Character Research- 6th December 2016
Toffee
The artist who created this character is Deron Nefcy, she created the animated series Star vs the Forces of Evil and Toffee is one of the main antagonists of the show. This character debut on STVOE was the episode Fortune Cookies released 20th July 2015. Toffee is drawn in a minimalist art style. Toffee's mission is unclear at the moment as the series is still on going, however we do know that Toffee has some history with Star's mother and that he doesn't like the Butterfly family at all. Toffee is mostly very calm and calculated, however he also shows some mild sign of being a megalomaniac; I think he also might be a little unhinged. Toffee could have grown up somewhere in Mewni, I'm not a 100% sure if that's right because we currently don't know were Toffee actually comes from. Toffee doesn't have any side kicks, the people he works with just tend to be a means to an end. Ludo is another villain from the series who is sort of a side kick to Toffee (Until the season finale). Ludo is selfish, egotistical, spoiled and generally unpleasant, also he's completely incompetent. Toffee always stands up straight whiles he's moving, often with his hands behind his back; The way he walk is very slow moving and orderly, it's a really fitting way for him to walk because of how calm and calculated He is compared to the other characters. The purpose of Toffee's creation was so Star could have an antagonist that she would have lots of trouble against, because before he came in Star was beating everyone she came up against without any trouble. Toffee is an amazing villain; He's got lot's of mystery surrounding him, and I love how sinister he can get at times. Toffee also strays away from the trope of the main villain being way too over the top. I really like the idea of a villain who hides in the shadows until their time to strike.
Star
Star was created by Deron Nefcy she is the main protagonist of Star vs the Forces Evil, the series is now animated by Rough Draft Korea and Sugar Cube Animation. Deron Nefcy created the character of Star back in her 3rd year of collage. She is drawn in a minimalist art style. Star is extroverted, extremely hyperactive, kind and she can also be very reckless occasionally. Her mission is to be trained to become the next queen of Mewni; However she actually wants to take care of warnicorns when she grows up, but unfortunately she can't because there's no one else that can be queen in her place. Star is the princess of Mewni but she got banished to Earth for her destructive behaviour, so she lives on Earth at the moment. Star doesn't know anything about Earth meaning she misunderstands how things work on Earth, this has gotten her into quite a lot of trouble through out the series; In season 2 she got into trouble with the police for vandalising public property. Star's best friends are Pony Head and Marco, however Marco is the one that works along side her to fight the different foes she goes up against. Marco is organised, Intelligent, overly cautious and he's also quite insecure too. Star walks with a slight jump in her step or she literally flat out jumps; The way she moves shows that she is very self confident and energetic. She was made to be a realistic flawed female character (which there are still very few of).
Character Thumbnail Sketches-7th December 2016
Circles are associated with good characters, they usually look softer and safe to be around. Star from my character research has a very circular appearance, this shows that she is aligned with the good side of the spectrum.
Square are associated with stability and strength, they are shapes you would find on a neutral character.
Triangles are associated with aggression and pain. They are used to represent evil characters. Toffee from my character research is a good example of this, his shape is very sharp and pronounced this show he is aligned with the evil side of the spectrum.
Character Types and Moodboards- 9th December 2016
In this lesson we learned about Vladimir Propp's Theory of character, It basically implies that their are 7 set character types in a movie,tv show etc. The Villian, The Dispatcher, The Helper, The Prize, The Donor, The Hero and The False Hero. He thought that these character types would fit any narrative structure.
I will be using Batman Begins characters as an example of this.
Villian
The Scarecrow is the guy Batman Struggles against throughout the majority of the movie.
The Dispatcher
Commissioner Gordon is the one who tells Batman what needs to be done, this ends up with Batman going on the mission.
The Helper
Alfred gives Bruce Wayne (Batman) helpful advice throughout the entire series, he also motivate him to fight when everything seems hopeless.
The Heroine or Prize
Rachel is the love interest of the movie and Bruce (Batman), and by the end of the movie they get together. This trend is still going on within a lot of movies, tv shows e.t.c, it's just more well hidden but almost every narrative even nowadays has this character type. In my opinion this is a trend that really needs to stop, and just not be used anymore with any gender.
