Applied: Storyboards

Today we met to show each other our storyboards and to decide on a narrative to follow.
Below are my quick thumbnails - very roughly timed to my transcription of the recording of David talking about the squashed frogs on Alabama highways.

After making an animatic from my thumbnails we all got together to watch the three animatics. We still couldn't decide on which to choose but eventually decided against Brenda's story because the quality of the audio recording was just not good enough - even though it was probably the best story. We drew up a list of pros and cons for mine and Rosie's stories, and eventually chose Rosie's because of the quality of the recording, and of the narration itself. Rosie has shared her storyboards with us and me and Brenda are going to look over them together and feed back any changes or tweaks we would like to see.

Applied: Knostrop Visit

We thought it would be a nice idea to visit the waste water treatment plant in Knostrop, South Leeds where all the fracking waste water from the UK is sent to be processed. The idea was to get more primary research, to collect photographs and make some drawings etc. but when we got to the entrance (after a half an hour walk into the middle of nowhere) multiple signs told us trespassers would be prosecuted. We expected not to be able to snoop around the whole site, but unfortunately because it was surrounded by trees and muddy lakes visibility of the plant was incredibly limited.

Applied: Devi's recordings

Over the weekend Devi sent us a Dropbox folder with the recordings we were interested in after our chat. After we each listened to the recordings the three of us came together to identify ones which we all agreed would be nice to animate, or had a strong climate change/sustainability message. Out of the six that I really liked, Brenda and Rosie were also interested in three or four of them.

The best story that we all liked was a man talking about the experience of farmers whose land and water was being contaminated by chemicals as a result of fracking. This story was exactly what we were looking for from the start, since we started out with fracking as the area of "sustainability" that we were interested in pursuing. Unfortunately this recording was made at a music festival, and try as we might it was impossible to remove the background noise to any usable point without completely distorting the voice.

Another nice tale was from a man, now living in Australia, who was originally from Alabama. He spoke about how his neighbourhood used to get infested with toads who liked to eat the swarms of flies and crickets attracted to the electric lights. On returning home after a 15 year absence he was shocked to see no more toads - which he related to a drastic change in the climate. He also mentioned having worked for a wind-energy company, who found their plans for a farm in California scuppered by Bob Hope's wife who didn't like the look of the turbines and used their connections to have the project binned.

We have agreed that, in order to decide on a story we will each pick one, make storyboards for it, and then reconvene. We can then look at the three storyboards, and decide on which one we want to continue to develop. I picked the toads story, Rosie picked a story about an old lady whose town flooded when she was a child, and Brenda chose the fracking story discussed above. Brenda's challenge is to find some way of making the background noise seem less intrusive.

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We are taking a trip to Knostrop on Thursday, to a chemical processing plant which is used by fracking companies to dispose of their waste water. We plan on getting a few drawings and photographs, which may come in handy if we decide at some point to move our project back to a more fracking based approach. Also on Thursday we will share our storyboards with each other.

Applied: Meeting with Devi

Last night we went out for a pizza with Devi and discussed her project, and the stories she has collected. She suggested that instead of her narrating a story to us she would be able to give us one of her field recordings to use. This is really great news as it means we will be animating somebody's first-hand experience of climate change related issues.

During our chat we went through Devi's field notes on each of the recordings she made, and highlighted some which sounded interesting and suitable for our project. Devi is going to send us the recordings and hopefully we will be able to find something to use as the basis of our animation.

Applied: Devi Lockwood

We went to Preston New Road, near Blackpool where there is a new Fracking drill site which currently has a pretty much permanent protest camped outside its gates. We got some great photos of the signs, which we are thinking of incorporating into an animation as they are so bold and striking.

Yesterday, Rosie made it to a Frack Free Leeds meeting, and got speaking to a poet and journalist called Devi Lockwood. Devi cycled round the world collecting people's first hand stories of the impact of climate change. we are meeting with her again tonight (Tuesday 7th) to speak to her further, and hopefully to collect a story or two to animate if Devi is up for it.

This would be a really nice opportunity to make a narrative led documentary, on a an issue that is still quite removed from people's everyday lives in the UK (for the time being), but has very powerful and immediate effects for people in poorer parts of the world.

