Jahiem's blog

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8th June 2022
by Jahiem Walker
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The life of a tealight 2- character designs & first animatic

After coming up with the concept for my story, I was ready to start developing the narrative and visuals of it. I decided to start off by designing the characters, as I had as lot of things to work out in terms of their movement; I needed to figure out how I was going to characterize the candles and have their actions and emotions be clear to the audience, As well as How they would move and interact with each other and the world around them, and whatever I decided could possibly influence/change the narrative. I completed some rough sketches to figure out their fundamentals before moving on to the designs for each character;

I decided to change the characters from actual candles to the flames on a tealight, for a couple reasons. Firstly, I had initially planned to have the characters be wax candles, with their flames representing the stage in life they were at (a tall flame for a healthy candle, a withered flame for a dying one), and the characters would melt as time passed, but after some thought I decided it might be confusing (especially for a younger audience) if the baby character started off as taller than the adult, and I thought these problems could be solved if the candles just served as the bases for the characters; They’d be flames on small tealights who gradually got smaller and dimmer as they started to die.

In terms of movement, I decided that the characters would remain mostly still; this could add a conflict into the narrative where the characters want to move around, but are unable to. They could jump small distances by springing upward, causing their candles to hop, but their weight wasn’t consistent and they’d remain practically weightless for other parts of the animation. I decided I’d base each character on a shape that reflected something about their character, influenced by our previous character design assignment; A strong character could be boxy and stable in shape, while a flimsier one might be more tube shaped and a stuck up one might be more triangular with a lot of corners. The designs would be relatively simple, with each flame distinguished by their head top and face, and they’d be able to morph their bodies and change shape at will.

With the fundamentals of the designs decided, I started working on the design of the father flame, who I named ‘Wixly’ after the wick of a candle. He would need 3 different designs; his prime form for the beginning, his middle aged form for the middle and his elderly form for the end.

I wanted Wixly to be a ‘gentle giant’ sort of character; someone who was big, healthy, confident and strong, but not threatening; I wanted him to look soft and cute. I remembered something that was said in the artbook for the game ‘The legend of zelda: breath of the wild’, which I’ll insert here;

To paraphrase, the designer chose to make the monsters in the game look a little cute and charming as opposed to scary and threatening, and he included small details for them such as snoring when they sleep and looking up to the sky when it rains. The intention behind this was to engage players more; If the monsters are presented as friendly, cute and innocent in some of their actions instead of completely violent beings, we empathize with them a bit more and see them as more organic creatures going about life and doing what they feel is necessary in the same way we are, even if they’re our enemies in the gamne. Another example of this design process being effective is here;

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/2/17642868/robots-turn-off-beg-not-to-empathy-media-equation

In this study, people were more hesitant to switch off robots that were designed as cute and begged to not be turned off, claiming to be afraid of the dark, despite knowing that robots don’t feel emotions and aren’t sentient beings. As my characters are quite abstract in concept, I needed some human elements in their designs to ensure that people could still empathize with them and read their emotions; this was important as my piece was meant to elicit an emotional response.

Going back to the design, I chose to make Wixly a bit soft and cute looking, despite his strong personality and muscular appearance, as I felt it would make people root for him and want him to stay safe and protected, making his disappearance in the end even more effective. I made his main shape a rounded square, giving him a bulky and yet soft appearance due to his lack of harsh edges, like a pillow. His facial expressions and actions would also be very exaggerated; despite being large and strong, He has a soft personality and emotes fully without trying to look strong. In his middle aged appearance he’s slightly smaller with some aging lines and thinner hair, and in his elderly form he’s reduced to just a head with more wrinkles, less hair and closed eyes. I based his prime design on strong actors who have a conventionally masculine ‘ideal’ appearance, aiming to make him clearly readable for audiences by giving him similarities to humans. I considered changing his hair between ages, but decided it was best to keep him recognizable by maintaining his features.