The Donor
Lucuis Fox makes and gives Batman all the gadgets he uses in combat, also he makes all of the vehicles Batman uses.
The Hero
Bruce Wayne (Batman) is the one who saves Gotham City from the threat of Scarecrow and Ra's Al Ghul.
The False Hero
He started off as Bruce Wayne's (Batman's) Mentor he acts as an ally for a while, but then double crosses Bruce at the end and you find out he's actually the main villain.
Character Mindmaps
We had to design our character by making mind maps about them, from these character ideas we will chose one character to animate.
We will have to pick one of these character to animate.
Character 1
This is an initial sketch I did for my first character.
Character 2
This is my initial sketch for the second character.
Rotoscoping-13th December 2016
I have decided to animate character two. I chose this character because I think there's a lot of potential with her design, also I could implement her power into the animation to make it more interesting.
Rotoscoping is an animation technique, that involves tracing over live action movement. The process of rotoscoping goes like this it's filmed in live action, the film is cut down in to different frames, you have to draw over each frame and finally put them into an animation timeline.
Pros of Rotoscoping
You can get really smooth and fluid animation. It can also help when drawing dynamic poses, you can get a better grasp on foreshortening and complex movements such as turning a corner for example. All the movements in the process of rotoscoping look really realistic.
Cons of Rotoscoping
It's take a really long time, some people actually spend up to 8 hours just drawing over 12 frames. Can create the boiling affect which happens when the trace isn't consistent, It basically makes you animation shake while it's rolling this can be very annoying. If something is too realistic it can cause something called Uncanny valley. Uncanny valley is feeling disturbed is something is too realistic, for example the movie A scanner darkly could provoke this effect in some people.
Why we aren't filming the walking cycle
The reason we aren't filming the rotoscoping animation, is because breaking the film down into frames and then tracing the frames would take way longer than just taking pictures. The process of doing the animation is already going to take 8 hours, breaking down the film into to frames would extend the process dramatically.
These are the rotoscoping images we took
We had to take 12 frames of ourselves,walking the way our character walks. We will use then translate these into our characters animation.
Researching Anatomy-13th December 2016
The bare bones of anatomy is the skeleton. This is the human skeleton, it's the same for almost everyone in the human race.
I've now researched into the muscles of the human body. There are only a few distinct differences between male and female body types. Males have stocky muscles and Females have a slightly thinner build and obviously breasts (the factors for the body types can change for either build, depending on what kind of character you're doing)
Developing my Character's Design- 28th December 2016
Here I have developed my character's design improving her anatomy and giving her more defined facial features.
Practising Character Movement by Copying Other artists-4th January 2017
These are some character movements I did by copying, this was so I could practice drawing their movements and get the way they were drawn into my muscle memory.
This is Roxas from the Kingdom Hearts series with his hood up, holding both Oathkeeper and Oblivion. I drew my interpretation from his original 3D model. The Company who owns Kingdom Hearts is Square Enix.
Here I drew a part of the alternate box art image from Doom 2016, I'm actually quite impressed with how well I managed to
copy this one. The Company who owns Doom is Id software.
This is Specter Knight he's one of the bosses from the game Shovel Knight, The company who owns Shovel Knight is Yacht Club Games.
To make these gifs we I used the motion setting in photoshop, this automatically gives you the option of doing a frame animation or a film.
This is my photo animation I used the photos I took in the rotoscoping group. This was an experiment into how my character will walk in the actual animation.
I traced over the all the photos and got the finished traced animation which you can view down below. The finished animation looks sort of like a character from a graphic novel. I needed to use dark outlines so that the rotoscope would stand out.
People Commented on my Rotoscope these are the comments
Half of the people thought the animation was smooth but the other half thought it was jumpy. Someone was impressed by the hair also being animated. I also had people tell me it was well drawn.
These are the comments from my peers:
Peer 1:
Jumpy Animation, consider smoother movement.
Nicely Drawn.
