Practicum – Week Seven

I can’t believe it’s over already… I feel like I’ve done so much, yet so little these past seven weeks. What a blur! This week was a slower paced one, as I fought my way through learning more animation in Maya. There was a lot of trial and error, redos and computer crashes (I need to save more often). But overall, it was an incredible experience! If I could go back and tell myself a few months ago that I’d have made a (mostly) successful walk, run and jump cycle in Maya, I’d be in disbelief. Because OOF, what a program it is. My trial will expire soon, but fortunately Blender has animation capabilities, so I’m going to pursue it further over the summer!

Here are my “finished” walk, run and jump cycles (because animation is never REALLY finished, as Nathan says). I know I could pick at them endlessly, but overall I think they’re a lot of fun! I’m particularly proud of the walk cycle. Nathan said I had a knack for animation and pointed me in the direction of some online animation courses. We also talked about the possibilities of me working in an animation studio and the best way to get my foot in the door. Aside from learning so much this practicum, I think I’ve made myself a great friend and valuable resource! Last I heard, Nathan might have some promising plans in the near future (that I can’t speak much about), so I’m looking forward to see where that goes!

I’m sad to end my journey at Capilano, but delighted to see where it takes me. Have a great summer!

Practicum – Week Six

We switched gears a bit this week! Nathan has been wanting to update the YouTube thumbnails for Big Dinosaur as well as some banners for the Website and channel. Even though design isn’t my uh… strength, I was happy to take on the challenge! We began with some episode thumbnails, because according to Nathan, he thought the current ones weren’t bringing in enough traffic, so we wanted to spice it up a bit. I took inspiration from Let’s Play channels on Youtube, which usually had custom thumbnails rather than just stills from the respective episodes. After sending Nathan a bunch of concepts, we settled on this layout:

We both thought having a bold colour background would help the thumbnails stand out among the other animation channels on Youtube.

After that, we began work on banners for the website and Youtube channel. This was trickier, particularly for Youtube, because they’ve got some weeeeeird size guidelines to follow. Though overall, I think it went as smooth as it could’ve! Again, I provided Nathan with a handful of mockups that he could choose from, and then refined the favourites. At this point though, I was itching to get back into Blender! I’m completely obsessed now.

I went back to working on some more objects for the space scene and found a tutorial on how to make an ice cream cone in Blender. This one was harder than I thought, and I messed up somewhere along the way and it turned into a total disaster. Round two was so much better though!

Once I was done with that, we moved on to Maya! And that was… daunting, to say the least. Maya is a whole other world to me. Usually, I’m quite comfortable when it comes to new creative software, but this one is unlike anything I’ve used before. The timeline feature and keyframing is familiar, but literally all of the buttons and features are foreign to me. I started out easy with the classic bouncing ball animation, which I think turned out very well for my first attempt! The video is super crunchy, so my apologies ahead of time… but check out that bounce!

I’m sad that next week is our last. I feel like it’s gone by so quickly, but I’m very happy with the amount of work we’ve accomplished. Nathan has a busy schedule, so unfortunately we won’t be able to release the new episode by the time I’m done, but I can’t wait to see it when it’s finished!!

Practicum – Week Five

I’ve developed a new love and appreciation for 3D. It’s SO FUN! After finishing the donut last week, I asked Nathan if he would be comfortable with me making more assets for the episode. Planets were an easy one, since they’re just… spheres with added texture and environment. Honestly, the texture painting was the hardest part, and something I still kind of struggle with. After that, and another check-in to see where Nathan was with animation, I was tasked with trying to find some stock music and sound effects for the episode. We used a site called elements.envato, because Nathan has a subscription to it, so I was able to make a playlist of potential songs/sounds for the episode. We’re aiming for a lofi-hip-hop-spacey-sci-fi vibe.

I forgot to include this last week, but Nathan sent me this lovely care package! I haven’t had many chances to play the game yet, because I’ve been so busy, but I’m looking forward to it!

Next, Nathan needed some background assets. He had me design some transparent illustrations of nebulas/galaxies/star clusters that he could drop into the background. These were incredibly therapeutic to illustrate. Oh! I also downloaded a free trial of Maya to practice some easy animation tutorials, and oh man that program is daunting… I have an easy time with Blender, because in some ways it resembles illustration software, but Maya is a whole other world (with whole other keyboard shortcuts). I might not make it far with this program, especially with just a free trial, but I think it’s worth a shot!

But… I still had an itch for more 3D. After catching up on the animation process and making sure all of my assets were successfully loaded onto Dropbox, I spent the remainder of Wednesday and Thursday developing more 3D assets! We want to have some junk floating around in space while Big Dinosaur is in his rocket ship, and I thought rather than paying for and downloading random objects, I could make them! There are hundreds of tutorials available on Youtube for pretty much anything you can imagine. I ended up making a UFO, a potion bottle and a banana so far! I’m very, very slow with Blender and have to pause the tutorials a lot to see where I’ve gone wrong, but overall I think I’m getting the hang of it.

