Brief:

Building on the knowledge we gained in first year for our 30 second animation project and the modelling project from this year, Our new assignment puts us into new teams to create another new animated but this one has a theme and it is to be based on the theme of Bravery.

The teams will need to work on idea generation , creating storyboards , concept art and a Previs for week 3 presentation along with a Powerpoint to showcase your work and development. Teams should all work together and the work should be divided equally amongst the group. Make sure to have ideation, conceptualisation, development and a rough plan. Try to develop and improve your skills and try to learn something new so that you have developed or your work flow has evolved or improved. In this project the theme must be clear and understood in some cases self explanatory as to how the emotion of bravery is conveyed be it in actions situation or relatability to your character in the scene or what the short will make you feel.

Design ideas to consider:

Look to push genre, narrative, character (or non-character) and art in different ways experiment and try something new.
Use your design and idea processes to plan and prepare yourself throughout and try to solve any problems or issues that may arise in the most effective and time preserving way. Try to learn something from these and if they occur in the future you could provide a quick solution that would fix the problem faster or you could teach someone facing the same issues.
Pre-rendered or Realtime rendering as an output (look at unreal/unity) if your group has the time or wants to learn new software.
Best way to communicate and work with your team (slack/regular meet-ups/fair voting on ideas etc) establish platforms for each segment of your work for concept art, research ideas and 3D workflow keep everything clean and organised so that things are easy to find.

The Group :

For this project like the last, Alec chose the groups. I have worked with all of these people in the past and found Dom and Katie to be very productive and strong workers. I was eager to see to see who my group members where, as i felt like the previous project towards the end of the project i had to carry it and even work on this new project and the modelling project which really took a lot of my time and energy. I know how these people work and what we are all capable and i feel like we can produce a strong body of work as long as the communication is kept up and everyone works to the best of their ability and as long as no one needs to be carried in the group.

As soon as the group list was posted i said to everyone that we should have a group meeting right after class so we could get a head start on the work and so that we could organise a few days for idea generation and possible generate some narratives and storyboards / rough concepts and then on the mid week meeting we would finalise the idea and then we would start research and a rough story/ narrative along with concept art for the character and the enviornment.

Idea Generation:

We all got together during class to discuss the ideas we had for the animation which we all spit balled in an afternoon. We all had to keep in mind the theme of bravery as it we found it very easy to deviate and had to keep coming back to the theme with the ideas and try to make the story flow and make it universally understandable via a persons experience or emotions.

Brainstorming:

Initial ideas by the Team

My ideas where:

To have someone give their heart to someone and have them rip it up. They then have to build up the strength and bravery to then give it to someone else who then mends by taping it up or putting the pieces back together as it was shattered into a million pieces. I could also get mended overtime.

I also thought we could user the destructible which is very easy to use in Unreal engine if we where going to create the animation in this as it would also render in real time which would be better than using Maya as it ay be more complex and time consuming to do and render.

Here is a screenshot of Ryan Loughran blog and i did some research myself i also thought of other things like having the heart beat and have it with cuts and scars reflecting damage and rejection and then it would be stitched and bandaged or a plaster would be placed over it to show it is healing or is mended.

Here is an example i looked at:

So the heart when given to some one would just simple fall apart or even fade in to dust showing the hopelessness and that the person giving the heart is now just a husk as there is nothing left and this would also be shown in the emotions or facial expression as it would be cold and unresponsive or the opposite where they would be in agony and pain as there figuritive heart is being broken into a million pieces or it is been torn apart.

Also the song we could play would be this:

I thought if we where to do this then we should set it in a restaurant or in a coffee house so that it would seem grounded and relateable. Also Dom would have his assets from last years project for the animated short about the bakery where we could reuse some of his stuff and re purpose it for our new scene if we the group chose this idea.

The diving board idea, where a man dives into water was also my idea where he would try to jump off the top diving board but would suffer from vertigo and a fear of heights where his sense of reality would be manipulated and everything would seem alot worse like the distance to the water doubling and him worrying or having a panic attack then he would final muster the courage to finally jump.

Here is the rough storyboard we as a group devised in an afternoon but this was subject to change which it did over the weeks and it originally had multiple ending and we had to many variations of what would happen so over the weeks we refined and developed the narrative and refined it in to something much simpler and effective, conveying a range of emotions like fear , pride , comedy and using scenes to exaggerate movement and expressions at different points.

Dom's Idea:

Revolved around a imaginery friend that a kid would have who was a robot, it seemed a bit to similar to Big Hero 6 to me.