With Wixly completed, I decided to move on to the son flame;

I named the son Cyrus, meaning ‘Sun’ in Persian. I started off by designing his baby form, as I wanted to make sure his age was clearly distinguishable from Wixly’s; I used a simple circle for his main shape, with the intention of elongating it as he aged, and to keep him small, cute and relatively nonthreatening in appearance. I considered having his baby form be just a head, but decided to give him a small body as I wanted him to be able to act more, and I made his head top look more traditionally like a flame than Wixly’s as he would appear most frequently in the animation and I wanted it to be clear what he was. I designed his adult form on the far right next, with the intention of giving him a lanky, clumsy ‘lovable dork’ appearance, as I wanted his character to be a little different from Wixly’s and thought this type of personality would aid him well in terms of humor and acting. I designed his teen aged form in the middle last, including typical teen aged features such as acne, an experimental hairstyle and a hat (which was later removed); I considered having him pull more angry expressions as a teen, but I decided to keep his happy and clumsy personality consistent as I didn’t want to create a confusion in where the story’s conflict happens (The conflict would be when Wixly started to flicker and fade, not when Cyrus started growing up).

With everything decided, I created the character sheets;

Next I completed some rough background concepts, using the process of doing loose sketches and adding tone that we were taught in the Digital drawing toolkit sessions I attended; However I began to like the contrast between the dark backgrounds and bright characters, So I decided to keep them grey-scale. I decided that the characters would live on a window sill, with the sky changing hues to display the passing of time.

My next step was to create some Animation tests, to ensure that my characters looked right moving in the ways I had intended for them to. I started with the jumping animation;

I had to complete the tests in Krita as Harmony wasn’t working for me at the time (technical difficulties).

Finally, I created the animatic;

I presented everything in an Interim session shortly after finishing the animatic, and my feedback was;

  1. Shorten the animatic a bit; cut uneccesary shots
  2. consider how to make them look more like flames in their movement; possibly head flickers, embers, certain effects in Harmony such as the glow, etc.

With this feedback, I was ready to start my next steps; more animation tests and a more refined animatic.

21st March 2022
by Jahiem Walker
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The life of a tealight 1- early ideas

For our second year final projects, we’ll have to create a 1-2 minute animation showing off our auteur styles (our unique visual/narrative styles), displaying what we’ve learned while on our 2nd year. We also have to collaborate with others; this can be through help with animation, character design or sound design, or generally anything we might want help with.

The first thing we were tasked with doing was to create a presentation detailing how we would approach the project; Ideas on how we would collaborate, what kinds of stories we might want to tell, things we’re interested in and more.

https://www.canva.com/design/DAE45X4DzSU/zBRuzf9qFMsPr6tsG_8XFw/view?utm_content=DAE45X4DzSU&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=shareyourdesignpanel

This was my first presentation. It was pretty general as I didn’t have many ideas this early on; I gathered influences and artists I looked up to, and I made a brief brainstorm detailing themes I might want to explore. This presentation was helpful in generating an idea, as when I looked over all of my references and interests, I could begin to vaguely see what kind of animation I wanted to create; something with a clear linear narrative, able to elicit an emotional response and targeted at younger audiences with the idea of helping them to understand or accept something. I briefly considered creating something for one of my personal projects, but I abandoned the idea, as I felt that coming up with an idea made specifically to fit within the parameters of the project might be a better idea.

My feedback from presenting was that I needed to do something unique with the idea of acceptance; I wanted to explore the idea of a character accepting something they were having a hard time with, but I needed to avoid the usual ‘zero to hero’ tropes that acceptance stories usually contain.

After the presentation, I started to brainstorm ideas on this miro board;

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOKVBeKI=/

A couple classmates had delved more into personal ideas and experiences in their presentations, and I thought it would be a good idea to make mine personal too, as drawing from real life experiences and thoughts can add some depth to a story and bring it to life. I brainstormed personal ideas and considered how I could link them to the overall theme of acceptance and things that I like; I initially considered doing something about hair discrimination against the black community as I found it interesting to research, but I came across an idea I liked more; one about two candles.

I asked myself what I found hard to accept personally, and I came to the idea of my grandma aging at the same rate I am. I often find myself worrying about what I’ll do when she isn’t around anymore, and I get concerned when I see that she doesn’t have the same energy she used to. I feel that this is something everyone comes to experience with the adults around them, and so I wanted to create an animation about how to deal with these feelings; I feel that children aren’t taught often that there will be things in life that are terrible but can’t be avoided or changed, and that acceptance is necessary because some things are out of our hands, and so I find this project to be a good opportunity to educate younger audiences about it in preparation for when they get older.