My potion bottle! One of the assets that I made in Blender.

Practicum – Week Four

Another fun week! On Monday, I spent the day working on concept/lighting illustrations to help with the overall look of the animation. I made these in Procreate and they were more or less just 2D stills from the episode that we’ve been developing, but fully fleshed out compared to my roughs from before. This way, Nathan and I would have a better idea of lighting and direction when we actually begin work on animation.

One of my concept illustrations for Big Dinosaur

After some minor fixes on the illustrations, as per Nathan’s instructions, I finally moved on to working in Blender! My first attempt at the donut was a disaster. Unfortunately, I have no idea where I had gone wrong, but I had an issue with the subsurface divider (I don’t even know how to explain what that means), but it ended up giving my donut WAAAY to many vertices and my computer was incredibly unhappy, and crashed. Round two was a lot better! Although, the whole process took me a LOT longer than I had anticipated, to account for me pausing the video a lot and rewinding in order to fix things. But the result? FLAWLESS. I’m so proud of it, and even though it’s a silly small asset, I can’t wait to see it in the final production!

I use my PC when working in Blender, cause my MacBook HATES it. Here is my disaster of a work station.

Throughout the week, Nathan was kind enough to show me his process in animating through Unity. We’re in the beginning stages of animation, so everything was quite rough (characters in t-poses, missing assets, etc.), but it was very cool to see! Unity is a bit daunting, but there are a lot of similarities between it and animating in the Adobe suite, so I think I could pick it up over time. What I’m very excited for though, is seeing how character animations are done in Maya! If we’re on track, that’ll probably come this upcoming week. So cool!

The final donut!

Practicum: Week Three

The past few weeks have been an absolute blur. Between Practicum, dealing with my cat, working at the flower shop, and general Covid exhaustion, it feels like we’re moving at terminal velocity. Fortunately, I’ve been lucky enough to work with someone so patient and accommodating. It’s crazy how low my threshold for dealing with stress is during the pandemic, and I know a lot of others are feeling the same. Practicum has been a great break from the reality of it all, as well as a good way to pace the weeks (it’s also been super nice not having homework).

My usual work station in the kitchen, occupied by my sister’s cat, Peri.

Anyways, earlier this past week I finished up my storyboards and stitched them together into an animated sequence using Photoshop’s timeline feature. It’s super efficient, especially because I typically draw/sketch on Procreate, which allows me to convert those files to PSD and airdrop them straight to my computer. I love convenience. After I got approval on the animation, Nathan recorded the script with his very talented son, Jack, who is the voice talent for Big Dinosaur! It was such a treat hearing my script come to life, and I couldn’t stop smiling. With the audio files, it was then my responsibility to add the audio to my storyboard animation. I ended up needed to draw some additional scenes in order to fix the flow, but overall it was such a blast. I haven’t worked much with audio in the past, and it was surprisingly challenging trying to make the dialogue flow naturally alongside the animation. But a fun challenge, of course!

After that, Nathan gave me a tutorial on how he typically animates in Unity. It’s a bit intimidating, but it looks fairly similar to how I animate using a timeline in Photoshop and After Effects, so maybe it won’t be so bad? I don’t want to speak too soon.

For Moodboards, Nathan had me use this really neat site called Milanote! I had never heard of it, but it was super convenient and intuitive.

From there, I created a list of assets that we’ll need for the episode and collected links so Nathan wouldn’t have to hunt them down, as well as mood/reference boards for the art direction. During the hunt for assets, I had the idea that I myself could make one of them! Part of our plot involves a donut (Big Dinosaur loves them), and there’s an infamous Blender beginner tutorial that teaches you how to make your own 3D donut. Even though it’s a simple asset, I asked Nathan if he’d be cool with me taking this on as a challenge. He was absolutely down for it, so I’ve been slowly picking at the tutorial ever since. Excited to see what this week has in store for us!

I never knew a donut could be so intimidating. I’m very excited to finally learn some of Blender though!

PRACTICUM: WEEK TWO

This week started off with… a scare. On Sunday night, my cat was rushed to the animal hospital and we discovered that she had a kidney stone that needed to be surgically removed. Monday was a day of stress and contacting the vets while we waited for her to be finished with her surgery, but fortunately Nathan was very understanding and accommodating with this. After a lot of stress and a very expensive vet bill, we were able to bring her back home. Luckily, all was well and I was able to pick my work back up on Tuesday. (I ended up working Tuesday to Friday to make up for it!)

My cat, Selina, hanging out while I work on the script sketches.

This week, we worked on editing and finalizing the script, as well as storyboarding. The plot we agreed on is about Big Dinosaur imaging what it would be like to go into space after he and his friend Bug Bug see a shooting star one night. It’s whimsical and cute, and I’m looking forward to see how we can animate it! For the storyboarding, Nathan gave me some helpful pointers, and I watched a few tutorial videos before diving in. I was able to illustrate the storyboard on my iPad and then move them to Photoshop where I used the Timeline feature to build it into an animated sequence.