There was a kid who was alone, afraid and didn’t feel like he belonged. He never really talked to anyone but his imaginary friend who was a robot. The robot always stands behind him and always encourages him to play with the others. However, the boy doesn’t heed his advice, until one day. The boy fines the courage to interact with other kids playing in the park on his way home. The robot encourages him, holding his hand, however the robot disappears as the boy begins playing. Then we cut to the same opening, but with all of the boys friends instead. The boy stops, does around and smiles

Katies idea:

Katies idea was about a haunted house and a scary ghost. It was about being able to stay in a haunted house until morning with all different things to scary you like an old clock the ghost and even tapping and scraping to set you on edge to see if you can stay the night.

Andrews Idea:

Andrews original idea consisted of a cat and a dog. It wasn't a well developed idea and seemed like to much work so we dropped it fairly quickly as he had no narrative and it had nothing to do with bravery.

Genres:

We discussed these ideas and the effects / emotion and narratives we wanted to convey and this is the list we came up with for the genres they would be in.

Comedy
Romance
Drama
Horror

We then shortlisted the ideas down to Dom's idea and my diving board idea and then had a vote on which one we would go with.

Animation Styles:

There was a few different styles that we discussed. Many of them revolved around a much more cartoonistic style, like Cloudy with a Chance of meat balls, Looney Toons and even Mr Bean and Bernard the Bear.

Artistic styles we considered:

Toon Shading

Cell Shading

I suggested the cell shader as i love the comic book style from borderlands and love the aesthetic it creates:

https://www.destructoid.com/borderlands-explains-its-not-cel-shaded-actually-art-style-128892.phtml

https://www.fanatical.com/en/blog/what-is-cel-shading

Cartoonistic - plain colours , painting by faces
Realism, includes textures and FX
Stylised Realism- all textures created by hand and designed with a specifc aestetic in mind
Block colours, includes Aistandardshader for rendering in arnold
Realistic enviornment with cartoony character

Finalising the idea:

We decided to stay in longer to fully flesh out an idea, this would mean that we could then begin work as soon as we all agreed on the idea and we could get a head start on all the work so this gave us motivation to get it settled and agreed on to start the work and see if the idea would work or give us time to play about with the narrative and produce some storyboards with a few variations. We also wanted to allow more time for learning new processes and to allow time for any problems and to have time to fix them along with working on trying to get the character and the scene to work and look right as if they belong so we had to compromise on the aesthetics.

We were undecided in what we wanted to do as we all wanted to do our own ideas , to solve this we then decided to have a vote based on the ideas we had and looked at some research for each and separated them into styles and emotions.

The majority of the group ended up choosing the diving idea as they thought it would be funny and we could have alot more fun animating the character, also we assessed that it would be more manageable to in our time frame and would be more attainable to create and complete in the time frame excluding render time which take longer for the pool water to render or if i have to use bifrost it may take alot longer and the animation will need to be cached for breaking up the scene to render over multiple machines unless in can do it an easier way which i plan on researching.

We ended up going with my Original idea was that we where going to have a diver that was very sure of himself at the start however, once he is on top of the board he gets scared. He sits up at the top of the diving board worried, until he gets moved out of the way by a kid, who jumps without hesitation. The diver then slumps to his knees, feeling sorry for himself. Time passes, he then gets Brave and decides to jump off the board.

We had 3 endings, however. You can read all about that on the linked page above.

Once we had the story in mind we discussed the style, rendering options and the workflow breaking it up into a organised timetable for work to do and complete on a weekly basis. We also listed all our strengths and weaknesses and what we where capable of or experienced in with Maya and what we area we wanted to work in or specialise in or experiment with.

Group Roles:

Andrew : Animation , Sound and scene production

Dominic: Character Creation and Rigging

Katie: Blendshapes for Character and Diving board along with Modelling a few assets for the scene and working on the skydome lighting and matte painting for looking out the windows

My role was creating the scene , structure and any assets that need done along with reworking anyone's else's modes and re purposing them for the scene i also did all the texturing of the scene and did the lighting and the water.

As we progressed through the project these tasks changed and more was added to different peoples workflow.

Rough Storyboard that Katie put together for timing of each shot :

This was very rough so then we agreed that in the second week we would record some source videos to work from for animating later along with generating a time scale and frame for the short and the length of each shot and the camera locations.

We all meet up again for the next few days working together to flush out the story and the different ways of presenting it and began doing rough sketches on post it notes and thumbnails to convey this. It provided us with a new perspective and helped generate different ideas and helped us see and make alterations and changes for the batter as it would have been to disjointed and long. Everyone was on the same page as they could all visualise the same thing despite there being some conflicting ideas and differences in the group which we spend a few days having to resolve. It allowed visualise what should happen and from what camera angle and perspective things should be viewed from and what parts we need to focus on more and what stuff can be overlooked if it is in a quick shot and if it will not be seen for very long it doesn't have to be highly detailed and textured.

