At this stage, I am still experimenting on how what style of drawings am I going to use for the project. We have decided to focus on 2D animation with a bit of 3D for the background buildings.
In this post I have produced different types of animation tests to see which will work best.
This is my first ever work of After Effects, I am still not very good at it. I have used an Image we've gathered from Digbeth during the Victorian times from the internet. At this stage I am playing at the the transform option to position 1 image to a different place to make it look like its moving.
In my opinion this style of animation looks really good, the combination of real backgrounds and cartoon objects it look like the adverts seen on the TV. This gives more life and colour and interact with the surroundings. Having real footage of the background makes the audience think about what the place really looks like right now, but having illustrated background could look very different from the real thing because of the style its been drawn. Combining real and cartoon makes it eye catching because of its unique style and suitable for promoting a place like Digbeth.
Having everything look like cartoon, could tell more story to it and it would be suitable for our idea as we are going to animate the History of Digbeth. we can be very playful with our animation like showing a building process of the Old Crown (scene from Storyboard)
Im experimenting how to use other 2D softwares other than flash and photoshop. In this line test, I have used Digicel Flipbook. The software is user friendly and has been used by the makers of Princess and the Frog, looney tunes and many more. It is the same way how you would animate traditionally using pen and paper but digitally and could combine with sounds and lipsync, you can also scan in series of traditionally drawn animation and edit on it and could also be used for stopmotion.
I have made a simple walk cycle test of a fat man using Flipbook and it is very easy to use. I can use this software to animate my main character for this project on it.
Line test
coloured
Bully scares kid
Recently, I' ve discovered this new technology currently in the beta phase by Autodesk "Project Photofly" Photofly is a new program with a big potential in 3D animation and videogames industries. What it does is it will automatically create photo realistic 3D textured model by taking series of photographs of an object or person from multiple angles. In the video, we were quite interested in using this software as a shortcut to making 3D buildings from Maya which will definitely save time for us to animate
We have tested Photofly and didnt get the exact outcome we wanted to be. We started off making a 3D chair and took more than 50 photos and didnt work quite well pivot points where every where because of the lighting changed it alot. We've decided to test it for the second time using Michael's face as a model and had quite alot of problem fixing it, from the most part, his face was nicely built but then every thing broke apart from his nose, chin and head. We did some repairs to it but unfortunately it is taking up more of our time for the Digbeth project.
