UNIT 4
Creating a final 3D Animated film in a group of 4, Storyboarding, Pre-Vis, Concept Art and Final Render Animation.
HEAD OF DESIGNING*
Storyboarding - Annie, Shelly & Fred
Character design - Annie & Shelly
Environment design - Jay, Fred, Shelly & Annie
Floorplan - Fred
Environment Modelling - Jay
Animatic - Shelly
LOGLINE
(LOGLINE + SYNOPSIS WRITTEN BY ANNIE)
A woman tries to sleep but the fire alarm won’t stop beeping. She tries everything to stop it.
SYNOPSIS
In a cluttered, disorderly bedroom, Mandy wakes up to the sound of her alarm clock beeping away. The time is 3:27 am and Mandy doesn’t remember setting an alarm so early. She goes to press the stop button and turns back to sleep, however, after a few seconds of peace the beeping comes back. Mandy sits up confused and presses the stop button again and again, but still no luck. Getting very frustrated, Mandy grabs the alarm clock and studies it closely. She proceeds to take out its batteries. Finally, silence is back and Mandy looks relieved. However just as Mandy is headed back to sleep, the beeping comes back. Mandy turns her head back towards the alarm clock, and her jaw drops. She grabs her pillow and covers her ears. Extremely irritated, she then uses the pillow to smother the clock attempting to put out the noise. The beeping is still constant and in annoyance, Mandy snatches the alarm clock, storms to her lounge and places it on the table. For a moment she stares at it intently, until out of nowhere Mandy reaches for her shoe and aggressively beats the alarm clock till it’s ‘broken’. However, Mandy’s actions make the situation worse as the now-damaged alarm clock beeps louder and faster. All of a sudden a spark comes off the clock and smoke is formed. In a panic, Mandy urgently grabs her pillow and puts out the fire. The alarm clock has finally stopped beeping….Until a trail of smoke travels up into the air and the fire alarm begins to ring.
FRAME DESCRIPTION
WRITTEN BY FRED
MOODBOARD - LIGHTING, STYLE, DECOR, CHARACTER
(ALL GROUP MEMBERS CREATING MOODBOARD)
As seen in our breakdown of tasks, I chose to take on the brunt of the Environment Design and Modelling. From the start I had an aversion to storyboarding, whereas others in my group were confident/ enjoyed storyboarding. So I opted to take on quite a large portion of the design and modelling, so I could avoid storyboarding. I have a big preference for digital works, especially since being able to experiment in blender more. Focusing on the design and modelling of the environment sounded very exciting to me, as I knew I would be able to use the skills I know in the best way possible, and I have always had an interest in concept art so it meant I could open this pathway up more for myself.
In our mood board, we went through a variety of movies, live-action and animation, to find the same type of style and lighting preference (you'll see later on that we really focus on the lighting and ambience in the animation)
The original plan was for Mandy (our main character) to be quite a messy, almost dysfunctional adult. Growing into Adulthood vibe, which married in well with our film concept, in that life isn't QUITE going right for her...
FINAL ANIMATIC
(ANIMATED BY SHELLY, STORYBOARD CONTRIBUTIONS FROM FRED, ANNIE, AND SHELLY)
BEDROOM CONCEPT
(ALL DRAWINGS DONE BY ME (JAY) SOFTWARE, PROCREATE)
COLOUR AND LIGHTING TEST - FIRST PASS
The concept art for our film was the part I was looking most forward to.
There was some initial miscommunication in our ideas/ execution of the bedroom. Initial floorplans and experimental environment modelling had differences in the concept design. With windows being on the wrong side of the bed, along with the table being closest to the window.
We knew from the start that lighting was going to be a very important feature, so within the initial colour test I really wanted to make sure that the lighting was very obvious, so we could get a good visual on how the environment would potentially look in the final render.
COLOUR AND LIGHTING TEST - FINAL CONCEPT ART
WITH AND WITHOUT LIGHTING DETAILS
In the final concept art I decided not to add line art, as I didn't want it to look illustrative, rather a close representation of our to-be blender model.
If I could redo the concept art I would definitely go back and work on the perspective further, as I had a slightly skewed perspective grid while drawing, and this can be seen quite obviously in the distortion of the bed and the windowsill, and I would have preferred to have a shot that could be compared to our animatics and storyboards an bit nicer.