So in this aspect of the storyboard with changes and exploring ways of incorporating emotions and making the short comedic while overcoming ones own fear to become brave i had made the suggestion when he is up on top of the diving board he would be so nervous and afraid he would shit a brick which would be fun and it is universally understandable in any language as a joke of going to the toilet and being afraid. I also had the idea that he would flaily about in the air and would belly flop into the pool causing a bigh spalsh or a little drop as it is so big and he only jumped off the bottom diving board or if we did go with the top diving board he would hit the cater and cause a tsunama and the camera would be soaked with water droplets running down the lense and the end credits would roll.

Dom had made a suggestion like trying to have a child run by and humiliate the man and have it be the smallest diving board he would be jumping off. It was the characters "Diving Dave's" own interpretation that it was the highest and his mind playing tricks on him that is why his sense of reality becomes warped and everything seems so exaggerated to the extreme because of fear and stress causing his mind to play tricks on him. This manipulation idea of the enviornment was my idea and i suggested we convey it by altering the camera focal length for certain angles and scenes to convey vertigo or to reinforce the height he his at or the insignificance of the protagonist as he is small and meaning less in comparison to the enviornment which is engulfing him and making him seem small and insignificant in comparison . This will hopefully be conveyed in the emotions we want the audience to feel , this will all be done once I get the scene created for when we would add in the characters.

The revised Story board we did together which then Dom refined again himself:

Project Breakdown :

Research:

My research was more focused on the scene and the structure and how i should compose it for the short.After we decided upon an idea that we where all happy with, we went away and decided that we will research into different types of swimming pools, looking at style aesthetics layout and structure.

I helped out with the other research for animation giving the references and styles like Looney Toon's and Mr Bean.

Bernard the bear the animations had alot of concepts we liked like the simplistic but we especially liked the style where it would be a mix between realistic and cartoonist as the character is very goofy and minimalist 3d cartoony character while the enviornment seems to be more based on realism and has alot of features that have a sense of mixed between the two stiles making almost stylised to do so making it believe able and it feels like the character belongs. This is what we wanted to create in the end as we want the character to belong in the scene and we don't want him to stand out or making him clashing to the enviornment.

Character Concept Art:

I just thought the character should have realistic proportions like a real swimmer or a diver so i ended up creating this :

This then lead onto a revised character design by the others looking at form and figure and exaggerating it like this:

This was a sketch i started to do with the new style we went with but then Dom said for me to stop and work on something else as he wanted to take over from my other sketches and do some character designs:

Character Research Mood Boards we added to and Dom and Katie Created:

This is what lead on to the more cartoony style for the character that Dom then took over from my design to break it up into shapes and create a playful yet functional design which then lead Katie to create and digitally paint the final outcome that we would then end up with. It lead to more research but more on style of the character and looking at how they would move and creating a character that could be capable to perform and move into the right positions and to have a face to convey emotions.

Environment :

Research :

This can be found on both Katie's and Dom Blogs as we all shared the same research using Discord I didn't really have time to write up my research but instead helped others :

https://theanimationmuppetblog.wordpress.com/2018/11/07/animated-strategies-animation-ideas-and-research/

https://katherinecatney.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/animated-short-diving-dave/

I looked at local swimming pools like Grove, Lisburn Swimmers the swimming pool in Dublin and the Olympic pool in Limerick. I did this as i am familiar with the layout and structure of these building s and the interiors as i can still remember them from when i used to play Waterpolo for over 7 years when i was younger going to pratice in Andersonstown and the falls and playing in matches from here to Galway and even participating in school to win the all Ireland championship under 16's. I can remember the layout of each pool as they are distintively differnt with the pools , tiles and struture along with the spectating areas and also they have different lighting and some have diving boards whilst others do not as they are smaller buildings.

My Environment work:

In my drawings i tried to convey the structure using symmetry and tried to devise a rough layout and design along with dividing up segments for what would be walls doors signs windows and supports. I also looked a lighting and from my research they are usually ceiling lights spotlights or lights attached to the supports beams. Also most pools walls are painted weight to reflect the light. I also brought up the topic if we would be using a glass ceiling and see through windows as we will need to plan for this in the scene and how each component of the scene will be lit and how by using a sky dome point light or emission? This was still to be discussed which me and Katie did the following week. I tried to look at scale and design some alternative camera angles for what should be seen in the background for some of the shots if these are the camera angels we are going to use in the end.

To do for myself for the future when i get a some free time:

Look into:

Learn Marvelous Designer all you need to retopologise a model. Use for posing and creasing clothing with folds

Learn/ Refine preproduction and post production methods.

Learn Unreal and Unity and use for real time renders

Index of refraction for mirror or glass set to 3

Ai noise try to reduce or eliminate it in the final render

Arnold nodes and lighting

Light Linking select on object and select and then deselect object to be on

emission, plugins, colour maps, flat emissions.