[Uni] Royal Armouries Summary

There's been a lack of entries about the Royal Armouries animation I'm working on in this blog, so I'm going to use this entry to talk about every stage of the development so far, starting at the very beginning.

THE VERY BEGINNING

Before we finished our first year at University, we were given our briefs for the first project of the second year as well as attending a talk from the NHS and Royal Armouries about our options, we had a choice from several briefs, and we were told we could work in a group for them. I decided to work with Jack Gray and Will Padgett for this project. I've had plenty of experience working with Jack, and had been wanting to work with Will on a project for some time too as we're all in a similar field in animation.
With this being a group project, we would all need to decide on our roles in the animation. Luckily, we had earlier had talks about the area of  animation we preferred to specialize in, these helped us to choose our roles in the project. Will had discovered that he had an interest in the production side of things, managing people and deadlines, as well as handling various tasks such as budgeting. Jack had started to get an interest in background art and had been practicing a lot lately in them, sometimes helping create backgrounds for my projects too. As for myself, I like the actual animation tasks, this project has been a breath of fresh air from producing my own animations as all the behind the scenes work is already taken care of. Now that we were all sitting comfortably in our roles, it was time to choose a brief and start the planning.

THE PLANNING

As we were given the holidays to have a think over the project, Will and I decided to meet up one day and take a trip down to the armouries. We had all decided on the folowing brief, and the goal of our trip was to choose a suitable item to base the video on:

Arms and armour have been made through the centuries not just for warfare and to functionally attack and defend, but got sport, spectacle and a means of showing status and wealth.

There is a great deal of craftsmanship and artistry involved in creating many of the items on display; who made them, who was it made for, and what were they trying to convey?

Arms and armours have also been used as trade items and played a role in diplomacy. Armours, swords and firearms have been given as lavish gifts and as prizes and throughout history today, still holding prestige and symbolism.

After a day around the armouries, Will and I decided on the moustached helmet. We originally had some interest in the horned helmet, but as this is used in a lot of promotional material for the museum, we thought it may be a little cliche and over used. The moustache helmet was interesting enough to draw in attention, while still having some unknown factor to play around with in the project. We then went back home and had a talk to Jack about our findings, he was ok with the idea, and we made plans to all return once we were back at University. Once we returned, the three of us put our heads together and had a think over the whole project, further defining our roles in the team, as well as the parts of the animation we were to work on. All of this was then put together for the pitch,

THE PITCH

After rehearsing to each other, we were ready to talk to a group of people about our animation proposal. This was still early on, and a lot of things have changed since then, but we managed to get green lit. Below are the slides from our presentation that I made:

For the opening slide, we showed the helmet we're working with, as well as a mock animation of the miners, this helped us to create a strong visual image from the get go.

We then showed the brief for the project and talked about how we were going to tackle it.

We then took it in turns to talk about our input into the project, starting with Will.

His roles in the project have been:

• Writing up the script with Jack, and making appropriate edits along the way
  Will and Jack wrote up the first draft of the script and voiceover. We decided to write the animation about the production of the helmet, showing each step of the process.
• Drawing the first draft storyboardWith the script complete, Will drew up the first thumbnail drafts of the storyboard, which would then be used for the animatic. To save time, he helped draw some of these up digitally for the animation too.
• Doing research into historical accuracy
  With historic accuracy being important, we went to Will to find out more information about the helmet, as well as other information such as the smithing process and other stages of the creation.
• Managing deadlines and production schedule
• Managing budgeting
  Our animation didn't need a huge budget to produce, but we did need a hard drive to store all of the data on, especially for After Effects when all the files need to be in a root folder. Unfortunately the first draft of the budget Will proposed got a little out of hand and was rejected, but he managed to fix this mistake and get us enough money to cover the hard drive, as well as some supplies and drawing equipment.
• Casting the final musician
  Another problem with the budgeting was that the university refused to pay for any crew, so we'd have to find people for free. This meant that the musician I've worked with before, Jimmy Sudekum, would have to be replaced, fortunately Will was able to find a replacement.
• Environmental animation
  With me getting through the character animations, Will and Jack were happy to be left with the environmental animation, such as grass swaying.
• Creating the final animatic
  With the final storyboard complete, Will created the animatic for the musician. This included a metronome to time the movement to, as well as the final voiceover.
• Composition and effectsWill has been eager to learn more After Effects, so he's taken the task of putting the final animation together.