We are also continuing to look at protest camps and occupations which we might be able to visit in order to build up a body of stories, opinions and alternatives from people living in areas which will be affected by fracking.

Applied: Sustainability

I have teamed up with Brenda and Rosie for the applied documentary brief, and we have decided to choose sustainability as our theme and focus specifically on fracking. There are lots of infographic-y type animations out there which visualise the process of fracking, and explain the possible side effects, but few of these actually stated whether or not fracking was a good idea or not, preferring to stay neutral. For example:

As a group we all agreed that fracking is not a sustainable or worthwhile process to engage in. Not only does it have detrimental effects on the land and the lives of people living in the areas surrounding drilling sites, but the continued use of fossil fuels as an energy source is a hole we cannot dig ourselves out of.

The biggest and most obvious example of the evils of fracking is Flint, Michigan in the USA, in which fracking for shale gas has resulted in the contamination of drinking water supplies which has led to in an increase in the levels of lead and other toxic substances in the blood of schoolchildren, and a higher likelihood of a variety of cancers and birth defects. In rural communities there have been sharp increases in livestock infertility, deformed young and mortality rates.

Aside from these side effects - which are admittedly easy to ignore if you are an energy company executive living in a mansion on Bishop's Avenue, or an MP in the Westminster bubble -the introduction of shale gas into the UK energy infrastructure will increase carbon emissions by 11%, when our government has already "committed" to reducing emissions. The UK's climate Change Act of 2008 set specific targets for reduction in emissions by 2050 which will be completely unattainable if we introduce fracking into the energy industry.

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We have decided to take a slightly different tack to the video shown above. We thought that it would be interesting to try a vox-pop style documentary, in which we discussed with people their ideas for alternatives and for improving our current carbon output.

From the top of my head I think it would be interesting to talk to somebody from Leeds University physics department, who I know are currently researching improvements in the storage and release of solar energy. As well as this there are a number of anti-fracking organisations in and around Yorkshire who may have spokespeople that would like to speak to us. Rosie suggested a visit to Blackpool as there is a lot of fracking activity in that area, along with a lot of people attempting to block this action.

Character and Narrative - Limitations in Aesthetics

As far as I can tell the one true limitation of hand drawn animation is the ability (or lack of) to portray realistic depth within a shot. This limitation is based on the fact that, even when utilising parallax effects, it is nearly impossible to achieve a truly three-dimensional looking space in the same way that CGI can. With CG animation the lighting and shading effects alongside imitation lens and motion blurs can give an effect of the third dimension that is almost as real as if it were live action film. In contrast to this, while not technically impossible, it is beyond the reach of any human being to draw and animate a scene that could closely imitate reality in the way 3D animation can.
I see this as the main limitation for traditional animation, and is one of the reasons 3D and digital animation has so many more uses - particularly for 3D which can now be seamlessly edited into live action footage, or used to create entire scenes and backdrops for actors to be placed in. Compare this to the look of Space Jam which while obviously very cartoony and unrealistic, still wasn't able to make Michael Jordan look like he was actually a pat of the scene, rather than just plonked on top of a hand drawn animation.

Character and Narrative - Traditional techniques in modern animation

Traditional techniques may be slowly being taken over by modern digital animating techniques but I think there will always be a place for traditional animation as a tool for getting to grips with the basics and solidifying the 12 principles. Even something as simple as animating a pendulum swing, a bouncing ball or a basic walk cycle is an invaluable step in learning the principles before moving on and applying them to a more specialist type of animation. There is no quicker or more accessible form of moving image than the flipbook - possibly the fastest tool an animator has to share an idea or concept, and while I don't think it is strictly necessary for an animator to be able to draw well (especially animators in the CG field) I think traditional techniques such as the line test will not go out of fashion as a quick way of previewing and tweaking with the timing of a shot or scene.