Storyboard progress, again featuring Selina.

I learned a lot from the process, and I think storyboarding is something I might be interested in working on at future animation studios, as I think it fits my skill set very well. Working on Big Dinosaur has been an awesome learning experience so far! I’m a bit nervous about moving on to 3D, but I’m lucky to have a host that’s so patient with my learning experience. More on that next week!

Not quite work related, but the view from my living room was incredible last week and I wanted to share. The clouds looked like waves over the mountains!

Practicum: Week One

The start of an exciting journey! Last Monday, I began my much anticipated Practicum with Little Mountain Animation. I’ve been working alongside Nathan Thomas, Founder and extremely talented VFX animator (I don’t know how I got so lucky). After some discussion, we decided that our goal for this Practicum would be to create an episode of their animated short series, Big Dinosaur. I’ve had very little experience working with 3D and animation, so I’m a bit nervous that I won’t be able to contribute much, but it’ll be valuable knowledge to gain nonetheless. This week, we worked together on ideation and writing (I also watched a LOT of tutorials on storyboarding and 3D animation). Our next meeting was for pitching ideas; I came up with a slide deck with 20-30 ideas, some more fleshed out than others, and we narrowed down the list to 3 potential episodes. Some of the others were scratched because they’d require additional assets that we wouldn’t have the time or resources to build (ie. one of the ideas had a cat, but they don’t have a cat model ready and rendering fur in that short time would be difficult). After that, we ideated some more and then wrote fleshed out scripts for each of the ideas. I’ve been working on sketches, scenes and figuring out the story beats as well. During week two, we will likely begin working on storyboarding and some more editing of the script. From there… animation! I think.

Big Dinosaur, the animated series that we’ll be working on.
Nathan! My Practicum host and new friend.

Overall, Nathan has been a pleasure to work with and extremely accommodating. He wants me to get the most out of my practicum experience by letting me work alongside him for the entire process. I can’t wait to learn more!

In all the excitement, I forgot to take photos of my workspace or anything like that, so I’ll be sure to do more of that this week!

Mentorship – Backgrounds

Lastly, I wanted to develop some basic backgrounds in order to nail down my style. It was difficult adapting to various scenes while also applying the same limitations that I set for myself when developing the characters. As Webtoon is displayed in a vertical, scrolling format, I chose to illustrate the backgrounds with this in mind too.

I didn’t want to over-complicate the style, considering it would be a weekly or biweekly production and I didn’t want to slow myself down with hyper detailed backgrounds and scenes. I chose to keep the saturated colours and tried working with basic shapes and shadows to express depth.

Mentorship – Expressions

This was the phase that took up the bulk of my time, and I felt I improved the most on! Dynamic facial expressions have always been my weakness, as I’ve always been more of a solo illustration kind of girl, and there hasn’t been much of a need for expressions in anything that isn’t sequential art. But if I wanted to write a good comic, I knew how important this part was! The ultimate rule to storytelling is “Show, don’t tell” and that especially goes in the case of comics, where you’re literally seeing what’s going on.

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I knew right away that I had to work on these… a lot. I wanted to redo them entirely after receiving Jouchelle’s feedback. And as expected, she helped a ton. Along with the red lines, she made comments and sent me plenty of resources to ingrain into my head when I’m working on expressions in the future.

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At this point, it was all starting to come together! I had much more of an understanding of what needed to be done and what makes an expression “dynamic”. Also, with the addition of their shoulders/busts, I can add even more movement and mood to them, because it’s not just in the face!

Here’s my final run through of the expressions:

Mentorship – Character Lineup

To start things off, I drew the main cast of my comic. Up until this point, I’ve only had a basic idea of what each of them are like, as well as some very messy Pinterest moodboards. This proved to be trickier than I thought! I wanted each of them to showcase their personality, have a unique style and all appear like they exist in the same universe. The trickiest character to settle on was Izzy, the main protagonist, because I knew that he had to be likeable, relatable, and I needed to love his design because I’d potentially be drawing it… 30 times a week, if this comic goes up. His original design had glasses, but I opted out of those after discovering how annoying it was to just draw them once, let alone over the span of a whole chapter.

My initial pass of the character lineup

Jouchelle was quick to respond with her feedback! The method we chose was redlining my illustrations, especially since we could no longer meet up in person due to Covid-19.

From Jouchelle, I gathered that my original attempt was too static and the characters lacked personality in their body language. Also, I could make things more interesting by switching up their directions, as I had everyone facing the same way in the original. As a personal note, I made sure to adjust the colour palette too, as it was looking too dull for my tastes.

And here’s the final attempt! I tried to adjust them so they were more interesting, but I also kept in mind the amount of time we had and was eager to move onto the next phase.