The story I came up with is about two candles; an older parental candle and a younger baby candle. As the baby candle gets older, his father does too; when he notices his father melting and flickering, he begins to try and find ways to keep him alive, but must eventually accept that no candle stays lit forever.

I have a lot of obstacles visually with my project; how I’ll make candles emote and move around, how to characterise the candles and more. I look forward to figuring these things out along the way and growing as an artist.

13th February 2022
by Jahiem Walker
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Digital drawing toolkit (2)

CLASSWORK

Task 1- to draw a coloured ball and add accurate shadows and highlights, reference image below. When finished, draw another coloured ball with light coming from a different direction.

My feedback; the left ball (basic) needs more of a strong terminator, stronger lighting and shadows overall would prevent it from looking so flat. Ball on the right (low light) received similar criticisms, and the bottom shadow should actually be on the top, as light is coming from underneath the ball. Terminator should also be a bit lower.

Task 2- choose a scene from a film and analyse the effects of the lighting. (quick task; no feedback)

(Kubo and the two strings, 2016)

My points;

  1. low lighting combined with the angle gives a sense of suspense
  2. bright yellow shade of the light contrasts with the paler blue light coming in from the left (taken further; the colour is ‘safe’ and ‘warm’ in contrast with the atmosphere of the scene)
  3. we expect some kind of a grand reveal
  4. contrast on character faces due to the shadows

HOMEWORK

Objective- create a digital tonal drawing of a composition with 4 components, differing in size and shape; use an artificial light source.

My work; a book, remote, glue stick and bottle. Details left out to focus primarily on tone.

9th February 2022
by Jahiem Walker
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2 week project- Stop motion (2)

Homework task

Objective- to create a city/landscape out of A4 paper; no sticking things down (everything had to be moveable), had to fit on a sheet of A4 paper. Models should reflect on the qualities of the material (paper) we learned from the first lesson.

WIP shots/process;

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I used techniques from the first class, such as crumpling, folding and re shaping the paper. I played around with combining both 2D and 3D shapes for contrast between depths, shadows and textures.
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I shaped some components by wrapping them around other things until they took on the shapes I was looking for.
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My final work

‘Far beyond the waves, it is said that a magical castle made of solid ice stands solitarily. The few who have seen it claim that the spirit of a young girl haunts it, silently watching sailors as they pass with a stoic expression.’

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Single light source- white torch light
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Single light source- yellow lamp light
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Both light sources
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Class work task 1

objective- To create a looping animation using 1 component of the model from the homework. We had to choose a word from a list as the theme of the animation.

my work

Chosen word- melt

Class work task 2

Objective- create animations using our model cities; ‘deconstruct’ as the theme.

WIP shots

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My setup for these animations; a lamp above for lighting, a flashlight attached for an optional second light source/white light. I held my phone in my hand to take pictures.

My work

1- waves clearing to reveal a mystical castle.
2- a change in light source; experimenting with how different hues and shadows effect the piece visually.
3- light passing over the castle
4- a figure appearing through waves.

What went well;

  1. I was able to think outside of the box and experiment with the possibilities of a piece of paper; It challenged my Imagination and I’m happy with my castle as a result.
  2. I feel that my pictures came out well, mostly because of the lighting. I can apply some of the things I did with the lighting here to other mediums of work, such as digital art.
  3. I was able to practice stop motion, which I don’t do often.

What could’ve been better;

  1. I slightly misunderstood the final task; none of my animations deconstructed the castle, they added things to it. They also didn’t loop.
  2. Could have experimented more with angles in my photography; getting closer/further would’ve added a sense of scale, and other angles could have been interesting.

What I’ll improve on;

  1. Ensure that I read our objectives properly and pay more attention so that I know what to do, ask questions if I’m unsure.
  2. Be more experimental with the composition of shots when I have to take pictures.

