Production Diary - National Geographic Ident - 29/04/2016

Today I am working on my National Geographic Ident and I want to look at taking it into After Effects to make the net flow a little smoother as well as adding in some text at the end. I have exported my fish and net on different files out of Photoshop and to do this I had to export at Quicktime and set the alpha channel to 'Standard', for future reference.



I haven't have much experience with the puppet tool, so I want to look a few tutorials while I try and edit my net so that I can learn as much as possible and not do a bad job of it.

I found a little guide on the Adobe help website on how to use the puppet tool and it's definition of the tool is that it 'works by deforming part of an image according to the positions of pins that you place and move'. So I want the pole of my net to stay quite still, however I'd like the net to flow a little more and possibly the yellow square to move a little bit more freely. It explains that there are three types of pins, the Puppet Pin tool (to place pins), the Puppet Overlap tool (to indicate which parts of the image should overlap in front of the other) and the Puppet Starch tool (used to stiffen parts of the image). 

I'm not going to try and puppet my net and I will post below the progress I make!

Here I have really stretched the net to it's extreme and you can really change the whole shape using this tool! However, by doing this is have made the stick part of the net come down too low so I'm going to have to use the starch tool or more pins so that it remains in the right place. I think to make the image a little better I'm also going to place more pins. I made the mistake at first of trying to puppet a moving image and it really did not work at all, so it actually only works on a still image so I then saved the net as a PNG and animated in and used the puppet tool on After Effects.

Here I have used the puppet tool successfully and it has worked really well at making the net seem to flow a little more like it's in water. This was what I felt was missing from my animation so doing this little thing has changed the feel of my animation dramatically.

E4 Ident Progress! - 25/04/2016

So, to make my ident flow a little better I needed to change the last scene like I said in my diary entry and this is what I have been working on recently. I decided that it would look better if it just zoomed into the face of my koala rather than cutting to another shot where it seemed like the jump was too big. This beow is what I have achieved today and I am much happier with the outcome! It is much clearer now what the audience is looking at and the only thing I could maybe change now is the mouth when he chews I have just done a small rotation with the same mouth, but I think it might look a t little better if I put in a new mouth that's puckered like it's full. In these shots below you can see how it zooms in and even though his face looks a little distort in these frames, it's very unnoticeable in the real preview as it zooms so quickly.

Post-Poduction Time! - Production Diary Idents 22/04/2016

So I have finished animating for both of my idents and I now want to look at tweaking and refining them using After Effects and as the deadline isn't for a couple of weeks yet this gives me lots of time to do this!

For my e4 ident I have been thinking about changing the last shot and making it so that there would be a zoom to the koala's face rather than cut to a whole new frame where it could possibly confuse the audience. Below is a little preview of how the scene cuts to the mouth and I think I will change this with a zoom and using the puppet tool to change the face. I think the shot when it first cuts to the koala's face is actually quite hard to tell what it is and this is the feedback I have received from a few people who have looked at my animation.

My National Geographic ident isn't quite as refined as my other, and this is because I have enjoyed using After Effects much more than Photoshop as it is something that is new to me. I have finished the actual animating part of this ident, however I want to tweak the way the net moves slightly using After Effects and put in titles too. I spoken to Mat and we have discussed having the text all come in at once instead of having the text come in each line at a time. This way it will be less time consuming and will look a lot nicer too so, I really want to look at changing the way the net moves and this will be my next move for this ident. Below I have shown the consecutive frames of the net and here it goes from a diagonal angle to very horizontal and this is almost robotic to me, so this is something that if changed would make the animation flow a lot nicer.

Overall, I am happy with my progress and I am glad that I am ahead of my schedule and I have time to go and refine each part of my animations. I feel what most helped was my calendar which allowed me to constantly refer back to each time I would work on my project!

Production Diary - IDENTS - 19/04/2016

Today, I worked on my National Geographic Ident as this was the one that I was neglecting out of the two and I have made so much progress on it! Last time I said that I wanted to make the fish smaller and add more in-betweens and after doing this it really helped make the fish swim more naturally and look a lot nicer overall. Below is a gif of what I have so far and I'm really pleased with what I have.

The fish swims a lot more naturally here and I managed to fade the net into the National Geographic logo quite nicely too. I still want to add more details to this animation such as particles and light rays to make the fish look more like it's swimming in the water instead of on top and I wanted to add bubbles too. My next ideas are to use After Effects to add the 'National Geographic Channel' text slide into the shot as if it has come out of the logo as I think this would make the animation look more professional. Also, to improve what I already have I could add a few more frames when the net is going back to become the logo as it looks a little sluggish. 

