Experimentation

Generating Ideas

For my FMP idea, it was important for me to make something which had a message behind it and something that was personal to me.

My First Idea

I wanted to use the characters I designed in Portfilo Thea and Lenna. I wanted to create an animation about a girl in her twenties going through her day and dealing with things like body positivity and mental health issues.

Storyboard

With Thea being the main character, I wanted to show her life over the span of a few months. She would start her days by not doing much and mostly laying in bed. Little by little she starts to be more productive and starts taking care of herself. I never go to finish this storyboard because this idea didn't get greenlit. Studious would most likely see a short fun animation. Because I want to work for feature it would be better if I came up with an idea that was targeted towards a younger audience.

Generating Ideas

With the environments that I had picked out, I wanted to create a story that takes place in a house.

Fantasy Idea

One of my ideas was to have a child playing with her toys in her room. I wanted her to experience something magical like her toys coming to life or she goes through a mirror into a different world. I thought this idea might be too difficult to execute. In terms of finding the right rigs for the toys or getting special effects for the magic.

Story Idea 2

Storyboard

For this idea, I tried coming up something fun. One of my objectives is to be able to animate different characters and personalities. I wanted to have a few different characters enter a room, one at a time, and react to the same environment. I chose to have a phone ringing in the room. I wanted to have a child a mother and a father. The child would do something silly when the phone rings, like put a box over it. The father would get scared because the box is moving and the mother would be the one to discover the phone under the box.

Notes

Editing Idea

Notes - Generating Ideas

A series of shots showing the life of a mother and her child.
3 different shots – 10 to 20 seconds
Shows the child getting into mischief around the house and the mother trying to navigate this while working from home.
Marketed to 5 to 12-year-olds

Storyboard 1

Storyboard 2

Scene 1
A child walks into the kitchen and sees her toy on the table. She tries to climb on the table. As she is dangling from the table she is gripping onto the table cloth but she falls onto the ground taking the tablecloth with her. All the plates fall from the table and break on the ground. The mother comes running in.

Scene 2
The child is playing in the living room. The phone rings. The child gets frustrated that it’s interrupting her playtime so she goes to it and hangs up. It rings again and this time the child takes a box filled with books that is next to the table. She dumps out the books onto the ground and puts the box over the phone. She can still hear it ringing and that annoys her further so she pushes the box off the table and stumps out of the room angrily.

Scene 3
The mother is working in her office. The child comes in. She is bored so she tries to get her mother’s attention. Her mother is working so she doesn't pay attention to her. The child starts walking around the room and she tries to climb up on a lamp and she starts falling back. That's when the mother notices her and gets her off the lamp.
The next scene is the child and the mother sitting in the office together. The child is drawing on a table next to her mother. The child gets bored again so she leaves the room without her mother noticing. In the last shot, the camera is focused on the mother's face while she's working. We hear crashing sounds in the background and we see the mother's reaction.

Storyboard 3

For this version, I tried a few different variations of the same idea.

Shot 1 - 3 variations

-The child is playing in the living room. I thought I'd show her jumping from furniture to furniture knocking something over while playing.

-She tries to call out to her mom but she doesn't answer

-The child is paying but she is making a lot of noise and the camera goes to her mom who has an annoyed look on her face

Shot 2 - 1 variation

-She sees the teddy bear and climbs onto the table to get it. She notices the cookies and goes towards them. She accidentally knocks off a plate with her foot. Her mother runs in.

Shot 3 - 2 variations

-The child is grounded in the office but sneaks out when her mom isn't watching. We hear crashing sounds in the background and see the mom's reaction

-The child is paying in the office and tries to get her mom to pay with her but she doesn't so the child sneaks out. We hear crashing sounds in the background and see the mom's reaction

None of these ideas got greenlit. The feedback I got was that I needed to get the child to be more mischievous. She needed to get into more mischief to drive the mother crazy. I couldn't quite tell the story in an engaging way.

I tried changing the story again and adding the father in. Maybe both of them team up and try to steal the cookies without the mother noticing. I still struggled with this idea so I dropped it and tried to look at things from a different perspective.

Final Idea

My storytelling is a bit darker and I don't have a lot of experience writing comedy gags and that's why I struggled so much. Instead of coming up with a short story I decided to go back to one of my previous ideas and just have a sequence of shots. I decided to animate a few characters reacting to the same environment.

Final Idea

Building the Environment

Since I am only modeling the kitchen now I looked more into kitchen environments in the syle that I wanted.

These are the stages of building my environment. I modelled the cupboards and the fridge myself but I did reference some assets. The table and chairs were referenced in. As well as the plates the toaster and the kitchen utensils.

This is the coloured version I didn't add any textures for this project because I didn't feel like it was necessary for the environment to be that detailed.

These are the rigs I will use.

Testing Rig

I had been looking forward to animating a child for a while now. I wanted to test out this rig beforehand and see if I could create a convincing child performance animation.

I am happy with how this animation turned out and the rig seemed to work great. I would have liked to make this performance less realistic and more cartoony.

Reference/Animatic

Reference

Animatic

I wanted to make an animatic to see how all the shots will look together. I recorded references for all of the characters. I tried finding additional videos for some of the shots which I had trouble recreating. Originally I wanted to have a still camera but I ended up putting a lot of details in and I felt like I needed a few camera angles to capture all of them.

Re-timed Reference

Blocking

Once I started blocking I found out that some parts in my reference were too long. I fixed the timing while I was blocking out my animation so it looked the way I wanted it to. Then I went into After Effects and laid my reference next to my block out. This was I could see which parts I needed to crop and which parts were unnecessary. The child shot was the one that required the most editing since my reference seemed to stretch out for a minute, which was way too long. I found more secondary references for the child so that I can get more accurate movements for her.

For my music collaboration please go to my collaboration tab or

Click Here

Fixing Camera Angles

I had to go back and change some of the camera angles. I wanted to make sure that the transition between the shots was nice and clean. After talking with my tutor we decided to change up the camera angles in the last shot, when the mother walks back in.

-cross dissolve transition between shot 3 and 4

-close-up of her hand

-close-up of her reaction

-keep the last shot

Passes of Shots

Blocking 2

For this pass, I started cleaning up the shots and adding more solid poses. As well starting to work on the lip synch.

Shot 1 Breackdown - Mother

Shot 3 Breackdown - Father

Shot 2 Breackdown - Child

Shot 4 Breackdown - Grandfather

This is the proses of my animation from blocking to polish. One of the most important things to pay attention to was the plate and the chair. I needed to make sure they were in the same place in every shot otherwise they would suddenly change position when the next shot would come on.