing some more sketches before I start trying to put one together. I'm mostly okay with the side view, and I'm almost alright with the front view (now that I've figured out that blasted beak) but the 3/4 view is still giving me hell. She looks really off-balance and I'm not keen on the head either.

This is by no means finalised and I'm going to go back and correct tons of anatomy/proportional mistakes, but I'm beginning to go a bit blind. If anybody has any critique it would be most welcome :]

Animatic Draft 01

Ta-da! The first draft of the animatic is finally up for show :] Now we can properly look at what and where things need to be changed, slowed down, speeded up etc.

I know we've already gone through a few things like a slower entrance for the scarecrow during the running scene and such. But feel free to comment on anything else you immediately see.

An unknown error occured, for some reason the screen scaled down for some of the sequences but I'll try to sort that out as soon as I can.

Crow sketches/design considerations

Just some more crow sketches to familiarise myself with the physiology of the crow — looking at the head from various angles and such :] 

Image source

I saw this really lovely photo of a crow and the eyes are very striking — I wanted to play around with the way I drew the eyes to try and make them a little more 'crow like.' What do you guys think of the blue? 

That weird little cartoon character on the side there is 'Drinky Crow,' a character from a rather obscure cartoon from 2007 about a crow who... drank. A lot. That was about it. Anyway, I quite liked how his eyes looked so thought I might try and emulate is, but I'm not too sure how it would work on our crow. Might play around with it a bit more.

More general sort of body sketches to try and figure out the placement of wings and such. I looked at the way a couple of other artists drew crows to get an idea as to how the body could be simplified.

Scarecrow in Colour - Draft No.1

Sorry guys that it took a bit long to get the design uploaded~ :)

Well it's just a first draft of the scarecrow in colour so still all the details can be discussed and changed, or be simplified and perfected... !

PS. I personally love the style that's with no outlines, so I didn't do outlines for the character either :D reference to :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKMxtfMSPTM&feature=related

and: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXWc3aFrxCo&feature=related btw love the background design in "the silence beneath the dark"

Scarecrow Colour Palettes

Hey guys, here are a few different scarecrow colour palettes for the scarecrow design! Obviously things can be mixed and matched as these were experimental.

I know there isn't as any as Alex's Crows but common I have got a lot more things to colour and shade! :P I really like the idea of having a checkered shirt as Jazzy said to me today when I was designing idea 2 so I decided to do a couple of others to see how well it works. Personally I think the checkered shirt idea looks great and that we should at least consider using this design prospect for the finial designed character! My favourite ones out of the lot are idea's 2 and 4 but hey I need input from you all so any requirements or changes let me know! :)

Crow colour palettes

Hello chaps! Just done a few colour schemes for our little friend and thought I'd put them up so you can have a look and tell me what you think :]

Was working mainly with the thought of blue/purple colour scheme, something quite  subdued in contrast to the relatively colourful scarecrow. I originally started by making the beak darker than the body, but it makes the mouth quite difficult to see. Overall I just think that it's too dark.

Personally I'm not keen on the orange beak — looks more like a duck! Jazzy then suggested making the beak lighter than the body which I think actually works really nicely. You can see her mouth and it keeps her looking a little more cheerful I think.

The last 3 (not counting disco crow) are probably my favourites so far. I was poking around on Google and a saw a few drawings where the crow's beak was more blue-ish in hue, so I tried it out and came up with 9 and 10 — 11, again, was inspired from another drawing where the crow was a brighter sort of purple with a brown beak and it looked really nice. So I stole BORROWED the idea. ;D

Personally, I think my favourites so far are 4, 8 and 10. What do you guys think? Any suggestions? :]

Edit: Agh! These look so much diffierent on my laptop screen. They're way brighter than I thought they would be - they looked super dark on the monitor in G01. Gotta try and fix that to keep them consistent across all monitors!

Meeting 4 - 22/2/2012

Today, Alex talked to me about drawing the scarecrow character design in a character model sheet where it shows the character doing either some actions or just turning on the spot so we can understand what the character would like from different angles and so I can practice the characters proportions and dimensions as to ensure I can draw them all correctly for when I animate him in the future. Here is a Skeleton and Detailed Model Sheets for the scarecrow.

HMK

• Complete the coloured designs for the scarecrow and post them onto the blog
• Draw some different positions of the scarecrow e.g. bending over, running etc

Production schedule (Update 22/02/2012)

Hi guys, just an updated production schedule for you all to ogle! It is, as always, subject to change depending on how we're getting on in any particular week, but it should serve to give you a bit of a breakdown as to how we should be looking to proceed.

I'm really sorry for the awful design — it made sense whilst I was making it but when I finally got it finished, I realised how difficult it is to read. I'll try and go back and re-do it so it's a bit easier to understand! 

Basically, the lighter coloured squares/strips are supposed to show the weeks we should be working on a task, and the dark squares are to represent the date we should have that task completed by. I've not given us fixed days to work on things — I think it's best if we leave that on a week-by-week basis and simply arrange according to personal schedules — however I am going to stress the importance of meeting to work as a group on this project at least 3 days a week. Bearing in mind the other projects we also have to do, you're going to need to manage your time accordingly to ensure that you can all make it to these group sessions as they really are absolutely essential. We all have access to Photoshop at home and the library is open weekends (for After Effects) so weekends are definitely open as a potential group work day. This will leave you Thursday morning, Friday morning/afternoon and potentially Wednesday to complete any outstanding work for Digital Skills and theory sessions.

