Rationale:
My research revealed a darker side to the nursery rhyme that I hadn't considered before, in reality I see it as a rhyme all about the suddenness of change and the upset of the established order. I can see how Little Miss Muffet has it's root in things executions.
I've interpreted the rhyme by looking at the idea of upset, and having 'Little Miss Muffet' as the bad guy and the 'spider' as the good guy showing a form of enslavement and having a hero come through and upset the order.
I chose to present it like this in order to get people to look further into things instead of taking it at face value. I like the idea of making people look further into things they're used to, like making Muffet into a nasty human harvesting beast.
I liked the way my characters developed and I think the kind of dark world i've shown with the hordes of mindless humans being harvested worked well. The music I chose played a part in setting up the world, giving an suspenseful feeling and the sound effects worked to accentuate the actions.
For sound i had a lot of trouble finding the correct ones, I settled with a nice suspenseful ambient drums background track, and stumbled upon this.
https://soundcloud.com/simonus/ethnic2a
Which i really like, I used sounds from http://freesound.org/, I managed to find with some searching some good sounds like bass drum kicks, and suspense building effects.
I had a lot of trouble with sound really, working with sound in after effects was a nightmare so I switched to Sony Vegas which allowed me a lot more control over the sounds (pic related), I've never worked with it before but I managed to get a result.
After emails with Claire i've got some changes to make to my animation.
Remade the human heart to fit better with my aesthetic.
Added in some muscle texture, textures on the horns, eyes, back of the mouth. Also remade his head a little, gave him larger, more spread out horns.
Textures added to the hero, Wanted to do something other than the default textures you might see on the kind of clothes he's wearing so i added a bunch of dots fading out from sections to give him an effect I really like.
Took Claire's advice and replaced the gold with a dark woodened brown, got rid of a lot of the shine and added in some wood textures to fit with the look more. Also darkened and upped the contrast to lend a darker look to my animation.
A happy human for a celebration scene at the end.
Working on the final scene of the human celebrating as the hero stands out on a cliff above them.
Just starting out. Figuring out how to loop animation and getting the grasp of precomping, Using the Puppet Pin tool to experiment with moving static images (creep.png)
First scene mostly sorted. Moving into animating the second scene, getting to know cameras and things like that.
Working with high quality images i've created, adding in manipulatable characters and learning more about camera movements, beginning to add text and work with yaw and rotation of cameras on 3d scale for character introduction.
Working on the third scene trying to set out this seperate head to work properly. Starting to get the hang of key framing and don't feel so lost when working in After Effects anymore.
Getting into more complex stuff, multiple cameras and whatnot. Starting to see the sheer amount of effort that goes into animation.
The big fight scene, Started by making a big stage and animating everything on there, planning on changing the resolution and using camera work to show what's going on.
Discovered the joys of trying to properly animate articulated PSDs, I think i'm getting the hang of it, made a nice crouching animation that doesn't look bad. More text work for the Little Miss Muffet rhyme.
Working on the stabbing scene, don't quite understand the fifty key frames 'recommended' on the brief, i'm easily using many many times more than that.
Starting to put what I have together to get some feedback on it.
First real draft of animation, quite long, needs some chopping down.
Things not shown: Creep digesting Being, Creep taking heart from chest and putting it on conveyor belt, Beast dissolving to smoke, creeps dissolving to smoke.
A Being, the submissive and enslaved species harvested for food by the Beast, very much inspired by the enslaved humanity of the Matrix.
Creeps, the being-harvester created by the beast to process the Beings into edible hearts
The Beast, the evil master of the Creeps
The Hero, the protagonist, the one charged with freeing the Beings
My original idea's been changed to include the creeps and beings to flesh it out for time and allow some establishment of why the two characters are fighting.
Sunday 17 March 2013
Text research:
I love the character introduction style that borderlands uses, I think this could be a good way to add in the nursery rhyme text.
stylized orange or blue background pans into throne (background being throne room) rotates to figure draped over throne, crown slung lazily over head shot snaps to extreme closeup of eyes looking down then jumping upwards looking towards distance camera zooms down to entrance of throne room throne room door slams open alternate figure, rebel, inverse of figure on throne charges towards figure on throne throne figure gets up and charges back as running, second figure pulls sword and stabs upwards first figure freezes, shot of bloodied sword sticking out of back first figure falls to ground second figure claims crown, goes to sit on throne as he climbs steps to throne, his head snaps to look at the throne door throne room door slams open, third figure stands in wait.
The Animatrix is one of my favourite films for the styles and variety that it presents in regards to animation.
It's a collection of backstories and lore of the Matrix series, each small segment is animated in an entirely different way.
The first segment is named the Final Flight of the Osiris, it's animated via computer graphics and attempts to create a photorealistic but still somewhat surreal digital world.
The second segment we see is named the Second Renaissance (Part I and II), directed by Mahiro Maeda, which is backstory of the war between the machines and man. The footage is hand drawn and digitally arranged results in an segment that presents an amazing visual anime style with some scenes being just downright gorgeous, in addition there are anime styled news bulletins put in at sections.
The third segment we see is named Kid's Story, it's hand drawn in a more western style, directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, animated by Kazuto Nakazawa. Kid's story is incredibly stylized and has very unconventional artwork, looking very quickly sketched with shaky pencil-like outlines and shading. The animation itself is very fast paced and exaggerated.
The fourth segment is named Program, the character designs were done by Yutaka Minowa and the segment is in a traditional, beautifully grainy and stylish anime style, reminiscent of something like Mononoke or Ninja Scroll.
The fifth segment is named World Record, I love the unorthodox and grotesque anime style with sharp shadows and a simplicity that reminds me a lot of western animation.
The sixth segment is named Beyond, and it draws from artists like Makoto Shinkai with extremely detailed hand drawn backgrounds and simple almost vector-like characters over the top. I absolutely love this kind of animation but I don't have the skills to replicate it.
The seventh segment is named Detective Story and it's done in the style of a modern-day detective film noir, grainy, gritty and almost monochrome but the characters are in a very anime style.
The ninth and final segment is called Matriculated, the artwork is incredible western and could be something straight out of the Justice League or Batman. The exception are the robots which appear to be 3d animated, perhaps a statement about man vs machine.
