Pre-Production

Lets Start From the Beginning

The pre-production stage is one of the most important part of the animation process as its when the animator and others working on the project can get a first look at the piece. Everyone has a different process that they build up for themselves when they animate. For some, they like to sketch out thumbnails and story boards, others filming themselves to get a more in-depth reference. It is extremely common to have a combination of all before mentioned and more.

I like to have a mixture of different pre-production for my work. When making an animation, I like to film myself acting out the scene that I have envisioned. I have a background in theatre so I am very comfortable trying out different types of actions, motions, over and under exaggerations, and so on. I find this the most effective way to start the animation process as I sometimes have difficulty putting my ideas into drawings, and by filming myself I get to explore different things that I wouldn't think to do in thumbnails or storyboards.

Here I will be taking you through my process from pre-production to final piece, starting with my filmed reference.

Sketching Out the Storyboard

Once I have chosen a reference video that I like, I will take it into Storyboard Pro. There is where I fully hash out my ideas of the camera angles and figure out if there is any camera movement. For this animation I decided I liked how close the camera was and the angle, but not the position. I decided to animate with the camera flipped to the other side.

Blocking and Notes

Once I have my reference video and storyboard all finished, I show my professor and get my notes. Her biggest note that she gave me was that this idea had been done before, and that I needed to make it my own. With it being 2020 and all my classes are online, I know how hard it can be to wake up for those morning classes and harder to stay awake. I discussed with my professor about my character being in an online class or doing a reading and falling asleep while doing so. We both thought it was a good was to portray what so many students and workers from home go through on a day to day basis now a days.

With this new additional vision to my animation I set to work. I start by posing my character and letting them float through their actions to just get the initial feel. Do I like their head movement? Is there enough exaggeration there? Does it feel like I am pulling in my audience? That is the main goal of this step.

Finishing and Cleaning the Final Animation

This is the final stretch!! In this step I take the feedback that my professor gave me and make my animation come to life. I started with her arm movements as her elbows clipped through the table. This was a bit of a technical challenge as they never stayed in place due to her sliding down when she was nodding to sleep. I then worked on adding more follow through and life to her hands. They felt stiff and lifeless, where normally hands and fingers are always moving whether they are at your sides on just tapping on your leg. Lastly I worked on her face, adding blinks, eyebrow movements, puffing up the cheeks, and little sniff at the end.

Before handing in the finished product, I showed my professor for a last round of notes. Her notes consisted of adding tweaks and small changes to make the scene feel real. One piece of feedback I received was that the Kayla Rig's face was too still, that I needed to bring more life to her eyebrows and give her little movements to make her more life-like. This included having her eyebrows raise as she bobs her head and while she blinks at the end. Another note was to make sure her body and head flow and move together as I had a bit of an unnatural arch in her back.

With those final tweaks, I have a finished product in two weeks.

The Final Render

Now that the animation is done, its time to make it demo reel ready! Here is the time to re-adjust the camera angle if it needs fixing, tweaking some outlying animation issues, adding in appropriate lighting, and then rendering out a high quality product.

In the scene I added two spot light, a point light, and an area light. The spot lights are used to light the front of Kayla properly and the point light it used to light the entire scene. The area light is used to re-create the laptops screen on Kayla's face. I next made animation edits, mainly to Kayla's elbows and her hands to keep them looking less floaty and life like. Finally, I adjusted the camera to bring the shot more alive. In my final animation video the camera is very far back from the action in the scene, so I brought it in closer.

With some tweaking to how the lights affect the scene, making sure the camera angle is good, and that the animation is clean, its time to render!