Character and Narrative - Texture in Traditional animation aesthetic

I have noticed a trend in lots of recent digital animation - applying textures to reduce the bland flatness of digitally coloured images. One example of an animation I think utilises this technique well, and for a number of reasons, is Drawing Inspiration directed by Wesley Louis and Tim McCourt. Whilst many background elements are actually painted in watercolour the character and prop animation is drawn and coloured digitally. Not only would these elements look anachronistic against a painted background, but the cartoony style of the characters could easily make it look playful and exciting - unlike the quite morose mood of the piece. The animation focuses on an alcoholic magician, and I think due to the slightly more mature themes portrayed in the film it would have looked weird if the art style used flat colours. It seems like for many animators who want to make films for adults, adding textures is a shorthand aesthetic cue which separates their work from children's cartoons.
In my own work I have used it as an alternative to line boil when a scene looks like it will appear to flat and lifeless, an animated texture can bring a bit of movement.

Another reason I think this trend has come about is due to a much wider movement in art away from digital techniques and towards more analogue or handmade aesthetics. I think this is due to some new snobbery about digital art now that it is so easy and cheap for the general public to create and publish their work. Maybe it is subconscious but I believe society or at least the art world is placing a renewed emphasis on the handmade, and this has resulted in the increased use of simulated paper textures, analogue noise and other overlays to add texture and depth to a flat image.
I used a similar technique during my "The Other Side" animation at level 4 - overlaying scans of old newspapers to break up the boring flat look of the animation.

Cartridge paper texture applied in Drawing Inspiration

Newspaper texture applied in my animation

Character and Narrative - Aesthetics

Traditional animation has possibly the most scope of all animation techniques in terms of aesthetics. Essentially the term "traditional animation" covers all forms of drawn or painted animation, and is therefore open to any style or aesthetic that can be physically produced in a 2D format and photographed. This can range from very simple black and white stick cartoons like the work of Don Hertzfeldt, to the incredible oil-painted production of Loving Vincent in the style of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. Traditional animation might be the most versatile in terms of aesthetics, and compared to the last 25 years or so of mainstream 3D animation the range of different art styles in traditional animation is vast.
When you look through the history of traditional animation the aesthetics are often linked closely to a social or artistic movement of the time. The very early commercially produced animations such as Flesicher Studio's PopEye the Sailor and Betty Boop films strongly resembled, and were often based on, the newspaper cartoon strips of the time. This aesthetic style was later developed on by Warner and Disney in their shorts, and when Snow White was released in 1937, Disney's aesthetic became the go to for fairy tale type stories for the next 30 years. Later in the 60s counterculture style infiltrated animations such as Fritz the Cat, based on Robert Crumb's pulp comic strips, and Yellow Submarine which drew heavily on the hippie movement aesthetic of the work of Milton Glaser and Heinz Edelmann.
These days we have the ability to look back on and borrow from the entire history of animation thanks to the internet and the instant accessibility we now have. This has allowed animators these days to imitate and reference, and broaden the aesthetic possibilities further.

Character and Narrative - Time/Budget Restraints & Limited Animation

30 seconds at 24 frames per second = 720 frames (or 360 on twos), a scary proposition for someone deciding to do traditional animation, especially if you don't like drawing digitally. I decided to use "limited animation" a time and money saving technique used throughout the history of traditionally drawn animation. Limited animation is the term used to describe a form of animation which reuses as many assets as possible, which became possible when animators began using transparent mediums such as celluloid or acetate to create frames which could be layered on top of each other and photographed all at once. The first major change this brought about was that the animators no longer had to draw the background in every single frame. One single background could be photographed below all the animated frames. When Winsor McCay animated Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914 the background was drawn anew in every single frame, compare this to his film The Sinking of the Lusitania produced four years later, which made use of layers of transparent cels layered above oil painted backgrounds.
Thanks to these new technologies it also became possible to animate individual characters separately, again allowing frames to be reused when certain characters weren't moving within a scene. This was later increased to using separate cels for separate moving parts on the same character, a good example of this being the Beatle's Yellow Submarine movie, in which many scenes are entirely static other than a single arm movement or a foot tapping to the music. In fact it was thought by King Features who produced the film that the film would have been impossible to make had they not used such limited animation (at the time of production no studio other than Disney had been able to produce a feature length animation without going bankrupt in the process).
These days with digital production techniques it is very easy to animate separate parts of a scene individually, and in my own production for Telling Tales I used Photoshop to repeat frames throughout the film.
The main issue I see with limited animation is a very flat and lifeless look in scenes in which there is little movement. Some easy tricks to make things look less dull are making static background characters blink every now and then, or producing line boil. "Boiling Line" means a wobbly look applied to outlines, normally by repeating a two or three frame loop which gives the illusion of movement. There are some plugins available for programs like Flash and After Effects which apply line boil to digital animation, but in my production I drew two frames for every still image to keep my character looking alive, and make the car look like it was being vibrated by its engine.