Peer 2:
Smooth.
Hair Movement.
Make legs clear.
Peer 3:
Well detailed .
Sort out flow of movement to make it smoother.
Peer 4:
Smooth animation.
Add some more detail (eg. add some creases in the clothes)
Researching Walk Cycle Keyframes- 10th January 2017
Key frames are just the individual frames that show the beginning and the end of an animation. We have to research a walk cycle and then use that research to develop a walk cycle from my own character. This is the walk cycle I have chosen, I need to make my own character to do the animation (note: this is not my final Character).
Making an Animation Flipbook-10th January 2017
We attempted to make an animated flip book of a stickman walking mine didn't turn at well; It didn't work because I had multiple drawing on a sticky note, the figures were in the centre so you couldn't see them that we when you flipped the book they really should have been by the side of the sticky note and finally I got the walking animation completely wrong.
Here is the picture of the flipbook I made.
Making different parts of my a Character Move-11th January 2017
This is my arm animation I used five frames of animation. To do this I selected the arm with the lasso tool, then I pressed Ctrl & T an adjusted the pivot point to the shoulder in order to rotate the arm without it moving from the body. In every time I moved the arm duplicated the image so that I didn't have to redraw it in the same position and then adjust the arm.
Life Drawing Experiments-12th January 2017
We did some choreographic drawing to help us improve on our normal life drawing skills, Choreography is basically using one line to draw something without taking you pencil off the paper. Here are the drawing I produced while using this technique...
After we did this we made a life drawing of a model who was sleeping we could draw normally our only restriction is we couldn't use a rubber; because if we don't rub out our mistakes after we do them we can look back on them and improve on our previous design. My life drawing is down below...
Designing my Final Character-13th January 2017
This is the progress so far on my final character..
As you can see she is a very pointed and triangular character, meaning she is an evil character. While researching Valdimir Propp's theory of character with the 7 character types, I decided I wanted to make a villainous character.
My main Inspiration came from the cartoons Avatar the Last Airbender and Legend of Korra. I put screenshots from the show down below.
Avatar the Last Airbender
Legend of Korra
As you can see from these screen shots I took a lot of inspiration from these shows while coming up with the idea of my character.
My Finished Character
To finish off my final character I coloured her, this is the final result of my efforts. I'm proud of the way I painted her face but I feel that the the lower half of her body seems way too undefined and loose,
it looks an after thought of colour basically it's all fuzzy and the colours are really weak.
What is Persistence of Vision?- 17th January 2017
The persistence of vision is where someone will see a bunch of discrete image moving within a few seconds of each other, this will create the illusion of movement and gives the impression that something is moving.
The first person to do persistence of vision was called Eadward Muybridge; He was essentially the god father of animation.
This was some of his work..
Life Drawing Movement- 19th January 2017
We practised drawing someone while they were moving. This is so we could capture there movement on the paper, we would draw and then overlap the pose we've drawn over so it gives the illusion that the character is moving. We did these drawings on an art stand. Here are some of the drawing I did...
We also did some portraits with charcoal and sugar paper however every seven minutes the model would change his position and we would have to start on the that portrait and leave are previous one. Here is what I did..
The Storyboard for my Animation-19th January 2017
We had to make a storyboard to plan our ten second animation. We didn't have to show a lot of detail but we still had to show the basic proportion and movement of the character. My character is breaking in to a prison so she can break her friends out.
Action Plan
This is the action plan I made for the last few week of the project.
Research For Final Animation-20th January 2017
How a Character Turns Around
I researched how to make a character turn around and I found a gif from the film Superbad that could help me in my animation.
Final Animation Stages
To begin my animation I had a close up of the lighter that my character was holding.
I then did a head and body shot of my character and had her eyes look over to the prison door and I had a smile form on her face as she looked round; I also had her raise her eyebrow for an extra effect.
I'm going to have her turn round while the camera turns to show her back while she plants her feet on the floor and get ready to charge at the door.
She's throwing the lighter into the air and cuts to a close up of the lighter, she then catches the lighter and her whole body gets engulfed by flames.
