Ellie Bowen Animation Journal

  First attempt at animating the character into the handdrawn scene. I designed a new room and am just using the values for now, with a very sketchy look. I haven't put the character design over the stickman-like base yet, because this is just getting into how the character is going to move. I think a mistake I've made here is making the legs too long, the feet should be closer to the body if I am going to pursue having a child as the main character. Below is a process video that I started just after I'd done the quick background:

 For the handdrawn side of my project, I've done some quick designs for the child character and their emotions. I did a basic young girl one, then a hairless, male character which was a little simpler but I didn't like as much. I did two just in the case of having difficulty with a more detailed design and needed it to be easier on myself. I also doodled some main emotions she could go through, utilising her big, childlike eyes, the spring of hair sticking up, and the way her hair moves with the face.  I feel her face design is quite similar to other studio's way of concepting children's faces. Big heads, cheeks, and eyes to differentiate the age from an adult character. I wanted to expand on this typical look and incorporate exaggerated expressions that involve her hair to really push the dynamic movements and faces I could have in the film.

  After the meeting on Friday and talking to Alan about trying to set the tone of the animation, I've been experiementing with a couple of colours to get the dark/scary mood I want for my film. This would be the little boy's bedroom, and I think for "hand-drawn" I'm going to draw it digitally because I think paper is too jarring of a contrast if I go ahead with using the 3D animation as well. I'd prefer for it to be two digital methods of animation so it's not a harsh, abrasive difference between styles.   I think I'm going to settle on this last palette for now, but it's still subject to change and quite easy to alter so I don't mind terribly if it's not perfect in this current stage, I was just trying to get an idea for how it'd look. I might even practise on some real images of a bedroom, too. But as of right now, I'm looking for simple, audience understands where it's meant to be set and effective mood-setting for the room.

  I watched Remi Weekes debut film His House on the weekend. It was a refugee experience retold as a horror story and I really enjoyed it. The backstory slowly unravels in the form of terrifying nightmares and flashes in the unsettling house and almost every scene and plot point had some metaphorical value that linked to the character's experiences. I enjoyed how it explored both having the eerie, fictional feel, and showing to an audience the reality of asylum seekers, both in Britain and their native country- what they have to go through to be where they are. The characters were well throught out and explored deeply, the antagonist was genuinely scary and evil, and the cinematic experience felt so pleasant to sit and watch. I really enjoyed this film.

  After finishing the Haunting of Bly Manor, I moved on to the first of this series, The Haunting of Hill House. It was admittedly scarier than Bly Manor, and I found it to be shot better. The characters were a little less appealing than Bly Manor, and at times, actually quite annoying and unpleasant. It was almost as if everyone in the show was an antagonist and they didn't seem to have many redeemable or lovable qualities each, which I find is pretty common in the horror genre. The Plot was nice, if a bit too jumpy sometimes, but if you find it easy to follow fast-paced series with heavy flashbacks it was enjoyable to follow. I think I liked it more, just because the ending didn't feel as forced and it had a bit more of an interesting flow when it came to telling the story and showing us the conflicts and archs. 

  The first humanoid model I made. I didn't really run into many issues with this, surprisingly. I enjoyed it though, and it took around 30 mins to do. I kept it even more basic than my drawing because I was fearful of breaking it irrepairably in any way, but it defintely has the human form I was looking for. I even started wondering if it was worth using the Steve model from Minecraft as inspiration, as 6 cubes would be even simpler to work with and only have about 5 joints. However, the silhouette of Steve would be quite hard to work with, a bit too blocky and awkward so I like my thinner, sleeker model more. My main problems were forgetting the keybinds for each tool, or forgetting which tool I had selected and making little weird alterations I didn't mean to, but that just requires me getting used to the software. Recorded my procedure below, to see the process I went through:

 Learning from the last project, I've started designing and storyboarding a lot faster, doing it all within the first couple days of working so I can get to animating faster. This allows me time to make mistakes later on and rectifying them so as not to fall behind like Cup of Coffee. I designed this character with Low-Poly Lara Croft in mind, trying to keep him incredibly geometric and shape-heavy so I wouldn't spend too long smoothing him out and embellishing it unnecessarily. Keeping the character geometric and clunky will admitedly be easier on me and give me more time working with other things, because I'm keen to get things moving and animated this time around.  PS1 character are a great source of inspiration for me for this because the technology back then matches the skill level I have now and the time I'm allowing myself to spend.

The basic, quick synopsis I typed out for this storyboard read: I was thinking about one of the rooms a character is dropped into (a simple one) and there's only a double door in there so they get worried about being trapped and start banging on it, but on the other side of the door its actually a child's wardrobe and the kid's bed faces the doors and it's shots of them getting gradually more fearful about whats in the closet.  So from this I sketched out the thumbnails for major scene points and plot, including the smallest script too, but I will have to see if having the mouth move would be viable for my Maya character. I'm thinking the child will be drawn and 2D and I can have more detail on him, and the character trapped in the blank room or void space will be my 3D one and can be pretty simply designed to save time and get onto making him move convincingly.

  Had a basic Maya tutorial with Mike and Maya yesterday evening and made this as my random object creation. Ended up with an ice cream cone after playing, didn't start out with that in mind but it's where I ended up. This is how I made it move a little bit with the rotation and move tools, using the keyframes in Maya, just playing around right now. Using edge loops and the extrude tool, I made this. It looks like nothing but a shape with a strange glitched triangle in it from the front, but from the sides it reminds me of a caveman-like head. Going to try to make something very low-poly that resembles a humanoid, which feels like a big jump from what I've got now but hopefully something I can get the hang of it quickly.

  Using Photoshop's frame by frame timeline I made this little looping cat GIF. It was simple and enjoyable to do, just wanted to try digital animation since I can't get adobe animate to work how I want it to and don't want to not be practising in the mean time. Only took around 20 minutes, and that time included choosing a brush to use and promptly losing it when I got to frame 2 and having to look for it all over again.