Character and Narrative - Evaluation

I really struggled to engage with this module, and felt thoroughly unmotivated and disinterested by both the set briefs and my own responses to them. The work I produced for Telling Tales was worse than mediocre - a dull story and visually very uninteresting. I find myself falling back on making work that I find easy to do when I am not interested in the brief or in my own ideas, and Road To Nowhere is an example of feeling like it wasn't possible to play or experiment within the confines of the brief, therefore resulting in a very safe and ultimately uninspired piece of animation.
Normally I find the process of animating much more satisfying than the end product itself, and am not usually worried about the outcome so much as the experience of making the work - but during Character and Narrative I found it a drag even to think about working, and have been more than happy to distract myself with less urgent business for COP or other modules. After the suggestion last year that changing projects to a more interesting idea after getting underway with another one was a waste of time, I spent a long time resisting starting work on a project I was not at all stimulated by, probably wasting more time in the process. I still believe that, as I am a confident and quick animator, my time would be better spent on long consideration of a project before getting underway with the work. I have often felt like there is a pressure or a rush to have settled on a story or project by the end of a briefing session, and I don't think that for me it is conducive to coming up with my best ideas.

In terms of the technical side of the Telling Tales animation, I consider the hand drawn elements to be a step down from work I have produced in the past, in fact there was very little actual animation involved, almost exclusively using line boil to bring life to a flat image. In the one scene in which I attempted to draw multiple frames (when the car drives off into the horizon) the animation is jerky, and the volume and shape of the car seems to warp and shift between frames.
Regardless of this I think that there were some small indications of a more interesting animation lurking under the surface of my Road To Nowhere. Had time constraints not played such a big role in my decisions about what to keep in and what to cut out of the film I would have liked to have seen more use of collage/montage and texture through the scanned elements.
Maybe the single achievement of the production of this piece is a growing familiarity with the intricacies of After Effects. I was able to very quickly transfer my knowledge of other Adobe software, particularly Photoshop, and through the use of adjustment layers, blending modes and effects was able to precisely tweak the look of the film, and to make sure each scene looked the same as the others, despite having been drawn with a range of pens on a range of papers.

I enjoyed playing with the puppet pin tool, mainly due to its speed, although I can't see it being massively useful to me. Similarly DUIK seemed like more effort than it is worth. The time taken to build the puppet in Photoshop, tweak the anchor points and positioning in After Effects and then rig it in DUIK seems excessive considering the limitations of the medium. I think in both cases I would prefer to use cutouts or traditional style animation. Both alternatives would allow me more control and a wider range of possibilities.

Strike A Pose was a fun exercise. I enjoy positioning and posing the puppet in Maya, but not building or rigging. Potentially I would like to try animating in Maya, in collaboration with someone who could provide the rigs. I found MOOM to be a bit of a fiddly character to manipulate, but was pleased with the facial expressions I managed to get out of him, if not so satisfied by the body positions. I found that sometimes looking in a mirror or at reference photos of myself was hard to translate onto MOOM because of the irregular proportions of his body. This is a consideration I will have to bear in mind in the future when modelling or animating in Maya.

In a wider sense I feel like this module compounded my feelings that the way I want to work (still not entirely clear to me) is incompatible with the university set up. I have often felt that the course in general is geared purely towards gaining a job "in the industry", with little to no compensation for those who are interested in animation as an art form (sometimes I forget I am at an "Art School" altogether), and this term has only bolstered those worries. Perhaps I don't want to sit behind a desk pushing a mouse around for Disney or Cartoon Network. Perhaps I don't want to tell tales with a central character and a clear narrative. Perhaps I don't want to write contrived stories which don't interest me just to fulfill the criteria of a brief. Perhaps this course isn't right for me, or I'm not right for the course.

Much soul searching to be done over christmas.