Canonically, Mandy lives in an urban city, and with inspiration from Fred and references I found online, I tried to make the light pouring into her room a mix of streetlights, but also neon lights. I would like to assume that in our story it is mid-summer time, as this lighting would almost correlate to the rise and fall of the sun in summer.
Something I did find very difficult, and took a lot of advice and assistance from others, was the patterns of the light as it fell into Mandy's room. I attempted to show this as accurately as possible, in order to get an accurate representation of the lighting we could be aiming for in the final film.
Trying to get the depth and shadows right in the room were also important to me, as I wanted to make sure that Mandy's position on the bed was going to be framed nicely, even when we were using wide shots.
ENVIRONMENT MODELLING AND PROP DESIGN
(ALL DESIGNED, RESEARCHED* AND MODELLED BY ME (JAY) - SOFTWARE, BLENDER
ALL INSPIRATION AND REFERENCES CAN BE FOUND IN MOODBOARD*
Above are a few sketches I did of potential props and furniture Mandy may have in her bedroom, some you can see in our final film, others I decided to scrap for various reasons. Being too difficult to model in time to animate, I generally could not figure out of to model something, and for the sake of small objects I decided it would be easier to not use them than to waste time trying to figure it out.
MODELLING THE PROPS
(MODELLED BY ME (JAY) - SOFTWARE, BLENDER)
This section does not include all of the props I animated, just the first few that I could be bothered to document and render. In the final stages of environment modelling, I started to just model everything in the same file, as it meant I could work with all the assets a lot easier, and edit them as I went along, as something I found out very quickly when modelling each prop separately, as that I was having to recolour and re-texture a lot of details, as the lighting changes and the objects around each other actually changed the colour and look of my originally rendered props.
THE BED
(MODELLED BY ME (JAY) - SOFTWARE, BLENDER)
RESEARCH - DIMENSIONS, INSPIRATION
Making the bed was probably the most intensive part of the whole project, aside from animating it, I had to do quite a bit of research into the dimensions of beds, as I needed to make sure it would be to scale, in comparison to Mandy, but also proportionally accurate. If the bed was modelled incorrectly, too wide or too long, it would be painfully obvious.
I went with a brass framed bed, as a suggestion from Annie, but also because I wanted a challenge, that would be worth pushing myself with, as the bed is in 50% (if not more) of our animation, So if I managed to model a really good bed, it would get the recognition and screen time to make it worth it.
MODELLING THE BED
I started out by blocking out he main shape of the bed with basic shapes, to ensure I was in scale, also to make sure I had all the main components in, and in the right place before I started working on the small details.
Something I knew was going to be a challenge, was the covers and pillows, For this reason, I left them out for now and worked on the solid shape of the bed and mattress.
MODELLING THE ROOM
(MODELLED BY ME (JAY) - SOFTWARE, BLENDER)
BLOCKING OUT SHAPES
As I was working off of the concept art I had previously done, I didn't need to worry much about figuring out composition, rather placing things in a way where they would or wouldn't be seen in the way I wanted them to be while animating. Hence the reason why I wish I had gone back over my concept art to fix the perspective. Much like the bedframe, I started the bedroom arrangement using cubes and other recognisable shapes, and over time went back over my work and added the newly modelled elements. Small objects, or main objects, I had already modelled, so these were added immediately into the room, to make sure I would prioritise their existence over other assets that weren't such key elements.
CREATING MORE FURNITURE, WINDOWS, AND DECOR
PLAYING AROUND WITH LIGHTING
Modelling each object was taking longer than expected, so alongside modelling I also started to experiment with the lighting, as I didn't know how Blender would react to the lighting, and I wanted to perfect this, doing it at this point meant I could experiment a bit more. This was a good thing to do as the lighting did prove to actually be quite difficult to figure out.
Can be seen in the far left and corner of the image, Light kept seeping through the corners of the room, even though the walls were one joined object, so this was something I needed to figure out.
This is the final lighting I set on, I really liked that I could see the shadows of the blinds against the wall, this is reflective of my concept art. I really liked the reddish pink toned light seeping into the room, later on in the project I also realised this could have been an environmental design choice, in the way of reflecting Mandy's growing anger.
At this point I had begun to model a large houseplant in the corner, looking back, I would have started from the stem first, rather than modelling the leaves first, as this gave me great difficulty later on.
