Final short animation film.

Final animation film: Emily

2D hand drawn frame by frame animation.

Stop start paper animation.

Stop start claymation.

All the information of the three animation styles are in this blog.

In the end, they all lived happily ever after...

Finally finished my final animation short film, It feels good to be finished but also weird as I had been working on it day and night for many months.

For my final blog I will go through my journey of making this final film...(hopefully this wont be too long.)

Firstly we had to start from the very beginning, the story, characters and the plan. You can't do anything or go anywhere with out a plan and the plan is vital when it comes to animating a film, whether or not it is a long or short one. It took me a while to settle with a story I actually liked thanks to the help of many such as my lecturers and friends. But I enjoyed creating the characters and designing the hole film.

My film ended up with three main medias, 2D hand drawn animation, paper animation and claymation.

Which did I enjoy most?

I really enjoyed making the scene for the Clay world... Out of everything I enjoyed that the most. Though I enjoyed animating in 2D as well.

I set myself many challenges, actually this hole project was a challenge. Though at times I made it harder for myself I am very glad I did, I tested myself and pushed myself and now know what I am capable off.

Many things changed from the original story to the final, but that's okay and good as every change was needed if it be a simple color change to a change of scenery.

Though I was working alone when it came to animating and creating everything to do with what you see in the film I had an audio student who did the sound for me, Josh.

Josh did an amazing job, especially considering he was working with someone like me, who kept changing things and the timing would end up being very different to what was originally thought. Besides all that he did a great job. There where many times where I felt worried about him and where he was at when it came to the audio,  just like I believe he was worried about me. At one point I actually thought Josh was going to bail on me... which terrified me. But in the end all it took was a little thing called communication, that settled all our worries.

I enjoyed working with Josh but if I ever work with an audio person again I will know for next time to keep in contact as much as possible and how important it is for both of us to be honest and straight forward with what we are thinking. (In a nice way of course.)

Though I really enjoyed creating this film at times I wish I was relaxed more... stress never helps and when I was really stressed I lost my passion and in the last few weeks didn't even like the film. Which is sad, now that I am rested I had another look at it and my passion for animating came back, and I am able to say that I am proud of my work.

Of course there are things I don't like about it and wish I had done a better job of. Such as the coloring of some of the 2D scenes, some are just not well done and that frustrates me but I had to try and color all of my 2D scenes frame by frame in a week.... that's not because I was disorganized... I was actually on time. But I sure have learnt how long things take and also how important it is to take a break so you don't burn out.


I had many challenges that tested me such as the challenge of rigging the clay characters, the technical issues whilst trying to animate in stop motion, frame rate issues and so on...

But through out all of it I am extremely grateful to have amazing lecturers, Kelvin and Luke, who where there to rescue me every time. (Even on a Saturday.)

Animating takes time, patience and passion to be created and for it to turn out well, but usually in the end it is all worth it.


P.S. Rendering is no fun... but I think I get it now.

Production draft.

~~~~~~~~~~~~ Draft ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is the production draft, there are many things that need to be fixed and changed but gives an idea of what is to be expected for the final.

Much finalizing and coloring to do.

2D animation

For my hand drawn animation I am using the program photoshop. I find animating in Photoshop really useful and easy.

In a few scenes of my hand drawn animation there are objects being created. For example as my beginning scene is opened up the city is being created. Now at first I tried to animate this way by drawing a little bit, then drawing a little bit more and so on, it works but it looks bad as you can clearly see the lines that where just drawn.

So I fixed this problem by working backwards. I draw the final image then slowly erased it bit by bit. Then I rearrange the image sequence and 'walla', when played through the city is created making it look as though it is being hand drawn right in front of you.

Another program I will be using is adobe after effects. This is another great program but I am still learning about it so I am seeking as much help and advice from my lectures as I can.  I will be using this program when putting my final piece all together as well as adding in little details here and there.

 I imagine I will have a few issues here and there but nothing that can't be figured out or done another way.

2D hand drawn animation

Another part of my final film is 2D hand drawn frame by frame animation. These scenes are in the beginning of the short film and at the very end with the paper animation and claymation in-between. As you can imagine I have been drawing a lot. And loving it, I have been drawing ever since I could hold a pencil and am really enjoying animating this way.

Animating this way is bringing a drawing to life, its spectacular when you can start drawing and draw bit by bit then play it and your character has come to life! It’s an amazing feeling, especially when it looks good.

For me I sometimes get frustrated when it doesn’t look the way I hoped it would but at that point I usually need to take a break and come back to it to either fix or change it. So far I have many scene that I really love and feel like I have animated to be best of my ability for this style.  And of course there are others which I think I will change later.  

My character Emily is simple in a way that she is very cartoony, for example she has a simple round face with a hair style that is easy to manipulate through drawing. I made her hands like mittens so that I don’t have to worry about fingers. Besides that though she is built like a regular human except that she is a bit short in the legs (I felt she looked better that way.)

Motka is a fun character to this film, he is a bit of comic relief and just that little background character you can’t help but love. I am really enjoying animating him, and every time he is in a scene he is doing his own thing in a very cute way. Motka is a very stylized character as well, it was fun making him a fluffy short cat and the way he is stylized has made it easier to animate. For example the way he sits I have made it that you can’t see all the things you usually see when a cat sits such as his back legs though it’s obvious that he is sitting.

The fairy-god-mother is mysterious and beautiful; I really enjoyed animating her as I have been able to make her more flexible when it comes to animating as she is a fairy. For example when she appears she comes out of a star and has magic swirly dust at the bottom of her robe. The fairy is also realistic and far more realistic than Emily.

I am just about to animate the other characters such as the old lady and the other homeless people. They are a similar style to Emily and they don’t move all that much in the scene so there isn’t anything to tricky happening there.  

The hardest scenes have been animated and turned out not being as difficult to animate as I had assumed. I plan on having all the rough draft animating done by the 24^th of August, which is when the production draft is due. That way all I need to do is finalize the animating add in the colour and all the details. Also this way my sound guy, Josh, will have all the information he needs to start putting sounds and music together. 

Helping out.

There are two of us working on our final this trimester, my good friend Janet and myself. 

Janet is doing her animation in 3D so in Maya. Her scene is looking fantastic, but because it is a forest scene she has a few trees and leaves, this is giving Maya some trouble and if Janet where to put many more in her scene it may not work properly or maybe not even load properly.

I suggested she should just put an image plan up and stick a forest image on it in the background so that it looks as though there is more forest whereas its just an image, I then offered to make the image scene for her as it is hard and almost impossible to find an image precisely how you want it. 

I grabbed samples of her scene and asked what she was after, Janet pretty much left it with me to do which makes me happy. I made the background image in Photoshop and it is now as a background scene for her animation. 

This is an image of Janets Maya scene at the moment. (not rendered)

And this is the background I came up with in Photoshop. The colors don't match but the image is meant to look further away, and with it all together it works.

I also made an image of just tree trunks that are the same color as her trees. This is so if she needed she could place it in an image plan in-between the background image and her scene. With the gapes in-between the tree trunks transparent, as the camera moved it would help the scene to look more 3D and as if there is no image but 3D trees. 

I have left it with Janet and if she needs any changes on the scene I am able to wipe it into Photoshop and fix it up. But hopefully it works well.

Claymation: Fix ups.

After I made the scene and the clay characters I had to bring them all into uni as they have all the animation equipment such as lights, camera and StopMotion on the computers that I need.

Lab was booked out to me and thankfully no one came in and bothered me as the other lab was available.

I arrived after being dropped off at uni on Saturday at around 9:00am and I finished at 7:30pm, yeah, big day. But that’s the life of an animator.

I had many technical difficulties, which is one of the reasons why it took me so long to animate. When animating in StopMotion you plug the camera directly into the computer and use the computer as the camera. It is really handy as you can change the way the image looks as well as many other things by working this way. But for some reason StopMotion was having difficulties and was taking forever to process an image and wouldn’t allow me to take another image until it was finished. After a long time I called my lecturer, Kelvin, (yes on a Saturday) and we figured out that the image size on the camera and the image size on the computer where completely different. That’s why it was taking so long to process.  I fixed this problem by simply changing the cameras image size to the same size as the computer, 1920 by 1080.

This brought out another problem as every time I fixed the settings in the camera as soon as I hocked it up to StopMotion the camera settings would flick back to the original image size which was massive, I can’t remember how big but somewhere along the lines of 5000. Crazy, and no matter what I did the problem would not go away.

In the end I ended up doing it the old fashioned way, I simple animated directly through the camera, this worked fine and I actually found it more useful.

Now the animating is done and my back was killing me, what’s next?

The first shot I had done was through StopMotion so the images where the right size, however the images I had taken from the camera where a different size then the images taken in StopMotion, so from shot two, three and four I had to go through and resize every single image. Time consuming yes, but I did it through Photoshop and was able to make a setting that would copy everything I did and I was able to reply that setting over and over to each image.

After this I had to do the fix ups, in my film I had wire on the back of Emily’s skirt to keep her from falling over, I had to go through and Photoshop this out completely image by image. I did this with the stamp tool.

Another thing I had to fix with the stamp tool was the eye blinks on my red and purple character, as when they blinked there was still white from their eyes visible.

My Clay scene is done and to finish it off I will be taking it into Adobe After Effects and in the end it will be lightly snowing over the top of the scene, which is going to be beautiful!