Research on the Human Back- 25th January 2017
I researched how the back of a human is drawn and as reference I used the a collection of anatomical drawings by the youtuber and artist Sycra to research.
The Anatomical Drawing by Sycra
This is where I got the Models
My Interpretation
I've taking the elements from sycra's simplified anatomy and I've applied them to my character, in order to get a better under standing of how my character would look while facing backwards.
My Final Animation- 13th February 2017
I had to put my animation in to adobe premier pro, because if I made more than twenty frames in photoshop the saving would eventually get really slow; The loading time could go from one minute to ten minutes, and since the time on the project is limited you probably don't want to wait that long every time you save. In adobe premier I had to adjust the speed and duration of each frame to 00:00:00:02, this is so my animation isn't too fast but it's still plays smoothly.
Animation Evaluation- 14th February 2017
Introduction
The requirement for this project was to make a character animation with 120 frames or have it be (10 seconds), however this depended on what type of animation you were making. The name of the this project was Character Animation and by the deadline we need to hand in a solid character animation.
I made an animation about about a women trying to break her friends out of jail, to achieve this I did lots of research in to anatomy, characters from different mediums and I also did some in depth research into key frames. My character is based off the art style from the cartoon the Legend of Korra.
Methods and Techniques
I came up with my idea when I decided my character was either going to be a villain or an anti-hero, I thought it would be cool if I had my character break in to a prison to break out some of the friends that had been arrested. I came up with two different mind maps for separate characters, one was and anti hero and the other one was my character who is a villain, I decided on this character because I thought I could make something really interesting.
We experimented with rotoscoping by taking pictures of ourselves walking, then drawing over them in photoshop to create more natural movement. I personally researched a bunch of different video game characters and made some artist interpretations. We also made a flip book animation but mine didn't turn out so well. On Thursdays we did some life drawings to get a more authentic understanding of anatomy.
In the rotoscoping experiment we used cameras and a wacom tablet (for photoshop), for the character reasearch I used a pencil and paper, for the flipbook animation we obviously used a flipbook and a pencil or pen, finally for the life drawing we used a pencil, charcoal, coloured pencils and pens. We used a camera for the rotoscoping because if we filmed it, it would have taken twice as long to do (rotoscoping with just pictures takes 8 hours), I used a pen for the flipbook animation because it was all I had on me at the time. In life drawing we experimented with lot of different types of drawing tools we used pencil most of the time, but we also taped two coloured pencils together to draw a model that way, we also used charcoal to get better shading on the model and improve our traditional line drawing skill.
To make my animation I used adobe photoshop and premier pro. I used photoshop to draw my frames and test the animation, I thought I could put the entire animation in photoshop but the saving time becomes slower and slower with each new frame you make. I used Premier pro to actually animate the frames, this is because premier pro is made for stuff like animations, photoshop really isn't. When you save the animation from premier pro it actually comes out more fluid.
To make my animation I used key frame animation, I chose key frame animation because it's the type of animating I'm most familier and I felt I could make a really cool looking animation with this technique. However we also experimented with rotoscoping, which was the technique Disney used back in the day to have realistic and fluid looking animation. We also did life drawing sessions where we had to draw sketches of people while they were moving, this was to get an interpretation of how people move in life.
Types of Animation and How I used Them
There are two different types of animation ones and twos, ones are one frame for image and twos are one frame for every two images. I used ones because they are usually the best choice for fast paced and fluid animation.
To animate you have to create something called the persistence of vision, this is where someones sees images with slight difference between each other moving really fast to create the illusion of movement. It's basically a fancier term for animation.
To make sure my animation was smooth on photoshop I kept playing it then adjusting the time until it got the smoothness level I wanted. On premier pro In didn't have to adjust the time too much, because you could select every frame and change the to the time you want all at once. I also added more images with slighter movements, to give my character more natural movement
I learnt specialist terminology like the "boiling effect" this happens when your trace isn't consistence, it creates an effect where the lines start to ripple sort of like something boiling. "Uncanny Valley" is another term I learned, this happens when something animated appears too realistic. I also learned about a term called "Shape Dynamics" this is refers to the different characteristics of shapes a circles are associated with a good characters, squares are associated with well-rounded characters and triangles are associated with evil characters.
