Category: Term 2

I’ve wanted to be an animator since I was 15. I’ve been an artist for way longer, but the first time I watched Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon, I knew I wanted to use animation as a medium to bring my art to life. I wanted to tell my stories using this new skill I was going to learn.

So I sat down with trial versions of multiple software to practice animating. I rotoscoped, and traced, and did everything I could as a fifteen-year-old with little to no exposure to the industry until I could build a portfolio enough to get me into a college course that would teach me animation. And that was exactly what I got to do in 2016 when I started my bachelor’s in Animation. I worked hard for four years. Maybe too hard towards the end because I was burnt out. This medium that I was so passionate about no longer felt comfortable. It felt daunting and scary. I felt stuck because there was a part of me four years of hard work later, that believed I still wasn’t equipped enough to work in this field professionally. This was around the time Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse had come out and I was so backed up into a corner by my own fears, it felt like it was that or nothing for me (silly), So I took a break from it.

I specialised as an illustrator instead and rekindled my love for art through that. I spent my time during the pandemic establishing myself as an illustrator and character designer. I animated something for myself once a year so I never forgot what it actually meant to me. And then I decided I was going to take a chance with being an animator once again and chose to do my masters in the same field. And I moved countries to do this.

Even though I’ve done a few of the exercises in this blog before, redoing them over the past few months in this course when I’m a little more confident in my art and talking to people who are equally passionate about this medium has brought me newfound joy. Learning the basics of 3D animation, experimenting with different software, trialing stop motion animation again – It’s all been a breath of fresh air after two years of hiding from it.

I’m only two terms into this course and we’ve mostly been working with the basics, but I’m already less scared of concepts like clean-up animation and perspective now. I’m still learning to enjoy the process and learning my limits so I don’t end up burnt out again, but so far my reflections here have been positive. I’m hoping that I continue to work and interact with the medium in ways that keeps my love for it alive because all these years later, I would still love to tell the world stories of my own using animation.

   I was assigned to work with the 2^nd year MA Character Animation student Bingqi Liu. Bingqi has been working on her final project about the everyday fears of a mother who has just sent her child off to school. Initially, Bingqi had sent me an email saying my work with her would be to collect references and I was willing to do that. However, in her second email, she gave me the option to pick between collecting references or character development. As I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog, character development and the creative pre-production process of animation are my favourite things to work on so I asked Bingqi if it would be okay for me to play around with the characters. It also helped that the initial mockup I was sent immediately appealed to me. Bingqi immediately agreed to give me reign in this department.

   I started out with silhouette mockups of the mother and child first. I sent in the files and got a reply with the silhouettes that best fit the story.

This is when my other assignments started clashing with this and the time I had to put into all of them. I was a little unsure of where to proceed from that point. I believe Bingqi was working on the references part of the project at the same time. I was reached out to again a few days later asking if I would be able to provide drawn-out character references for poses in the animatic. And that even if it wasn’t the final design it didn’t matter because these references would be far more important to have at hand.

   I took up the challenge and got to work immediately. Bingqi’s style is very expressive and works wonders in animation. My style has always been a little bit more restrictive and subdued and I’ve always wanted to expand and reach out of my comfort zone a little, so this assignment also helped me broaden my horizons. First I started with the child going through almost every single pose and expression on the animatic. This was the outcome:

Next, I started working on the mother. This one was a little more exciting as a few of the shots with the mother were close-ups to focus on her reactions. I got to pay more attention to her expressions this way. This was the outcome:

   When I handed in the sketches, Bingqi seemed ecstatic about the outcomes. She said this was perfect for what she was going for. That I’d gotten most of them down and that she could proceed from there. She asked me to focus on my assignments from that point as I’d finished the tasks she asked me to and told me to reach out again later if I had some time to spare. Unfortunately, my work has been extended till the night before submission and I haven’t been able to reach out for more work. Maybe in the coming weeks, I could check in with her and ask if she needs my help with something small.

   Overall, I had a wonderful time working on this and I’m very much looking forward to seeing her final film someday. The creative vision behind it is so wholesome and relatable and I’ve always been a sucker for narratives revolving around a mother and child so I’m honoured I got paired up with Bingqi to work on this project.

by Vanessa Luther-Smith

Easily my favourite workshop of the term. All these years of art has given me the ability to sort of eyeball perspective and get things done. In this process, I’d given up on sitting down and actually learning the basics properly. When I found out we would have a workshop on perspective, I knew I had to be there.

