Trailer for In Make Believe Woods
One Drive Access to all of my files: portfolio project for submission 1
17/06/24 - 01/07/24
In the past few weeks since finishing the second semester of my Masters Degree, I have started on the preproduction of my first episode for Make Believe Woods. But after completing the script and realising the episode will be at least four minutes long, the feeling of that not being an attainable goal for the beginning of September weighed on me. The longest animation that I have done to date is the 40 seconds of H20No, but even so with my teammates that goal was still hard to reach. So I switched gears and decided with guidance from Sarah to create a trailer for the series.
Simon quickly introduces his friends, their home, and invites the viewer to play with them.
In this trailer I want to quickly get the audience's interest while also introducing the main characters, for inspiration I looked at trailers from previous animated works. I couldn't find trailers introducing just regular animated series. It was either an animated series getting a movie or just animated movies. But I liked how in Hey Arnold! and Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius, the characters were introduced in such a quick and efficient manner. That even someone not having seen the shows before could say “wow that looks cool let’s check it out”.
Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius Teaser Trailer
Hey Arnold! The Movie Teaser Trailer
Other trailers that caught my interest not for their quickness but their visuals while also showing the characters personalities are below. When showing the cutaways to the viewer my goal is to allow them to get a taste of the boys' individual personalities.
Monsters University - Official Trailer 2013 [HD]
Pocahontas (1995): Theatrical Trailer [35mm 4K Restoration] The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Trailer #1 (35mm 4K) (March 29, 1996)
When creating the script I went for the camera being a potential friend that Simon wanted to join in the fun that day. Inspiration for this type of setup came from the shows, Blues Clues and Mister Rogers Neighborhood.
https://bluesclues.fandom.com/wiki/Snack_Time
https://www.oocities.com/tvtranscripts/mrrogers/mr_1614.htm
https://thescriptsavant.com/movies/A_Beautiful_Day_In_The_Neighborhood.pdf
First Draft of Script:
Final Draft of Script:
When creating the shotlist I went back and forth with how many shots needed to be created to then be shown in the storyboard to make a cohesive story. Since these two things go hand in hand this took awhile to correlate. One of the main things I struggled with when creating the storyboard was how to successfully display that some of these scenes were flashbacks. This led to research on how it's usually done in the past in the television industry.
First Storyboard Draft:
Final Storyboard:
I then went in the direction of adding a yellow hue into the scenes to portray the flashbacks. Also when preparing Simon and Henry in the sword fighting flashback my reference was fencing from the 2020 Olympics.
Starting this then gave way to the change in how detailed both Henry and Simon’s hands were. Since their previously designed hands were in my opinion too simple to wield a sword, I also knew from previous experience that I would need to separate the arms and legs into two long ovals in order to successfully animate them using a rig.
Before redesign:
After redesign:
Reference for creating the new hands:
02/07/24 - 22/07/24
To get the reference backgrounds for the storyboard I went to my local woods and first got digital 3D scans of each environment. This allowed me to get different perspectives of the desired shots. I did this through an app called Scaniverse and a tutorial I found on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8H0rAHym0k
Along with my final results with the app showcased in a video I created to present my idea to my classmates and lecturers on the first day back.
https://youtube.com/shorts/fGVE_JpoIkI
I also went and took video on my Canon Rebel T6 so that I wouldn’t only have reference images when creating the backgrounds. But also to get the diegetic sound from nature as well the movements of the grass and water. At first I was going to use the real life backgrounds and composite the characters into the environment. But this was deterred when I couldn’t remotely record to my camera through an app. I also attempted to get a pan using my poor man’s dolly (a tiny skateboard and my camera on top of it),which in the very end was super bumpy. So the quality of the videos were not up to my standard especially for my portfolio project so I retracted that idea.
So I figured there's no time like my last semester to learn how to create backgrounds, that process would begin after I rigged Simon. For now I was focusing on the very rough animatic. Before returning to Northern Ireland, I had the voice over recorded and I distorted it through Adobe Audition. This was in order to give the recording a high pitched child quality to match Simon’s exterior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SLTCPpu2qs
The day before school started again I was editing my animatic and was unsure what to do with Benny. I did not mess with his appendages. Instead of doing something rash with the character's design, I waited to see what everyone thought of what I have done thus far. That is why he is not present in the very rough animatic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLzHYPysTsY
23/07/24 - 01/09/24
After giving my presentation about what I have done and what my goals are for the beginning of September.
I was specifically instructed by my lecturer (Sarah) to focus on rigging the main character Simon. So all of my attention was brought to that aspect of the project. In previous projects I also did rigging but that was within Adobe Animate with no plug-ins. I really only have experience with the super simplistic form of rigging. That is why when I told Sarah that I had Simon all rigged and ready for the next course of action in Adobe After Effects, she was very confused since it wasn’t even an hour after the presentations took place. After seeing that I had just connected each limb together she explained that there is a more complex way of rigging that can only be achieved with plug-ins. I was instructed to install Duik onto my computer and to find tutorials.
