Animation Visual Development 1

Visual Development: Is a way to explore and figure out the look and style of your final film before beginning the animation process. Visual Development isn't just the background images, but the characters, the props, ways of moving a character or object, the environment and the world that the story takes place in.

Here are a few early VisDev designs for Disney Pixar's "UP". Here are a bunch of simple head designs of an old man... An idea of the House in a different location by Lou Romano.

Another Lou Romano design, Its night and the two characters are talking about what is shown on the right of the image. Your eyes start in the middle, drift to the left to see the horse and night sky in the window and then over to see the house on the mountain with a waterfall.

What starts off as simple concepts and drawings, eventually becomes more visually defined.

As the storyboard is locked and the Animatic is being assembled, Visual Development begins about the same time the storyboard is being created and Character Designs are coming together. Visual Development keeps on going through the rough animation process to figure out how the rough props or environments will look. The Director is the one who is approving what the visual look will finally be.

Your visual development must be explored to make it as interesting to look at as possible and which fits the story in general. 

Here are character designs from "Inside Out" by Chris Sasaki. See how the character designs for Disgust evolves into her final look.

From a Cartoony look...

to a little more realistic...

 A combination of both...

 After all the revisions, redesigning and tweaking, we finally get to our final design!

 

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Happy Holidays!

What happens when the bad guys mess with Santa?

 
Happy Holidays! 

Share this link with your friends and family!
https://youtu.be/n8-U_LNmeVY

Animating Holiday Scenes

When I was a kid, I would always plan out and print up Christmas cards for friends, family and relatives. It all started off with linoleum block printing, later it was screen printing, then photoshop and finally animation. Here are a few animated cards I've done in the past.

 Snowman Magic from Toondini on Vimeo.

Making Holiday cards has always been a way for me to get into the Christmas spirit. My cards have become less hand made as the years have gone by, but I still like to send something out. And so, that's one reason why I have been working to finish up this project up.

Here is the rough blocking of animation for the Holiday Watchcat card so far.

Rough_Blocking_xmas2016_01 from WatchCat Films on Vimeo.

Any feedback about this is always welcomed, please let me know and Happy Holidays!

Making an animated Holiday card

My final animation class has ended allowing some free time to animate a Watchcat Holiday episode to send off to friends and family as an animated Holiday card to end 2016 in a fun way. I installed a 21 day trail version of ToonBoom Harmony 14 with a goal of documenting this production and show more about the animation process using Harmony.

To begin with, I made this animatic with final voices and sound effects as a QuickTime file  imported as a movie into Harmony . The bottom layer holds the animatic which I will use to keep my scenes in sync. The layer above holds a white background until I create a final one. The layer above the BG is where I will create my rough poses.

wc03_rough_sc01 from WatchCat Films on Vimeo.

There is only about 6 scenes in this project and I've designed it so that after one shot, the camera will pull away from one setup to reveal something that is happening in the foreground or in the background. You can see the animatic in previous a post entitled "Making Christmas".


By setting up different layers; the animatic, white background card and a rough animation, this will keep everything organized and easier to animated. The rough animation is also made up of several other layers and since we are zooming away from Santa and the Robber,
those drawings are both attached to Pegs.

Harmony allows you to create different layers by clicking on the +  button near the timeline and by holding it down, you will see other layers to choose from. Peg (ctrl + P) allows you to attach a layer and then move the peg, everything on the layer moves with the peg. In this case, Santa and the Robber move away from us on the Z axis. 

By clicking on the peg twice, Harmony opens a control panel showing the Key frames on a graph line. You need to determine which frame you want to set a Key on by clicking on +KF button. The -KP will remove a Key on the timeline. You can add ease ins and outs to each XYZ avis with the Velocity editor which is shown in the video below.
  
Watch this short video to see how it all works and where everything is located.

Tutorial Harmony 12_01 from WatchCat Films on Vimeo.

Each scene is a separate Harmony file that you will export a separate video file. Each file is then imported into an editing software program like Premiere or Final Cut Pro.

Next Posting: Animating Holiday Scenes

For your consideration, Watchcat Episode 2

As I write this, I can't believe we have finally come to the end of this project. What started off as a webseries to introduce Watchcat in episode 1, only hinted at what this cat could do. A Batman in cat form, a mysterious protector of the neighborhood on the watch for crime and criminals alike. 

Could we tell a story about a crime fighting cat in animation, with editing and original music? A mini motion picture of a cat hero that people would want to follow in every episode? Would we find an audience, get millions of hits and maybe even fund more episodes using a crowd funding situation? All these questions take time and effort to answer, but hopefully we will find out what you, our audience thinks about all of this.

We made Episode 2 to continue to follow the characters we introduced and and how our cat would deal with them. Both parts equal a whole and if people like it enough, we will do more. Maybe not 3 minutes an episode, but shorter situations could add to this cat's tale. 

And so, for your consideration, please enjoy Watchcat Episode 2.

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