Influences
I think my main influence for the animation were the show Avatar the Last Airbender and Legend of Korra, both these shows have animation that's mostly centred around action, I thought this would work really well considering my animation is also centred around action. I think with these influences it really pushed the action orientated style of the animation.
Vladimir Propps theory helped me come up with my idea for an evil character, I feel that my character fits his description of a villain really well. I also made my character very triangular to show her evil personality.
Problem Solving and Choices
When creating my animation I decided to cut some scenes to reduce the production time of the animation, I also had to decide in what order to I should show my animation and what scenes I should add in for extra effect. I think these choices changed my animation for the better, taking out all the boring scenes and only keeping in the ones centred around intense movement and action.
I think most of the problems stem from trying to make the anatomy accurate while having my character turn around. To solve this problem I simply looked up characters doing things from different angles and I made artist interpretations of them, this is so I could get a better Idea of what human anatomy looks like from different angles.
Conclusion
I was sort of pleased with my animation I like how it looks, but I'm disappointed by the fact I couldn't actually reach the goal of 120 frames or have it be 10 seconds. I like the animation because it's really smooth and I was impressed by the fact I actually managed to pull off my character turning around while the camera zooms out. I'm very disappointed that I didn't manage to make the animation at least 120 frames/10 minutes.
The bit of my animation I like the best is where my character turns around, I think I did it surprisingly well, it's fluid and quite action orientated which is always nice. The bit of my animation I like the least was probably the beginning bit with the lighter, because I think it's more like filler than anything else it doesn't really add anything to the animation and it technically doesn't need to exist.
If I had more time to develop my animation I would have shown off her power, by having her mimic the fire from the lighter and engulf her entire body in flame, after this she will fly into the door shattering it. I would also probably add colour as well, just to give the animation a bit more life.
The best animation technique I learned was probably the rotoscoping. I like it just because of the effect it give when your done tracing over the images, the animation that follows it is always full of life and really fluid. I also liked coming up with my characters design, I really like thinking up a characters personality and backstory.
To be honest I don't think I managed my time really well, to start off with I should have used simple forms and not started of with the detail right away, that should have been an extra thing I added in at the end. In conclusion if I ever make an animation again I should start off with basic forms, add the detail afterwards and finished off with the colour.
Introduction
The requirement for this project was to make a character animation with 120 frames or have it be (10 seconds), however this depended on what type of animation you were making. The name of the this project was Character Animation and by the deadline we need to hand in a solid character animation.
I made an animation about about a women trying to break her friends out of jail, to achieve this I did lots of research in to anatomy, characters from different mediums and I also did some in depth research into key frames. My character is based off the art style from the cartoon the Legend of Korra.
Methods and Techniques
I came up with my idea when I decided my character was either going to be a villain or an anti-hero, I thought it would be cool if I had my character break in to a prison to break out some of the friends that had been arrested. I came up with two different mind maps for separate characters, one was and anti hero and the other one was my character who is a villain, I decided on this character because I thought I could make something really interesting.
We experimented with rotoscoping by taking pictures of ourselves walking, then drawing over them in photoshop to create more natural movement. I personally researched a bunch of different video game characters and made some artist interpretations. We also made a flip book animation but mine didn't turn out so well. On Thursdays we did some life drawings to get a more authentic understanding of anatomy.
In the rotoscoping experiment we used cameras and a wacom tablet (for photoshop), for the character reasearch I used a pencil and paper, for the flipbook animation we obviously used a flipbook and a pencil or pen, finally for the life drawing we used a pencil, charcoal, coloured pencils and pens. We used a camera for the rotoscoping because if we filmed it, it would have taken twice as long to do (rotoscoping with just pictures takes 8 hours), I used a pen for the flipbook animation because it was all I had on me at the time. In life drawing we experimented with lot of different types of drawing tools we used pencil most of the time, but we also taped two coloured pencils together to draw a model that way, we also used charcoal to get better shading on the model and improve our traditional line drawing skill.