DUIK Angela Jumpstart \\ Complete Beginner's Guide
This specific tutorial was very useful for someone just starting out in the program. But I still ran into problems with the bones tool not connecting to the original artwork, which was easily fixed with the parent tool.
https://youtu.be/v2KFPzHL8s8?si=TkNc0baxc7ofsHdR&t=180
When creating the walk cycle I ran into another problem getting the appendages to move correctly. I already knew that the problem was the drop shadow that I had added to the arms, legs, hands, and feet. The reason for adding the drop shadow in the first place was so that the viewer could distinctly see the arms from the rest of the body, while still having the arms in the same colour palette as Simon. In doing this there was a harsh line created in the connection of the forearm and upper arm, which I covered up by creating another piece that would blend in between the two different bones.
This artistic decision came back to bite me when auto rigging. Not only would the middle piece not cover up the harsh line for both bones throughout the cycle, but it looked incredibly messy and after talking with Sarah she stated that drop shadows are the last thing added to pieces. So then I had to go back to the original artwork and would have to find a new colour for the appendages that didn’t require a drop shadow for distinction. It took a little bit but I settled on a lighter brown not used with Simon already and then the walk cycle worked very well.
The next course of action was getting Simon to talk. This was one of my main goals when coming into this final project because all of my past projects I didn’t get to create mouth movements for the characters. I knew that this was an important skill to bring into the industry since animation was very rarely silent films.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NxisQ548-c
So I created a mouth chart specifically for Simon and made another rig to easily navigate the different mouths. The tutorial was helpful in the setting up process. But when it came to which mouth movements to use for letters not listed on the chart I was left to sounding out each word. This was a long process but rewarding with the end results.
The last rig I wanted to create before combining them all together to really bring Simon alive was an eye blinking rig.
https://youtu.be/3pgOQiLV2jc?si=2XWGrUBjAro9fJ3a
Since blinking is such a quick action I was unsure of the end results because I felt the white of the eyes was lingering when Simon’s eyes were supposed to be closed. After changing the opacity to control how much of the white was being shown the problem was corrected.
Rig Walkthrough
When it comes to the backgrounds I kept going back and forth on what to do and settled on using the photographs I took on my camera.
28/08/24
When adding the camera movements to the scene I took inspiration from the cartoon Dora the Explorer. I added a pause after the initial question to let the audience have a chance to answer.
https://youtu.be/OKe7q1nUFgE?si=xoyqUOxkbp0L9WyJ&t=66
After my last conversation with Sarah in person, I went with the decision to just finish the project in its entirety. I realised as I was putting the parts where Simon is directly speaking to the camera that without the middle of the story it would make no sense to the viewer so I thought why not just get the whole thing completed. This left me with going back to the storyboards removing all of the drop shadows and updating the body parts. I did in fact later on re-add the drop shadows but instead of just adding them to specific body parts, I grouped the whole character and the drop shadow went over the whole piece to integrate the character in the background.
The key poses I feel really bring Simon so much more to life. At the time of piecing everything together there were some aspects that I wished did but unfortunately did not make the cut. Such as Simon counting him and his friends on his fingers in the beginning but the transition to the first image cut that as a possibility. Along with Simon being concerned with the camera's reaction to Benny again it was a timing issue with him only being on screen for four seconds. I also did not include the yellow hue for the flashback scenes since I felt that them being in an animatic format was enough of a difference.
Draft for final meeting with Sarah: https://youtu.be/UNCy88ECGcY
01/09/24
As I went into my virtual meeting with Sarah for the last week of class my trailer was almost complete. All that needed to be done was the last scene of the camera and Simon finally reaching Henry and Benny. I had already lip synced the last part but After Effects was being finicky since it wasn’t at the beginning of the track but towards the back. That was easily fixed by changing the composition time in the file I was copying the mouth movements into. I then made the camera movements needed for the scene and Simon was already to go.
What I got I done of the final scene: https://youtu.be/UyTLUgHHyog
As I started on Henry and Benny I realised that the camera pan to them was awkward anyway I tried to do it. My first technique was blurring them with the background until I wanted them to be seen. The problem I kept running into was that both of them would move off their mark. Nothing about it looked natural like I wanted, especially when it came to the waves.
Henry waving: https://youtu.be/yDE2EnOyx5o
I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to submit messy work so I cut the final scene and it ended with the group hug. In order to get the naturalistic movements I’m going for I think I would need to create rigs for Benny and Henry. Which was not possible with how little time I had left. Even with all the problems I faced during this project I feel that I did the best I could with the allotted time.
