For the advert we are using Kates style and doing stop frame animation.
Throughout the project:
I am the main Director and animator
Kate will be the Art Director and animator
Matt will do model making and animation
Paul will also do model making and animation.
With the advert being produced in Kates style I redesigned the storyboards, scripts and timing and asked Kate to apply her style to the images I already set out.
A few changes have had to be made to the storyboard upon the customers request. In shot one the sheep will now be jumping over the fence from the side and there will be a group of sheep.
I have also asked Kate to do some character designs so we can decide on how we will be using the product colours throughout the animation. She has produced quite a few colour palettes to choose from.
The advert is split into two styles. The real world will be in Indian ink or water colour, paper and cardboard and the dream world will be made from different types of fabric and materials.
The storyboard has had a few more changes to it upon the customers request. The sheep are now jumping over the fence in shot one from the side and the snoreeze logo is now the lens instead of the moon.
Schedule
We made an animatic to show roughly the materials we will be using and style. Sound effects are included.
We decided that we were going to animate using the multi plane. This was the first time I had used the multi plane and dragon frame.
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After the animatic was made a few people in the group decided they wanted to change the jobs that I had assigned them on the schedule and did not really discuss this with me but when they finally did I agreed to it but it did leave me being confused later on when some parts of the animation had been missed out.
Kate now was animating her characters as she really wanted to which I was originally going to do, I animated the sheep/ lion transformation and jumps, matt did the sheep jumps in shot one as well as post production and Paul was supposed to do the demonstration animation and clean up the last shots but he did not do the demonstration animation bit so I said I would do it but needed the new sound effects that Mario sent to Kate but Kate did not give me the new audio files so decided to do it herself.
I decided to do a little test in photoshop to get an idea of how I would do the transformation and to sort out timing correctly. Here are some images from the 5 second animation I did.
Here is a link to the practice animation:
When animating using fabric, I had spent a lot of money on fabrics and materials so Matt kindly offered to buy the lollipop sticks and made a fence for me to use in my animation. I did want the grass to be cut into a hill and told Matt this a lot of times before he started animating but he did not do it so I had to animate the same way he did so that it would not look too different. Here is a link to the fabric transformation scene:
We would discuss the work through a facebook group conversation and would share our work through dropbox.
Here is the link to the almost finished advert animation, just needs a few more tweaks. I have asked for the shadows to be removed in post production and to see whether we can adjust the lighting in the animation. I personally preferred the old audio files for the voice over and it seemed more lively and friendly but we had to redo them as that is what the company requested.
Snoreeze contacted the group for some last minute changes which caused a bit of conflict within the group as changes were made without me seeing them and then snoreeze wanted things to be the way I had designed not the way they had been changed but changing them back would cause a lot of work and reanimating.