My roles in the animation have been:

• Art direction
  One of my initial worries f working with a team is the differences in art styles. To counter this, Jack and I both decided on a simple, consistent art style for the whole video.We also decided on a simple, grey scale art style with high contrast. The important details would be white to stand out from the background.
• Character design
  I created a set of basic characters that would be simple, yet effective. Sticking to simple designs meant that I could also put more emphasis on the movement without worrying about detail. 
• Character animation
  As I have more experience in Flash, I animated all of the characters for the project, this also made things such as timing and sync a lot easier to manage.
• Creating first animatic
  Once Will had completed the thumbnail storyboards, I started piecing together the animatic for the pitch.
• Animation director and consultant
  As I'm doing most of the animation and recreated the storyboards, I'm taking up the role of animation director to keep everything consistent with how the animation is envisioned.
• Setting deadlines for secondary animation
• Casting for voice actors and musicians
  Through my online animations I've started to make a lot of connections with animators, voice actors and even musicians. These have come in handy at University when I need people in a pinch, and this project was no exception. I managed to get fellow animator and voice actor, Tom Kerin to voice as the narrator for the project. I played his demo to Will and Jack and they both liked the takes he gave us.
• Creating the final revised storyboard
  A problem that had been bugging me with the initial storyboard was the changes in direction. I created the first few shots that had a 2D side view, and Will created the blacksmith scenes that were a lot more dynamic, and broke the style. The switch between these two was very obvious, and that's one thing that I decided to change in the final version. I initially tried to make the whole video with dynamic shots, but this didn't look right. Instead, I went with a tapestry sort of effect, with everything being side on, and constantly scrolling along. When I pitched this idea to Jack and Will, they were on board, and I began drawing the new storyboard. This didn't follow the conventional storyboard format, and ended up more of a scroll, to represent the final outcome. This felt a lot more consistent and had a more thematic feel to it.
  
  

Jack's roles have been:

• Art direction
  After working with Jack on a few projects in the past, I knew that I could work with him effectively to create a solid art style for the video, together we decided on the high contrast idea that could be used to highlight certain parts of the animation, while still showing all the background detail too.
• Background artist
  Again, experience with Jack has proven that he is proficient at creating backgrounds. We've decided to work on four planes, background, mid ground, foreground and extreme foreground. His backgrounds have been planned around this idea to make use of parallex scrolling.
• Script writer
  Jack wrote the initial script for the animation, which Will helped edit along the way.
• Environmental animation
  Once the backgrounds are complete, Jack is helping animate environmental aspects of the video.

To finish off, we showed our proposed budget, there were issues with this later on, but Will managed to resolve them. Once were green lit, we were ready to start pre-production.

INFLUENCES

As an art and animation director, I've had to make some decisions about the direction. Below is a list of sources I've used to inspire the direction of this animation.

LIMBO

This game is a huge influence on the overall art direction in the video. The ambience it manages to make with a "less is more" approach to the overall scheme is outstanding. Scenes such as the mine had a lot of focus on the atmosphere, which is where the similarities to Limbo started to become apparent. As the scroll idea comes more into play the animation drifts away from this influence, but the colours and set design remain prominent.

GHOST TRICK: PHANTOM DETECTIVE

The link to 2D video games is apparent in our animation, and I was hugely influenced by one game in particular, Ghost Trick. I love the animation in this game as it's so incredibly fluid and tailored to each character, who might I add have a LOT of character. Not just that, but the designs create very strong silhouettes, which is a very important factor with the characters I'm working with. Below you can see examples of silhouettes being important in the game, as well as the official trailer, showing off some of the character animation.

ALSO MISSILE THE POMERANIAN.

NOAH'S ARK

An old Disney animation I remember is Noah's ark. This animation featured a lot of looped and rhythm based movement that was useful reference material for my own characters, the animation is below.

THE CHARACTERS

It's now time to show my actual character animations so far in the project. I've decided to put them all into separate files to help organisation for the project. I discovered that Cartoon Network do separate model sheets for Adventure Time characters, and I've taken the idea from that:

As stated before,t he simplicity of these characters allows me to get the most out of the principles of animation, one that I've used in particular is anticipation and follow through movement. The looping action of the animations also means that I can make extensive use of smoothing in and out to feather the transition from the beginning and end of each loop.