When we were pitched this idea by Sonia Matos, back at the start of the semester I was really excited about it and I knew I would want to take part in this project. I love fish and marine life and I am constantly watching documentary's about them, so I figured this would be the perfect one for me! Overall the project is concerned with creating an interactive app that will allow its users to explore the marine museum in Madeira and educate them about the many species of fish skins housed there. In practice an animation would pop up when they approached an exhibit and play 10-15 second short animations, helping them learn about that particular fish. I have been working with a team of 4 other fellow students, who like me got to choose which species we wanted to animate, each person is meant to be animating 3 species each to begin with, with one person tackling the main protagonists (Madelena's) story at the beginning, which will be a short animation itself played at the beginning of the exhibit and 1 species of fish. And that person is me. I choose to do this part since I wanted to challenge myself a little and get out of my comfort zone, since usually I'm not too confident when it comes to animating people but I feel like this one will be fun and a challenge.
Hammer Head Shark Research:
To begin with the species I ended up choosing is the peculiar hammerhead shark.
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| Images From Pintrest: https://uk.pinterest.com/tyler1599/ocean-stories-research |
I ended up doing some visual research first, which involved studying the shark and trying to get a feel of body shape and movement. This included watching many a documentary about the Hammerhead, some of which I have linked above, this not only allows me to study their movements but also gives me a chance to learn about the creature I will be drawing, of which I think is very important. As a group we also shared a pintrest board which was really useful since we could all share our findings of designs and art we liked of our species. The Images of the hammerheads art above are from my personal pintrest, I decided to look at the different kinds of styles that people produce, which turned out to be quite cartoony, however I'm not sure this Is the style that we were going to go for, since Sonia requested that the animation match the older style that the museum has.
Pictures and Thumbnails:
It was at this point I decided print out some images and then sketch some simple quick thumbnail drawings next to them, just to get a feel for drawing the shark and its body shape, getting that muscle memory going.
Hammer Head Sketches Proper:
I then decided to move on and draw some more fully formed drawing of the hammer head, using predominantly pencil to get a sketchy look. This steamed from the group having a meeting and coming up with the idea of having the species visually look hand drawn which would fit into the overall aesthetic of the museum and relate to Madelena's story of her losing her sketchbook with all of the species drawn inside. Sonia and her team really seemed to like this idea, so we set out with this in mind.
Media Tests:
Before totally forgetting other media however I did want to look at trying out drawing the sharks in different media seeing what might work and what will not. Since at points in the animation the species will be coloured in during their 'magic moment' sections in the animations, as if the sketches were to come alive.
Hammerhead Movement Studies:
Again I also began to watch more hammerheads swimming. At a later stage I wish to rotoscope these videos and really dissect how these animals move.
Hammerhead Thumbnail Animatics:
After we had another meeting with Sonia, we learned that she and her team wanted to test out the app at some point in December and requested that we have animatics and character sheets ready for the 5th. This being so they could place these into the app and test it fully with the integrated animatics and replace these with the actual animation at a later date. I began to follow the scripts that we got sent through from Sonia and much like with what I did in the memory project I began to thumbnail out all of the hammerheads "magic moments", figuring out what I could do with each moment.
Animatics for Hammerhead:
I then took these thumbnails, following them very closely and created proper 10-15 second animatics for each magic moment again using Photoshop and its timeline and layering system. For the bubble transitions within each, I actually took inspiration from Sponge Bob Square Pants and how they do their bubble transitions and I think I replicated it quite effectively, even if this is in animatic form. What I found a bit cumbersome was trying to time out everything so it made sense without the aid of audio, but I suppose this is where the challenging part came in and I would read the script out load to myself as the animatics played. Using thumbnails before hand also helped a lot with this process.
Hammerhead Character Sheet:
What we also had to do was create character sheets for our species, I also suggested we should perhaps send them a PNG file of our species also, just so they have an asset with no background to work with. For the main character sheet however we all followed the format that Amy came up with. Adding some images of the actual animal on the side of the page seemed like it was quite a nice idea and it makes it look more professional.
Madelena Character Design:
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| Images From Pintrest: https://uk.pinterest.com/tyler1599/ocean-stories-research/ |
For Madelean's character design, I was not sure how she would look so I began to look at images on pintrest for inspiration (as seen above).
Initial Character Concepts:
From what I gathered from the script, Madelena herself seemed to be quite adventurous and artistic, and I wanted to try and convey that in her design. At this stage I was not too sure if Madelea herself would be a large part of the app so I thought I would design her as a character anyway. To begin with I really struggled with her design, I really needed to fight the urge to make her too cartoon'y and graphic'y if all of the species where going to look hand drawn and more realistic. As a character by the last page (above) you can see that I have began to refine her character down a bit however I still believe she is a work in progress. I have been thinking about rotoscoping her but I'm still not sure yet, I may need to have a discussion with Sonia about that at some point. At this stage however It should be fine to use this current design within the animatic and I shall see what Sonia thinks.
Madelena's Story Animatic Thumbnails:
And again like the hammerhead I used thumbnails to figure out a plan of action for Madelena's Story. This animation seems like its going to be a lot more complicated than I initially thought, since to fit everything in I have had to come up with ideas for transitions between everything that is said in the script, which I think I have achieved. However again I think we will need to see what Sonia and her team thinks first.
Madelena's Story Animatic:
Madelenas Story Animatic from Tyler Carrigan on Vimeo.
Again like the hammerheads animatics, I created this in Photoshop. I again also found it challenging to get the timings all right in this one, however if they are indeed off they can be tweaked or changed. Overall I was pretty proud of this animatic and I'm glad that I managed to figure out and get all of the transitions to work well together.
Thoughts on the Project:
Overall I have really enjoyed this project so far. I feel like there is still quite a bit of work to do, but I have been having a tone of fun doing this. A bonus being that I have gotten to watch a lot of shark documentaries so how can I complain! I think my next steps will be getting on with figuring out how a Hammerhead swims properly to get the animation right and figuring out whats next in regards to the animatics and animation.
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