9th February 2022
by Jahiem Walker
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2 week project 2- my chicken animation

Objective- to create an animation portraying an abstract connection between mankind and nature; ‘Observations of irrational relations between humans and nature’.

My animation

A chicken eating at a restaurant that serves human meat, with a casual/bored expression; what he’s doing is mundane and routinely for him. Comedic branding on the walls for a somewhat dark concept (killing and eating humans); role reversal between people and animals.

What went well;

  1. clear communication of my idea- I feel it’s clear what’s going on for viewers
  2. Line boiling- my first time using this technique (re drawing lines with every frame to make them wobbly), It looks the way I intended it too
  3. Mixed textures- a combination of drawing, My own photography and found images, I like the look of these differing textures coming together

What could be better;

  1. Duration- the animation was supposed to be between 5-10 secs, I went over this by 7 seconds
  2. Time management- I under estimated how long I could spend on this; It wasn’t fully coloured in time for the lesson

How I’ll improve next time;

  1. Give more time to complete it (I gave myself 2 days and it took 3; If I had started earlier I could’ve had it finished in time)
  2. ensure that I plan out the animation first (possibly through a rough animatic using keyframes) so that it meets the duration requirements

4th February 2022
by Jahiem Walker
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2 week project 1- a chicken that bites back

Since finishing our cats and dogs project, we have 2 weeks until our animation arts classes start back, and until then we have been set a small 2 week project; We will all complete a short animation and they’ll be combined into one film at the end, similarly to the exquisite corpse task we did in toolkits 2.

The objective is to complete a 5 to 10 second animation following the theme ‘observations of irrational relations between human and nature’; In teams of 2, we have to discuss our ideas and come up with two separate animations. Once we’ve finished the animations, we will swap with each other and add sounds to each other’s work,

The first thing we had to do was to brainstorm rough ideas; I created a mind map for this, to get what I was thinking down somewhere.

Here was my mind map. While writing down my ideas, I found that a lot of them had a common theme; reversal of roles, whether that be between animals and humans or humans and other things. I felt that this idea opened up the doors to what could be a humorous and fun animation, which I wanted to aim for. I generally liked the idea of switching the role between an animal and a human, and seeing if it made me uncomfortable or more newly conscious of my own relations with animals.

I followed this up with some drawings to capture some of these rough ideas;

I completed drawings of possible themes I’d go with for the animation; animals who eat human meat and wear human hair, dinosaurs who study humans in an exhibition and fish who go ‘humaning’, baiting humans into the sea, were all fun ideas to me. I chose to go with the chicken eating human meat, as this idea appealed most to me and I felt it would make for a weird and funny animation; we were also told to not include too many scene changes, and I feel like this idea only really needs one camera angle. I stuck with a simple style, as I feel that if I combine a simple style of animation with some wobbly lines, the overall aesthetic of the animation will be unique and stand out.

The general idea is to have a businessman chicken enjoying a human arm on his lunch break, In a similar fashion to the way a lot of us go to fast food restaurants and eat meat during our breaks. Here is the logline;

‘Have you ever gone for a quick piece of chicken on your break from work? well in this universe, the chickens bite back’

One of our challenges was to try and be experimental with the medium we chose to animate with; I couldn’t think of many different techniques since I don’t know how to 3D animate and can’t learn during our time frame, and I don’t have the equipment for stop motion, but after some discussion with the teacher I came up with a fun idea; to create a collage-esque background, filled with both my own pictures, artwork and things from the internet, and a 2D animated chicken. I feel that this will make for an interesting looking end result, so I’m going to try it.

