Animation Rationale & Final Edit of my TV Ident.

SJF Ident - Sound from Samantha Freeman on Vimeo.


Over the past three weeks I have been focusing on the practice of animation in my Design Practice 1 module. My task was to produce a 30 second animation on 3DS Max to be used as an ident on my own TV station.

I decided to just use my initials as the station name in my ident. This very simply but effectively represents me and gives me a chance to use some typography in my work; therefore adding written clues to what the station could contain. I also decided to include a quite basic character based on the skills I learned in my second seminar. This character was loosely based upon me and my interests – the glasses being the main feature of my influence! The rest of the alterations on the character were mainly just to give it a cartoony, cute style, as this is quite simply the style of character I would most want on my own TV station!

I experimented with animation on 3DS Max for a while before deciding on the motion to be used in my final ident. I played with tools such as bend, extrude, stretch, melt, etc. to try to mimic jelly-like movements when jumping and sliding across the screen. These are movements I decided on using due to my experimentation working out quite well.

I also experimented with materials, cameras and lighting for a short while to help me figure out how to make my character and its surroundings look as good as I could with the little knowledge of modelling I had. I think this worked out quite well, although I would have liked to have learned more about textures and lighting to enhance the quality of my renderings.

I have found this project very interesting, mainly due to specialising in animation in my previous course. I have always found animation fascinating; particularly stop motion pieces (Coraline, etc.) However, now I have discovered how 3D animation can be produced, I have grown a great interest in improving my skills and discovering more about the subject.

Uploaded videos to vimeo. Edits 1 + 2. Voila.

I have done my first edit without sound... I am currently on the that task (:

Here is my first go at it...


SJF Ident - No sound from Samantha Freeman on Vimeo.

I found the movement of the glasses slightly awkward near the start, so I will try and improve this in 3DS max and render these frames again before adding sound to my finished piece.



Here is what I now consider as my final ident design. It may change as I can be picky with things like this and alter them constantly :) but I think this will be my main edit. I have tried to alter the fault with the glasses slightly and have added a few sound effects to make it more interesting.


SJF Ident - Sound from Samantha Freeman on Vimeo.

Latest rendered samples...

Here's how some of how my animation's going so far.
Only done about 275 frames and it looks quite slow as it is. How to fill the rest without it all being text falling or my character zooming about? HMMM..

Voila!

Doodlez and stuff.

Did a bit of sketching to plan my final idea today... To make up for my missed seminar yesterday... Stupid cold keeps coming back to haunt me! :(

Anyway, heres my main character idea and quick storyboarded sketches of what movement I could try and include in my ident.

This idea very much uses the tutorials we have followed in seminars (text and jellyhead!), as these are features I think I can now use fairly well on the software. However, I have added certain aspects I have explored and discovered myself - glasses, teeth editing, arms, character movement/bending/stretching, etc.

This idea has a strong use of moving text (falling or spinning, perhaps?) so I have looked at a few current idents using similar styles to help me decide how to approach this. Here are a couple of my favourites...

Made this idea..

Did a lot of messing about on 3ds max today...
This is the main thing that came out of it...

Very much based on the character we did in the seminar I think you will notice, but plan to edit it even more to make it suitable for the brief. I just really liked the cuteness of it :P and simplicity.

I also finally managed to make a shape that looked slightly like glasses today to fit in with my main idea for the ident. So might actually persue with this one now.

Will keep you posted. (:

More playing around with ideas...

I have messed around on 3DS max even more today... Didn't do any sketches but managed to get straight stuck into it with my idea using glasses.

So far I have produced a simple glasses shape, although I couldn't figure out how to remove the lens area, so just used a cube shape of the background colour. I also added some eyes to animate through the glasses. This follows my previous simple, cartoony style.

Screenshot time...

Animation Project.

So, I was given the brief for my new project in DP1 today - 3D animation.

My main task is to produce a television ident for a channel/station based on myself and my social networking sites. (e.g. Facebook, Twitter...)

Here are examples of existing televsion idents using 3D animation that I quite like...






In my first seminar yesterday, I learned the basics of 3Ds max (the software I must use in this pathway) to make a simple animation of the word "JELLY" jumping and bouncing on the floor (in a jelly-like fashion - clever much?

I couldn't figure out how to put my rendered stills together an animation on Premiere Pro yesterday, and do not have this software at home (maybe I shall find a way at some point haha), so here are a few of the 100 rendered stills from the animated sequence...