Brief and Initial Thoughts

WELCOME BACK TO UNI FRIENDS

Going straight into the brief for cinematic project, our animation has to...
-Have at least one live-action character
-Have one animated character (can be 3D or 2D or a mix of both)
                 *The animation has to include a 3D element somewhere: character or no character
-Be a hybrid of two different genres: hybrid dramatic scene
-Somewhere between 30 to 40 seconds long

Well this makes things interesting...
First things first, I had to make a list of some film genres
~action
~romance
~comedy
~western
~scifi
~horror

...and from this, I already ran into my first problem: I never watched enough movies to have a wider range to choose from. However, I believed that I would be able to mix and match quite a few of these genres.

Comedy was something that was easy enough to define, so it was probably going to be included the most within my ideas.

Final Script - personal idea

Ahhhh I finished my script...Hope it shows up fine because I typed it up on my phone OTL 
Scanner at home isn't working for some reason so I've decided to upload planning and stuff later QAQ


Final Script
By Michelle Choi

Ext. A sunny morning in a park filled with bright flowers, a bench and a water fountain. 

Establishing shot of the setting along with a lone figure(male) standing in the distance in front of a park bench.

Close up of the male's back profile when a voice calls him from off the screen, causing him to look towards the source - it is revealed he is a handsome individual.

Girlfriend: Sorry I'm late!

Over the should shot from the male as he sees his girlfriend running towards him.

Girlfriend: Hope you didn't wait too long!

Twoshot of the characters conversing with eachother.  

Boyfriend: (chuckles) Nah, don't worry about it, its okay if its you. You want to get going now?

Girlfriend: Of course! What have you planned for us today? 

Boyfriend: Well you'll have to wait and see won't you? 

Camera gets an extreme close up of the boyfriend grabbing his girlfriend's hand. It soon goes to a close up of the male smiling and another with the female replying with a blushing face.

Camera goes back to a two shot as the character walk out of the screen to the right. A montage filled with images of the couple appear with events of their date. As each image shows up, the voice overs of the characters are heard.

Image of couple walking in the park
Boyfriend: By the way, don't you look very nice today! 

Girlfriend: Huh? Oh, th-thanks!

Image of couple at a calm cafe
Boyfriend: Hm? God, you got cream all over your face!

Image of couple at an arcade
Boyfriend: (laughs) I win again! W-wait, don't cry! 

Montage ends and scene fades into a new setting.
Int. A small room in a flat with the couple sitting in front of television on a couch.

Two shot of the couple and the boyfriend taps the girl's shoulder.A slow zoom as they lean in for a kiss. Girlfriend looks nervous.

Boyfriend: I really lo-

Boyfriend is cut short as camera is directed at the girlfriend's flatmate in a full body shot. 

Flatmate: Hey Sonia, you alright with pizza tonigh-

Point of view shot from the flatmate as the "girlfriend is seen with a cardboard cutout of her fictional boyfriend. Camera returns to the flatmate.

Flatmate: ...Never mind actually... (closes door slowly)

Screen goes black and a smooch is heard.

Genre Twist Rationale

Many thanks to everyone who helped! Rationale is written below :3

As I adore the cute 3D characters for children’s shows, I wanted to create an adorable character. After deciding that my aesthetics would be that of a family film, a choice had to be made regarding the contradictory genre. Horror seemed like it had the largest gap from a family film, meaning I would have to make my animation change from a cuter style to something scary. From the variety of iconic film scenes shown in class, Breakfast at Tiffany's was the most inspirational towards my animation. My classmates liked a suggested scene of mine of a seemingly innocent girl showing her “true” colours as a horrifying girl.

My research was focused around discovering a style and finding possible ways to creating a dramatic transformation in my character's personality. I found the circular shape language was present in the majority of children's shows; playing a significant role in emphasizing youthful and loveable characters. I also discovered from different sources; webtoons and Japanese anime, that facial expressions play an important role in showing a character's turn in personality. From my research, I knew I had to create a character with many circular features and have drastic changes within the expression especially with the eyes for the largest impact possible. When I had a grasp of what kind of story I wanted, I gave my character the name Shoo (sounds cute but also “go away”) as she was going to be portrayed as isolated from other children. Summary descriptions including her prop's origins and backstory built a solid foundation towards Shoo's developing stages.

The designing process was my favourite part of the assignment due to all the drawing I was able to do. During the ideation process, my designs were largely influenced by the show Pocoyo since they revolved around a young character. I received feedback from peers regarding designs and their opinions about the style they liked. From this, I began developing Shoo, focusing on giving her curved shapes. Another key influence was a cartoon character named Erma who would always have her fringe covering her face. I thought this was an excellent suggestion from a classmate because it made my character seem shy and mysterious. After I had a clear idea of Shoo and the skull's (Molly) aesthetics, I made a few notes on how I wanted to decorate her room to look of that belonging to a young girl with soft pinks and purples.