Strike a Pose

I think Moom is a rubbish model as you don't have much control over the legs, and I feel that lots of emotion is displayed through the stance. For example I wanted to turn the knees inwards for a cowering stance to indicate fear, but the knee joints don't have their own controls and only move up and down parallel to the body when controlled by the foot movement.

 

Confusion

 

Pain

Pride

Sadness

Surprise

Full Blown Puppet Mastery

Let's take a trip to the circus, I hear they have a really sick balancing act.

Look at him go!! Keep watching long enough and he might fall off.

I made the mistake of standing in the position I wanted my puppet to be in, with arms and legs slightly bent, rather than in a T-pose or similar position which would have made the warping of the puppet look a bit smoother and given me more control over the limbs.

I like how quick and easy it is to use the puppet pin tool, but it seems fairly limited in its applications. I'm not sure I can see myself using it for much more than warping and wobbling.

All I wanna do is DUIK

In my first attempt with DUIK I tried to create a rig of a pink elephant with fat stubby legs, and I quickly learned that no amount of tweaking with DUIK's controls, the anchor points or with the separate limb images within the rig would change the fact that stubby limbs don't want to pay nice with DUIK.

I gave up on Nelly the elephant when not only did the joints seem to dislocate and float around improperly, but the knees on the back legs decided to bend in the wrong direction.

I decided to follow a new tack, and thought "Who has really long and skinny limbs?" Giraffes, NBA Players, long distance runners, corpses. Maybe a zombie marathon runner would solve my DUIK woes. Introducing Zomboy:

He knows not why he runs.

Character and Narrative - Week 9

Things have finally come together, and other than a few very minor tweaks to the timing of a couple scenes the visuals are complete. I have started looking online for royalty free sound effects. I want to use a lot of different sounds and samples to create that tense buildup of confusion and angst. The biggest problem so far has been trying to find samples for the SatNav voice. I might have to resort to actually recording what I need myself, or asking someone to voice-act for me, but I don't think I will be able to make it sound exactly how I want if I use my own recordings. For now I will carry on building up the texture of motorway sounds.

Character and Narrative - Week 8

This week I made no progress on the project, but I am confident of having it completed on time.

Character and Narrative - Week 7

Most of the drawn parts of my animation are now completed, scanned in, touched up on Photoshop, and I have begun putting things together in After Effects. I also spent the evening scanning in old maps from a reference book in the library in order to create the content of the SatNav screen before it goes haywire. Essentially all the work for the project is done and all I have to do now is compiling and ordering the individual scenes and finding suitable audio. I want to have ambient road sounds, which build up into a mess of white noise, alongside looping and glitching SatNav sounds.

Character and Narrative - Week 6

This week I drew frames for around 10-15 seconds of the animation. I have had to cut even more scenes from my storyboards in order to fit into the 30ish seconds time limit.

Character and Narrative - Week 5

This week I painted lots of road signs. Some are exact replicas of real life signs, and some look like real signs but have unusual imagery on them, for example; alarm clocks, mushroom clouds and dinosaurs. These made up signs will be mixed in subtley amongst the replica signs during the montage sections, and as they will only appear for a second or two I want to create a "Was that a picture of a dinosaur?" moment for the viewer.

Annoyingly my Mac decided it doesn't want to turn on anymore (1 week after warranty ended - coincidence?? I think not. Fuck you Apple). This means I have lost the neat storyboards I drew on Photoshop, as well as the animatic that I made from those storyboards. I still have my rough thumbnails on post-it notes, which are enough for me to outline the story with.

Character and Narrative - Week 4

This week I made no progress on the animation, but have chosen a character design, and begun collecting images of maps and road signs for reference and use in the montage sections.

Character and Narrative - Week 3

This week I thumbnailed the story, and began making storyboards. Thinking about the timing of the animation I feel like in order to show the buildup of stress that the driver goes through I will paradoxically have to show less and less of the things that drive him mad in order to allow myself more screentime for the driver himself. Because of this I have scrapped some of my planned montage elements, and will limit the use of the map images to the screen of the SatNav and only use the roadsigns in the visual bombardment the driver undergoes. I have made no progress this week on the actual animating.

Here are some initial development scribbles.

