Animating A Chase Scene

Storyboard

Our first task for this project was to create a a storyboard for the animatic. I came up with a pretty good idea for what I should do for my animation quite quickly so I had a very good idea of what I wanted it to go like. Here are photos of my cleaned up storyboard.

I changed most of the storyboard as I was animating the animatic and was drawing through frames, so I ended up almost completely swaying away from what was in my storyboard. By the time I had a good grasp of what I was doing, I was so engrossed with it I didn't feel a need to draw out a more current storyboard. 

Inspiration

These are a group of images that I think are most like the kind of style I'm going to pursue for the scene. This is both for colour, and overall style of drawing/animation.

Animatic

This was my first attempt at the animatic, for me personally to understand what I was going to do I wanted to do as much as the animation as possible for the animatic, because I really wanted to get across what I was planning to do. There were problems with this animatic and things that didn't come across well enough to the audience, which I made note of and changed for the next try.

Taking the feedback into account, I started working on it again, changing things and getting rid of the parts that I didn't think would work. I wanted to make sure that you could understand the story. This is a newer version of the animatic that I think is a bit better.

I was really really happy with how this one turned out, i was actually ready to start moving onto character development and such, because I was happy with how this one worked. I still wanted to try out different endings to it though because I thought that that could be improved a lot. This was a newer version.

I kept changing the order of the animatic and taking bits out that I didn't like and ended up with these two animatics.

When it comes down to it, I decided i want to see how the characters, the colouring and the style would work with the different endings I came up with and couldn't have a definitive animatic in the end, but for the most part, i think you can see where I was aiming for.

Characters

For my characters, I wanted them to be two girls, that look like opposites of each other. The main girl that is running away is supposed to be cheeky, smart and the type of character that gets into trouble a lot so that when she sees someone chasing her, her first instinct is to run away. I thought it might be best for the character to have blonde hair as well because bright yellow hair is going to stick out well with the style and colours I plan on going with. 

This was my first initial sketch I had for her.

I'm really happy with this first idea it's perfect for the character I have in mind. I think this style of drawing the character will look good with the style I'm going for too. It's a little bit like anime, but that's not really what i'm going for.

I started drawing some side views of the character, also looking a little bit at expressions for her. There are a lot of angled scenes, or scenes that i'm going to do at a perspective shot, so i need to experiment with the side views of characters.

I did two different tests for the second character. This is the first look.  I really liked how this one was starting to look, to the point where I drew a few posed sketches with the main character.

The only issue I have with this character's design is that her hair is too busy. When thinking about time I have for this animation and everything it just seems like it will be too fussy to do any complicated looking characters, as I don't want any reason to be behind near the deadline.

This is the second character design I had for the second character. I think this hair is a lot better because not only is it going to be easier for me to animate, but it seems to suit the antagonist of the scene, and is a good contrast to the look of the main character. This girl is pretty much going to be angry throughout the entire scene, so I think this is a good start for her.

I drew out the characters properly, on a character board. This helps me with posing the characters and the face expressions for animating the scene later. I also started to re-think the third 'extra' character that i was going to have in the scene and ultimately decided to abandon the idea at this stage. I thought that with the clear colour scheme of the characters and the backgrounds I was going to do, it would be a bit confusing adding in another character, and I wouldn't be able to make her colour scheme work.

At this point, I went ahead and started colouring the characters in the exact style and colours that would be used in the scene, to give the lecturers and classmates a good idea of how it would look overall.

This now i think shows the character's personalities or roles in the scene clearer.

Because of constraints with time, I didn't have much time to draw out a full coloured turn around for each character, and also thought it wasn't necessary for my own use. I designed the characters and chose the style/colours, so I already know exactly what I'm doing, and what they look like in my head.

Adding the characters

For me to get any further with the scene now, I needed to go over my animatic, work out for real which scenes were staying and which were going. I then would draw my characters into the animatic and finish animating them. Thanks to how much animation I did at the animatic stage, it wasn't much work for me to animate the characters fully into it. I realise at this point I never saved a fully animated scene with the characters at the sketching stage, but I did run a lot of tests.