To make my animation I used adobe photoshop and premier pro. I used photoshop to draw my frames and test the animation, I thought I could put the entire animation in photoshop but the saving time becomes slower and slower with each new frame you make. I used Premier pro to actually animate the frames, this is because premier pro is made for stuff like animations, photoshop really isn't. When you save the animation from premier pro it actually comes out more fluid.
To make my animation I used key frame animation, I chose key frame animation because it's the type of animating I'm most familier and I felt I could make a really cool looking animation with this technique. However we also experimented with rotoscoping, which was the technique Disney used back in the day to have realistic and fluid looking animation. We also did life drawing sessions where we had to draw sketches of people while they were moving, this was to get an interpretation of how people move in life.
Types of Animation and How I used Them
There are two different types of animation ones and twos, ones are one frame for image and twos are one frame for every two images. I used ones because they are usually the best choice for fast paced and fluid animation.
To animate you have to create something called the persistence of vision, this is where someones sees images with slight difference between each other moving really fast to create the illusion of movement. It's basically a fancier term for animation.
To make sure my animation was smooth on photoshop I kept playing it then adjusting the time until it got the smoothness level I wanted. On premier pro In didn't have to adjust the time too much, because you could select every frame and change the to the time you want all at once. I also added more images with slighter movements, to give my character more natural movement
I learnt specialist terminology like the "boiling effect" this happens when your trace isn't consistence, it creates an effect where the lines start to ripple sort of like something boiling. "Uncanny Valley" is another term I learned, this happens when something animated appears too realistic. I also learned about a term called "Shape Dynamics" this is refers to the different characteristics of shapes a circles are associated with a good characters, squares are associated with well-rounded characters and triangles are associated with evil characters.
Influences
I think my main influence for the animation were the show Avatar the Last Airbender and Legend of Korra, both these shows have animation that's mostly centred around action, I thought this would work really well considering my animation is also centred around action. I think with these influences it really pushed the action orientated style of the animation.
Vladimir Propps theory helped me come up with my idea for an evil character, I feel that my character fits his description of a villain really well. I also made my character very triangular to show her evil personality.
Problem Solving and Choices
When creating my animation I decided to cut some scenes to reduce the production time of the animation, I also had to decide in what order to I should show my animation and what scenes I should add in for extra effect. I think these choices changed my animation for the better, taking out all the boring scenes and only keeping in the ones centred around intense movement and action.
I think most of the problems stem from trying to make the anatomy accurate while having my character turn around. To solve this problem I simply looked up characters doing things from different angles and I made artist interpretations of them, this is so I could get a better Idea of what human anatomy looks like from different angles.
Conclusion
I was sort of pleased with my animation I like how it looks, but I'm disappointed by the fact I couldn't actually reach the goal of 120 frames or have it be 10 seconds. I like the animation because it's really smooth and I was impressed by the fact I actually managed to pull off my character turning around while the camera zooms out. I'm very disappointed that I didn't manage to make the animation at least 120 frames/10 minutes.
The bit of my animation I like the best is where my character turns around, I think I did it surprisingly well, it's fluid and quite action orientated which is always nice. The bit of my animation I like the least was probably the beginning bit with the lighter, because I think it's more like filler than anything else it doesn't really add anything to the animation and it technically doesn't need to exist.
If I had more time to develop my animation I would have shown off her power, by having her mimic the fire from the lighter and engulf her entire body in flame, after this she will fly into the door shattering it. I would also probably add colour as well, just to give the animation a bit more life.
The best animation technique I learned was probably the rotoscoping. I like it just because of the effect it give when your done tracing over the images, the animation that follows it is always full of life and really fluid. I also liked coming up with my characters design, I really like thinking up a characters personality and backstory.
To be honest I don't think I managed my time really well, to start off with I should have used simple forms and not started of with the detail right away, that should have been an extra thing I added in at the end. In conclusion if I ever make an animation again I should start off with basic forms, add the detail afterwards and finished off with the colour.
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