Production Diary - IDENTS - 15/04/2016

So, I feel like I have made massive progress today and I feel like my e4 ident is pretty much finished! I am going to get a few peers to look over the result and see if there are any major changes that need to be made but overall I am really happy with the way it has come out. I really enjoyed using After Effects and I definitely want to use it again in future projects. Below I have put a few screen shots of previews of my finished ident and the main thing I found with very fast movements is that it's easier to have less keyframes as it doesn't actually require as many as I was putting in originally which was slowing my whole animation down. I changed a few things since I last documented and that was that I basically changed all my keyframes around because I wasn't happy with them and sometimes it's actually easier just to get rid of all the keyframes and start again if you really aren't liking how it's looking.

Line Test - National Geographic Ident

I did a small line test for my National Geographic Ident and by doing this it helps me see where I need to add or remove unnecessary frames. This one I am finding actually quite difficult as I want my fish to swim naturally and not just float across the screen, I have looked at videos explaining the locomotion of a fish however I still feel like I need to tweak it here and there. I want to make the fish stay on screen for longer and I am considering making it smaller so that it has a longer way to swim and the logo which is also the net will be at a better size in consideration for it being shown on a TV. After looking at this line test I have found that I need to adjust my sizes and I need to add more frames into the swim as I current have only 3, which is 2 extremes and 1 inbetween so possibly it will help if I added another 1 or 2 inbetweens.

Maya Truck Task

This task I find really hard to understand but I got there in the end, and I found it difficult just because I wasn't used to the program which will get better with time. I did like to try and use the program as it gave me a chance to learn something new and the main problem I faced was trying to understand all the different buttons and just pressing one wrong one can make everything go very wrong. The guide I used really helped me and without that I wouldn't have been able to make a cube! Maya is something that seems to scare a lot of people but I feel like it's a program that can only become easier the more you use it and start to understand the tools and what you can achieve by using them. I think my truck turned out okay, however it could have been a little more symmetric as some of my edges were a little wonky as I made little mistakes and tried to fix them. I also feel I should have made the wheels a little bigger but this can be easily fixed.

Production Diary - IDENTS - 11/04/2016

I have been working a lot on my E4 Ident and below are some screen shots of the kind of processes I have been looking at! It has been a little challenging so far working with so many keyframes but I have been slowly getting through it and the main difficulty is actually that there is so many keyframes working at once it's sometimes hard to figure where the problem is and which keyframe to get rid of.

Here you can see that I have been working heavily with keyframes to make my animation come to life and I have used keyframes before but not so much where I am actually relying on them to make everything work. In this screen shot I was working with key framing the position of the flower as well as the arm so that they worked alongside each other in the same path. This is felt was difficult as my arm seems to be moving too slowly so I'm going to speed up the movement for this part. 

 

When looking at my animation I also found that it looked very flat and lifeless and this was not the look I was going for. So as you can see in this closeup, I put a drop shadow onto every layer and this really made the shapes pop! This was a really important part of the process that I actually forgot about but it has made the biggest difference. 

Production Diary - IDENTS - 3/04/2016

So, I have started animating my idents for both my E4 and National Geographic and so far it is going smoothly, the cut out animation I have only made my cut outs to animate with which I have shown below. However, this is still a good step and I found some really good scans online of crumpled and textured paper that I have used!

For my National Geographic I have gotten a little further with this one, however I still think it needs lots of work. My fish doesn't seem to swimming as naturally as I would like it to so I'm going to work on changing the way it swims til I am happy with it. Below I have put a screen shot of how I am considering how the spine of the fish moves and how this will effect the shape of the body. This is something that is very important if I want my fish to swim naturally as well as the speed that it travels at. I have been looking at YouTube videos of the locomotion of a fish so far to come up with an idea of how a fish moves but it's proving to be quite difficult.

E4 Animatic

Here is my E4 animatic and even though my idea is simple and easy to follow I still thought it was really important to have an animatic. This allowed me to plan out how long it should take my Koala to reach and grab the flower in this narrative and plan out having the E4 logo up for 3 seconds like the brief asks for. I feel like to make my animatic more effective I could have added sound, however I am planning on looking at different e4 soundtracks so that my ident really fits with the channel. I am also thinking about looking at using Australian instrument sound effects on top of the e4 music just to add that little bit extra. I think this animatic really clearly shows what I wanted to achieve and that's the most important thing.

National Geographic Animatic

Here is my animatic for my National Geographic ident! With this animatic I was able to look at how long it should take for my fish to cross the screen and how long my net will take to spin around, as the logo has to be up for 3 seconds on screen I found it was very important to have good timing to be able to fit everything I wanted into the 10 seconds I was allowed. With this idea I feel I will need to look at the speeds of the action a lot within the frame as I don't want the fish to swim unnaturally but I need the action to be fast at the same time.