The final animation...

How I achieved a final animation...

Using illustrator I created my whole animation, pretty much using the stop motion technique by moving the characters on screen. I found this was easier for me to change the expressions on the characters faces, and although it took a lot of time to change and export each frame, I think it would have taken 10 times as long to keep struggling along with after effects...

Despite my hate for the program, I did use after effects to import all the images as a sequence, stretched them, add the music and export the animation.

I Hate After Effects...

I tried to import the tea cup into after effects after saving it as a layered photoshop file. HOWEVER, for some reason the layers weren't there separately. I struggled with after effects a lot, and after researching on the internet how to do different things and following tutorials, when I still couldn't achieve what I wanted, I gave up.

I used iMovie as it was a quicker and easier process to just run the images I created and quickly add music and export it...

Key frames...

To develop my animation I created key frames in illustrator and put them together in iMovie to see how my animation would run...

Development..

From my experiment it was clear that I needed to slow it down a lot, also I felt that the animation would benefit from some colour...

I used minimal colour added to my characters as I didn't want to over power them, and needed to keep them simple because of the drawing style of the characters I'd gone with initially...

Experiment...

Using illustrator I used the stop motion technique to create a quick basic animation by moving the characters and saving each frame....

I think it worked well and I got the kind of effect I was looking for but animating through after effects would have been quicker and create a smoother movement.

I preferred drawing and scanning the images in rather than computer generating them from the start, however I am going to try and animate these drawn images rather than drawing all frames.

Cartoon faces..

To bring my characters to life I experimented with facial expressions, only using eyes and the mouth to portray these feelings and the tone I wanted to set.

I drew out the tea cup and the biscuit with empty eyes, and scanned this image in, live traced it on illustrator, and tiled the image to have 9 to a page.

I added emotion to the eyes and a mouth, using a range of references as inspiration from other cartoons and illustrations. Again I scanned in the edited characters and live traced these in illustrator.

I am really pleased with the outcome once they were scanned and live traced. I also felt that I managed to portray a wide range of emotions, whether I'd be using them for that particular character or not, but as I haven't done any animation and little illustration of this kind before I felt it was really helpful to get as many emotions down as possible. Plus, I really enjoyed it... 

Tea Cup...

Instead of drawing the characters by hand, I tried drawing straight into illustrator. I found this quite successful, but harder than drawing by hand. I tried out the different lines that could be used when drawing my cup. My favourites were the feathered Charcoal and Pencil lines, because they didn't look quite as computer generated as the others

Trying to expression emotions through features...

I started by using only eyes, and played around giving the eyes different emotions, drawing with a simple black marker onto paper and live tracing this in illustrator...

Bit of after effects with cell animation...

I thought I'd try out some cell animation with my idea using the main action that would be used in my animation... I'm not sure I like this style, because it isn't as consistent as I'd like it to be, also, only drawing, scanning and cropping 18 pictures took me hours! And I wasn't particularly impressed with the result...

Although I like the hand drawn aesthetics of it, I'm going to try drawing on paper, and scanning them into the computer to then animate them.

Developed Story Board...

The story behind this animation is that the biscuits are pretty much a gang, bullying the tea. When a biscuit is dunked, it is so satisfying when you have a successful dunk! The right amount of tea soaked into the biscuit, on the verge of breaking - a good dunk! 

I feel that the biscuit personifies the tea drinker, proud with a good dunk, disappointed and frustrated with a bad dunk. When the biscuit falls into the tea it just ruins the whole drink! The tea, being 'bullied' by the biscuits, always wanted the smug biscuits to fall! So when they do, he's over the moon.

I need to animate the biscuits and the tea cup to portray the emotions and feelings necessary... 

Feedback on Story board...

After feedback from our presentation sessions, I was advised to focus more on the dunk and the 2 characters of the tea cup and the biscuit, rather than the beginning where the tea is being made etc etc. This way, I can focus more on creating the right tone and attitude for my characters and its a lot simpler too. I think I'm going to use cell animation for this... but I'm going to try it out first...

Story Board...

THE END.

After Effects Workshop...

Character Creation...

THE TEA CUP:

Here I drew lots of different possibilities for my tea cup, I tried to keep them quick and simple, consisting of only a few lines. Also, I started to play around with the eyes and mouth giving it different expressions.

These two drawings are my favourite as they're simple and effective. Drawing 2. is more mug like, which is sometimes related more with coffee or hot chocolate rather than tea, whereas with drawing 12. I have used a shallow round tea cup with a saucer, which is better associated tea. Also, it's posher to have a cup and saucer, and a bit more old lady like. Therefore, I think I will go with drawing 12 to base my character on

Initial Storyboarding...

(I've just realised I can't spell story...)

I started brainstorming some of the main ideas which I was more strongly lead to by instinct... I liked the idea firstly of focusing on the old lady, but I felt the story was a bit dull and boring, and when thinking about it, I wasn't looking forward to drawing people, let alone old people...

So, I decided to focus on the cup of tea, rather than a person, as I could personify the tea with features such as eyes, a mouth, legs, arms...
Also, I felt that this kind of theme was more fun and had a better narrative starting to take shape...

This was my first initial idea for a story with the cup of tea. I have simply added eyes and a mouth to the mug and the biscuits to bring them to life....

I am going to experiment with different methods of how to create my animation...

Perhaps drawing them out using cell animation

or adding features to a real mug and using stop motion photography

however this could become difficult with the biscuits jumping and moving...I also feel it would be better as a cartoon like animation rather than realistic... 

I could potentially digitally create these characters like I have seen done before in other designers work, for example, in Flothmann's work, http://vimeo.com/16494997 

Visualising my track...

Using the built in visualiser on iTunes, I recorded the abstract movements to the first 27seconds of my track, these again moved to the beat of the track inspiring more ideas and getting me used to track itself...

Visualising my track...

When listening to my track I noticed the beat tracker at the top of the itunes bar, so I thought it would be good to record this, unfortunately the sound is really tinny because of the built in microphone, but it's a bit pointless without the music as a reference. I found this quite useful and I think one side is the base, and the other is the beat on top (I'm not very musical hence the lack of technical terms!)

Looking into my words further...

I took my 3 words and thought of words branching off from these rather than the music, hopefully leading to more of a story for my animation...

From these words I created a moodboard from a range of images, from magazines, my own phoographs and google images. I felt that everything on this page was supported by at least 2 of the words, for example, Black cabs and Royal Guards are English and Respected (definitely more than other cabs), whereas my Nan, and the ice cream van are more English and innocent, rather than respected...

Even my own nan is in there because she's cute...

I've found that this is helping getting things moving, and I'm starting to have some idea's for a story...

My 3 Descriptive words...

English     

(I think english can be used descriptively? - yeahhh, why not)

Innocent   

Respected

These words already remind me of my nan...

My piece of music...

These are all the words which came to mind whilst listening to my piece of music. For some reason this piece strongly reminded me of a cup of tea, and it felt really English.

My own little experiment...

Using the idea of stop motion, I used a white board to create a stop motion movie, drawing a little bit of the character each time. This animation really got me enthusiastic about the module once I'd got started, and even though it's really simple, it got some idea's going and was quite useful. Didn't take me too long either!

Stop Motion creation...

Having a go!

During the week I had a few workshops looking at stop motion and after effects, creating little experimental animations to get to grips with the software...