Character and Narrative - Week 2

This week I settled on a story for my Road to Nowhere animation - it involves a driver whose SatNav breaks, and he struggles to navigate a spaghetti junction style motorway by reading the road signs. The majority of the animation will be black and white traditional hand drawn style, potentially with some limited use of textures. This will make the introduction of brightly coloured road signs and scans of a variety of road maps during the montage sections look even more jarring.

Character and Narrative - Week 1

For my character and narrative I have picked the title "Road to Nowhere', as I really like the visual quality of maps and road signs. I plan to use lots of map imagery in whatever I decide on for my storyline, potentially using montages of different types of maps.

Telling tales -- OUAN504

My first idea for the 30 second Telling Tales animation is for the title "Road To Nowhere". My character will be a driver who is lost and disoriented by a variety of incomprehensible and contradictory road signs. I want to use a mixture of cutout, collage and drawn animation - the character of the driver, his car, and some scenery like roundabouts and background elements will be hand-drawn, whilst the roadsigns which flash in front of his eyes will be handmade, scanned and superimposed using After Effects.

Potentially this video could be looped as the driver never reaches his destination.

Applied Evaluation -- OUAN406

I feel like Applied was the first module in which I was really happy with the work I completed. My idents both came out very similar to how I pictured them in my head, and I managed to create and find soundtracks which I feel suit them both very well.

I really enjoyed the cutout process - taking the best part of a week to plan it, create all my assets, and tweak the animatic meant that I spent no more than an hour or two animating, not including a few tweaks in After Effects and Premier. It was also fun to record in the sound booth with Dan and Brenda. I think we made a very fitting audio track for the piece. I have a little prior knowledge of sound recording, and we were able to finish everything that I needed very quickly, and with no post-recording editing required.

This module I enjoyed getting into Maya, and am enthusiastic about working in it more in the future. At first glance (and from speaking to second years) it seemed really daunting, but actually modelling and texturing my truck and banana was quite enjoyable, and animating MOOM's walk cycle was very intuitive. I also enjoyed teaching myself more After Effects, and some parts of the National Geographic ident really made me think and stretch myself technically. At the beginning of the module I decided I wanted to do some motion-tracking, or something similar with live-action footage - originally this was going to be for the E4 project, but once I chose the cutout path for that film I had to think of other ways to try and incorporate these techniques, eventually using a myriad of different software and processes. It was satisfying to be able to set myself this challenge at the beginning of the module and then figure out a way of enacting it through the National Geographic ident. This could have resulted in an ident that was all about the technique, but I believe I managed to make something that was suitable to the identity of the brand at the same time. I had worried that both dent's would turn out quite drab and lifeless, but I think I succeeded in adding some vitality to the E4 piece at least with some overlapping action.

For the first time I also felt much more calm and confident during the pre-production stages, and was happy to pursue my ideas to completion, which hasn't always been the case. I got lots of brainstorming out of the way early and made a much more astute decision over what I wanted to work on, before steaming ahead. Perhaps it is because of the more professional style briefs - and the thought ringing in the back of my head that I could potentially submit the E4 ident when they next open their competition - that made me engage more professionally with the tasks. I want to keep this momentum going through summer as I work on my own practice, and hit the ground running next year.

National Geographic sounds -- OUAN406

I was originally planning to have some diagetic sound for each scene in the Nat Geo ident, but after playing around with different audio tracks couldn't get the results I wanted. I have now decided to use some ambient music in the background, and found a nice sample on copyright free site looperman.com which I think suits the feel of the ident quite well.

E4 Sound effects -- OUAN406

I booked time in sound booth 1 to record some sound effects for the E4 ident. I used my voice to make screams, comet sfx and an impact explosion. I think using vocal sound effects works with the irreverant tone of E4's output, and the surreal storyline of my ident. I took these recordings and synced them up in Premier.

MOOM walking

Using the image plane and Richard Williams' basic walk cycle I have animated MOOM a bit. I found it tricky to get the feet and legs in the positions I wanted because you don;t have direct control of the knee joints.

Banana model

The object I chose to model and texture is a banana. I chose it because it isn't a particularly difficult shape to model, but I can go really in depth with the texturing.

I started with a cylinder, added 10 edge loops and dragged the edge rings into a kind of lozenge shape. Then I applied the Bend non-linear deformer to make a gentle banana-like curve.

Then I used a similar process to make a stalk.

