Week 11/12 Animation

Following on from the first animation I had produced and presented to an informal presentation as mentioned in the previous post, I produced my animation in the style that I wanted to have it as in its final form and then presented it. I got a couple of tips here and there about certain features like the eye movement being too slow or more eyebrow expression which I managed to add and am now pleased with, I believe that the characters show enough emotion towards each other and effectively carry the illusion of these characters understanding emotion in works parallel with the voice recordings. Animating your own voice, as painful as it is can have benefits too such as mouth shapes; if you get stuck, look in a mirror! Overall, I am happy with how the animation has turned out, the emotions are clear and the characters present those emotions very well. The lines bubble a bit too much perhaps? OR maybe the animation would all be like this, being highly stylistic and maybe even exaggerated? Regardless, I feel there is nothing more I can add to this shot without taking away it's effectiveness.

Week 11/12 Animatic 2

After completing first Animatic, I received feedback on my work which included tidying up the drawings and replacing the final shot with a slightly different angle. I also decided to turn this animatic into an advanced animatic to show movement directions as well as camera directions to easily demonstrate the final outcome of the film. I redrew each shot in a cleaner, more detailed environment, including background colour and depth of field. This makes the animatic much more true to the final outcome, demonstrating the colour palette taken into account from the mood board and also from the character sheets as well as demonstrating the interesting movements in the scenes, such as the scene when the socks are being "attacked", I wanted to make the socks seem literally horrified because they'd only ever been worn before, not taken away in a box but the strangest part for them was being taken away without their pairs because of them not being "good enough". At closer inspection, it is more obvious that I have added ware and tear to Anger and Envy which is why the woman only chose those 2 in particular. I may add more to the box but I wouldn't want to over complicate the shot and take the focus away from the main characters here. The final shot of the homeless person wearing the socks I actually had to change because during one of our informal presentations for practice, we saw that the final shot in the first animatic zoomed in onto not the socks, but between the homeless man's legs. Obviously this had everyone in stitches but it now meant that I had to redo that shot using the same story idea but changing the position. I eventually came up with the idea of using the laid down shot being as though it would give me a change to show the living conditions too and showing that they wear them to bed because it is so cold without funding for heating or hot food or blankets, etc. So the message becomes clear that they need your unused socks. I believe this new animatic delivers that message perfectly.

Week 8 Foley Sounds

Once i had the music composed and recorded to the video, I focused on adding in the dialogue and sound effects. The dialogue I recorded with my computer and a Senheiser rifle microphone to my computer and organised the sounds within REAPER. Once the dialogue was all complete, I focused on going around sheffield with the Senheiser and the Zoom audio recorder to record as many sounds that I could potentially use. I wrote up a list of required sounds so that I knew the basic requirements and any other sounds would be useful for future reference. I imported all of the my sounds into reaper and labelled them to their respective sounds before importing them into my project sessionto crop and edit so that they fit in with the timing of the video and music.
The next stage was sorting the volume levels of each track so that the dialogue stood out above the music when speech was occuring and I also lowered the sound effects volume when the music plays towards the end as the screaming fades away into music to show the obvious change in mood so the chords will control the mood as the music holds a note of D right before a C major which ends on a bright chord to conclude the piece having resolved the problem by pairing the socks together afterall.
I then rendered checked over the animation and sound to make sure they sync perfectly before rending out the audio to put into Premiere to render out the animation.

Week 7 Sound Design Music

Using the storyboard, I began work on the music through garage band. I plugged in my piano and began composing a short piece to play along to the animation. Keeping it simple, I went with 4 chords (C, F, G and Dm) for the left hand, then for the right hand I used the same notes that it would take to make the chord (so a C chord would be C, E and G) to make the melody playing the notes in a decorative way playing off beat to contrast the heavy chords. I then felt the need to add more "power" to the chords so I added a bass playing the notes of the chords (C, F, G and Dm) to boost them. I also did the same with strings so the silence echoed in a sweet hum of the strings. The tempo of the piece is interpretive of the actions within the shots; so a fast changing shot would pick up tempo and a slower changing shot would make the tempo slow down. The progression of the tempo overall works as shown below.

Week 6 Animatic

Using my storyboard, I constructed an Animatic to visualise the structure of the piece, asking myself such questions as so:
Are the movements clear? Do the characters seem relatable? Does the composition work? Is the animation easily readable?
To all these questions I believe my answer is yes, apart from the ending 2 shots where the characters appear in a box. I will add other items to the box so that it is clear they are being donated as they will be among other items donated in a shoebox. As for the last shot, I will design an environment that fits with the rest of the piece but stands out as being a homeless shelter as opposed to a warm bedroom. The colours for the homeless shelter should be cold so as to explain the meaning of donating socks.

Week 5 Storyboard

Using my previous design for storyboard tiles, I cut the first scene out and focused on the 2 other scenes so that the animation focused more on the character interaction rather than the full story. I used the colours relative to the character designs so they are representative of the final outcome which helps me visualise whether the characters show in their emotions. The storyboard effectively shows the direction of movement through red arrows and dialogue is shown in the text beneath each panel. I feel the ending scene maybe unclear though so I may need to develop this section more so.

Week 5 Character Colours and Patterns

After the last design on the character shapes, I decided now to focus on colours for the characters which began by picking colours I thought looked appropriate to the characters overall personality, such as red for anger, etc. I then developed this even more to combine the two sets of socks' colours to create one unique colour that is essentially unisex. The red works perfectly between male and female and even made the "Anger" character look even more like a "Jock" from high school. The next step was to decide whether the blue fitted the male and female forms which in some ways it does but could do with being a slightly lighter shade of the same colour so the character stands out more.