Along with final decisions such as material and colours for Shoo, along came the storyboarding. It never specified to create multiple storyboard ideas but I thought doing so would allow multiple perspectives with camera angles and interior design. While doing so, I never forgot to ask around peers for feedback and ideas on how I could improve my storyboards, leading to the final storyboard idea. However, I noticed that many changes happened when I actually began animating Shoo due to reasons such as time and critique sessions. As much as peer feedback was important, personal ideas were also a reason towards the developing storyboard.

Using Maya for the first time began as an interesting experience. A reason to why Shoo was such a simple character was impacted because of this: I had never used a 3D animating software. Because Molly consisted of a circle with more circles and sharper shapes attached to it, I thought it was a nice place to start my modelling experience. Keeping note of topology was difficult initially because I was always thrown off with the vast number of edges and vertexes but it improved over time. I learned of attaching different polygons together through Shoo’s model when I had to stitch the vertexes of her limbs to her main body. Texturing and rigging was kept simple on Molly when time became a factor to cater to. Shoo’s UV texturing and rigging was done while watching in class demos to further understand what I had to do. When all the basics to the models were complete, the animating began. 

When animating, I had altered storyboards to better fit my intentions. Examples include cutting out an entire shot and adding it to another which cost less time as I had found ways to cut corners such as covering legs with a table for a run cycle so it was faster to animate. The final shot had been rendered twice to show her expression texture change and with lights and environment addition, my animation was finally complete.

Final Animation Complete - MChoi_BAR06final

This is my final animation! I can safely say that it turned out a LOT better than what I expected my first work to be QAQ Shoooooooooo why you gotta be so scaryyyyyyy

Animating!

This was fun in the sense that I could finally see my character come to life. It was really difficult to get a hang of using the timeline properly because I would make some joints move too quickly for my liking. The camera was placed a bit further away than what I had for my storyboard so I could show that walk cycle of the character. A teddybear was added in the corner and with just that, the room immediately looked more like that of a child.

When Shoo ran across the room, I made the camera slightly pan along with her and also made it tilt towards her to show where she was running. When I had time, I added a few things to her room that would make it look like that of a child such as a play fort and animals. The picture frame at the top was placed in a way that would make the room look massive in comparison to the character. This would emphasize how small Shoo was.

This shot was supposed to be for this part of the storyboard 

However, I decided to cut this out entirely because I didn't see the need to show her running towards the skull and pick it up in two separate shots. Instead, I decided to grab this initial idea from one of the storyboard concepts:

and alter it so I could merge the two shots together.

So it would show her run into the shot and stop at the table to pick Molly up.

Animating the movements of her picking the skull up...

Shoo: "My best friend...♥"

The final shot was altered so she was standing rather than sitting while the camera rotated around her. I added a spotlight onto her to make the audience focus more intently on the child.
"Something was wrong with Shoo"
and that something would be revealed within this shot.

Just animating the shot...

Then added the environment

And the lighting would make the character be focused on more intently.

For overall lighting of the animation, I decided to keep it quite dark to emphasize night time just before she goes to bed. This can be seen with the light seeping through the door in the first scene as she closes it shut. I used slightly blue and purple ambient lights which were toned down in intensity with a similar area light to achieve this effect.

Some changes to the Storyboard!

So....you might remember my original storyboard looked something like this.

I ended up changing some parts when actually animating >.>;

 The scene where she would run across her room from a tilted birds eye angle was reverted to her running across her room in profile view. This was because the high angled camera shot looked rather awkward and I thought this wouldn't show my character's movements to her full potential. Also, I would be able to add different camera moves if it filmed her side, because it would be an overload of camera angles if I did for the original idea.

This entire shot was cut out because I realized I had more cuts than what I wanted. This would mean I would make multiple Maya files, and this would cost me more time because of how slow Maya can be on the computers.

The ending shot was changed a lot as well. I decided I would only add the effects of her room changing if I had the time. This was because once I started animating, I noticed how it was a lot more difficult to move Shoo in the way I wanted = less time to do things. The lecturer and the brief mentioned that the most important thing was the character and not an environment, so I decided to leave this out.

Rigging for Molly

Well for my prop, I was lucky that I didn't need to add any controls because I only had the expression change. To do this though, I had to use something called Blend Shapes.

I first had to duplicate my skull once. This is so I don't actually change my original model. However, the first dummy skull would be bound to my original by using the Blend Shape tool. This would mean that any changes happening to the dummy would also appear on my original without me having to manually change them, or accidentally breaking my original somehow. 

After that, I had to make multiple duplicates of the dummy and bind them all to it. These would become my different expressions for Molly.

Hello there happy yet disturbing Molly

This is what my tab looked like. I realized afterwards that there was a much more clean way of setting this up...T_T I could have grouped them all under one blend shape but instead, I had created multiple blend shapes. At least I learned for next time >.>