I took this picture of my desk with a plate on it. My idea is to cut this out digitally and use it as where the chicken is sitting. I want to set my idea in a restaurant, so I might change the chair out for one that looks more like a chair you’d see on a restaurant.
I also took this picture of some tiles in my shower, which I think could work for the wall in the animation, as some restaurants have tiled walls. I’d like to add some things to the walls, to give some context to the scene.
KFC food illustration for in store graphics | Illustration by Danny Allison
KFC_FoodCreds_01_ag | Kfc, Graphic design posters, Graphic poster
I’m going to try creating some graphics like these for my restaurant, as I feel they’ll bring it to life a bit and add a sense of reality to it. I want to achieve this through digital collage, which I’ll try completing on Krita.
I started by combining the table and plate with the design for the wall. I liked how the chair looked, so I ended up keeping it; I wanted an overall odd and slightly misplaced aesthetic for the animation to match the theme, and I thought it fit well.
Using a free photo editor called Pixlr, I played around with the light and exposure of the image. I liked this look for it, as it brought out the colours more and added more of a mixed and matched collage look to the whole thing.
I worked on two graphics for the background, starting with this one. I used PNGs from the internet, as I wanted my graphics to have a really rough, spliced together and somewhat comedic element to them, parodying real life restaurant graphics.
I tried to be comedic with my wording and choice of imagery to really bring home the sarcastic and somewhat unusual theme of this animation. I thought it would be funny to parody brands who boast about their meat being fresh and treated well, as I’ve always found that comedic because either way, they’re slaughtered; combined with the animation, I feel this background will be funny and make people smile.
here is everything all put together. It’s all very rough and copy paste, which I like about it; it almost feels like a meme or a parody.

With my background done, I’m ready to animate my chicken. I look forward to finishing this animation and seeing people’s reactions to it.

2nd February 2022
by Jahiem Walker
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Toolkits 3: digital drawing class 1; learning the basics, 6 thumbnails

I chose a different toolkit this time around; Digital drawing. This toolkit has a focus on creating backgrounds, which is a skill I’ve been long overdue on learning; I’ve always enjoyed looking at well drawn backgrounds, but I get stressed attempting to draw them as I don’t know where to start and the basics have always seemed kind of daunting. I hope to leave this toolkit with more courage, and a better understanding of things like composition and perspective.

For the first class, we looked at some basics, which included;

How To Use Leading Lines To Create More Interesting Compositions
Leading lines; lines that draw an audience’s eyes to the focal point of the image.
The Rule of Thirds in Art
The rule of thirds; drawing a grid over artwork can help us to see where everything has been placed, and how much of a canvas has been dedicated to certain parts of the drawing. Generally, drawing things in the sections where the dots are in the top left image draws our eyes to them more.
assassins creed valhalla: What your PC needs to have to run Assassin's Creed: Valhalla - Times of India
Colour- generally backgrounds will be 70 percent one shade (warm or cold) and 30 percent the other. Contrast is also important, with the orange on this image standing out on top of the more soft blue tones. Scale is also important; the house in this image being so big implies that it’s of importance.
Fan Creates Epic Crossover Between God of War and Assassin's Creed Valhalla
Repetition- can make a feature in a world feel more natural, as things are usually found in groups. The mountains here serve as an example. Also present in this picture is some contrast in the direction of lines, with the pole coming up off of the boat being horizontal and interrupting the mostly vertical composition; another tip we were told to look out for.
We were challenged with choosing a piece of concept art and adding notes of the things we had learned. I chose a background from steven universe, a cartoon that i particularly like the backgrounds from. I applied the things I had learned to it. Although I was able to apply some of what I had learned, I was told that this background was a little chaotic and didn’t really apply the things we had learned about (it’s probably a still from an episode and not concept art), so I looked at some different artwork to further test my knowledge;
The Art of Super Mario Odyssey / Twitter

This is concept art for mario odyessy. Here you can clearly see;

  1. contrast- the palette is mostly warm, but there is still contrast between green and red on the grass and in the trees.
  2. scale- Mario is a lot smaller than the forest components, giving us an idea of the scale of everything. Judging by how it towers over a human, it can be assumed that the things in this location are rather large.
  3. golden ratio & composition- the structure at the end of the cliff is directly on a grid line if you draw one over it, drawing our eyes to it. It’s also higher than Mario and closer to the sky, adding a sense of importance to it.
  4. Repetition- the cube shaped structures on the right of the cliff are repeated, making them look like they belong.
  5. leading lines- our eyes are guided toward the top of the cliff because of the curves on the white spheres and the curved line of the cliff, as well as the direction of the trees.