With the help of BlenderKit, was beginning to add textures to the scene, I'm glad I made this choice, as I am still guessing a lot of the texture shading on blender, an I sometimes end up with some badly rendered looking objects if I try to do shading I don't understand (and don't research). This is visible in bottom left, where I couldn't find a nice woven texture, So I decided to attempt to create it myself.
At this point I started having issues with the lighting, Which will be most obvious in the next picture. I had further modelled the leaves on the houseplant, In an attempt to save it, although I was still very unhappy with the quality compared to the reset of the room.
'Cat Mum' Mug modelled by Annie
I added some additional decorations, more light sources and posters, in an attempt to light the room up a bit more.
At this point was when I realised I was very unhappy with the quality of the plant, especially as I was now facing lighting problems that really made the plant seem as though it was plastic, in a room I was trying to design in a sophisticated and to life way. It was at this point I decided to scrap the plant (unfortunately).
FINAL BEDROOM
(SOFTWARE, BLENDER)
ANIMATING
One of the first things needed was to model the blanket to make it appear as though they are weighted, draping over Mandy's legs. I knew this was going to be an issue at some point anyways, but I don't think any of us knew the actual proportion of the problems it was going to cause us. Although I could sculpt the blanket as a solid shape, I thought that I would be able to sculpt the model in Keyframes, so that there would be force against the blanket when Mandy moved against it. This was not the case. It required me to think of other possibilities and loophole to get around the fact that, without a lot of difficulty, this blanket would not move. This meant that I had to change a few camera positions and movements, to accommodate the blanket, so that it would not be visible in situations where I could not animate Mandy around the blanket or pillows. There was a possibility I would be able to use shape keys, but at the time of writing this I am still unsure if I will be able to do this. Another thing I will try is duplicating the blanket, and sculpting one of them into the position I need, and during a camera change, attempt to make the first blanket disappear and the second appear, as if there was motion off-camera.
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A few days into animating, I realised that the animatic we were using as reference was not exported correctly. It was exported at 4FPS, which meant our animation was switching to 4FPS for the animatic would swap to 24FPS, making it very fast. This meant that the first few clips of our animation were not timed out correctly. although that first bit of effort proved to be a slight waste of time, it gave me a chance to experiment with animating, and get in a groove of how to make Mandy move in a way I deemed realistic.
I had started redoing this collection of shots at 24FPS following the animatic to a T. Then my entire file got deleted the day after, so I feel as though that was the biggest waste of time... On the bright side, It gave me a brief chance to experiment with a different style of animating.
CLICK TO SEE OUR FINAL FILM!
From the beginning there was some concern raised about how certain shots were going to play out, specifically shots that had us moving organic objects (a lot of the film) such as bedsheets and pillows. Our original plan (and the plan used for the majority of the film) was to use shot changes to have these movements happen, as much like water and fire these physical movements were going to use a lot of time to render and were also communicated as slightly difficult to animate. I realised on my last allocated shot (shot 15) that unless I included a very odd camera change, or just attempted to ignore the oddness of the movement, that this process wasn’t going to work, as throughout this shot, Mandy heavily interacts with the blanket, and I wanted this to show. For this scene I decided to research and use Shape Keys in order to make the blanket move alongside Mandy (Perviously I had tried to sculpt the blanket with key frames, but realised this doesn’t work and I did need to use shape keys to make this possible). For a first attempt I am extremely happy with how this worked, although if I had more time I would definitely develop the shape keys more, adding volume to the blanket and creating more fluid movement.
One portion of the project I did struggle with was animating object constraints, no matter how much I researched, or a short tutorial from Molly I could not get object constraints to work. I ended up frame-by-frame animating the clock and battery that Mandy can be seen holding, which was not a problem, but in the future I would like to learn how to properly use object constraints.
After already having restarted this project more than once, the next time I came across problems, I was determined to not start again, because at that point I was fed up of animating the same thing over and over again!
This is the first time I'd seen something happen like this on Blender (but its not like the first time I'd even opened blender was a few months ago or anything), and every time I tried to Google it, I couldn't find anything online similar to what had happened to my animation. After a lot of searching, I realised that I could (fairly easily) transfer my animation from the corrupt file, to an empty animation file, by just moving the action paths, and not the textures rig or model, in theory, saving all the work I'd just done... and it worked! This saved me a lot of extra hassle, and actually gave me back the time I needed to be able to experiment with the shape keys.