   There’s not much I can write about the workshop but I did make plenty of attempts during the session that speak more than any words will:

by Bianca Ansems

This was our second time working with Bianca and our first time this term. I’ve always been grateful for the input we get during her classes as they’ve constantly been the most engaging sessions for me. This time we got into the storyboarding element of narratives. After briefing us on the importance of different kinds of shots and sequences, we were given a small script to storyboard at the end of the day.

The script:

The final results:

by Robert Bradbrook

During the storytelling workshop, we learned the structures (Hollywood and European) of storytelling in depth. We covered the needs of storytelling and the need for storytelling too. I’ve had some prior experience with storytelling, and scriptwriting during my undergrad but one of the biggest things I learned during this session was about the European structure and the high point of the story being the penultimate scene right before a drop in tone. A lot of stories I’d grown up with started making sense to me immediately.

We delved a little bit into establishing conflicts in a story to make it interesting and how conflicts and resolutions are the foundation of every story. These are some of the notes I’d taken down during the session:

Colour/Art Direction workshop – Sue Tong

During this workshop we got a look into the world of colour and pre-production in animation. Pre-production has always been my favourite part of the process and my strongest points. Since the course began in September, I’ve been focusing on animation to rekindle my love for it, but this workshop was a reminder as to why I put a lot of my time to specialise in this. And even so, I picked up so many new things during this session. 

   We covered the do’s and don’ts of composition (of which the don’ts are few and far apart) and got some tips on colour and contrast and on how to make things more visually pleasing. We learned about the tricks of using warm and cool toned colours to create depth and using colour to add layers to our storytelling process.

These are some of my notes from the workshop:

Colour/Art Direction workshop – Duane and Saffron

During the clean up workshop we were given a briefing on the clean up process and the industry requirements for it. Clean up has always been the most intimidating part of animation for me and listened to Alumnis of this course go into their process and reassure us that everyone feels similarly about clean up and have people to guide them through this until they get a hang of it eased my mind a little. We got to look at some of their works and discuss the process of it. We also discussed in-betweening key frames and did a little brush tutorial on TVPaint.

Lipsyncing with a theme. For this, we as a class had to decide on a theme that we’d like to work with and collectively we came upon the idea of animating Vines (seven-second videos from the site Vine that was big in pop culture about a decade ago). The audio I picked was the “Lipstick In My Valentino White Bag” vine.

This time I wanted to exaggerate a little more on the character designs and move a little outside my comfort zone.

The designs:

The first draft:

The final animation:

Reflections: By the time I arrived at this assignment (the last one of the term) I could feel the start of burnout from my uneven pacing. Though there were animation-based revelations I had, one of the biggest things I learned from this exercise was to pace myself and take breaks. I tried to work smarter instead of harder and tried to achieve the same end results considering as this was only a rough animation. My favourite part of this exercise was trying to step out of my comfort zone a little with the style and adding in the smaller details like the drink swirling in the cup or the slight jump of the Valentino bag when the character bangs her hands on the table. I realized that the finer details in storytelling bring me a lot of joy.

Objective: Lipsyncing with a partner in the language of their choice.

For this assignment, I worked with Renad Al-Alola and in the audio, I recorded her, she said “Hello. My name is Renad. I am from Saudi. I love Qahwa(coffee) and Henini” in Arabic. I designed a character to look pretty similar to Renad herself and went ahead from there.

The character design and initial mockup:

The mouth movement:

The first final version:

Corrections after feedback: I was asked to move the audio a fraction of a second ahead so that it felt more natural. And to not overlap the action and dialogue too much so that it looks unnatural and staged.

The final version:

Reflection: This was the first exercise where I got to animate with a character that I designed, and I had an incredible time with that. I tried to slow myself down and not overdo anything in the animation since it was such a small clip. I wanted it to be impactful and subtle and I tried my best to get that out. During the feedback, I also figured out ways to correct myself quickly and efficiently after a moment of panic. This was one of my favourite assignments.

Second exercise of term 2. We were given a pre-made character for this so we could focus on the expressions instead of the design. We were once again asked to explore a character interacting with a few listed things and I chose to make my character interact with visual media on a screen while they were knitting.

Acting reference:

Final result:

Feedback and corrections made: I was asked to make the character blink at certain intervals for it to look more natural. And to exaggerate the poses.

Reflection: Exploring expressions finally was a very distinguishable step up from all our previous exercises. It started to feel more human in a way. I’ve always loved the art of storytelling through expressions. I believe a person’s face can tell as many stories as their words can.