After these evaluations, we were challenged with creating a simple composition using geometric shapes, and applying some of what we had learned. Here is what mine looked like;

I decided to try creating a composition where this little green cube was in danger. By the time I created this, we had received some more tips; a lack of horizontal lines can make something feel threatening and dangerous, especially when paired with sharp edges. I tired playing around with scale and colour here; the red things are threatening, and the poor cube is tiny and defenceless against the larger and more intimidating shapes.

We were set a homework task to complete, testing how much we had learned in the class; to create six thumbnails of environments applying our new knowledge. I decided to use six locations from a story I’m working on, as I had been meaning to draw them anyway, and I took this as a good oppurtunity. To summarise the overall themes of these locations;

  1. Elderveiss- a peaceful country surrounded with nature and greenery; home to a magical guild, and where the main characters start their journey.
  2. Bailan- an icy country based on China, with influence from other east Asian countries. A beautiful and culturally rich land full of tourist attractions; an icy castle where the emperor lives.
  3. Majinon- an old fashioned land where magic is prohibited. Very stony and outdated, not much nature; a statue of a goddess who the people worship.
  4. Dravonous- a mountainous country inhabited by both dragons and humans; a more natural and primitive way of life is practiced here, not the safest place for people who aren’t used to it.
  5. magic cave- a trap-filled cave that connects Elderveiss and Bailan. Usually out of limits, full of danger.
  6. ?

My first drawing was of the peaceful land of Elderveiss. Here, I relied a lot on the grid, in order to make the guild the focal point of the image; I placed it high up and along the third points, implementing the rule of thirds. I tried playing around with scale by including trees and Luda, the main character of the story; The guild’s importance is exaggerated by it’s scale, towering over people and rivalling the height of trees. I tried using lighting to highlight the guild (although I feel like this approach may have been a little too head on), and I made the branches and floor lines point up toward the guild, working as leading lines. The drawings have to be tonal, but I’d imagine this location to feature a lot of natural and earthy shades of green and brown. I’m happy with this drawing, although I feel it could be improved through gaining a better understanding of perspective.

After the lesson, the feedback I got for this drawing was to focus more on perspective than line and smaller details; when studying something new, it’s best to start small and work on the basics before going into details. For future tasks I’ll try more loose and simple ways of drawing.

Next I drew Bailan, a snowy and beautiful nation based on east Asian countries, notably China. I tried having the temple in the back be the focus of this piece, but I feel it isn’t as noticeable as other things such as the buildings on the left. Still, my leading lines go up to this temple, with the floor, walls and buildings all pointing to it. I chose to play around with lighting too, having the sky be dark and the light mainly coming from the buildings and lamppost. I included the lamppost for some contrast in horizontal and vertical lines, and I tried featuring a lot of dark shades to contrast with the white snow. I added two children playing in the snow to the scene, as I felt this would add to the atmosphere; It makes the scene look happy and safe, which is what Bailan is like as a country in the story.

The feedback I got in the lesson here was about perspective; the image looks a little crowded because the perspective on the left is off. I was told that this would be an interesting composition if the buildings were corrected, So I’ll possibly go back and try to fix them.

My third drawing was of Majinon, a secluded and old fashioned country where magic is prohibited and the people worship a goddess. I feel that the perspective for my church was a bit off here, as it looks a bit out of place in the image. I tried having a lot of light in this one, as it’s meant to be a holy place of worship and I feel light fits this kind of a theme well. I like how the goddess statue turned out, and I feel the drawing is atmospheric and captures well what the country is like.

For this drawing’s feedback, I was advised to avoid having things touching the edge of the image, as they become distorted and the whole image starts to look squashed together; these are called ‘tangents’. My church and statue both touch the edges of the canvas, which makes the whole thing look a bit squashed.

Unfortunately I only managed to complete 4 drawings, and so this was my last one; Dravonous, a volcanic country where dragons and humans live together in harmony. I tired to avoid any vertical lines in this piece, as I wanted it to look as if the viewer was looking upward and didn’t see the floor. I tired having everything lead up toward the volcano, to draw the viewer’s eyes toward it. I worked with mostly dark colours, with a white mist covering the volcano for some contrast.

For this image, I was told that a better understanding of perspective would strengthen it; if the distortion was more dramatic and the perspective was stronger, you’d really get a sense of distance.

