A Twist of Fate / Final Group Project
10. Group Project – Jacky
This was the major project of our attachment, and one of the modes of assessments critical for our grading as well. We were put into groups, and my group consisted of Melissa, Melvin, and myself. Mr. Ahmad then explained to us the basic frame work of a short animation like the ones he had been showing us in class as well as the other requirements for the project.
The requirements are as follows:
- Short film with a little more complicated story line then just stomping/walking
o Concept of storyboarding and model sheets
o 45-80 secs
- Act 1
o Introduce the characters and setting
o Open with establishment shot (of scene and character)
o Character can be doing something (eg: walking, drinking tea)
- Act 2
o Character encounters conflict/obstacle.
o Something that causes the character to change what he's doing
- Act 3
o Resolution
o Does the conflict get resolved?
o How is it resolved?
Initially, we thought of quite a few plots to base our clip on; however those were quickly discarded as they were either too simplistic or too complicated. Finally, we settled on a storyline where a boy watches a super hero cartoon and starts to experiment with chemicals in his lab, when suddenly his concoction explodes and afterwards he turns bald, but discover that he has superpowers – the power of flight/levitation and superhuman strength.
He then begins to lust for money, and using his superpowers, goes to rob the National Bank. The police come after him, but they react a little too late, he flies off into the air with the moneybags. However, as the famous proverb goes ‘the good will always triumph over evil’, and he meets his unfortunate end when he is happily gloating over his success and does not look where he is headed, consequently flying into the flight path of an airplane and getting sucked into its engine turbine.
We planned out the rough storyline, which has been reproduced and included behind this journal as well, as well as the rough storyboard. After finalizing our storyboards and plot, I started working on crafting our character, which we named ‘Jacky’. A few ruffs of certain key scenes in the storyboard plus model sheets and action poses of Jacky (before and after the explosion) have also been included, in addition to a second character that I had initially created but one which we had decided not to use.
Other sketches like a ruff of the character’s walk cycle have also been added in, before I started to transfer and touch up Jacky on the TAB software. Meanwhile, Melvin and Melissa started working on the backgrounds of each scene, while I drew out the different poses of Jacky and added them into each scene after they were done. The most complicated and tedious thing about the whole process was actually putting the entire clip together, since we realised that they keys we used to position certain backdrops were not locked onto the frames and we had no way of doing so as well, hence we had to manually shift them every time we moved a frame or level of animation.
Another issue was the arrangement of frames. While arranging the backdrops, we had forgotten to add in extra clean frames so that the animation would be smooth flowing, hence creating more trouble for ourselves when we wanted to add in more frames, having to shift all 16 or 17 levels one by one and then repositioning the keys and running though the animation over and over to make sure that we had gotten the placing of each key right.
Yet another complication to the Jacky project was that I could not always reproduce the exact same face for Jacky, and I think that the changes in his facial features were quite prominent in the clip. You see, I am more of a still picture cartoonist. I may have a slight flair for drawing stills, but when it comes to reproducing the same face or picture over and over, therein lays my weakness. No matter how much I try to redraw Jacky’s face or a certain body posture of his, it comes out different each time, which frustrated me to no end, since consistency of the character was one of the basic principles of animation, be it digital or traditional, two dimensional or three dimensional.
Nevertheless, we managed to complete the clip even though we had some problems with the exporting, and then we submitted it to Mr. Ahmad before finally washing our hands off of the TAB software. I think that over the last three weeks, most of us had countless complaints and bones to pick with the software, which we felt was quite a pain to animate on as compared to FLASH(for those of us who had tried our hand at FLASH animations anyway).
/reflections of -theKNEES.