Soundscape Project

Our Brief for this project is to create a soundscape of our choice for an animation we are going to make, but we will be starting with planning the soundscape and collecting the sounds for it and then move onto the animating based on our soundscape.

My Idea for the soundscape is going to be a misty cold mountain filled with fantasy creatures, I believe that I can retrieve some natural sounds as I am going to be going the Brecon Beacons which sound contain many of the sounds i am looking for.

Sound Score

I was unsure on what a sound score was as I couldn't find anything about it on the internet but i searched for sound in art and found a man called Wassily Kandinsky who does a lot of sound related art work. Here is a good example;

I then looked at a few different wave forms to help me with my sound score.

I then used these to create my visual sound drawings.

Here is my first attempt at visualising sound. I used a combination of 'Triangular Wave' and 'Sine Wave'. I used oil pastels as i have a variety of colours. The blue represents the birds in the ambient track. The Yellow is going to be the rhythm so in this small piece it represents the footsteps. The green is a smooth fluctuating line representing the sway of the trees. The Brown line is the wind in the ambient track. The black represents some sort of falling rock and the pink is going to be a river. I then smudged it with a white pastel to create a broken look to it representing rain.

After my first attempt I then had a go at creating a graph that is more commonly seen on digital recording/editing software. The yellow represents the wind, the blue is trees, the pink are birds, the green is a river that slowly moves away and the brown being footsteps followed by crumbling of rocks or the drag of leaves.

Recording

I took a trip to the Brecon Beacons to record most of my sounds on location. I managed to get a lot of great quality sounds and while i was there I took some reference photos to use for the animation side of the project.

(My Sounds I Recorded In The Beacons)

(Frosted Twig)

 (Frosted Tree)

 (Frosted Tree)

 (Sunrise)

(Frosted Tree Close) 

(Misty Mountains)

Character Development

I decided to design my character of paper rather than digitally as I find drawing a lot easier on a physical piece of paper.

Storyboard/Animatic

Backgrounds

I used a program online called Adobe Colour to help me pick a colour pallet. I'm using a colour pallet called 'Japanese Garden' because it fits the atmosphere that I am aiming for and it it very easy to look at.

I have managed to finish 3 of the 6 backgrounds I plan to draw. Three of these will be animated, for example the river, the waterfall and the panning shot.

I plan on finishing all of the backgrounds before I move onto animating the characters.

Sounds

Using the birds in every shot really helped keep all of the scenes in one location. I have tried to create an idea of distance by using the violin and editing the volume and location of it.

Animation

Tests

Walk Cycle attempt one.

After receiving feedback for this walk cycle a realized that the left leg changed length and gave a distorted look to the animation, therefore I chose to scrap this walk cycle and move onto creating a new one.

Walk Cycle 2

Walk Cycle 3

Crying Animation

Finishing touches

Animation

For the animation I did one last clean up to make sure everything is smooth and clean. My animation was done on Two's as animating every frame would have eaten into my time and could have cause me not to finish by the deadline.

I really Struggled with the walk cycles and these took the most time. This was because I have never animated in perspective therefore it was new experience for me. The rest of the animation I found quite straight forward therefore took less time.

Improving on my last animations I tried to look more at the arcs to make the movements smoother and lifelike.

Sound

In my last edit of my animation I decided to scrap the idea of having a violin in the final piece. This was mainly due the violin making the sound choppy which ruined the atmosphere, I also chose to do this because of the lack of time to animate the violin player.

From my last presentation I receive feedback about the choppiness of my sound, I was told to add a sound that plays threw out the whole animation. I decided to use the waterfall sound to do this, by changing the volume and the location of the sound I also managed to create a sense of scale of the world I created.

2D Animaiton Hand In

Olympic animation

Pre-Production

I Started by thinking of a famous historical character that I would like to animate. I originally thought of the idea that I would be animating Theodore Roosevelt doing the javelin, but I couldn’t find any funny/interesting ideas with this combination.

I then moved onto the idea with a Viking named Ragnar Lodbrok/Lothbrok. I explored a few early animation character designs but found these did not fit the style I was looking for so I looked at a sheet that was given to me in a lesson on designing characters and used some of the ideas from that.

Here are the results;

I Then Drew some more details on the Computer so I had more of an idea of what I was going to animate.

And after went on to drawing a character sheet so I could see my character from all angles.

After I had my character designed I went on to storyboard some of the shots for my animation. I started with the idea of Ragnar doing boxing, but found that this would be too hard to finish by the deadline. I thought about Ragnar throwing so shot put.

Storyboarding;

This is the original storyboard that I drew. I then went on to drawing the frames on a larger 

scale on TV Paint which I could then animate. 

After creating the storyboard, it was time to animate. I planned the timing and drew arcs for each action individually.

To animate the throw, I looked at a lot of reference on YouTube to create some key poses which you can see in the animation.

After establishing all the movements, I then moved onto to refining the line art and adding some “in betweens”. By doing this it smoothed the animation out and gave it a more professional touch.

When I finished all of the line work and had all the animation done I moved on to colouring the line work and drawing the backgrounds. 

I then exported the clips on TV Paint as a JPG sequence and imported them into Premier Pro as a sequence. By doing this it allows much more control over editing each shot.

After doing this I imported the sounds that I had found such as Footsteps, Grunts, Screams, soundtracks and Other smaller sounds. I then synced them to the Animation and changed balance and volume to create the atmosphere that I wanted.

When I was happy with my edit I exported it as H264 at 720p with maximum render settings for the best result.

Advantages

I found that doing this project really helped me with developing my skills in basic animation. It allowed me to analyse walk cycles and gave me the chance to practice them from angles I have never tried before. I also had a go at demonstrating weight in more depth by using a pendulum effect when Ragnar picks up the ball man.

I developed my skills in TV Paint which should help me be more proficient in my future animations as I found a lot of helpful tools during this project.

I also learned how to throw a shot put correctly and efficiently due to analysing a lot of the videos and looking at key poses.

Difficulties

The most difficult part for me during this project was time management, I set myself too much to do such as colouring and choosing a difficult movement, this resulted in me staying behind a lot of the time just to make sure I could finish.

I also found creating the walk cycle as well as animating another person in the frame was very difficult and brought up a lot of problems but I managed to pass the problems and proceed with the animation.

Link to Final Export: https://vimeo.com/199718425