Week 10: Technical Experimentation: Episode 1

It's that day - I have finally begun work on my final animation. I am very excited and cannot wait to have the completed product on my computer screen.

As part of my final project, I have decided to document my progress. This is to show you, the readers of this blog, how I went about creating my animatic. It will also allow me to reflect on my work once it is completed - the mistakes I may have made, what I did well and what I can improve in the future.

Technical Experimentation Episode 1:

As previously stated, I want the visual style of my project to mirror that of Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected. In order for me to do this, I have decided to utilise the 'stick-figure' drawing style that Hertzfeldt's makes use of.

1. The first part of the creation process consists of drawing. A lot of drawing. In order for me to animate my characters and scenery to maximum potential, I have to draw each part of the drawing on a separate sheet, then put them together on my computer.

For example, in order for a character's legs to move separately, I have to draw them separately, scan them into my computer and put each one on a different layer in Photoshop.

Here is a screenshot of the legs I drew for the protagonist of the animatic:

2. The next part of the creation process consists of removing the white space from around the object. This is to ensure that the object doesn't interfere with other objects in my animatic.

As shown above, I used the Magnetic Lasso Tool to cut around my object. This tool proved useful as it easily recognised the object on the screen, and cut around it almost perfectly. However, it didn't remove all the white space around the object. To counteract this, I used the Rubber Tool to delete any of the remaining space (shown below).

3. I then copied the cut object, and pasted it onto a transparent background (shown below).

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4. The next part of process was slightly more complicated.

In order for me to be able to animate the eyes and mouth of my character separately, I had to isolate them and put them into separate layers. 

To do this, I used the Magnetic Lasso Tool to cut the desired object, copy it, and paste it into a new layer. I then deleted the object in the old layer.

This allowed me to view each part of the character's face separately, whilst remaining on the same canvas. 

As an example, below is a screenshot which depicts all the different layers, with the character's right eye turned off.

5. I then copied each individual layer and put them onto a transparent background. I used the Mouse Tool to put the objects together to create my character (shown below).

I did this mainly for convenience. By doing this, I had each separate layer ready to animate all in one .psd file.

6. I then opened the the file in After Effects ready to animate! 

Shown below is each separate layer, which I can animate individually.