Overall, I’m happy with myself for attempting some background drawings after so much avoidance, despite their flaws. I was complimented on how imaginative my ideas were, and I feel that if I combine my imagination with improved practical skills, I can create some truly great artwork. The feedback I received was very useful, and I hope to improve on my next background drawing.

1st February 2022
by Jahiem Walker
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cats n’ dogs final; final changes, creating the animation, final thoughts

We worked on a new storyboard after our presentation, aiming to implement our new changes. Here’s the animatic, to show our final draft before animating;

changes; middle scene removed, first scene longer, we didn’t end up removing any dogs, some added sounds to fill emptiness. The boy is also now the human inside the book.

This animatic was received more positively, as the story was clearer. There were two main pieces of criticism for this one that we worked on; 1. the ambience in the beginning sounds like a kitchen instead of a bedroom, and 2. it still isn’t very clear when the scene changes between the book and real life. For the ambience issue, I simply found a different atmospheric sound effect and applied it to the beginning, and for the second issue, my team came up with the solution to use harmony’s charcoal texture for the book scene lines, giving it a hand pencil drawn effect. We’d also colour with this brush, setting the book’s texture apart from the real life scenes, and change the appearance of characters in the book so that they looked more simplistic, with round dot eyes and softer features.

The change in texture

As mentioned before, I also added some sounds to this version of the animatic; our first one felt a little bit empty, So I added some simple things such as ambience and subtle sound effects, along with making things like walking and fabric sounds louder.

With all of our changes implemented, we were ready to start the animation.

For my scenes I spent 2 days on each of them; one on rough animation and line art, and another on colouring. In hindsight it was a bad idea, as I didn’t give myself time to perfect many things in the animation and I felt severely burned out due to not taking any breaks. Because of this I ended up missing a lot of my own mistakes, such as the fact that I forgot to include seats in the car with the boy and police dog, pictured above. Still, I managed to complete my scenes each on time. I tried to use some harmony techniques we had learned in class, such as camera moves and tweening.

Here is our final animation. Overall, I feel it works well and the scenes flow into each other nicely. The colour palette is effective in creating a peaceful and warm bedtime scene, and the shots have enough variety to keep the viewing experience from getting stale. The sounds also match the footage well, and the timings aren’t too awkward; I like the transitions between shots too, as they’re imaginative.

To improve, I think we could work on our consistency; the animation quality varied at times, and some things looked a bit different between shots, such as the colour of the door frame changing from white to brown. More attention to detail will prevent these things from happening in the future.

I feel like i have improved my cooperative skills through this project, as I was able to approach my teammates more easily than I have been in the past. I also feel like I managed to stay within my time frames well, although a more specific schedule would’ve been useful to me. Going forward, I’ll pay more attention to detail in my animations, and allow myself enough time to live life away from my project and take some breaks while animating, as it refreshes my head. I look forward to further developing my skills with our next project.

1st February 2022
by Jahiem Walker
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Toolkits 1 & 2; what I created

This will be a long post containing the work I created for the first two toolkits. For both these toolkits I chose 2d animation, as I wanted to choose something that would aid the main project I was doing at the time, the cats and dogs horniman animation.

Generally, the toolkits focused on practicing a principle in 2D animation, ranging from things like squash and stretch to anticipation. I already have some experience with these principles, but practice makes perfect and I was able to polish my skills a bit through the toolkit. Below, I’ll attach videos accompanied by a bit of text explaining what the task was. I completed these animations all on Krita.

  1. squash and stretch
This was a simple ball bounce animation, to practice the principles of squash and stretch. It’s a simple beginner’s animation, so I didn’t have too much trouble with it.
This was a second squash and stretch exercise; the goal was to animate jelly being penetrated by something, and stretching out as jelly does. I chose to have a character push his finger into the jelly from the top; However, I was advised to consider the qualities of jelly and it’s transparency & movement a little more, as it kind of looks more like dough in my animation.
For this animation, the goal was to have the ball interact with something that was applying force to it; we had to make the ball get hit with a bat. The feedback I received was to 1. apply more overshooting to the bat, as it looks awkward when it stops suddenly after hitting the ball and it’s unrealistic, and to also avoid using things like big spiky marks to display that the ball has been hit, as the focus should be on the movement. As a personal point I feel it would’ve been more interesting to animate in a more 3d space, with the ball getting smaller as it goes off toward the distance.

