AESOP'S FABLES: Compositing

Compositing was really difficult for me, and without the help of George and Jamie I wouldn't have been able to do my scenes as well as I did. It really helped me learning After Effects more in depth however and now I feel more confident with the program and will be able to use it in my future projects with less difficulty.

AESOP'S FABLES: Working In A Group

It was interesting to work with other people and keep to deadlines so that other people were not let down. It was frustrating at time when others didn't provide me the same courtesy and didn't complete or start their assigned roles which lead to me taking on more roles than I was originally assigned, including drawing of storyboards for animatics. 

When somebody didn't complete them on time I would offer straight away as it was unfair for the group to be hindered because of some inconsiderate people.

An example of part of the storyboard which I contributed when we were first digitising our animatic.

AESOP'S FABLES: Dynamic Poses

The session where we spent all day drawing dynamic poses of our characters for our animatics was my favourite session of the term. It felt really good to be in drawing from 9 - 5 and it  really, really helped us with the animatic and later on, the animation. It made our animatic much more interesting visually and it was a good way to explore different poses and movement. 

We were shown this and it really hit home with me and from then on I felt that my poses were getting better and better thanks to using a line of action. It removes stiffness and makes things much more interesting!

I tested it out on a pose that wasn't within our animation using this method at first.

It really hit home looking at this how much more dynamic and expressive I could make a movement with the line of action.

I went onto explore some poses for not only my fox but for the other characters as well such as the raven and the owl.

Before I knew that the fox would bump himself up with owl, I tried to draw him standing his hind legs to give the flower to the raven. 

 

Two attempts at having the fox stand on the owl. The owl is more squished, closer the ground and the fox is stretching his body out to reach higher.

Some movements were never included in the animation or animatic.

This pose was exploring the idea of the fox jumping on the food rather than it falling into his mouth.

Fox stretching and rolling around as he speaks, persuading the raven that he is indeed the most beautiful of all the birds. These movements were too unclear and complicated, as the fox never actually speaks throughout the film. Everything he says is said through the owl and so these were not used.

At this stage I wasn't sure how the fox would obtain his food. One possibility was that it would fall into his mouth so I played with this idea of him running around, looking up and getting into the right position for it to fall right into his mouth.

Here is the fox jumping up and trying to reach the food before coming up with a plan to trick the raven. The fox scrabbling for the food was scrapped from the final animation and the dynamic animatic but was in quite a few of the early animatics.

Above there is also a quick owl sketch, there was no design for the owl at this stage so I went with my own. It was unclear how much the owl would move around and so I turned his wings into arms which he could gesture with while speaking.

Confused fox. Perhaps this could have been used if he spent more time coming up with his cunning plot. However, our fox is a speedy thinking and this thought process wasn't needed.

Fox gesturing for the raven to sing!

Dizzy owl after being knocked off a branch by the raven. My idea was for him to land on his back and then get to his feet, walking around in a daze before stopping and putting his head between his wings to regain his senses.

Owl comforting the raven. The raven was really stiff here so I drew the sketch below, where his head is pointed down sadly, having lost his food.

Raven with head tilt being comforted by owl.

Raven admiring himself in the mirror, leaning in to his reflection because he is so in love with himself.

Raven singing. He believes he will be amazing, so he is using his wing to gesture!

Fox is hungry. He is hunching over his tummy because it's empty.

AESOP'S FABLES: Animation

I watched some real foxes walking about to get the right movement. I noticed that they flick their back feet out a little bit before moving forward so I tried to copy this.

I drew this for myself as a guide to follow when animating. It's crude but it helped me a lot.

I looked some more at how foxes walk by looking at Todd from The Fox and the Hound and how he walks and runs when he is a kit and also a full grown adult. I tried to keep the toes of my fox dainty and to mimic the way a real fox walks, however in the final animation this is not as smooth as I would like and would need a lot more in betweens.

Baby Todd has big paws and doesn't move as daintily as his adult counterpart. Although I view my fox as quite young, he moves a bit more daintily because he is very cunning and clever, so I want his walk to reflect this.

My first animation test was a walk cycle done in Photoshop, frame by frame.

It was more important to me to get the movement of the legs right than keeping the size and shape of everything else consistent. At this stage, it still needs a lot of work so that it flows and also can be used in a continuous loop. I also want a bit of a tail bob when this character walks which is put down very loosely here.

