Mid-Production

 Digital design

I did a full Biffo turn around, with his arms disconnected for easy rigging. My plan was to have everything rigged for him during the design stage so animating could be quick and relatively painless with less frame by frame reliance.

Gantt Chart

 

I made my schedule a little late because I was timelining in my head for a long time, analysing how long I'd need for everything. I think there was a lot of content in my idea which made me want to have a lot of time for the animation and only leave a week or so for post-production.

Rig

 

 

At the beginning I was very proud of my rig and was ready to colour my symbols to start implementing them into my animatic. However, I started trying to do the side view rig and broke everything I'd done which was devastating. As I was waiting for Mike to figure out a better way for me to do my rigging because I'd learnt what to do from Youtube and didn't have any deeper understanding I started to do the frame by frame animation I needed in cetain shots so I wasn't wasting time.

Animatic

I think my animatic has a good feel for how I want my final film to look and it's a promising guide even in terms of pacing as it is now. After Jared told us that most of the final films look better in 2x speed, I've tried to keep that in mind with my own designing and not have my actions being too drawn out.

Process

 

I had 23 scenes in all that I kept in completely different files so I could comp them all together in After Effects at the end, as per Mike's advice from last semester. The animating mostly went smoothly. I had a moment of weakness trying to do a walk cycle because it was stressful for me to realise I hadn't ever done one before and I had such strong feelings of dread that I was behind everyone else on the course in terms of technical knowledge, but I ended up experiementing with smear frames instead which I had never gone near before and had a lot of fun. The movements I was making turned bouncy and had an old-cartoon feel to them which I think suits The Beano really well. Other than minor hiccups and reanimating parts I felt like things were solid for the majority of this portion, especially because I was only swapping between two softwares, I could just keep my head down and keep on, using Adobe Animte and After Effects to get the effects I wanted.