Here's the text version (with current homework):

MOVEMENT STORY & STRUCTURE

GROUP 7 – Jazzy, Sam, Jae, Alex

Production Schedule

Updated 22/02/2012

Date

Week 1 (6^th Feb - 10^th Feb)

Create group blog. Discuss production roles. Begin initial sketches. Individual idea development.

Week 2 (13^th Feb - 17^th Feb)

·       Character design discussion & development.

·       Finalise script by Friday (17^th)

Homework:

Jae & Sam – For Tuesday 21st: Finalise character designs. Hold independent meeting to discuss ideas and develop scarecrow design.

Alex & Jazzy – Camera blocking (Jazzy) & storyboarding (Alex) for Tuesday.

All – Annotate script so far, consider ending possibilities.

Week 3 (20^th Feb - 24^th Feb)

·       Storyboard completed by Wednesday.

·       Create first animatic from storyboard images and stock sound effects.

·       Use storyboard animatic to identify key poses and backgrounds.

·       Start moving animatic.

·       Wednesday 22^nd: review completed character designs and begin character model sheets/colour charts. Identify key poses from rough animatic and start making a list of puppets to be created.

·       Use storyboard animatic to make early sound decisions — gather stock effects over the weekend and apply them to rough animatic.

Decide on final character designs and use storyboard animatic to identify key poses/backdrops and potential sound effects. Research for background design.

Homework:

Jae & Sam – For Wednesday 22^nd: Come up with some colour schemes for the scarecrow and practice drawing characters in different positions. Use the storyboard as reference and re-create some of those key poses.

Alex – For Wednesday 22^nd: Rough storyboard animatic to check flow of scenes. Amend production schedule and finish the timetable.

Jazzy – Start moving animatic using storyboard images (aim for completion by Monday 27th).

Sam & Alex — For Friday 24th: more colour schemes, using the model sheets drawn today. Familiarise yourself further with drawing the characters, try sketching some of the poses and scenes shown in the storyboard/animatic.
Jae — for Monday 24th: start gathering sound effects from the internet and put them onto the animatic that Alex will email to you. It's really important that we have the first draft of the sound ready by next week, so please let us know if you have any problems. Try and have some colours for the scarecrow ready for Friday as well!
Alex — Start looking at how best to divide up the scenes for production. Complete crow model sheet with potential colour schemes for Friday.

Week 4 (27^th Feb - 2^nd Mar)

        

Tues 28th Feb             Acting for Animation Workshops (B124)

·       Monday 27^th: Review animatic, discuss movement, timing and sound. Use week to amend as necessary.

·       First draft of sound by Monday [rough animatic]. Refine choices and gather more resources over the course of the week.

·       Begin filming/sourcing animation references for both characters.

·       Start background creation.

·       Rough puppet creation, animation tests to identify limitations/problems.

Jae and Sam to work together to ensure consistency on scarecrow puppets. Build some basic puppets and test to identify potential problems early on. Important to work closely together to make sure puppets fit with background perspective etc.

Start sourcing references and building puppets over the week.

Week 5 (5^th Mar - 9^th Mar)           

Mon 5th Mar                Acting for Animation Workshop. (B124)

·       Animatic approved & finalised by Monday at the latest.

·       Discuss scene allocation — calculate number of puppets/backdrops needed.

·       Puppet preparation — rough sketches & refinement/colouring.

·       Continue to test in After Effects.

Week 6 (12^th Mar - 16^th Mar)       

Mon 12th Mar               Sound Technical Workshops (G23)

·       Have list of sounds and sources ready for workshops.

·       All puppet sketches ideally completed — finish refining/cleaning/colouring stage.

·       Be ready to start animating by the end of the week.

Work in pairs to help aid puppet creation/After Effects/problem solving.

Week 7 (19^th Mar - 23^rd Mar) 

·       Emergency overflow period for any extra puppet fixing/completion needed

·       Group After Effects practice/tutorials

·       Begin animation (if not already started)!

Week 8 (26^th Mar - 30^th Mar) 

·       Animation production

·       Weekly feedback/group critique of animation so far

EASTER BREAK – 31st March – 15th April 

·       Animation production

·       Weekly feedback/critique — to be carried out through blog

Make sure you’re uploading your work periodically to the blog! This is the only way we can continue to give feedback!

Week 9 (16^th Apr - 20^th Apr) 

·       Animation production

·       Group feedback, critiques and refinement

Week 10 (23^rd Apr - 27^th Apr) 

·       Finalise main animation — final tweaks, further group feedback.

·       Begin preparing/refining/editing sound samples for post-production. Final decisions to be made regarding sound.

Week 11 (30^th Apr - 4^th May) 

·       Final refinements to post-production.

·       Meet to discuss portfolio preparation, hand-in requirements, DVD responsibilities and treatment.

·       Portfolio preparation

·       Last minute changes

·       DVD design

·       Discuss evaluation

·       Treatment/presentation production

Week 12 (7^th May - 11^th May) 

·       Portfolio preparation.

·       Last-minute contingency period

·       DVD authoring and design

·       Evaluation

·       Label printing

·       Portfolio assembly

Mon 14th May          ASSESSMENT. HAND IN B124 10.30am

Any problems, let me know!

Alex