I coloured my walk cycle test and I unfortunately lost a lot of the movement that I enjoyed about my line test. 

I am posting my progression reel here as it demonstrates my animation development more thoroughly. I drew most of my animations on F12 paper and shot them on the rostrum before going over them in Photoshop with a black line, so that they could be added into an animatic which would include some small animations from everyone in the group.

Once I had done this it was easy enough to colour all my animations for the final compositing. I'm really happy with how the turned out and how quickly I was able to animate and colour despite being without a laptop fro two weeks due to a hardware failure, it didn't prevent me from staying on top of the project and delivering my work on time.

AESOP'S FABLES: Final Character Design

This is the final design which was agreed on by the group following a crit where we were asked to change the colour of the foxes tail and to give him open eyes.

AESOP'S FABLES: Storyboarding and Animatics

Storyboarding was not my assigned role but as others in the group were unable to complete their work in time for crits and deadlines, I had to step in and draw scenes for some animatics. For example, I drew the first digital storyboard using the pencil drawings provided by Dan who then turned them into an animatic.

I digitised all our chosen dramatic poses that were to be used in the animatics by drawing over them in Photoshop.

AESOP'S FABLES: Character Design

After discussing the script with the group, I was assigned the task of designing and animating the character of the fox. I started out a bit too complicated than the brief really called for but from this I was able to simplify my design further and further.

From the start, I wanted the fox to have the defining face of a trickster, as that is his role within the story so I tried to incorporate a smirk and a slit for eyes as this made him look tricky and untrustworthy.

I toyed with making the fox bipedal or keeping him on four legs during the initial sketching, and it took little time to decide to keep him on four as the fox was too tall on standing upright on two legs. He could have easily reached the food at this height, making our story make less and less sense and so he had to be made smaller, though he is able to stand and sit on his hind legs but with limited reach and movement.

Expressions for the fox. It was unclear at this point how much the character would emote but this helped me to get more into his personality. I envisioned the fox as a young clever kit who was hungry so I tried to keep him cute and silly. Later on this was to change, but for now with this design you were able to empathise with the fox if you so wished.

Toying with the idea of giving the fox some additional props such as a scarf or a bow tie, as in the script he is said to be wearing a dinner jacket during one scene when he eats an apple. We found this that was unnecessary and  tried to simplify it further.

Water colour test. This design was too complicated, and too friendly and wide eyed looking. The colours are also too bright, I needed something a lot darker.

Taking inspiration from Pablo the Little Red Fox, an animated cartoon from 1999, I finally found what I was looking for. I went for a bean shaped body with limbs, tail and head attached onto it, which is loosey based on the style of Pablo the Little Red Fox and changed to suit our style requirements. 

For a few weeks this was the final design for the fox that was going to be used. He was small, I knew how I wanted him to walk and move about.

Because we had to keep characters throughout every group's animation look consistent, I ran into the problem of the other group having done their fox very tall and standing on two legs. This absolutely would not work for our animation as it would make the fox too tall, and he would look out of place next to the birds who were not anthropomorphised nearly as much. However, I did this test and we all agreed we would not be changing the fox to this as it was inappropriate and awkward looking.

There was a lot of debate going on about the fox needing to have visible eyes even when the design was okayed. I tried to give him some eyes but they made everyone laugh too much along with the big fat lips so this was immediately dropped.

We decided the fox was too much of a sympathetic character so I was asked to add visible untrustworthy eyes instead of using slits. At first it looked weird to me but, venturing away from the horrible round big eyes like the ones above, I found a shape similar to the slits that worked very well. I also added lips around the mouth to be in keeping with the brief's request to use Creature Comfort mouths without making it too big and silly looking. Luckily, the fox doesn't speak, so it's only when he eats that you can really see this.

It was my original intention for the fox to be an ambiguous character, not necessarily the bad guy in all of this. But I was told we needed to see him as a villain and the fox was looking too friendly and innocent, and so as a group it was agreed that it needed to be changed. So, along with the eyes, a small tweak in colour scheme was in order.

I tried a very dark tipped tail at first but it was too dark against the rest of the animation which is quite bright and vibrant.

Using the colour picker I picked out the brown of the inner ear and used it to colour the tip of his tail. This is our final fox design that has been used in the final animations. I personally like it, he looks like a little chocolate orange. I miss the original light yellow tail as it is closer to a real fox but it is not such a huge loss, and this suits the character better.