This is the first test I did. The antagonist would come running towards the main character angrily, like in the animatic. The main character then turns around determined, and runs off as fast as possible.

This is another one of the tests I did. This is the opening scene showing the antagonist angrily running towards the main character which is obviously showing that she's chasing her for some reason and she could try to hurt her when she catches her.

These are some screenshots of work in progress of me drawing the characters into the animatic.

I did during this stage as shown above decide to add the extra character in at the last minute, but I didn't get around to doing a full character design or pose sheet for her or anything. It was really right near the end that I decided on her look and colour scheme.

Style/Backgrounds

At this point I was ready to move onto preparing the backgrounds for the scenes and decide on the final colours and styles of them. I still had a very particular idea of how the overall look of the animation would be so I never really re-designed or changed them once I had finished them.

This was the initial 'test' coloured hallway example, that i would use as a reference later for colouring it all properly.

This is all purple colour schemed because my idea was that for each character the camera is focusing on, the background would all be colour themed to suit that particular character. This way there's no confusion on which character is which when the scene isn't showing their face or hair. This is obviously the purple scheme to go with the antagonist.

I also needed to check that these wouldn't clash with the character's colours too much or draw away from the characters at all so I added them onto the image to test it.

For the one small scene where the two main characters and the extra will be on the same shot, I needed to come up with a neutral colour to do the background that would not stand out much and would compliment the character colours. I eventually decided to go with a pastel green, which did the job perfectly.

These are the backgrounds used in the final animation.

Colouring The Scene

 With all of the background now done and coloured, my last job was to colour the frames for the characters. This of everything took the longest and was the most work involved. Each frame at least took half an hour/an hour to colour and finish, making it a very tiring painful process. I was determined to have it all painted in Photoshop with a particular brush that gave it a sort of crayon, drawn look, so instead of it being just a colouring in job, I had to completely re-draw each frame.

These are some process/finished screenshots of the frames.

Final Animated Scene.

This is the final finished Scene. I'm very pleased with how it turned out. My biggest regret is not making enough time to sort out appropriate sound to go with it, as the soundtrack I chose isn't the best fit. I'm really pleased with how the style of it came out looking it's perfect to how I planned it to be. There are one or two scenes that look now like they needed a few more in-betweens, but I think I've done well for the time I had to do it.

Neil's Lectures

Arm Drop

This is my arm drop animation exercise. The first photos show the frames I drew together and how they work together to get the timing right.

This is the animated version of the arm drop.

Moving Ball

This exercise was to animate a ball rolling down the hill and up the other side, we had to get all of the frames to have the right timing which meant, it would have to go fast at the start and slow down.

Character Turn Around

This was a random character turn around we were asked to do to see how well we could do one after being a long time.

Head Turn

We were asked to do a head turn drawing to see if we were able to get all of the angles and proportions the same again. I enjoyed drawing this quick head turn, it's always fun to try it with a completely different styled character.

Posing in Maya

 This is my posing a zombie character into an angry pose. I love posing characters, because it's always a challenge to have a pose that is an obvious movement without a description or explanation needed. I needed to change the original because the shoulders and waist looked too stiff and straight so emphasizing the shoulders adds to the angry look.

This is my example of a happy pose, if I was able to make the mouth smile it would look happier, rather than shocked. I do really like this pose so after tweaking it a few times I kept it like this.

Light/Heavy Box

 This was my example of a character lifting a heavy box. I tried to put all of the weight into the hips and legs because I thought it looked much more like it was a really heavy object and showed him struggling.

This is my pose for carrying a light box that weighs nothing. I thought the character would be in quite a casual pose if they were holding something light, and I used myself for reference. I had to move the torso and hips a few times to make the legs and arm holding the object make sense with the pose.

Short Animations

This is an animation test of someone pushing something heavy. It only shows the keyframes to show the important movements and showing where the weight is.

This was a short test of a jump that shows the anticipation of the movements. Looking at the hips was where the root of most of the movements was coming from. This was the hardest to do after looking at all the reference.

This is an animation test of a person standing up from a chair. I think this one works the best of all of them because the movements are very smooth and natural.