SIDE BY SIDE ANIMATION
Below you can watch a split screen comparison of my section of our final film, next to the same section of Shelly's animatic. In some parts of the final film, I did shorten or lengthen shots, but I always ensured I made this time up in my other shots, as to not disturb the length of the film, or the timing. Some parts I felt that they were dragging out a bit, while rushing through other sections, slightly messing with this also meant my animation ran a lot smoother, and more lifelike.
TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES
Over the time my group spent animating, and the 8 shots of film that I animated, i had to restart animating multiple different scenes 3 times. The majority of these times were just as I was getting close to finishing said shot. This proved to be incredibly annoying, but also meant that my final features in the film weren’t really the quality of work that I was aiming for. Some of this was because of personal reasons, there were certain shots that I had attempted to animate in a very odd manner, and being so early into learning blender animation, I didn’t really know how to fix the mistakes I made, so I chose to restart. I have tried to include as many variants of shots that I had animated, to show the dynamic movements and additions to the film that I had originally planned.
Other reasons for re-animating was due to issues with my blender files. Something I didn’t realise would cause such a problem (and ended up ruining a majority of my animation) was continually transferring my shots from my personal laptop (with Blender 3.5.1) and the Uni computers (running Blender 3.0.1). This caused a lot of problems with my rig. As well as distortion of textures that resulted in some horrifying shots. After all of this panic was over, I did almost give up at this point, due to then losing all of the shots I had just re-animated (the entirety of shots 8-12) due to a technical issue with the uni computers (and my own stupid mistake of only having one copy of my animation) causing me to animate this scene for a THIRD time.
I managed to find some screenshots of some of the issues I was facing that was causing me to restart, as you can see, they're horrifying. If I knew how to fix them I definitely would have, and if I had the mental capacity I probably would have tried harder to fix my original files, but after the first load of animation got deleted, I was already at wits end when the second and third time came to deal with problems, and it was just easier in my head to reanimate them than fight with Blender.
GROUP DYNAMIC AND REFLECTION
I enjoyed working with the other people in my group for this unit. We all had varying strengths and weaknesses, which meant there wasn’t really many issues with handing out tasks. Shelly, who enjoyed storyboarding, took the most important section of creating the animatic, with Fred and Annie helping with the storyboards, as they also didn’t mind storyboarding. I however have a distaste to storyboarding. I didn’t really enjoy it in the previous unit, as I struggle to convey movement and specific angles of shots without going over something a thousand times, which meant when I did try storyboarding I was going over the same shot over and over again to get something I was happy with. On the other hand, once a shot had been established, or I had the flexibility to create environments without the complete importance of layout, I have a very passion for concept art and environment design. So originally, I was tasked with the main bulk of the environment design, originally intending to design both the bedroom and living room, which then just became the bedroom after others in my group also wanted to be involved in the environment design. This then also became the same for environment modelling, where I modelled the bedroom and others worked to create the living room. One thing I do think our group could have improved on overall was our communication. There were points in the project where I did feel very in the dark as to what was going on, especially early on. As although our tasks were divided up between us, sometimes there would be some miscommunication (lack of communication) and multiple people would be doing the same tasks at once (even though this wasn’t planned for). For example the environment modelling for the bedroom had begun before the design was done, with a very different layout that hadn’t really been discussed, and also wasn’t planned. And a room floor plan had been done, using a vague idea of the bedroom floor plan, without using reference from the concept art, that had been 95% finalised at that stage. I could have tried harder to communicate with my group, as it seemed like the others in my group had built a good connection, and were communicating well with each other, while I would do the work allocated to me, with no real idea what was going on elsewhere in the production. Once everyone started animating, I do feel that our communication improved as we had a document that we could use to see who was doing what, and this made it easier to see the structure of what we were animating and how far behind, or ahead of time we were.
If I had a chance to redo this project, I would definitely make my voice more heard within my group, as looking back there are some things I wish I voiced my opinion on. I would have also (begrudgingly) worked on the animatic/storyboarding, as while animating my section I realised there were portions of the animation that I wish had more time or portions that I believe could have been quicker. I am overall very happy with our film and what we managed to produce, especially as this was a massive learning process for all of us.