2. Anticipation

For this animation, the goal was to use anticipation; we had to have a character interact with a ball, either kicking it, batting it or throwing it. For my first anticipation task, I chose to make the character kick the ball, but with a twist; he breaks after kicking it, as it’s solid. I challenged myself to try making the character expressive, as I thought it would add to my overall idea; I think it turned out well.
Here, I chose to animate a character throwing a ball. Acting on my self criticism for the ball being hit with a bat, I wanted to try and envision a 3d space, allowing more movement for my character. The advice I received here was to have a small moving element, such as a jittering eyebrow, on the parts where my character is still, to avoid making it look like they completely freeze before finishing their actions.

5. overshooting

The last task for toolkits 1 was to create an animation with overshooting; small things that stop moving just after the big object they’re attached to has stopped moving, such as hair on a head. I used a bunny character, and made his ears overshoot. The advice I received was to avoid a mistake I made on the 2nd head turn; the ears start moving before the head, making it look like the the bunny is being dragged. Overshooting should happen just after movement stops.

5. character acting

toolkit 2 was about character acting; how we can characterise characters through their movement. The first task was to sketch up a quick character using simple shapes, displaying their personality; we’d then go on to animate this character doing something that would express their personality to viewers. I used my character, Alf; he’s a mischievous young boy who enjoys messing around and slacking off. I tried communicating his characteristics through his expressions, but looking back I think I could’ve made his traits more outstanding and noticeable through a single drawing with a more dynamic pose and exaggerated face. I was also told to avoid patterns and things that are hard to reproduce in a character design, such as Alf’s hair and the lines on his hat and zipper.
I went on to animate a short video showing off Alf’s power and love for fighting. The animation is pretty stiff; I’d like to take on the advice of simplifying designs and ensuring that they’re re drawable for future character animations.
For this task, we had to animate a person walking like an animal; I chose a crab. We were challenged with not using video references, and instead getting up and acting the motion out ourselves. This was effective as we could feel the shift in weight, allowing us to better visualize subtle details that we may have missed through videos. The advice I received here was to be less careful with the detail in the drawing and to focus more on the movement of the character, as well as to practice anatomy to better portray the pose.
The task here was to animate a character moving along the stage, and one of the prompts was a character chasing a fly. I chose to use a cat, as i thought it would be fun to work with a non human character. Initially my cat had no tail movement; I was advised to add it as it’s a subtle detail that adds a lot of character to the animal, along with his hip shake before jumping. I was happiest with this out of all of my toolkits 2 work, as I feel I clearly communicated the cat’s frustration to the audience, and it has a fun ending.
The task here was to animate a witch attempting to hang up a broom that doesn’t want to be shelved. My feedback here was to 1. again avoid using added things, e.g. the ellipses that appears next to the witch’s head, to express her feelings, as it distracts from her actual actions which are more important, and to keep the size of my witch consistent as her legs got longer when she fell onto the floor. (unfortunately I can’t find the file where I implemented these changes, but they did make a difference. I added a sigh to the end instead of the thought bubble).

The final task was to create a scene for an ‘exquisite corpse’ animation; scenes made by multiple different animators and combined into one long flowing video. We had to have a character interact with this pole, dethatching the top half; the character would then reattach if before leaving, and the first and last frames had to be empty. I chose to use a witch character who bumped into the pole and broke it, before fixing it with magic. I wanted to play around with anticipation, which I used before the pole broke, and other principles, such as squash and stretch for the broom and overshooting for her legs when she landed on the floor. I was happy with the outcome, as I liked the way it looked when combined with the other animations.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hMP97KYCeoGka1_m-lfk4MBMC6MWEUnJ/view?usp=sharing (the whole animation)

Overall, these two toolkits have been helpful in giving me some practice in animation, and in challenging me to create things quickly without too much planning and clean-up. It has changed the ay I approach animation, as I now prioritise movement more than I previously have. I look forward to further developing my arsenal of 2D animation skills.

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