Texture

Finished product

Truck Texturing -- OUAN406

Dan has given me some help with unwrapping and texturing my truck in Maya. Im going for a rundown and rusty look, and will add some details like door handles, a grill on the front and maybe a logo or two.

The finished piece:

E4 Completion -- OUAN406

I have done all the animating for the E4 ident, and now just need to edit in After Effects to fix some colour issues from the lighting, and add sound effects. I am currently looking for free SFX online, but may end up recording them myself with my own voice to add to the rough and ready homemade feel already given by the cutout style.

E4 Progress -- OUAN406

I decided to animate the E4 ident with cutouts, partly asa challenge and to learn a new skill, and partly because from the previous E4 idents I have seen there were none animated by cutout. I think the story is basic enough to be animated this way, and cutout lends itself well to the style that I drew my storyboard and animatic in.

National Geographic 3 -- OUAN406

The hardest scene to make in my National Goegraphic ident was the one where the logo appears partially obscured by trees. I didnt want to have to hand paint a mask around the branches for every single frame, so in order to have the trees look as close as possible to the original I had to employ some Adobe wizardry.

First I made the original footage black and white in After Effects, and also ramped up the contrast to make the sky white and the foreground black.

The effect wasn't quite strong enough so I exported the clip as PNG images, and with Photoshop batch processed them into Bitmap PNGs. When I reimported the sequence in after effects it was ready to use as a mask layer.

This could then be applied over the top of the original footage with all the white areas automatically knocked out, leaving me with the desired effect.

I added a very gentle pan to the rectangle object, in the opposite direction that the trees are moving, to give the impression that the camera is rotating around the logo, and used the After Effects "Color Change" to make the logo look like it was being illuminated by the same light source as the trees.

Final Result:

National Geographic Progress -- OUAN406

I have placed my Maya model into two scenes so far and continue to look for more diverse environments to use.

National Geographic Progress -- OUAN406

I have made a model of the National Geographic yellow rectangle in Maya, and begun looking for nice footage to place the model into. I hope to use a mix of shots including still and moving camera - so some scenes will require me to animate the model, whereas others I can simply use a still render and impose that into the video.

National Geographic -- OUAN406

I have decided to scrap the intial idea of the spinning globe, and instead go for the second concept of placing the logo rectangle into various different environments. I think my initial idea would look great, but the time it would take me to animate does not leave me with much time to work on E4, and this way I also get the chance to do something other than hand drawn animation. I still like the concept, and would like to use it in a future project if the chance arises.

National Geographic Concept 2 -- OUAN406

I am still interested in utilising motion tracking or other techniques to impose images into live action footage, and would like to try to impose the yellow rectangle of the National Geographic logo into various different scenes from all around Earth. This would include cityscapes, rainforests, mountain ranges, beaches, arctic tundra etc. I would like to use timelapse footage preferrably as I like the effect, and it also gives a sort of voyeuristic sense to the footage which I think works well for a TV channel whose main output is documentary programming.

Nat Geo Globe idea -- OUAN406

National Geographic Channel Ideas -- OUAN406

National geographic channel has a wide range of documentary programming focusing on all elements of the earth. Many of these shows are straight up documentaries about social or cultural subjects, for example current series "God" with Morgan Freeman, which looks at the way various modern and historical cultures and religions think about life, death and other religious isues, or "Sea Monsters: the definitive guide" which talks about various real and legendary sea creatures. Other programs follow a more reality-show kind of format, for example "The Great Human Race" in which two archaeologists trace the steps of neolithic people migrating to North America.

The element of their programming that I want to focus on is the broader look at the Earth, and I want to represent the fact that their shows discuss people, places and events from across the entire planet (and outer space).

My initial concept was to create some sort of slideshow, with images from all corners of the Earth. The idea is to display the wide range of subjects shown on the channel, but I am struggling to think of an interesting way to animate this.

I remembered seeing a music video (https://vimeo.com/88360151) which used multiple GoPros mounted on a drone, and when the footage was stitched together it created a miniature globe effect. I thought it would be really nice to have an overhead view of a rotating planet, and every second or so a new environment or ecosystem would appear over the horizon.

The effect would hopefully turn out like this footage from the International Space Station: